Bag of Worms Yet Words

Values (8) Collapsing the Fact-Value Distinction

Existentialism collapses the fact-value distinction. Building on a philosophy called phenomenology, existential philosophers, led by Martin Heidegger and Jean-Paul Sartre in the twentieth century, argued that facts cannot be distinguished from moral values or moral values from facts in an absolute way. Facts are always saturated with values; indeed, they are inseparable.

The existentialists attack the fact-value distinction from several directions. First, arguing as phenomenologists, they claim that all knowledge we possess, whether of facts, values, or anything else, is contained within consciousness as structured by intentionality. We can have no knowledge derived from any other source. We cannot step outside our consciousness to compare our ideas with anything else. We cannot experience our consciousness independently of intentionality. Second, they claim that the consciousness of each of person is situated, rather than existing independently. A situation is a intentional act (or action) taken by a person in her relationship with other persons and in the midst of nature, as she experiences them. Third, the existentialists maintain that our understanding of our situation is embedded in conversational language. We are continually engaged in discussions or dialogues with other persons - what they call called "discourse". When we say that something "makes sense", making sense derives from our participation in dialogues.

A fact and a value do not arise separately within our experience. Fact and value arise together. (Indeed, they arise together with a lot of other contents of our mind.) They assume each other and shape each other. They are relative to the situations we are in and to the language we know and use to talk about our experience. For instance, we never experience the killing of one person by another person simply as a "fact". We see it occur, recognize that it takes place, organize our observations of it in our totality of experience, and take action regarding it, because we have values about killing. In addition to values as moral standards, we have feelings, commitments, and disinclinations that automatically put us in a posture of approval, disapproval, or temporary neutrality, or some other attitude, as the event occurs. If we experience a killing as "an objective, value-free observation", it is because of the situation we are in, not because the killing actually has an objective, value-free existence. When, for example, a sociologist studies killings through the instrument of statistical surveys, the value-free objectivity experienced by the sociologist is simply a pose constructed by the situation of being a scientist in the computer lab. When that same person is home with her family and sees a killing occur outside her home, she condemns it, is angry toward the killer, is roused to physical action, and quickly moves to protect her family from the killer. In this situation, she is no longer a "social scientist"; she is a "mother" and "wife" and the fact of killing is not value-free, to say the least!  A different way of stating this point is that, in the phenomenological-existentialist tradition, there are no "facts"; everything is values.

It is possible, by and large, to ignore the technical arguments of philosophers, as long as their arguments stay within the professional province of academic philosophy. We can get along in ordinary life with common sense without knowing anything that philosophers say. Even when philosophy gets picked up by literature and the arts, which have wider audiences than philosophy, it is still possible in ordinary life to ignore philosophical ideas. In this case, however, the phenomenologist-existentialist assault on the fact-value distinction did not stay within its technical professional province. It made its way into academic history and philosophy of science, a dry and arcane study. Reaching out from the history and philosophy of science, it profoundly influenced general conceptions of the nature of science. Since science is the most pervasive and important intellectual activity of the West, the changing conception of science had a large general impact on Western thought and society.

The American historian and philosopher of science, Thomas Kuhn, in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions,* brought the phenomenological understanding of fact and value to our understanding of science. Kuhn claimed that scientists work within social-intellectual communities. Each community is built on the scientists' acceptance of an approach to doing scientific work that he called a paradigm. Controversially, Kuhn asserted that scientists are committed to their paradigm in a way that it cannot be disproved for them. Scientific paradigms are consigned to the dustbin of history only when outside scientists, who are not committed to a paradigm, believe the tests disproving it, socially organize themselves to get rid of it, and create a new paradigm to replace it.

Kuhn's theory of how science works is controversial, because he claimed that scientists are ultimately ruled by their values, that is, by their commitments. Their values are so strong that they will not even recognize disproof of their theory when it happens. We can restate this claim in terms of the fact-value discussion we have been having. The scientists' values shape their facts.

For the opponents of Kuhn, it seems as if Kuhn subjected science to politics, political ideology, and subjective emotions. By erasing the fact-value distinction as a large framework within which  science takes place, Kuhn destroyed the objectivity of science as objectivity was traditionally understood. In a certain sense, the critics are correct. I have only briefly characterized Kuhn's work, however. I have not explained how (according to Kuhn) paradigms works and how paradigm replacement occurs intellectually. Kuhn recovers objectivity within the paradigm (unlikely as that sounds, given what I have said above) and in the shift from one paradigm to another. It is beyond the purpose of this discussion to explain how he makes this recovery; but limited objectivity and a limited applicability of the fact-value distinction is obtained within the paradigm. Within the paradigm, science looks a lot like it was traditionally supposed to look.

