Freud and Education--Russell Kirk

Having spent the last eighteen years working with educators I am often surprised that there is little awareness of the Progressive roots of modern public education. In this essay Dr. Kirk makes the point that educationists, drawing from progressive theories and the psychology of Freud, created a system which they felt would make everyone well adjusted and productive. It is fair to say the actual results have been, and continue to be, very disappointing.

"From the Academy"
by Russell Kirk
from the National Review,
August 29, 1959, p. 304
Freud and the Educationists

Mr. Richard LaPiere, professor of sociology at Stanford and editor of the McGraw-Hill series in sociology and anthropology, has just published an important and courageous book: The Freudian Ethic, an Analysis of the Subversion of American Character (Duell, Sloan & Pearce, $5.00). The Protestant ethic (a term borrowed from Max Weber), Dr. LaPiere writes, is being supplanted by the Freudian ethic -- that is, a coddling of the human person in the delusion that man is happiest when he is almost back in the womb.

This study contains the keenest demolition of Freudian psychology that I have seen anywhere, particularly the two chapters about Freudian theory and practice in education: "The Progressive School" and "The Adjustment Motif." Going straight to the heart of the matter, Mr. LaPiere finds in a vague and vulgarized Freudian notion of man the principal cause of the failure of modern American education.

Publicly-supported schools in the United States, he points out, were established in the belief that they "would, in a generation or two, be the cure for every recognized social ill; and that the schools would, moreover, in the course of time, cost the taxpayer nothing, since the educated boys would grow up to be reasonable and honest men and the need for public support of jails, prisons, poor farms, and homes for the aged indigent would thus be eliminated." This naive hope, derived from the Protestant ethic, died hard. As the public schools failed to fulfill these Utopian hopes, education was made compulsory, and extended to girls. We established the state teachers' colleges -- and so riveted upon ourselves the present shackles of Teachers' College Columbia. "The end result of these and other related developments has been the creation of a fairly closed system of teacher recruitment, training, and accrediting that is impervious to correction from without and generates only nominal self-criticism within its own ranks."

As the initial hopes of the zealots for state schooling waned, the doctrines of the evolutionary sociologist Lester F. Ward were invoked to sanction the public-school system: the schools were to work improvements in the social order. The entrenched educationists, however, "did not implement their philosophical goal by teaching teachers to transmit knowledge to public-school students. They became, rather, so preoccupied with the techniques of pedagogy that they largely and often totally ignored the fact that pedagogical techniques are means to an end rather than an end in themselves. Thus there came about an isolation of the professional educators from the sources of human knowledge -- science and the humanities -- that is now so complete that in every university the school of education --its faculty, and its students -- is viewed with a mixture of anger and contempt by the scientists and humanists."