Dare the Schools Build a New Social Order

Dare the Schools Build a New Social Order? By George S. Counts Zechariah Motz September 23, 2013

How much faith should we have in Education • Counts says that most people, whether consciously or not, believe that education is a cure for all evils and that it is infallible. • He cites the fact that there has never been as great of an increase in organized education at a time of the greatest amount of social decay such as depression, violence, corruption, etc. • Schools are no longer the driving force behind society, but have instead fallen from that position to come under the influence of the same negative forces that influence society.

It depends • If teachers were willing to be scrutinized rigorously, and be realistic about the requirements, then it may be possible to restore the educational system to its former power. • They would also have to give up many legitimate things to make this happen such as fortune, reputation, time and ease • The school as it existed at the time of his writing could not have been defended by any reasonable scholar as something which improved the social order because it has lost its convictions and become complacent.

Progressive Education • What he saw as a bright light at the end of the tunnel was “progressive education” which he believed would promote social welfare if coupled with education. • He believed in everything that this movement supported including the importance of active learning, the learner as the center of teaching, growth of character and the free personality of the child, and applying learning to life situations. • He also believed that this was not enough and that the movement had to define more specifically what its aims are

Continued… • Progressive, by definition, implies a specific direction, and he believed that the current movement was content with a lot of activity that had no end goal in mind • He criticized the current movement in his age very sharply by likening it to a “baby shaking a rattle, we seem to be utterly content with action, provided it is sufficiently vigorous and noisy. ”

Whose fault is this? • • • Almost half of this excerpt by Counts criticized the liberal middle class and the ideology that they have introduced into the progressive education movement. Because of their agnostic attitude towards the most important questions of life, the smugness of their tolerance to any issue, and lack of any deep conviction or loyalty, these people have introduced a kind of shadowy unreality of the seriousness of the crisis that were present the society. As long as this class of people, who secretly despise others that are of lower income or class then themselves, ispermitted to take charge in the important decisions in education, it will never be truly progressive.

What should the extent of school be? The liberalism of Counts’s day was an overreaction to the idea that school was a place where children were to be indoctrinated with certain views that were fixed and final. He gives an example of how even in a country like the soviet union where children are thought to have no freedom in education, the children are merely presented historical facts, and they end up choosing to become communists without any other or outside compulsion. He argues that neither the child having complete freedom in the classroom as the liberal would like nor the child being coerced into believing exactly as the school would want them to is the right mindset in the education model

Conclusion • There should be no deliberate or secretly biased distortion of the truth in the education of children • The imposing of the material being taught to children is inevitable but also desirable, because the nature of education demands that the teacher be a firm believer in what she is teaching so as to also get the student to believe likewise.