Today at the outset of the twenty-first century, the collapse of the fact-value distinction stands and the implications of the collapse grow. Post-modern advocates of the phenomenological-existentialist philosophy are pushing to reinterpret other areas of Western thought, such as law, in terms of it. Certainly, the collapse has affected political and foreign policy discussions in the U.S., where its consequences for how we view our nation's friends and enemies seem momentous. If the fact-value distinction is to be resurrected, if values are to be set in their own intellectual realm, much work needs to be done.

Contents

• 1. Introduction
• 2. Definitions Not Used
• 3. Popular Definition
• 4. Social Science Definitions
• 5. Philosophical Definition: Existentialism
• 6. Cultural Relativism
• 7. The Fact-Value Distinction
• 8. Collapsing the Fact-Value Distinction

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* Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962;revised 1970). A useful opposing view, focusing on values, is provided by Larry Laudan, Science and Values: The Aims of Science and Their Role in Scientific Debate (1984).

Values (6) Cultural Relativism

The concept of values and the role of values in social life and morality are controversial today, I believe, for two main reasons. The first reason is the widespread acceptance of the social science principle of cultural relativism.* The second reason is the collapse of the philosophical distinction between fact and value. These ideas undercut today's popular understanding of values. The concepts of cultural relativism (or relativity) and the fact-value distinction originated in Europe in the nineteenth century as intellectual strategies in the ideological, philosophical, and scientific disputes of that time. Cultural relativism was deployed against religion, scientism, racism, and ethno-nationalism. The concept of the fact-value distinction was a response to Darwinian naturalism. The collapse of the distinction between facts and values, beginning in the 1970s, and the concept of cultural relativism are central to post-modernist ideology that became popular in academia.

In the following discussion of cultural relativism, a complicated principle, we focus only on questions of values. The fact-value distinction will be discussed in a later article. I label cultural relativism a principle, rather than a fact, because it has not been universally verified. Rather, it appears as an operative procedure of anthropological investigation with significant empirical support. Cultural relativism is also widely accepted in other social science disciplines.

The concept of cultural relativism claims that all values arise individually within specific cultures and that no values are universally shared across cultures (except by borrowing). This claim means that a prominent value in Western culture, for example, that is shared with passionate commitment among its members might be unknown in another culture, such as an Amazon River basin native people. For instance, one society might strongly value individualism and reward unique achievement; but a different society might have collective values and enforce conformity. The claim also means that people share notions of what is good and bad, right and wrong, beautiful and ugly, for example, only within their culture. There is no idea of good and bad that meaningfully transcends all cultures and is shared in the same way with the same meaning by all peoples irrespective of their cultures. For example, what is murder in one culture is not murder in another culture, but, perhaps, demonstration of group leadership potential. What is rape in one society is not rape in another, but, perhaps, courtship. What is genital mutilation in one society is not genital mutilation in another, but perhaps a spiritual ritual demonstrating holiness.

Cultural relativism implies a judicial principle: Values and behavior of one culture cannot be judged from the perspective of the values and behavior of a different culture. For example, in one society, for a man to kill his father's oldest brother might be an acceptable means of establishing tribal leadership and draw much admiration; it cannot be condemned as murder simply because in a different culture such an act would be murder.

The claims of cultural relativism rests upon two assumptions. The first assumption is that there no common human nature shared by all human beings. By human nature is meant a substantive constitution of mind and body that is uniform in all humans across racial, ethnic, cultural, and political groupings. If human nature were to exist, some values would arise out of it, as humans operationalized their human nature in living in diverse conditions; and these values would the same for all humans. This notion is denied by the principle of cultural relativism. 

The concept of human nature lies behind the opposition of the anthropologist, Clyde Kluckhohn, to cultural relativity, as expressed in this quotation:

"Contrary to the statements of ... exponents of extreme cultural relativity, standards and values are not completely relative to the cultures from which they derive. Some values are as much givens in human life as the fact that bodies of certain densities fall under specified conditions. These are founded, in part, upon the fundamental biological similarities of all human beings. They arise also out of the circumstance that human existence is invariably a social existence. No society has ever approved suffering as a a good thing in itself. As a means to an end (purification or self-discipline), yes; as punishment--as a means to the ends of society, yes. But for itself--no. No culture fails to put a negative valuation upon killing, indiscriminate lying, and stealing within the in-group. There are important variations, to be sure, in the conception of the extent of the in-group and in the limits of toleration of lying and stealing under certain conditions.  But in the core notion of the desirable and nondesirable is constant across all cultures. Nor need we dispute the universality of the conception that rape or any achievement of sexuality by violent means is disapproved. This is a fact of observation as much as the fact that different materials have different specific gravities."**

The second assumption concerns language.  Advocates of cultural relativism claim that the human ability to use language, create abstract symbols, and construct meanings is not determined by human biology or brain structure. All humans freely invent the mental world in which their consciousness lives (so to speak). All the phenomenological contents of consciousness, such as values, are completely enveloped in the freely invented mental world. This mental world is  "culture."  Humans shape their culture to meet their needs according to whatever intentions and goals they have. As a result of this freedom, human beings are divided into many groups, each sharing a unique culture. The enormous number and diversity of human languages and sublanguages are proof of the diversity of cultures and strong support for the notion of cultural relativism.

