Anti-Intellectualism in American Life

by Richard Hofstadter

The new education was also at bottom politically conservative, but its warm rhetoric about democracy, its philanthropic approach to the child (not to speak of its having become the object of much harassment by right-wing cranks) made it seem, at least to its advocates, “progressive” or even radical. It prided itself on the realism of recognizing and accepting the intellectual limitations of the masses, and yet on the idealism of accepting, encouraging, and providing for the least able members of the student body.

It was founded upon a primary regard for the child, and avoided making large claims upon his abilities. It made no hopeful assumptions about the child’s pleasure in intellectual activity, at least where such activity was difficult, or about his satisfaction in achievement. On the contrary, it assumed that the child’s pleasure in schooling, which was a primary goal, came from having his needs and ...

The main strength of progressivism came from its freshness in method. It tried to mobilize the interests of the child, to make good use of his need for activity, to concern the minds of teachers and educators with a more adequate sense of his nature, to set up pedagogical rules that would put the burden on the teacher not to be arbitrarily authoritative, and to develop the child’s capacity for expression as well as his ability to learn.

Hitherto I have intentionally spoken not of progressivism in education, but of something still broader and more inclusive which I prefer to call “the new education.” The new education represented the elaboration of certain progressive principles into a creed, the attempt to make inclusive claims for their applicability in a system of mass education, their extension from experimental work largely with very young children into a schematism for public education at all ages, and finally the development of an attack upon the organized curriculum and liberal education under the rubric of “progressivism.”

Dewey was trying to devise a theory of education—of the development of intelligence and the role of knowledge—which would be wholly consistent with Darwinism.

Dewey began by thinking of the individual learner as using his mind instrumentally to solve various problems presented by his environment, and went on to develop a theory of education conceived as the growth of the learner.

Dewey felt that he and his contemporaries must now surmount a series of artificial dualisms inherited from past ages. Primary among these was the dualism between knowledge and action. For Dewey, action is involved in knowledge—not in the sense, as some of his uncomprehending critics charged, that knowledge is subordinated to action and inferior to “practice,” but in the sense that knowledge is a form of action, and that action is one of the terms by which knowledge is acquired and used.

Dewey was also trying to find the educational correlates of a democratic and progressive society.

If a democratic society is truly to serve all its members, it must devise schools in which, at the germinal point in childhood, these members will be able to cultivate their capacities and, instead of simply reproducing the qualities of the larger society, will learn how to improve them.

It was in this sense that he saw education as a major force in social reconstruction. Plainly, if society is to be remade, one must above all look for the regenerative contribution the child is capable of making to society. And this cannot be done, Dewey thought, unless the child is placed at the center of the school, unless the rigid authority of the teacher and the traditional weight of the curriculum are displaced by his own developing interests and impulses.

To mobilize these impulses and interests toward learning, under gentle adult guidance, is to facilitate the learning process and also to form a type of character an...

I have chosen these remarks because, though written by a working educator rather than a theorist, they sum up in brief a number of the convictions prevalent in what was then up-to-date educational thinking. They reflect its Christian fervor and benevolence; its sense of the central place of the child in the modern world; its concern with democracy and opportunity as criteria of educational achievement; its conviction of the importance of the dull child and his demands on the educational system; its optimism about educational research and child study; its belief that education is to be defined essentially as growth; and its faith that a proper education, though focused on the self-realization of the individual child, would also automatically work toward the fulfillment and salvation of democratic society.

As Dewey did later, Parker stressed the school as a community: “A school should be a model home, a complete community and embryonic democracy.”

and powers furnish the material and give the starting point for all education.” Also: “We violate the child’s nature and render difficult the best ethical results by introducing the child too abruptly to a number of special studies, of reading, writing, geography, etc., out of relation to [his] social life. The true center of correlation on the school subjects is not science, nor literature, nor history, nor geography, but the child’s own social activities.”

They envisaged a child life engaged more or less directly with nature and with activity, and not with absorbing traditions meaningful only to adults or with reading books and mastering skills set not by the child’s desires and interests but by adult society.

Etymologically, Hall pointed out, the word for school meant leisure, “exemption from work, the perpetuation of the primeval paradise created before the struggle for existence began.” Understood in this sense, the school stood for health, growth, and heredity, “a pound of which is worth a ton of instruction.”

