As schools seek to promote students’ intellectual development, questions about what that looks like in practice inevitably arise. 

 

This issue of Kappan takes Richard Hofstadter’s 1964 book Anti-intellectualism in American Life as its inspiration. Decades before Hofstadter, though, contributors to this magazine had already begun to voice concerns about the public schools’ commitment to the life of the mind. In January 1935, for example, Earl Marlott asked “Does America believe in thinking?” Too many Americans prefer action to contemplation, he argued, and this influences our schools in numerous ways. Completing projects often comes to seem more important than learning the principles and ideas behind them. Activity is exalted over thinking, and schools often emphasize training rather than education (which, to Marlott, meant the inculcation of certain habits of thought that would enable students to evaluate whatever new and old ideas were circulating around them). And just three months later, in April 1935, I.W. Howerth (“Popular indifference to science?”) urged educators to prioritize scientific thinking in particular (science, in his view, being not just a body of content but a means of acquiring knowledge): 

What is needed . . . to destroy popular indifference to science is to develop, particularly in the young, a respect for the scientific method by teaching them the value of it in solving the common problems of life and by insisting upon its constant use. The disposition to use it we call “the scientific spirit.” This spirit must be generalized through education. (p. 193) 

But while dozens of Kappan authors since the 1930s have called upon educators to do more to teach young people to use their minds, they haven’t always agreed on what such teaching should look like or the extent to which it should emphasize the study of traditional academic content. 

School as intellectual wasteland? 

In 1953, the eminent historian Arthur Bestor published Educational Wastelands, a critique of the Progressive educational approaches of his day, which he saw as unscholarly and plagued by low standards. Kappan authors tended to disagree. In an April 1957 article, for example, Lawrence Metcalf (“Intellectual development in modern schools”) took issue with Bestor for complaining that important intellectual disciplines (meaning the liberal arts) were being squeezed out of schools and that, as a result, students were no longer being taught to use their minds as well as in the past. That’s an outdated view of intellectual development, Metcalf argued. Schools shouldn’t attempt to fill children’s heads with the vast amounts of content contained in the various disciplines. Rather (and in an echo of Howerth’s 1935 article), they should focus on teaching students how to think about content: 

In order for intellects to develop, two things are needed. First, students must think, and second, a conceptualization of the thinking process must take place. If there is a content that everyone must master, it is not history but rather the content of scientific method. We begin to acquire this content when we begin to think about our thinking. And this practice of examining our thinking must permeate all our instruction, and not just our instruction in a logic course. (p. 279) 

Such instruction would engage students in carefully examining their own beliefs and exploring relevant issues. This would not, Metcalf was careful to explain, mean teaching students only what they are interested in. Quite the contrary: Part of an educator’s job would be to “build interest in a socially significant conflict whenever that interest is lacking in students and proceed to help students resolve the conflict at a level of understanding appropriate to their maturity” (p. 280). Some content previously deemed essential might not be included, but the content included would have clear value to students. 

In November 1957, Arthur Robert Olsen (“A social scientist vs. the historian”) took another swipe at Bestor, arguing that Educational Wastelands misrepresented the ways in which earlier generations of American intellectuals were educated. For instance, Thomas Jefferson — most certainly an intellectual — would have rejected the idea that schools should focus mainly on the study of academic content, with little regard for practical skills. Indeed, as an agriculturalist, Jefferson treasured precisely the sort of  the vocational education that Bestor scorns. Practical education has value because, “Despite ivory-tower philosophy, life is real” (p. 67). And while some knowledge of academic content is important, Olsen acknowledged, children also need to be taught to blow their noses and button their pants, and they have emotions that must be attended to, sometimes in school.  

Shifting sands of knowledge and belief 

Writing in January 1958, Frederick Neff (“Education and the cult of certainty”) introduced another line of criticism against those, like Bestor, who seemed stubbornly wedded to the traditional academic curriculum. As new discoveries are made and knowledge expands, argued Neff, previously held beliefs and values become obsolete. Ideally, our schools should help students raise and confront new questions, rather than teaching them old answers: 

We are suddenly finding ourselves living in an altered world, where many of our earlier scientific and moral principles are becoming increasingly difficult to apply. In this altered framework, where a discovery in biology requires a revision of a principle in psychology, or where an archaeological finding results in a reinterpretation of an epoch in history, the teacher who pleads the unrelatedness of subjects in attempting to preside over a sacrosanct domain of fixed knowledge simply belongs to a bygone generation. (p. 168) 

In his April 1958 response to Neff, Robert H. Tensing (“Education and the existence of certitude”) pointed out that, in fact, new discoveries rarely require the wholesale abandonment of existing knowledge. “The human mind’s progress in the intellectual understanding of any subject is from the generic to the specific” (p. 318), and certain general principles about nature, the self, and morality are true and relevant for all times: 

By understanding first the general and basic structure of things, we have made some important discoveries. These should not be rejected. Surely we can teach a child to obey legitimate authority and to respect the rights of others. These principles belong to absolutism. They are immutables and they are some of the most important truths a child shall ever learn. The child will still have to learn the forms in which he is expected to obey legitimate authority and the way in which law can regulate human freedom. (p. 319) 

A decade later, in May 1968, Joseph Junell (“Whither public education?”) echoed Tensing in calling upon the schools to teach enduring truths, but he worried that it was becoming increasingly difficult to convince students of them. For instance, his own teacher education students were “affected by the new spirit of scientific intellectualism” (p. 512), were reluctant to take old certainties for granted, and feared that requiring students to accept certain fixed beliefs and values amounted to a form of indoctrination.  