Advocates of cultural relativism believe that the capacity to create culture is equally shared among all humans. Regardless of the level of technological or political evolution of their societies, all cultures are equally complex and equally innovative adaptations to the environments in which their constituent societies must exist.

In the 1940s and 1950s, many social scientists refused to follow advocates of cultural relativism in arguing that no values transcended cultures, that is, that there are no universal values. The Kluckhohn quotation (above) makes it clear that the notion of human nature is crucial to the scientific credibility of universality of values, or at least some values. (We are not discussing religious concepts of human nature.) In the 1970s and following decades, advocates of post-modernism strongly attacked the concept of human nature. From their point of view, because culture is a language-construct, it is logically and as a matter of fact free from human biology.

A second attack on the notion of human nature and universalism of values was provided by the existentialists, notably Heidegger and Sartre, whom we have briefly discussed in our previous article. The philosophy of these thinkers greatly influenced the literary theorists who promulgated post-modernism. For both philosophers, values are produced within the context of social negotiation and verbal dialog between persons. Sartre called this context a "situation". Situations are not dependent upon human biology. It is the "human condition", or "human situation", not human nature, to which all values are relative.

Contents

• 1. Introduction
• 2. Definitions Not Used
• 3. Popular Definition
• 4. Social Science Definitions
• 5. Philosophical Definition: Existentialism
• 6. Cultural Relativism
• 7. The Fact-Value Distinction
• 8. Collapsing the Fact-Value Distinction

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* Wikipedia discusses the anthropological principle of cultural relativism in a useful article (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_relativism) with references.

** P. 418, Parsons and Shils, eds., Toward a General Theory of Action.

Total Schools (6)

Conclusion:
The Sensitive Teacher and The Totalitarian School

I would like to conclude my discussion of Kozol's Death At An Early Age by looking at the issue of teacher sensitivity. Kozol repeats endlessly that the teacher's most important quality for effective teaching is to be sensitive to the student's own feelings. The requirement of sensitivity follows directly from the mental hygienist approach to education. Sensitivity is mentioned in the White House Midcentury Report, which we have previously examined as the immediate social science background to the Brown v. Board decision.

In discussing the school and the emotional life of the student, the Conference Report* states unambiguously:

"For if satisfaction and increasing control are to result, integration in terms of ego strength must be always augmenting. And this entails emotional supports in relationship with others--for the child and young person, primarily with adults who may stand as counterparts for the once all-powerful and all-enveloping parents.

"Some teachers have always been able to lend some such support through their acute, sympathetic sensitivity to people and to what children, in particular, are feeling and contending with. Now they and others less sensitive are offered a clearer comprehension of what is involved, and so a more adequate conception of their own role in furthering the kind of integration of the personality required for robust living and social effectiveness."(Midcentury Report, p. 252.)

Kozol contrasts the need for sensitivity to the insistence of the insensitive teachers of the segregated school where he substitute taught that the traditional intellectual discipline was most important. These teachers expressed the importance of the discipline, in part, by maintaining an emotional distance between themselves and their pupils.

The Reading Teacher, for instance, refused to associate with her pupils out of the classroom.

"...about what she had been saying I found I was still puzzled. 'Would you have Negroes come and visit you or come and have dinner with you in the evening?'

"And to that the answer was clear and elucidating and exact: 'They could come and visit if I invited them to come but not as you could come to see me. They could not feel free to just drop in on me. I would have to draw the line at that.'"(Kozol, p. 23.)

Kozol interpreted the separation of teacher and student as maintaining a racial color line separating Black students from white teachers.(Kozol, p. 25).

The lesson about avoiding social relationships with the students came to Kozol formally as an injunction:

"To have any friendly relationship with a student outside the classroom would make teaching him impossible or, at the least, substantially more difficulty. To know him as he is and to allow him to know you in any ordinary vulnerable light is likely to affect adversely both the way in winch you think of him and the way in which he thinks of you."(Kozol, p. 114.)

Sensitivity to the student required the belief by the teacher that the teacher had much to learn from the student. The student was "worth listening to and even learning from."(Kozol, p. 157.)

Kozol was, in his self-congratulatory account, an effective teacher, because he was sensitive to the students. "The real reason that I was able to get on with those children in the state in which I found them is that I came into that room knowing myself to be absolutely on their side."(Kozol, pp. 161-162.)

