What business does a democracy have establishing official institutions of cultural authority? For, in the context of public education, that is what the teaching profession is, especially where the humanities are concerned. This question, about the legitimacy of democratic cultural authority, is adjacent to, but crucially distinct from, that of democracy’s relation to scientific knowledge, because while one can acquire a certain kind of expertise in humanistic subjects, expert humanists are not expected to converge on a common understanding of what they study. Likewise, it resembles questions about the role of aesthetic avant-gardes, but differs from them in that a democratic cultural authority (say, the nation’s corps of high school English teachers) is supposed to uphold higher standards than those of the average person, while at the same time serving as an agency through which the shared culture of the community reproduces itself. The United States saw the consolidation of such a cultural authority during the Progressive Era, as teaching and school administration took on the status of a self-policing profession at the same time that compulsory attendance laws gave public education an unprecedented importance in national life. (Although there are certainly parallels with the expansion and professionalization of higher education, the case of public school teachers raises the question of legitimate cultural authority more sharply because it is mandatory, and because it is funded entirely by the state.) What did accepting this new form of authority mean for Americans’ conceptions of self-government, of freedom of thought? What did it mean for American artists’ and intellectuals’ sense of vocation, and of their role within a democratic society? These questions are the subject of this book.
Not everyone, of course, agreed that an official cultural authority could have democratic legitimacy, and certainly not everyone agrees with that idea today. Yet, as perplexing as such authority is, to reject it leaves one with even more troublesome options. One could, with John Holt or Ivan Illich, reject schooling altogether, but, in that case the quality of education a child receives would depend, even more unacceptably than it already does, on the resources available to her parents. Alternatively, one could ask the state to provide funds for parents to spend on privately administered schools (i.e., vouchers), but then the question of cultural authority is merely displaced, as one must ask whether the government will allow the funds to be spent on just any institution claiming to be a school (a recipe for disaster) or whether they will enforce standards about what is and is not a school, in which case those standards become the issue. One voucher proponent, Charles L. Glenn, argues that the standards should concern only the objective, factual side of the curriculum and should not address issues of culture, philosophy, values, and so on, but this distinction is obviously untenable and also too easily allows for public funds to support ideas (say, racist ones) that are corrosive to democracy. A different solution might be to accept a culturally freighted form of public school but to prevent the educational profession from becoming self-policing by insisting on direct democratic control of the schools, unmediated by professional authority; for instance, teachers might serve at the pleasure of elected boards of education, an arrangement that was common in rural areas in the nineteenth century (as depicted in Edward Eggleston’s The Hoosier Schoolmaster or Joseph Kirkland’s Zury: The Meanest Man in Spring County). This arrangement, however, only works if schooling is so limited that the teacher does not need any specialized expertise; if she does require such expertise, then the community is not qualified to judge whether she has it. To consider one last option, in her valuable book Democratic Education, the philosopher Amy Gutmann proposes a system of checks and balances in which the government is allowed to set curricular goals but may not compel teachers to violate their disciplinary standards of knowledge (e.g., by forcing a biologist to teach creationism). The problem here is that humanistic disciplines do not generate standards in this way (or at least, much of what they do is not covered by such standards), so it becomes unclear how to enforce Gutmann’s division of labor. Suppose, then, that we allow that democratic cultural authority is necessary: it follows that there must be some form of it that is legitimate; or at least, we can move on to ask which form of it is most legitimate.1
The questions we are then faced with, of how to reconcile democratic principles of individual spiritual autonomy and self-government with officially sanctioned institutional power over aesthetic and cultural matters, and even over aesthetic subject formation itself, are those of (what I will call) the classical Bildung tradition, as developed by Kant , Goethe , and Schiller and as interpreted in the literary criticism of Georg Lukács, Franco Moretti, Marc Redfield, Gregory Castle, Joseph Slaughter, and Jed Esty (to give my own personal and partial genealogy).2 The premise of this classical Bildung is that cultural authority can be democratic if it relies on genuine aesthetic experience. In aesthetic experience, the argument goes that we are most ourselves, because we are spontaneous and uncoerced and because all facets of our being are involved. Who we are, who we show ourselves to be, during such experiences matters more, is more essential, than the ideas or preferences we express in less complete states of being. If an institution of cultural authority could make itself aesthetically appealing, in this heightened sense, it would be legitimate because it would be helping us become more who we essentially are, even if its legitimacy might appear questionable by mundane standards. In Isaiah Berlin’s terms, classical Bildung thus claims to promote a kind of “positive liberty,” not the liberty to do as one likes but the liberty to become what one essentially is.3 If classical Bildung is redeemed from the totalitarian associations of Berlin’s positive liberty (and that, we shall see, is debatable), it is because the higher nature for which it asks us to sacrifice some of our freedoms is itself characterized by greater spontaneity and self-expression. One argument of this book is that the Progressive Era leaders of the educational profession converged, in varying ways, around something like the classical Bildung vision of cultural authority, and that novelists responded to their doing so, producing new kinds of bildungsroman for new kinds of Bildung .
This Introduction begins (in the following section) with an overview of classical Bildung . It then compares classical Bildung with discourses of aesthetic education developed in the formative years of the American public school system, with particular attention to Horace Mann. The subsequent section describes the particular kind of progressivism, which I will label “social action progressivism,” which best contextualizes the profiles of progressive educators in the later chapters. Then come summaries of the following three chapters, covering, respectively, Abraham Cahan and the Herbartians, Willa Cather and the Montessorians, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman and the social efficiency educators. The Introduction’s final section describes the last chapter, on John Dewey, and offers some conclusions about the value of his version of aesthetic education today.
This book is not trying to make an original contribution to all the subjects on which it touches, and it may be useful to be explicit about that here. In characterizing the Progressive Era, while the phrase “social action progressivism” is new, the basic point echoes classic histories of the period by Daniel Rodgers, James Kloppenberg, and Robert Wiebe. In the history of education, I again rely on well-established accounts, by David Tyack, Herbert Kliebard, Merle Curti, and Lawrence Cremin , among others, but I believe that the studies of the specifically aesthetic ideas of the educators is (with the obvious exception of Dewey) mostly uncharted territory. In literary criticism, my approach has been at right angles to the questions about realism, naturalism, or modernism that often organize studies of this period. Instead, I have thought in terms of “Progressive Era literature” and pursued that category across formal lines. Also, with only a handful of exceptions, there have been few studies of writers’ perspectives on public education (though there are more about literature and higher education). This may be, as Maxine Greene so acutely observed in The Public School and the Private Vision, because America’s literary classics have been predominantly concerned with the “darkness” repressed beneath the nation’s official account of itself, while America’s public schools have tried to polish that account to a bright sheen. If we are interested in writers’ conceptions of democracy, though, we should be asking after their conceptions of public education, since the two are inseparable. Finally, in the area of pragmatist aesthetics, while I draw heavily on Victor Kestenbaum, Steven Fesmire, Richard Shusterman, Philip W. Jackson, and others, I ultimately offer what I believe is an original description of the affinity between aesthetic experience and democracy, one based not on the development of new vocabularies (as in Richard Rorty and Richard Poirier) but on the qualities essential to both.4
Classical Bildung
The generic resources of the bildungsroman are particularly suited to the problem of how to reconcile a democratic ideal of spiritual autonomy with the consolidation of an official, professionally self-regulating cultural authority. The bildungsroman is relevant, here, not so much as the “coming-of-age” novel (despite the representation of schooling that that tends to encompass) but as the novel of Bildung, of “aesthetico-spiritual” cultivation. To sketch in broad strokes, scholars of...