[Peace-discuss] Re: More on school as propaganda [1]

[C. G. Estabrook]

[Interesting discussion, Ken, but I think you're being unfair to John
Dewey.  A passionate democrat, Dewey asked in 1931, what is politics other
than "the shadow cast on society by big business?"  I'm appending what
seems to me an important Deweyite article on education (in two parts).
Regards, Carl]


Democracy and Education

Noam Chomsky

Mellon Lecture, Loyola University, Chicago
October 19, 1994

The topic that was suggested, which I'm very happy to talk about, is
"Democracy and Education." The phrase democracy and education immediately
brings to mind the life and work and thought of one of the outstanding
thinkers of the past century, John Dewey, who devoted the greater part of
his life and his thought to this array of issues. I guess I should confess
a special interest. It just happened that this was for various reasons,
his thought was a strong influence on me in my formative years -- in fact,
from about age two on, for a variety of reasons that I won't go into but
are real. For much of his life, later he was more skeptical, Dewey seems
to have felt that reforms in early education could be in themselves a
major lever of social change. They could lead the way to a more just and
free society, a society in which in his words, "The ultimate aim of
production is not production of goods, but the production of free human
beings associated with one another on terms of equality." This basic
commitment, which runs through all of Dewey's work and thought, is
profoundly at odds with the two leading currents of modern social
intellectual life, one, strong in his day -- he was writing in the 1920s
and 1930s about these things -- is associated with the command economies
in Eastern Europe in that day, the systems created by Lenin and Trotsky
and turned into an even greater monstrosity by Stalin. The other, the
state capitalist industrial society being constructed in the U.S. and much
of the West, with the effective rule of private power. These two systems
are actually similar in fundamental ways, including ideologically. Both
were, and one of them remains, deeply authoritarian in fundamental
commitment, and both were very sharply and dramatically opposed to another
tradition, the left libertarian tradition, with roots in Enlightenment
values, a tradition that included progressive liberals of the John Dewey
variety, independent socialists like Bertrand Russell, the leading
elements of the Marxist mainstream, mostly anti-Bolshevik, and of course
libertarian socialists of various anarchist movements, not to speak of
major parts of the labour movement and other popular sectors.

This independent left, of which Dewey was a part, has strong roots in
classical liberalism. It grows right out of it, in my opinion, and it
stands in sharp opposition to the absolutist currents of state capitalist
and state socialist institutions and thought, including the rather extreme
form of absolutism that's now called conservative in the U.S., terminology
that would have amused Orwell and would have caused any genuine
conservative to turn over in his grave, if you could find one.

I need not stress that this picture is not the conventional one, to put it
rather mildly, but I think it does have one merit, at least, namely the
merit of accuracy. I'll try to explain why.

Let me return to one of Dewey's central themes, that the ultimate aim of
production is not production of goods but the production of free human
beings associated with one another on terms of equality. That includes, of
course, education, which was a prime concern of his. The goal of
education, to shift over to Bertrand Russell, is "to give a sense of the
value of things other than domination, to help create wise citizens of a
free community, to encourage a combination of citizenship with liberty,
individual creativeness, which means that we regard a child as a gardener
regards a young tree, as something with an intrinsic nature which will
develop into an admirable form given proper soil and air and light." In
fact, much as they disagreed on many other things, as they did, Dewey and
Russell were perhaps the two leading thinkers of the twentieth century in
the West, in my opinion. They did agree on what Russell called this
humanistic conception, with its roots in the Enlightenment, the idea that
education is not to be viewed as something like filling a vessel with
water, but rather assisting a flower to grow in its own way. It's an
eighteenth-century view which they revived, in other words providing the
circumstances in which the normal creative patterns will flourish.

Dewey and Russell also shared the understanding that these leading ideas
of the Enlightenment and classical liberalism had a revolutionary
character, and they retained it right at the time they were writing, in
the early half of this century. If implemented, these ideas could produce
free human beings whose values were not accumulation and domination but
rather free association on terms of equality and sharing and cooperation,
participating on equal terms to achieve common goals which were
democratically conceived. There was only contempt for what Adam Smith
called the "vile maxim of the masters of mankind, all for ourselves, and
nothing for other people." The guiding principle that nowadays we're
taught to admire and revere as traditional values have eroded under
unremitting attack, the so-called conservatives leading the onslaught in
recent decades.