Kozol's work epitomizes the most extreme development of the progressive, child-centered tradition of American pedagogy. It was also, in a sense, an official publication of the academic elite in the social sciences and education that prepared the social science statement submitted to the Supreme Court for the Brown v. Board decision. Not only was Kozol a product of Harvard, the home of many members of this elite, but portions of the book were published in the Harvard Educational Review and the Atlantic Monthly magazine before they appeared in book form. Dr. Robert Coles, an influential Harvard child psychiatrist wrote a preface for Kozol's book. Harvard educators eventually became the advisors to the busing program that courts imposed on Boston in an effort to end the city's de facto school segregation.

Let's close our analysis by asking a question. What kind of schools, as public institutions, are likely to result from the educational philosophy expressed by the Midcentury Report, the Supreme Court in the Brown v. Board decision, and Kozol's journalism?

The school must be an institution that takes over the role of the family of the students, in which the teacher's influence extends outside the school and school hours, that places medical administration of the students' emotional maturation at the center of its program, and that denigrates the teaching of critical intellectual skills that would enable the students to criticize the educational and social policies that created such an institution.

That such schools should be public, state-run institutions constituted a vast expansion of the role of the state in the lives of citizens. It dramatically shifted the line between private and public, so as to diminish private lives and expand the reach of public power. The Midcentury Conference report candidly and honestly referred to the "total school program". We may cast the social science agenda somewhat differently by saying that the educational pedagogy demanded by Kozol and the elites he represented required totalitarian schools.

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* Helen L. Witmer and Ruth Kotinksy, editors, Personality in the Making: The Fact-Finding Report of the Midcentury White House Conference on Children and Youth, reprint edition ([1952, Harper & Brothers] Science and Behavior Books, Inc, Palo Alto, California, n.d.).

Total Schools (5)

What Is the Source of the Chaos?

Kozol's school, with white teachers and Black students, was in chaos. "White was overcome in black among them, but white and black together were overcome in chaos."(P. 29.) What was the source of the chaos? For Kozol, the school's discipline and the racial bigotry of the teachers were the sources of the chaos. Of course, many social observers said that the chaos was already inside the students when they came to school. This view was the official position of the Boston school board. The chaos was created by social disorganization of the Black family and community.

Kozol tackled this issue by retelling a conversation he had with a white (presumably Jewish) landlord in Roxbury. "I remember a talk that I had around that time with a man who owned a lot of property in the Negro section and who made a great deal of money out of this property..."(P.140.) The landlord thought that the schools gave a poor education to the Black students; nonetheless:

"'The schools are doing a wonderful job with what they've got. You take these kids from homes like those and parents from all over no place and everything all mixed up and nobody living right and how on earth do you expect a day in school to change that child's life?'"(P. 140.)

Kozol countered that the physical facilities of the school were poor and uncomfortable. Windows were broken. A window fell in on Kozol's class. Two classes shared the same room.  Attentive teaching and learning was physically impossible. The landlord responded:

"'We did it, and we never had any fancy schools either and nothing special for us, no special classes or stuff like that. And if we did it then I don't see why can't they?'"(P.140-141.)

"We" were the Jewish families and Jewish community who lived in Roxbury a generation earlier. Jews had been able to obtain social mobility through education and move out of Roxbury's poor buildings. Jews had been advance in the face of discrimination and prejudice. Why could not African Americans do it also? That indeed was the question. Kozol, who was Jewish, evades it. (Instead of answering the question, Kozol accuses the landlord of hypocrisy. On the basis of Black rents, Kozol notes, the landlord sent his child to a "sophisticated little French school outside of Boston" [p. 141].)

There was no way for Kozol to answer the question. In 1965, the Department of Labor released Daniel Moyniham's report, The Negro Family: The Case for National Action. The report documented - again - the well-known fact of Black family instability and its consequences. (Du Bois and Frazier had both analyzed it at length earlier.) The contrast to the strong family structure of the Jews and the role of the Jewish family as the base of Jewish community culture was obvious and clear.

It was not the law of the land in America (as it was in France, for instance) that the family was the basis of the nation's social structure; so it was not the law of the land that social policy should establish racial equality in family stability. It was the law of the land, however, that social policy should make schools equal; so schools bore the burden of repairing the damaged subjectivities of children attending them. And this is the story Kozol tells while disguising and evading the central issue.

[To be continued.]

Total Schools (4)

Feelings Before Thinking in Kozol's Death at an Early Age

One dogma of the mental hygienist program of progressive educators, behind the 1954 Brown decision, asserted that the student's emotional development must be cultivated before the student's academic development. This doctrine was based on the notion that students must reach a level of "readiness" to learn before they can learn. Since segregated students were deeply damaged, according to the Supreme Court, it was by implication more important for schools to repair the segregated student's emotional state than it was to teach her the intellectual subjects.

Jonathan Kozol's criticism of the instructional program of the segregated Roxbury elementary school where he taught in 1964-1965 was based on the progressive education dogma. Repeatedly, Kozol states that the authentic subjectivity of each student was being crushed by the school, specifically, by the school's insistence on teaching the traditional subjects.