Growth is a natural, animal process, and education is a social process. Growth in the child, taken literally, goes on automatically, requiring no more than routine care and nourishment; its end is to a large degree predetermined by genetic inheritance, whereas the ends of education have to be supplied.

Since the idea of growth is intrinsically a biological metaphor and an individualistic conception, the effect of this idea was of necessity to turn the mind away from the social to the personal function of education; it became not an assertion of the child’s place in society but rather of his interests as against those of society.6

The problem, however, did not arise from any lack of awareness, on Dewey’s part, of the social character of education; it arose from the fact that the concept of individual growth became a hostage in the hands of educational thinkers who were obsessed with the child-centered school.

Although Dewey himself did not accept the antithesis between the child and society as a finality—indeed, he hoped to achieve a harmonious synthesis of the two—the historical effect of the conception of education as growth was to exalt the child and dismiss the problem of society, on the ground that the growth of the child stood for health, whereas the traditions of society (including curricular traditions) stood for outworn, excessively authoritative demands.

Dewey himself never argued, as critics and followers have often thought, for a directionless education.

Dewey’s difficulty was of another order: having insisted that education, being growth itself, cannot have any end set for it save still more education, he was unable to formulate the criteria by which society, through the teacher, should guide or direct the child’s impulses.

the suggestion that the child has a destiny implied an end or goal somewhat removed in time and not envisaged by the child. For this reason, what came to be called progressive education, although often immensely fertile and ingenious concerning means, was so futile and confused about ends;

The effect of Dewey’s philosophy on the design of curricular systems was devastating. Even if one is aware of the conditional and limited character of any hierarchy of values one may establish among subjects, one must have such a hierarchy in mind to design a curriculum that runs over the course of several years, for its lower years must be in some measure conceived as the prerequisite to certain choices in the later years.

The ideal of growth was the primary expression of Dewey’s concern with the individual; the ideal of education in the service of democracy was the expression of his sense of the social function of education.

The child, now released from traditional restraints, would be raised none the less to accept social responsibilities; but these would be defined as responsibilities to his peers and to the future.

“We may produce in schools a projection in type of the society we should like to realize, and by forming minds in accord with it gradually modify the larger and more recalcitrant features of adult society.”9 This sentence expresses in brief the essence of Dewey’s demand on the schools in behalf of democracy, and at the same time shows a central difficulty in his educational philosophy: he was obliged to assume that there is a kind of pre-established harmony between the needs and interests of the child and “the society we should like to realize.” Otherwise it would be necessary either to sacrifice the ideal of education as growth or to abandon the goal of “forming minds” in accordance with an adult, and hence externally imposed, vision of the good society.

intellectuals

What they have come to fear is not so much rejection or overt hostility, with which they have learned to cope and which they have almost come to regard as their proper fate, but the loss of alienation. Many of the most spirited younger intellectuals are disturbed above all by the fear that, as they are increasingly recognized, incorporated, and used, they will begin merely to conform, and will cease to be creative and critical and truly useful. This is the fundamental paradox in their position

Howe,

“What is most alarming is that the whole idea of the intellectual vocation—the idea of a life dedicated to values that cannot possibly be realized by a commercial civilization—has gradually lost its allure.”

Whenever intellectuals “become absorbed into the accredited institutions of society they not only lose their traditional rebelliousness but to one extent or another they cease to function as intellectuals.

Almost any alternative would be preferable to subordination of their talents to the uses of others: “A total estrangement from the sources of power and prestige, even a blind unreasoning rejection of every aspect of our culture, would be far healthier if only because it would permit a free discharge of aggression.”

The legacy of the Founding Fathers, itself tinctured by Puritan ideas, was equally important. In the development of new countries, while the people are engaged in liberating themselves from colonial status and forging a new identity, intellectuals seem always to play an important role. The leaders of the American Enlightenment did so with signal effectiveness: they gave the new republic a coherent and fairly workable body of ideas, a definition of its identity and ideals, a sense of its place in history, a feeling of nationality, a political system and a political code.

The culture of the Founding Fathers was succeeded by what I like to call mugwump culture—and by mugwump I refer not just to the upper-class reform movement of the Gilded Age, which is the conventional usage, but to the intellectual and cultural outlook of the dispossessed patrician class.