To Junell, by insisting on a skeptical approach to all received wisdom, these new teachers were undermining their ability to teach many important truths. Personally, he added, “the values I hold most significant are those least supportable by empirical data” (p. 512). And instruction in these areas might just require an appeal to emotions, rather than an intellectual approach alone. He expanded upon that argument two years later, in November 1970 (“Is rational man our first priority?”): 

It is not our intent to discredit the need for reason, nor to elevate the position of emotions. Our thesis is simply that because attitudes function in the peculiar way they do, the emotions of young children must be made the primary target of public education, and the educator who wishes to improve the human condition without full recognition of this fact is merely whistling in the dark. (p. 148) 

Prioritizing thinking 

The arguments about what constitutes an appropriately intellectual education continued into the 1980s and ‘90s, highlighted by E.D. Hirsch’s 1988 bestseller Cultural Literacy, which sounded the alarm about students’ shallow supply of knowledge about the world. In response to this line of thinking, Edmund Janko (“Knowing is not thinking,” March 1989) pointed out that kids did, in fact, have plenty of background knowledge, just not about the same things that many teachers value — for example, they knew what was happening with their favorite baseball team, and they knew the poetic lyrics of Bruce Springsteen. Moreover, those who fretted about children’s lack of knowledge were missing the bigger point: “The real heart of the matter — the thing that disturbs teachers the most — is not students’ ignorance, but their unwillingness or inability to deal intellectually with what they do know” (p. 545).  

According to Janko (much as Metcalf and Olsen had argued three decades earlier), giving students more facts was not going to be of much value if they were unable or unwilling to think critically about those facts. Yet the kinds of lessons that would encourage critical thinking would also need to allow for some ambiguity and disorder, perhaps more than teachers and students would be comfortable with. Such lessons were important to students’ intellectual development, because real intellectual engagement in the issues would not be easily found elsewhere: 

If not in school, where on earth would a youngster see an example of how a subject should be approached and discussed? The popular television talk shows — the ones that students might actually watch — generally exploit issues rather than explore them. Even when the air waves are not befogged by the dopey chit-chat of the glitterati, the “serious discussions” usually consist of a series of emotional outbursts that are not followed up or analyzed, because the host has to keep the ball rolling on to the next sensation. (p. 545) 

There will always be a new sensation for students to analyze and understand. Equipping them to do that is part of the complex mission of schools, and the work is no easier today than it was in the 1930s. 

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Exegesis of a ‘special kind of vice’ in America 

Review of Anti-intellectualism in American Life by Richard Hofstadter 

The authors in this issue of Phi Delta Kappan were inspired, at least in part, by the historian Richard Hofstadter’s 1963 classic, Anti-intellectualism in American Life. In the November 1963 issue of Kappan, the book was reviewed by Raymond Muessing, then associate professor of education, Purdue University. We share it today as a summation of Hofstadter’s ideas and an example of the conversation about them in Hofstadter’s own time. 

By RAYMOND H. MUESSIG 

 

In Apology, the reconstructed account of his beloved mentor’s trial, Plato has Socrates say that “the unexamined life is not worth living.” Socrates identifies himself as “a sort of gadfly” whose job it is to fasten upon others, “arousing and persuading and reproaching” them. While Socrates paid the supreme price for his convictions, he played a dramatic part which has served as a model for thoughtful, sensitive persons from 399 B.C. to the present. Other dedicated, courageous individuals with probing minds have added to the legacy Socrates perpetuated, but even today the role of a critical analyst is rarely a comfortable or popular one. The contemporary savant who examines his society’s inappropriate or antagonistic ends and means, questionable a priori assumptions, covert non sequiturs, and unfulfilled dreams has no assurance that his shared observations will be greeted hospitably. 

His concern about the status and function of American intellectuals has led Richard Hofstadter, De Witt Clinton Professor of American History at Columbia University, to “trace some of the social movements in our history in which intellect has been dissevered from its coordinate place among the human virtues and assigned the position of a special kind of vice.” As the author and co-author of books such as Social Darwinism in American Thought, The Development of Academic Freedom in the United States, The Age of Reform, and The American Republic, this recipient of the Pulitzer Prize in history is no stranger to the American scene. He feels that “anti-intellectualism is pervasive in our culture” and that “in the United States the play of the mind is perhaps the only form of play that is not looked upon with the most tender indulgence.” 

Hofstadter rejects the idea that the American public is “simply divided into intellectual and anti-intellectual factions.” He has the impression that the “greater part of the public, and a great part even of the intelligent and alert public, is simply non-intellectual; it is infused with enough ambivalence about intellect and intellectuals to be swayed now this way and now that on current cultural issues.” He holds that twentieth century intellectuals have been “engaged in incompatible efforts: they have tried to be good and believing citizens of a democratic society and at the same time to resist the vulgarization of culture which that society constantly produces.” 