Kozol opens Death at an Early Age with a set-piece, good v. bad, description of the struggle between the damaged boy, Stephen, and his Art Teacher. The Art Teacher taught drawing by requiring the students to copy drawings by others, or by passing out mimeographed outlines for the student fill in with indicated colors. The drawings to be copied were models the teacher expected the students to learn. Stephen did not want to do this assignment. Requiring him to do it quashed his motivation and diminished his self-esteem, just as the Supreme Court said segregated education would do. Let's listen to Kozol tell this story.

"The fact that [the students] were being asked to copy something in which they could not believe because it was not of them and did not in any way correspond to their own interests did not occur to the Art Teacher, or if it did occur she did not say it....

"How did a pupil like Stephen react to a teacher of this sort? Alone almost out of the entire class, I think that he absolutely turned off his signals while she was speaking and withdrew to his own private spot. At his desk he would sit silently while the Art Teacher was talking and performing. With a pencil, frequently stubby and end-bitten, he would scribble and fiddle and cock his head and whisper to himself throughout the time that the Art Teacher was going on. At length, when the art lesson officially began, he would perhaps push aside his little drawing and try the paint and paper that he had been given, usually using the watercolors freely and the paintbrush sloppily and a little bit defiantly and he would come up with things that certainly were delightful and personal and private, and full of his own nature."(P. 3.)

It is worth pausing here to point out that copying masters is a traditional art instructional technique. It is integral to master-apprentice instruction. The apprentice learns a technique, almost always too complicated to explain clearly in words, by copying the master's active practice and trying to replicate instructor's works. In other words, the Art Teacher taught by employing a technique used for thousands of years in teaching art, calligraphy, and many complicated manual skills. The technique was the gateway to participating in an artistic tradition, that is, the basis for self-expression and originality within the tradition.

According to the dogma, imposition of discipline destroys the student (hence the title of the book, "Death" at an early age). Kozol wastes no time in getting to this point.

"If Stephen began to fiddle around during a lesson, the Art Teacher generally would not notice him at first. When she did, both he and I and the children around him would prepare for trouble. For she would go at his desk with something truly like a vengeance and would shriek at him in a way that carried terror. 'Give me that! Your paints are all muddy! You've made it a mess. Look at what he's done! He's mixed up the colors! I don't know why we waste good paper on this child!' Then: 'Garbage! Junk! He give me garbage and junk! And garbage is the one thing I will not have.' Now I thought that garbage and junk was very nearly the only real artwork in the class. I do not know very much about painting, but I know enough to know that the Art Teacher did not know much about it either and that, furthermore, she did not know or care anything at all about the way in which you can destroy a human being. Stephen, in many ways already dying, died a second and third and fourth and final death before her anger."(Pp. 3-4.)

Kozol is being melodramatic here. He is implicitly comparing the teacher's words to stabbing. She is stabbing Stephen to death, stabbing a second and third and fourth and final time until Stephen is dead.

Once the reader steps into the web of assumptions spun out by Kozol, it difficult to escape his conclusion that this Art Teacher was a monster--a murderer. But let's extricate ourselves from the web. Let's assume the students are not emotionally damaged. Let's assume the students are normally motivated. Let's assume that the school is not a psychological clinic or mental hospital. Let's assume that the purpose of the art class is to teach the students to appreciate art, to understand why great art is great, to obtain a feeling for the practice of art techniques that masters used to create great art. Let's assume that purpose of the class, even for fourth graders, is not "self-expression". Let's assume that, from the perspective of the art tradition, self-expression is no more than infantalism.

With these assumptions, the Art Teacher's reaction is cast in a different light. The teacher should not accept self-expression, which would be simply a childish, defiant refusal to do the lessons. The teacher should not receive any art production by a student as okay. The teacher should make it clear that there is a difference between disciplined technique and undisciplined self-expression.

Kozol would have none of this. The goal of education was to heal the injured subjectivity of the pupil; therefore, all the student's self-expression was desirable and legitimate. Any disapproval by the teacher, from this point of view, was insensitive to the pupil's self-esteem and illegitimate. But this view was more than Kozol's, of course; it was the law of the land. It was the view imposed on education by the Supreme Court.

[To be continued.]

Total Schools (3)

Brown Versus Board of Education - The Movie

If Brown v. Board of Education was the script, "Death At An Early Age" was the movie. Each point made by the Supreme Court is acted out and described in melodramatic prose in Jonathan Kozol's 1968 fictionalized account of his teaching experiences in a segregated school. Kozol, a recent Harvard graduate, took up substitute teaching in the Boston public schools in 1964. For most of the academic year, 1964-1965, he taught a fourth grade class in a Roxbury elementary school. In the spring, he was fired for using literary materials (poetry by Langston Hughes) not on the approved curriculum list.  Diane Ravitch, in The Troubled Crusade, characterizes Kozol (referring to his book) as a romantic; but he was not a romantic. He was simply a journalist providing illustrations for the social science dogma of the time.