It's worth taking time to notice how sharp and dramatic is the clash of
values between on the one hand the humanistic conception that runs from
the Enlightenment up to leading twentieth century figures like Russell and
Dewey and on the other hand the prevailing doctrines of today, the
doctrines that were denounced by Adam Smith as the "vile maxim" and also
denounced by the lively and vibrant working class press of a century ago,
which condemned what it called the "new spirit of the age, gain wealth,
forgetting all but self." Smith's vile maxim. It's from 1850 or so, from
the working class press in the U.S.

It's quite remarkable to trace the evolution of values from a
pre-capitalist thinker like Adam Smith, with his stress on sympathy and
the goal of perfect equality and the basic human right to creative work,
to contrast that and move on to the present to those who laud the new
spirit of the age, sometimes rather shamelessly invoking Adam Smith's
name. For example, Nobel Prize winning economist James Buchanan, who
writes that "what each person seeks in an ideal situation is mastery over
a world of slaves." That's what you seek, in case you hadn't noticed.
Something that an Adam Smith would have regarded as simply pathological.
The best book I know of on Adam Smith's actual thought (Adam Smith and His
Legacy From Capitalism) is written by a professor here at Loyola, Patricia
Werhane. That's Adam Smith's actual views. Of course, it's always best to
read the original.

One of the most dramatic illustrations of this new spirit of the age and
its values is the commentary that's now in the press on the difficulties
we face in uplifting the people of Eastern Europe. As you know, we're now
extending to them, our new beneficiaries, the loving care that we've
lavished on our wards elsewhere in Latin America and the Philippines and
so on; with the consequences that are dramatically clear and consistent in
these horror chambers but also are miraculously free of any lessons about
who we are and what we do. One might ask why. In any event, we are now
proceeding to uplift the people liberated from communism as we've in the
past liberated Haitians and Brazilians and Guatemalans and Filipinos and
Native Americans and African slaves and so on. The New York Times is
currently running an interesting series of articles on these different
problems. They give some interesting insight into the prevailing values.
There was an article on East Germany, for example, written by Steven
Kinzer. It opens by quoting a priest who was one of the leaders of the
popular protests against the communist regime in East Germany. He
describes the growing concerns there about what's happening to the
society. He says, "Brutal competition and the lust for money are
destroying our sense of community, and almost everyone feels a level of
fear or depression or insecurity" as they master the new spirit of the age
in which we instruct the backward peoples of the world.

The next article turned to what we regard as the showplace, the real
success story, Poland, written by Jane Perlez. The headline reads "Fast
and Slow Lanes on the Capitalist Road." The structure of the story is that
some are getting the point but there are also some who are still
backwards. She gives one example of a good student and one example of a
slow learner. The good student is the owner of a small factory which is a
"thriving example of the best in modern capitalist Poland. It produces
intricately designed wedding gowns sold mostly to rich Germans and to that
tiny sector of super-rich Poles." This is in a country where poverty has
more than doubled since the reforms were instituted, according to a World
Bank study last July, and incomes have dropped about thirty percent.
However, the people who are hungry and jobless can look at the intricately
designed wedding gowns in the store windows, appreciating the new spirit
of the age, so it's understandable that Poland is hailed as the great
success story for our achievements. This good student explains that
"people have to be taught to understand they must fight for themselves and
can't rely on others." She is describing a training course she's running
that's trying to instil American values among people who are still
brainwashed with slogans like, "I'm a miner. Who else is better?" They
have got to get that out of their heads. A lot of people are better,
namely people who can design wedding gowns for rich Germans.

That's the chosen illustration of the success story of American values.
Then there are the failures, still on the slow lane on the capitalist
road. Here she picks one as her example, a forty-year-old coal miner who
"sits in his wood-paneled living room admiring the fruit of his labour
under communism: a TV set, comfortable furniture, a shiny, modern kitchen,
and he wonders why he's at home, jobless and dependent on welfare
payments," having not yet absorbed the new spirit of the age, gain wealth,
forgetting all but self, and not "I'm a miner. Who else is better?" The
series goes on like that. It's interesting to read and to see what's taken
for granted.

What's happening in Eastern Europe recapitulates what's gone on in our
Third World domains for a long time and falls into place in a much longer
story. It's very familiar from our own history and the history of England
before us. There's a recent book, by a distinguished Yale University
labour historian, David Montgomery, in which he points out that modern
America was created over the protests of its working people. He's quite
right. Those protests were vigorous and outspoken, particularly in the
working class and community press that flourished in the U.S. from the
early nineteenth century up until the 1930s, when it was finally destroyed
by private power, as its counterpart in England was about thirty years
later. The first major study of this topic was in 1924 by Norman Ware. It
still makes very illuminating reading. It was published here in Chicago
and reprinted very recently by Ivan Dee, a local publisher. It's very much
worth reading. It's a work that set off a very substantial study in social
history.

