The American experience seems to confirm the fact that the social effectiveness of education depends in a definite manner upon social reality.
My American experience is very much more limited than the Austrian. A six-week stay in the Middle West, an eight-week tour of the central and eastern South, as well as a few weeks spent in the East, that is all. But I had the opportunity of short stays at some 30 colleges and universities, as well as of interviews, visits, and so on at high schools (senior grade schools). Incidentally, I was asked to advise on “study plan on social sciences” at a progressive high school in the Middle West and had some official contacts with the Office of Education of the USA in Washington, which introduced me to the federal agencies dealing with the relief of the youth with Civil Conservation Corps and so on.
The well-known and somewhat perplexing paradoxes of the American education may be summed up thus:
(A) The complete separation of church and state, enforced in order to safeguard religious liberty in a deeply religious community, led to highly paradoxical results in the United States.
Though in some of the fundamentalist states of the USA anybody is liable to instant dismissal for a mere mention of Darwinism, at the same time in teacher colleges every vestige of a religious atmosphere has been removed through a ban on religious teaching enforced by state authorities. This ban was meant as a safeguard against religious freedom from secular encroachment, but has resulted in a complete freedom from religion in the educational field.
Education is thus, in America, practically more secularized than under the social democratic school reform in Vienna. Conjointly with a very marked development toward departmentalism in religious belief, this explains the striking secularization of the thoughts, work, and life of the whole community, without distinction.
(B) Although throughout public life a very high degree of idealism is professed, and often practiced, education is confessedly aimed at the purely practical purpose of enabling the young to earn a living as quickly and efficiently as possible. The “job” is not only the main concern but also the chief hobby of the young in vacation time. In fact young boys are traditionally as keen on jobs as the grown-ups are in the depressed areas of England. (Incidentally, imagine the shock that unemployment must have meant for a school system that sees its only justification in helping to get jobs for the youth. For what is the purpose of the school, once the boy cannot get a job, anyway?) In fact the American educationalist often cannot answer satisfactorily the question of why a definite subject – a definite mater of no definite practical value – should be included in the curriculum.
On the other hand, as you will see later on, the idea that school and education must have a practical value works as a strong motive toward the use of the school as a vehicle of social cooperation, an instrument of developing new organs of conscious adaptation to environment, and so on – and not similar social values of a higher type.
(C) The task of setting up social equality does not fall to the school in the USA. In common human appreciation, both on the side of the rich and on that of the poor, equality is a fact. So is equality in speech, manners, behavior for some 80 percent of the population (excluding the Negroes). The rich man does not feel socially superior to the not rich, the common citizen does not feel socially inferior to the rich. (Exceptions are of course numerous but do not affect the fundamental facts.) Thus equality is achieved; setting for the schools the task of establishing equality would be beside the mark.
On the other hand, the differences of income between different individuals and groups do mark definite social differences between them. Such differences of “belonging to this or that set” are numerous; they correspond to the English social strata. But they are different in character from these.
They are not marks of descent, upbringing, breed, and breeding, but marks of income. You move into a set when your income rises, and you move out of it again when you lose your income – moving into the set corresponding to your present income. Thus cash brings the groups together and also separates them again (in a sense). This kind of group distinction is less deep and yet more brutal and harsh than any other. But it is very much mitigated by the fact that the ups and downs of income are frequent, the different members of one and the same family often living at different social levels, according to the set into which their earning capacity falls during a given period.a The youngest brother would be a university professor while the oldest one would be a miner, another five or six between them ranging on a sliding scale of income grades and corresponding social sets. Thus friends are often separated by a change in their social sets, but the cleavage is factual more than one affecting self-valuation – while in England social cleavage is so deep that, for the sake of appearances, it must in many ways be artificially bridged.