The social scientists who advised the Supreme Court believed that Black society is pathological. So Kozol begins his account by describing a beaten Black student, "Stephen". Of Stephen's life, Kozol says:

"Nobody has complained about the things that have happened to Stephen because he does not have any mother or father. Stephen is a ward of the State of Massachusetts and, as such, he has been placed in the home of some very poor  people who do not want him now that he is not a baby any more. They money that they are given for him to pay his expenses every week does not cover the  other kind of expense--the more important kind which is the immense emotional burden that is continually at stake. Stephen often comes into school badly beaten. If I ask him about it, he is apt to deny it because he does not want us to know first-hand what a miserable time he has."(P. 1.)

Stephen had been rejected by his Black parents, by his foster parents, and ultimately by the state.

The social scientists told the Supreme Court that segregated Black children were damaged by segregation and made to feel inferior. Kozol describes Stephen:

"I think that much of his life, inwardly and outwardly, must have involved a steady and, as it turned out, inwardly at least, a losing battle to survive. He battled for his existence and, like many defenseless humans, he had to use whatever odd little weapons came to hand. Acting up at school was part of it. He was granted so little attention that he must have panicked repeatedly about the possibility that, with a few slight mistakes, he might simply stop existing or being seen at all."(P. 6.)

The Supreme Court stated that the inequality of segregated education could not be overcome by providing high quality physical facilities for the segregated students.  Segregation as a social policy made the Black pupil feel inadequate and crushed her motivation. Here are selected observations in which Kozol makes this point:

"I received confirmation of the belief that even a modern structure and new equipment could not do away with the problems inherent in a segregated school. The slave-master and black child feeling was prevalent here anyway, and discipline remained the overriding problem."(p.42.)

"There was nothing wrong with his motivation, and there was nothing wrong with his home or home-life, either. It was the public schools, pure and simple, which had held him back and made the situation of his life pathetic."(P. 48.)

"... there still was not going to be a real opportunity for me to teach here or for the children to learn. It was not a school. And it wasn't a center for disturbed children. And it wasn't an institution dedicated to salvage. It was a place in which the school system kept is unteachable out of sight and turned them into untouchables."(P.49.)

"The problem is the waste of years, the loss of chances, the closing of avenues, the end of hopes which that kind of institution represents."(P. 50.)

[To be continued.]
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Jonathan Kozol, Death At An Early Age ([1967]Boston: Bantam Edition, 1968).

Total Schools (2)

The Brown decision of 1954 mandated the pupil's subjectivity as the test of equality, but the court could not implement this mandate in the schools; implementation required legislative and executive action by the states and the national government. The federal Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 (ESEA) were the first national efforts to fulfill the Brown mandate.  Ostensibly, ESEA was intended to help children attending low income and poor schools, but low income was a proxy for racial designation of Black Americans (and Mexican Americans, a special interest of President Johnson). The administration of President Johnson did not want to use race language in writing or justifying ESEA.*

Amendments to the acts in subsequent years built, piece by piece, the total school program envisioned in 1950 in the Midcentury White House Conference. Programs included assistance to disadvantaged pupils to meet high standards, the Eisenhower Professional Development Program for professional development, education technology, class size reduction, safe and drug free schools, bilingual education, Native American education, charter schools, Head Start, and community learning centers. (The Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965; Elementary and Secondary Education.)

ESEA was controversial, because it greatly reduced local and state control over public education. Opposition to the end of racial segregation in education was centered in local control of schools. The act also measured and enforced academic progress with national assessment testing. (See Bev Eakman, "Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching".)

The legislation for ESEA 1965 was conceptualized and outlined by the federal Commissioner of Education, Francis Keppel. Keppel had been the Dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Education. He represented the educational reform vision of the liberal educational elite associated with Harvard University. In 1974, he became an advisor to Judge Garrity in the integration of Boston's schools by busing.

The sudden and vast expansion of the federal government's role in the nation's public education created an opportunity for the total school program's focus on the student's subjectivity to become the national pedagogy. It is not my purpose to examine, as a research matter, how the focus on subjectivity made its way into school after school; I am not in position to do that. Rather, I wish to point out how the emphasis on subjectivity became the basis for the dominant psychological and pedagogical paradigms of public school teachers with the new federal context. We can easily catch the early progress of this pedagogy by looking at a wildly popular publication, Jonathan Kozol's Death At An Early Age; The Destruction of the Hearts and Minds of Negro Children in the Boston Public Schools (Boston, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1967)**, the subject of our next article in this series.   

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* For a general history of education at this time, see Diane Ravitch, The Troubled Crusade; American Education, 1945-1980 (New York: Basic Books, Inc., Publishers, 1983).