Anti-intellectualism in American Life is an ambitious undertaking, for it attempts to portray religion, politics, business, and education. As one might anticipate, the picture Hofstadter takes with his wide-angle lens has its sharpest focus in politics, but it suffers some distortion at the edges where religion and education seem to have been standing when the shutter was snapped. 

Hofstadter argues that religion was the “first arena for American intellectual life, and thus the first arena for an anti-intellectual impulse.” The “forces of enthusiasm and revivalism won their most impressive victories” at an early stage in American history, he reports. The Awakening “gave to American anti–intellectualism its first brief moment of militant success,” and later the evolution controversy and the Scopes trial “greatly quickened the pulse of anti–intellectualism.” “For the first time in the twentieth century,” Hofstadter adds, “intellectuals and experts were denounced as enemies by leaders of a large segment of the public.” The idea is developed that “fundamentalism has been a significant component in the extreme right in American politics” since the 1930s and that the cold war and struggle against world communism “have given the fundamentalist mind a new lease on life.” 

In the political realm Hofstadter posits: “When the United States began its national existence, the relationship between intellect and power was not a problem. The leaders were intellectuals.” Yet at the same time a “current of anti-intellectualism can be found in some of the earliest expressions of popular political thought,” and the Jacksonian movement which followed produced the “first truly powerful and widespread impulse to anti-intellectualism in American politics.” Hofstadter follows the threat of anti-intellectualism in politics, perceiving one of its crescendos with the defeat of Adlai Stevenson. 

Hofstadter places business “in the vanguard of anti-intellectualism in our culture” because it is the “most powerful and pervasive interest in American life.” The “claims of practicality have been an overwhelming force in American life,” the historian feels, and “since the mid-nineteenth century, businessmen have brought to anti-intellectual movements more strength than any other force in society.” Hofstadter’s fear that the relationship between business and intellectualism can be detrimental is evident in this statement: 

. . . The freedom of intellect and art is inevitably the freedom to criticize and disparage, to destroy and re-create; but the daily necessity of the intellectual and the artist is to be an employee, a protege, a beneficiary — or a man of business. . . . 

 Commenting upon American education, Hofstadter says that our society has been “passionately, intent upon education” but that the results of our educational system have been “a constant disappointment.” He finds some elements worthy of praise and even defense, concedes that the “history of American educational reformers often seems to be the history of men fighting against an uncongenial environment,” and alludes to a few of the many problems which envelop the ideal of universal, free, public education. But he is convinced that crucial aspects of our educational system have come under the control of people who are hostile to intellect and that this condition explains many things in twenty-five words or less. Occasionally Hofstadter lapses into breezy, superficial asides which come as a disappointment from a historian of his caliber and stature such as: “Life-adjustment educators would do anything in the name of science except encourage children to study it.” In rarer instances he even lets his typewriter get away from him in a passage like this: 

. . . The more humdrum the task the educationists have to undertake, the nobler and more exalted their music grows. When they see a chance to introduce a new course in family living or home economics, they begin to tune the fiddles of their idealism. When they feel they are about to establish the school janitor’s right to be treated with respect, they grow starry-eyed and increase their tempo. And when they are trying to assure that the location of the school toilets will be so clearly marked that the dullest child can find them, they grow dizzy with exaltation and launch into wild cadenzas about democracy and self-realization. 

Although he has a short quotation from an article by an educator like William Chandler Bagley, the essentialist, and endeavors to provide some balance to his dour treatment of American educators, Hofstadter has a tendency to lump all persons involved in professional education — past or present, competent or incompetent, scholarly or unscholarly — into a single stereotypic, gray glob. 

Anti-intellectualism in American Life is well written on the whole and interestingly (if not always objectively) documented, and it should serve as a vehicle for worthwhile individual contemplation or group discussion. While Hofstadter confesses that “factual details are organized and dominated by [his] views,” his views tend to be constricted. At times he leans toward over-simplification and monistic diagnosis. Though he is critical of others whose concepts, precepts, goals, and procedures lack specificity and rigor, his own definition of what is meant by “intellectual” is sketchy and his recommendations for implementation are meager. 

Perhaps Hofstadter’s book suggests a companion volume similar to the one Herman H. Horne proposed to accompany John Dewey’s treatise, Democracy and Education. On June 18, 1929, Horne wrote to Dewey suggesting an “expository analysis of the main points in the argument” offered by Dewey and a “contrasting point of view” as a follow-up to Democracy and Education. Horne hoped to face similar concerns from the point of view of an idealist. Dewey welcomed the idea, and Horne’s The Democratic Philosophy of Education was penned and published. Analogously, a researcher-writer might tackle a volume centered around the growth and development of intellectualism in American life, uncover positive dimensions and their exemplification, and spell out his program for the care and feeding of intellect today and tomorrow in our society. The combined impact of Hofstadter’s “it can happen here and has” approach and a second “but it doesn’t have to and hasn’t always” endeavor might be doubly enlightening.