Here again, as in case of the effect of unemployment on the ideals of education, the influence of actual economic and social conditions becomes strikingly apparent:
The understanding of American social thought is impossible without relating it to the actual social conditions obtaining during the period in which this concept of social life was developed. This is the clue to perhaps the most essential trait in the American attitude to society. Thus:
(D) It is only superficially true that the American attitude toward society as a whole is “materialistic” – in that sense where “materialistic” designates a valuation divorced from advancement. In fact the opposite is true. The American is convinced of the fundamental righteousness of the social order. He believes that it has produced the highest degree of material welfare for all, that it affords opportunities for all, in fact that it makes everybody free and equal. In a sense this is true. Thus the American, disregarding the very important qualifications of this truth, believes in his society and upholds it as the highest fulfillment of God's purpose on earth. He does this, in a sense, irrespectively of whether he believes in God or not, for his belief in society transcends religion in a paradoxical sense; it is a direct expression of his faith in life. His views and opinions about the whole of society must therefore be regarded as equivalent to religious convictions.
The Webbs call the communist regime in Russia a creedocracy. The USA too is, in a wider sense, a creedocracy – only one of a different creed.
(E) The Covenanters founded a society, not a state or a nation. In the USA the political state is banished by the constitution to a remote corner in society. It exists only on sufferance and on condition that it will on no account try to gain powers and competences similar to those enjoyed by the European states. Thus society in the USA exists without the props of the political state. The American does not think of society as being supported by or based on the power of the state or of any kind of force whatever. The US federal government has no police powers in home affairs whatever. There is no police. Society is supposed to look after itself. Anarchy is here realized.
Social reality is at the back of these educationally decisive social ideals. The general belief in the ultimate validity of the principles of this society is its only support. It is delivering the goods: an unprecedented standard of life and a great equality of chances. After all, there is not more than a small percentage of very rich and more than a moderate percentage of down and outs in the United States, and those are almost all recent immigrants. The rest, the vast majority, are the best fed, best clothed, best housed, and (on average) certainly best educated people in the world. (The economic crisis, although it has made an indentation in the minds and thoughts of the people, has not yet decisively changed this appreciation.) This is the outcome of the experiment started by the Covenanters. It has not yet come to an end. It still continues. This is the meaning of the well-known phrases: “How do you like America?” and: “We are a new country.” In America, in these past 150 years, these phrases have meant what they mean in Soviet Russia today and probably in the next two hundred years, namely the attitude of a people taking part in a vast experiment – only with the curious difference that, in the USA, there is a very distinct element of vagueness and uncertainty as to where all this will lead to, while in Russia the aim and end seem to be known and fixed (in a manner) beforehand. On the whole there is no country more similar to Soviet Russia than the USA – the only other country in modern history that is the outcome of a conscious and deliberate determination to found a society. The real difference between the two is that the Russian effort is on an altogether higher plane.
Yet the USA should not be underestimated, as happens so often in this country.b Its obvious weaknesses are partly due to its being a “new country.” Although the lower layer of educational attainments is low indeed, the average level of the educational attainment of the masses is unprecedentedly high. The experimental attitude, for example, is often regarded as a very much misplaced application of a technologically fruitful principle to the cultural field. But this experimental attitude is only partly due to the American tradition of starting everything anew; partly it expresses a highly positive relatedness of the school to the task of society building.
Here we are touching on a very important aspect of the educational task under the conditions given in social reality in America.
This is the reason why Americans know more about social change than any other people in the world (excluding USSR).
These two facts account for the constant concern of the American for the role of the individual and of the small group of individuals in the change of the new environment. The plasticity of society and the fact that change was the only constant thing in his experience account for it. The American knows incomparably more about the role of the individual and of the small group in social change than we do. If one day the Americans ceased to believe in their society and therefore to run it, it would instantly change – for there is nothing to prevent it from changing.
This is the social background of the belief in the formative value of education in society in the USA: insofar as education indoctrinates (as the American phrase runs) the child with these ideas and principles, it is, more than in any other country, the direct formative and supporting force in society.
Thus the achievements of American education, from the point of view of American society and its improvement (if only in the American sense), depend for their effectiveness on two preconditions: on the existence of given social ideals; and on the environmental factor of social reality itself.
Whether we take the Austrian case of an education aiming at a transformation of society or the US example of an education that, although progressive, is essentially conservative, the result is the same.
The possibility of socially effective educational efforts in the abstract, detached from the concreteness of society, is an illusion.