** Twentieth Century Classics in Education, Postelate 4 (March 31, 2004) 2.

Religion and Social Science

The Midcentury White House Conference report*, that provided essential social science support for the Brown decision of 1954, emphasized the importance of religion for the formation of the healthy child's personality. The report's discussion is so forthright that, from today's perspective, it is surprising; it provides a measure of the secularization the social sciences have undergone in the past fifty years.

"Children's well-being is dependent in large part upon their parents' sense of self-worth and ... that sense is intimately related to the values and workings of the society in which they live. The ethical and moral affirmations of religion constitute the base on which all this rests and from which social malfunctioning can be criticized. In this widest sense, then, religion is basic to healthy personality."(P. 160.)

The role of religion, the report said, was to provide ideas of the meaningfulness of life that the child requires. The healthy child has an inner assurance of her importance to the world. She believes that the world is set up so that she can make sense of her life.

"The individual must have some conception of the universe as meaningful and benevolent, and of his place in it. He must integrate his life around some ethical or religious concepts. Honor, grace, faith, courage: some integrating idea or idea must replace his parents as the objects of dependency and trust."(P. 159.)

The Judaeo-Christian tradition makes the individual responsible for what she does with her life. It provides a framework for a realistic understanding of human agency. Each person has both strengths and weaknesses. No situation is ordained; no situation is hopeless. No weakness or fault makes a person utterly worthless. Persons have the opportunity to transcend their weaknesses and faults and thereby to activate their strengths.

Religious education is an important part of child rearing. The spiritual qualities of each child must be cultivated and strengthened. They bind together the material circumstances of life and our psychological attitudes toward those material circumstances. Spiritual education helps create a total personality - whole and balanced.

Religion also provides ideals. Ideals are important as goals toward which the growing child should strive. During adolescence, the child learns of the sordid aspects of life and about failure of society to live up to its ideals; religion teaches the child not to accept failings with dismay, but to have hope in the child's and humankind's ultimate ability to overcome those failings.

"To be able to look squarely at the life that is before them without blinders or rosy glasses and to deal with it without either false stimulation or an opiate, children and youth need faith in God."(P. 222.)

The report does not blink before the issue of teaching the child about the existence of God. The healthy child learns to believe in God and to have faith in God as the source of ultimate meaning and hope for human ventures.

The belief in God is important, finally, in teaching the child to live in harmony with other peoples. God is God of all peoples. God is the source of meaning of everyone's experiences.

At a distance of fifty years, we can stand back from this report and evaluate its position on religion. We can see that religious faith was an important part of the lives of African Americans, strengthening them to cope with segregation and to fight against it. We can also see that religion was an important ingredient in making African American culture healthy (in contradistinction to the conclusions of the Myrdal report, American Dilemma).

Why did this acknowledgment of the importance of religious faith to American life  disappear from American social science? Here we can only suggest answers. The allegiance of many social scientists to Marxism and co-existence with communism during the Cold War would have led them diminish the importance of religion to American life. The influence of European secular humanist philosophies - especially existentialism and post-modernism - helped to deprive religion of intellectual legitimacy. Radical feminism spurned religion, viewing religion as conservative and opposed to the complete social emancipation of women.

Public schools, too, played a role, because of the total school program. The total school program, impelled by the Brown decision, turned over the emotional development of children to the state through the public schools. With much of the child's growth controlled by schools, religion would have to be removed from children's lives, because of constitutional prohibition of state sponsorship of religion.

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* Helen L. Witmer and Ruth Kotinksy, editors, Personality in the Making: The Fact-Finding Report of the Midcentury White House Conference on Children and Youth, reprint edition ([1952, Harper & Brothers] Science and Behavior Books, Inc, Palo Alto, California, n.d.). Esp. chapter VII, "Religion as an Aid to Healthy Personality Development," and chapter X, "The Church and the Synagogue."

The Reign of Subjectivity (9) Past Future

A Concluding Discussion of How Ideas Work

Placing the injured subjectivity of segregated minority children at the center of the inequality of segregated education, in the Brown decision, the Supreme Court provided the template of debate for social science research in education for the next several generations. But the decision did more; it set out an agenda for philosophical exploration of subjectivity that came, eventually, to dominate philosophical thinking, ideology, and pedagogy in the U.S.

When we examine philosophy and intellectual history, for instance, in Charles Taylor's Sources of the Self (1989), ideas seems to be born, grow, expand, and pass away in insulated intellectual traditions. But ideas do not have a life of their own; they must be lived in the minds of persons. These persons in turn must live in society.  All history, life, and vitality of ideas we discuss today must exist in a sociology that sponsors them.

The Brown decision, as the law that shapes American education, replaced a deeply rooted sociology of race relations and education that existed in law for nearly sixty years, with a new sociology of race relations and education. The strengths, weakness, and  political contests of this new sociology created and shaped the way ideas about subjectivity would be discussed.