The mugwump mind, in which the influence of New England was again decisive, inherited from the Puritans a certain solemnity and high intent, but was unable to sustain their passion. From the Founding Fathers and the American Enlightenment it inherited in a more direct and immediate way a set of intellectual commitments and civic concerns. In the mugwump ambience, however, the intellectual virtues of the eighteenth-century republican type dwindled and dried up, very largely because mugwump thinkers were too commonly deprived of the occasion to bring these virtues into any intimate or organic relation with experience. It had been essential to the culture of the Founding Fathers that it was put to the test of experience, that it was forced to cope with grave and intricate problems of power; it was characteristic of mugwump culture that its relation to experience and its association with power became increasingly remote.

The mugwump mind reproduced the classicism of the Founding Fathers, their passion for order and respect for mind, their desire to rationalize the world and to make political institutions the embodiment of applied reason, their assumption that social station is a proper fulcrum for political leadership, and their implicit concern for the decorous exemplification of one’s proper social role. But having retreated from the most urgent and exciting changes that were taking place in the country, having been edged out of the management of its central institutions of business and politics, and having chosen to withdraw from any identification with the aspirations of the common people, the patrician class produced a culture that became over-refined, dessicated, aloof, snobbish

The case of the anti-intellectualist had taken on the character of a self-fulfilling prophecy. Partly by their own fiat, intellect had become associated with losing causes and exemplified by social types that were declining in vigor and influence, encapsulated by an impermeable world.

Anti-intellectualism, as I hope these pages have made clear, is founded in the democratic institutions and the egalitarian sentiments of this country.

the alienation of the intellectual and the artist, long since a ponderable fact, was beginning to congeal into a sort of ideology, as they fell into a somewhat parochial struggle with their own national inheritance.

An excessive, rampant individualism had prevented the formation of a collective spiritual life. The pioneering spirit, coarsely bent on acquisition and conquest, had fostered a materialism which was hopelessly opposed to the skeptical or creative imagination; and it had been reinforced by Puritanism, the ideal philosophy for the pioneer, a philosophy whose contemptuous view of human nature simultaneously released the acquisitive side of men and inhibited their esthetic impulses. American business, as it developed in the atmosphere of the pioneer spirit, Puritanism, and frontier opportunities, had indeed become more adventurous and attractive than business elsewhere, but by this very fact it had absorbed and diverted all too much of what was good in the American character. What one had, then, was a society of sorts, but virtually no “organic native culture,” and it could hardly be surprising that “our orthodox literary men, whatever models they place before themselves, cannot rise above the tribal view of their art as either an amusement or a soporific.”

It appears, then, to be the fate of intellectuals either to berate their exclusion from wealth, success, and reputation, or to be seized by guilt when they overcome this exclusion. They are troubled, for example, when power disregards the counsels of intellect, but because they fear corruption they are even more troubled when power comes to intellect for counsel. To revert to Professor Howe’s language: when bourgeois society rejects them, that is only one more proof of its philistinism; when it gives them an “honored place,” it is buying them off. The intellectual is either shut out or sold out.

Facing the world together is a tactic of politics, but facing it alone seems to be the characteristic creative stance.

Earlier I observed that it has been largely the function of expertise which has restored the intellectual as a force in American politics. But the pertinent question is whether the intellectual, as expert, can really be an intellectual—whether he does not become simply a mental technician,

Here, as in the case of the university and other accredited institutions, I think the answer is not easy or categorical, and a true answer will almost certainly not be apocalyptic enough to please the modern intellectual sensibility.

The critic of power tries to influence the world by affecting public opinion; the associate of power tries directly to make the exercise of power more amenable to the thought of the intellectual community. These functions are not of necessity mutually exclusive or hostile.

The characteristic intellectual failure of the critic of power is a lack of understanding of the limitations under which power is exercised. His characteristic moral failure lies in an excessive concern with his own purity; but purity of a sort is easily had where responsibilities are not assumed. The characteristic failure of the expert who advises the powerful is an unwillingness to bring his capacity for independent thought to bear as a source of criticism. He may lose his capacity for detachment from power by becoming absorbed in its point of view.