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Children know a great deal about many things, but about public affairs they
know virtually nothing.

Yet of all forms of political power,
the power to teach history to children is the only one Americans have handed
over without a struggle to a remote and unaccountable few, commonly known
as the educational establishment. America Revised, by Frances FitzGerald,
[subtitled "History Schoolbooks in the Twentieth Century." 240
pages. Atlantic/Little, Brown, $9.95] is an attempt to describe what the
educational establishment has done with that power through the years.

The crisis was this: the public
secondary schools, which had catered chiefly to the well-to-do and successful,
adhered to a traditional liberal arts curriculum of "history, language,
and literature--the "arts that liberate," as Montaigne has called
them. With the children of ordinary people attending high school, American educators
found themselves face to face with a specter that had haunted Europe for a century:
the danger of educating people beyond their station, or, as the National
Education Association preferred to put it, leading them "away from the
pursuits for which they are adapted." The danger was largely political.
By teaching the liberal arts to commoners, the new secondary schools might well
become the spawning ground for popular tribunes, politically ambitious guttersnipes,
and similar dangerous malcontents. As J. E. Russell, head of Columbia University
Teachers College, put it in 1905: "How can we justify our practice in schooling
the masses in precisely the same manner as we do those who are to be their leaders?"

The "Realistic" Education of John Dewey

a few of his salient principles. Suitably adapted, they have supplied educational
leaders with the lasting framework for a pedagogical system designed to prevent
"the masses" from ever learning in a classroom what a free people
ought to know.

Dewey's most important contribution was his
conviction that democracy has little to do with politics and government. Democracy,
according to Dewey, was "primarily a mode of associated living," which
for most Americans chiefly meant working together in factories. Having stripped
democracy of its political character, Dewey and his colleagues, who prided themselves
on their "realism," went on to redefine it as "industrial cooperation."

The schools were to be adapted instead, Dewey wrote in
1897, "to the circumstances, needs, and opportunities of industrial civilization."

The new "realistic" definition of democracy even stripped public education
of its theoretical republican objective, which was, as Jefferson
had said, to teach future citizens "how to judge for themselves what will
secure or endanger their freedom."

To Dewey, on the other hand, political history was "undemocratic"
(and FitzGerald wholeheartedly agrees with him) precisely because it deals with
the deeds and intentions of ambitious men.

To the purblind Deweyites political history was elitist; to the powerful
few it was politically dangerous--then and always. "Throughout history,"
as FitzGerald rightly notes (though, alas, only in a passing remark), "the
managers of states have with remarkable consistency defined good citizenship
as a rather small degree of knowledge of, and participation in, public affairs."
To replace political history with Deweyite social studies was the perfect
means of meeting the educational requirements of the powerful. In social
studies, American youngsters would learn that America was chiefly an industrial
system and not a republic at all, that a "good citizen" is a worker
who gets up when the alarm clock rings and speeds to his job on time. In
social studies, too, they would learn that the "real" history
of America is the "development" of American industry--history
without politics in it, which teaches the most corrupt of political lessons,
that politics does not matter. Pedagogical wit could scarcely devise a better
instrument for ensuring "a rather small degree of, and participation
in, public affairs. To replace political history with social studies has
been the abiding goal of America's educational leaders since ordinary Americans
began attending high school. Interestingly enough, it took them more than
half a century to register a complete triumph.

Today, a quite small number of
educators have virtually unchecked sway over the curriculum of America's
public schools, which have become, as one educator put it in 1962, "a
monolith under oligarchic control."

Local control
of the common schools, though waning, had not yet become a sham. To a degree,
it could still meet the purpose for which it was originally intended: preventing
the "managers of states" from teaching a republic's children that
"good citizenship" consists in "a rather small degree of
knowledge of, and participation in, public affairs." The usurpation
of local control in the years after World War I was to be an essential element
in the corrupting of a venerable republic.

Then, quite suddenly, middle-class
Americans awoke from their slumber and discovered that they were as powerless
as everybody else. To the shock and dismay of Lodge--who thought it the
end of civilization as he knew it--middle-class Americans, a complacent
bourgeoisie for decades, began pouring into the public arena, determined
to overthrow "the machine," to curb monopoly and bring the "money
power" to heel. Just when the leading educators were urging the schools
to look on America as an "industrial society," middle-class Americans
who did the teaching, served on the school boards, and voted in the school
board elections--had suddenly remembered that America was a republic, and
an endangered one at that.