How to Create Utopia

Of all U.S. educationists now brewing Bold New Experiments for the public schools, few have won quite so controversial a reputation as Professor Theodore Brameld of New York University's School of Education. At 52 he is one of the chief spokesmen for an extraordinary doctrine called reconstructionism -a philosophy that wants to revolutionize the world's whole concept of education. In his latest book (Toward a Reconstructed Philosophy of Education; Dryden; $4.50), readers can not only learn what reconstructionism is, but just what would happen to education if its adherents got their way.

In general, says Brameld, there are four major philosophies that dominate educational thinking today. The perennialists, e.g., Robert Hutchins, hold that "the supreme end of education is the possession of everlasting, timeless and spaceless principles of reality, truth, and value." The essentialists emphasize the cultural heritage and traditional subject matter. The progressivists treat the schools as laboratories of experience in which students learn chiefly by pragmatic problem solving. From all these, says Brameld, the reconstructionist has borrowed, but he finds each, in its own way, inadequate. Perennialism leads to dogma and false orthodoxies; essentialism stagnates in the status quo; the progressivists, while strong on method, are not sure what they should be educating for.

The Group Mind. What should education be for? The reconstructionist's answer: education must try to create a new social order that is as close to Utopia as possible. The reconstructionist rejects all absolutes, thinks that there is no metaphysical design to the universe and that "history has no ingrained purpose, no preordained goal." All he wants to do is to build a future in which "man may be happier, more rational, more humane than he has ever been."

Since there are no absolutes, says Brameld, truth is only what the majority says it is. The task of both school and society is to determine what goals men should strive for by appealing to "social consensus." Though the individual must be encouraged, "our aim is always to build a 'group mind' that expresses the social consensus of the majority." The all-embracing value for the individual, says Brameld, is "social self-realization," and that comes only when each man comes "to grips with the realities of our group-centered culture."

Constructive Critic. In Brameld's eyes, "the people" do not run the nation -they only think they do. The real rulers make up a Veblenesque minority that controls communications as well as the sources of wealth and power. Education, therefore, must pierce this sham; it must teach the majority how to find out what it really wants and then put those wants into effect. Education is "the learning of cooperative methods for attaining objectives upon which the widest possible majority of the people, young and old, can agree."

For such an education, both the traditional and the progressive school are unsuited. From his earliest years the child must learn "the value of participation . . . He should learn to regard himself as a constructive critic [of the school] who not only dares to question the rules and program of a given classroom, but who also is expected to offer suggestions for improvement." Authority rests not so much with the teacher as with the group. "The teacher himself may belong to the minority -a position which he will gladly accept and for which he will be respected . . . The only acceptable definition for the term 'punishment,'" says Brameld, "is a group-determined penalty for noncooperation with, or violation of, group-imposed regulations."

Defensible Partiality. The student does not learn history, chemistry or literature in the traditional manner. He uses appropriate smatterings of these only to answer questions that the majority has agreed to ask. In the secondary school these questions are threshed out in discussion and study groups twice a day, but over the years, all these questions should lead up to the central theme of the school: "Where do we as a people want to go?" The student might learn about art by exploring topics such as: Should radio and TV be owned by the state so as to provide more access to the fine arts? He learns about chemistry by analyzing "patent medicines or radio-advertised foods to test the reliability of commercial claims." As for arithmetic, "a whole unit . . . could be planned around a consumer cooperative or even around running a school store on cooperative principles."

If this sort of thing spreads, not only through education but through all of society, Brameld believes that the school will at last play its rightful role as shaper of a reconstructed world. This, Brameld insists, is not indoctrination (though he believes that the reconstructionist teacher is perfectly within his rights in using a certain amount of propaganda) but education for "defensible partiality." And what sort of society is Brameld himself partial to? Nothing less than a sort of global collectivism in which the workers of the world will unite as world citizens against all exploiting minorities. If only they are given the proper education, says Brameld, the People will find that that is exactly the sort of world they want, too.

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