We will explore one of the major conditions of subjectivity created by the Brown decision in future articles. This condition is the weakness of empirical social science research upon which the Brown decision rested. For two decades, social scientists conducted research to shore up and to test the empirical basis of Brown's social science. But evidence was slow to come, slow to decide debate; while the law moved forward. To compensate for the weakness of empirical research, I believe, philosophy began a great preoccupation with subjectivity.

It is true that Western society has been preoccupied with subjectivity for hundreds of years. It is true also that in the first half of the twentieth century, before the Brown decision, psychology, as in Freud, child psychology, and psychological therapeutics, and philosophy, as in the phenomenological tradition of Heidegger and Sartre, made subjectivity a central concern. But the mere existence of these traditions and developments in books and seminars did not compel anyone to devote a second of their time to subjectivity. It is sociology, including political conflict, that compels attention to philosophy. A great shift in social relations was required to set off the great development of subjectivity philosophy in postmodernism, pedagogy, and feminism. And a great shift of social relations was required to stop Marxist-Stalinist philosophy, which denigrated subjectivity in favor of objectivity, in its tracks in the 1970s. The Brown decision was the cause of this shift.

The Reign of Subjectivity (8)

Pathological Subjectivity

One of the most famous social science sources cited by the Supreme Court in the Brown decision is Gunnar Myrdal's The American Dilemma, published in 1944 in two volumes (1483 pages plus front matter). Myrdal's study resulted from an invitation by the Carnegie Corporation of New York in 1937, which committed itself to the study of the African American in the 1930s.

Myrdal, a Swedish economist, laid out the initial research plan for the study. He assembled a group of social scientists, including African American scholars, and consulted with a much larger group of scholars and social scientists, including the African Americans, W. E. B. Du Bois and E. Franklin Frazier. The Carnegie Corporation paid for a large staff that included Ralph J. Bunche, and utilized African American scholars for special research tasks, including St. Clair Drake and Frazier. As research materials accumulated, the Carnegie Corporation published four specialized volumes, in addition to Myrdal's work.

In view of the vast collaboration, we may say that The American Dilemma had  African American scientific compliance. Myrdal stated his acknowledgments this way:

"The collaboration in the study--which embraced, in friendship and concerted efforts, white and Negro men and women of different specialties, ages, and different accomplishments--gave more than is contained in the 15,000 typewritten pages of manuscript. Even about the specific problems of race relations, which we were studying together, I learned much more from our informal conferences than I can ever duly account for in this book."(P. xiv.)

I have emphasized the contribution of African American scholars and social scientists to the composition of The American Dilemma, because I want to bring forward one theoretical premise of this study that bore directly on the Supreme Court's Brown decision.

One problem Myrdal faced was how African American community, society, and culture, as they were studied in the late 1930s, should be conceived. This problem was a different problem from studying Negro sociological characteristics or accumulating vital statistics or reciting anecdotes from literary sources. How the community was to be interpretively portrayed would be important for the findings and recommendations of the research. Presumably, this interpretation would have the stamp of approval of the African American scholars and social scientists who contributed to the research.

So it is of interest to read that Negro culture, to use the vocabulary of the 1940s, was pathological. Here is appropriate quotation, with the original italicization:

"In practically all its divergences, American Negro culture is not something independent of general American culture. It is a distorted development, or a pathological condition, of the general American culture. The instability of the Negro family, the inadequacy of educational facilities for Negroes, the emotionalism in the Negro church, the insufficiency and unwholesomeness of Negro recreational activity, the plethora of Negro sociable organizations, the narrowness of interests of the average Negro, the provincialism of his political speculation, the high Negro crime rate, the cultivation of the arts to the neglect of other fields, superstition, personality difficulties, and other characteristic traits are mainly forms of social pathology which, for the most part, are created by the caste pressures."(Pp. 928-929.)

Eventually, Black Americans reacted against the attribution of pathology; this was, generally speaking, the genesis of the intellectual component of the Black Power movement of the 1960s and later. Black Power is another story apart from our current subject; here we need to note what this characterization of the African American did for the Brown decision and the reign of subjectivity.

When the Supreme Court justices ruled that segregated education created negative self-evaluation--inferiority and humiliation--in segregated minority children, the justices were drawing upon the Myrdal work, as well as upon child psychology and mental hygienist theory of the Midcentury White House Conference. For Myrdal and coauthors stated that all segregated Black society was pathological. The Court would have had reason to believe it had the authority of African American scholars themselves for their conclusions. To be a Black person in segregated America was to suffer a pathological subjectivity. In education and by implication in American society at large, the main task of the reform of racial relations would be, focusing on each person's subjectivity, to end the pathological deformation of personhood due to the inherent, nearly metaphysical, contradiction between American ideals of universal equality and American practice of segregation. So the Court ruled.

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* Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy, with the assistance of Richard Sterner and Arnold Rose, 2 vols. (New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1944).