What Ware describes, looking mostly at the labour press, is how the value
system that was advocated by private power had to be beaten into the heads
of ordinary people, who had to be taught to abandon normal human
sentiments and to replace them with the new spirit of the age, as they
called it. He reviews the mainly mid-nineteenth century working class
press, often, incidentally, run by working class women. The themes that
run through it are very constant for a long period. They are concerned
with what they call "degradation" and "loss of dignity and independence,
loss of self-respect, the decline of the worker as a person, the sharp
decline in cultural level and cultural attainments as workers were
subjected to," what they called, "wage slavery," which they regarded as
not very different from chattel slavery, which they had fought to uproot
during the Civil War. Particularly dramatic and quite relevant to today's
problems was the sharp decline in what we call "high culture," reading of
classics and contemporary literature by the people who were called the
factory girls in Lowell and by craftsmen and other workers. Craftsmen
would hire somebody to read to them while they were working because they
were interested and had libraries. All that had to go.

What they described, quoting from the labour press, is "when you sell your
product, you retain your person. But when you sell your labour, you sell
yourself, losing the rights of free men and becoming vassals of mammoth
establishments of a monied aristocracy that threatens annihilation to
anyone who questions their right to enslave and oppress. Those who work in
the mills ought to own them, not have the status of machines ruled by
private despots who are entrenching monarchic principles on democratic
soil as they drive downwards freedom and rights, civilization, health,
morals and intellectuality in the new commercial feudalism." Just in case
you are confused, this is long before Marxism. This is American workers
talking about their experiences in the 1840s.

The labour press also condemned what they called the "bought priesthood,"
referring to the media and the universities and the intellectual class,
that is, the apologists who sought to justify the absolute despotism that
was the new spirit of the age and to instil its sordid and demeaning
values. One of the early leaders of the AFL, about a century ago, late
nineteenth century, expressed the standard view when he described the
mission of the labour movement as "to overcome the sins of the market and
to defend democracy by extending it to control over industry by working
people."

All of this would have been completely intelligible to the founders of
classical liberalism, people like Wilhelm von Humboldt, for example, who
inspired John Stuart Mill, and who very much like his contemporary Adam
Smith regarded creative work freely undertaken in association with others
as the core value of a human life. So if a person produces an object on
command, Humboldt wrote, we may admire what he did but we will despise
what he is, not a true human being who acts on his own impulses and
desires. The bought priesthood have the task of undermining these values
and destroying them among people who sell themselves on the labour market.
For similar reasons, Adam Smith warned that in any civilised society
governments would have to intervene to prevent the division of labour from
turning people into "creatures as stupid and ignorant as it's possible for
a human being to be." He based his rather nuanced advocacy of markets on
the thesis that if conditions were truly free, markets would lead to
perfect equality. That was their moral justification. All of this has been
forgotten by the bought priesthood, who have a rather different tale to
tell.

Dewey and Russell are two of the leading twentieth-century inheritors of
this tradition, with its roots in the Enlightenment and classical
liberalism. Even more interesting is the inspiring record of struggle and
organization and protest by working men and women since the early
nineteenth century as they sought to win freedom and justice and to retain
the rights that they had once had as the new despotism of state-supported
private power extended its sway. The basic issue was formulated with a
good deal of clarity by Thomas Jefferson around 1816. This was before the
Industrial Revolution had really taken root in the former colonies but you
could begin to see the developments. In his later years, observing what
was happening, Jefferson had rather serious concerns about the fate of the
democratic experiment. He feared the rise of a new form of absolutism that
was more ominous than what had been overthrown in the American Revolution,
in which he was of course a leader. Jefferson distinguished in his later
years between what he called "aristocrats" and "democrats." The
aristocrats are "those who fear and distrust the people, and wish to draw
all powers from them into the hands of the higher classes." The democrats,
in contrast, "identify with the people, have confidence in them, cherish
and consider them as the honest and safe depository of the public
interest, if not always the most wise." The aristocrats of his day were
the advocates of the rising capitalist state, which Jefferson regarded
with much disdain, clearly recognising the quite obvious contradiction
between democracy and capitalism, or more accurately what we might call
really existing capitalism, that is, guided and subsidised by powerful
developmental states, as it was in England and the U.S. and indeed
everywhere else.

This fundamental contradiction is enhanced as new corporate structures
were granted increasing powers, not by democratic procedures but mainly by
courts and lawyers who converted what Jefferson called the "banking
institutions and monied incorporations," which he said would destroy
freedom, and which he could barely see the beginnings of in his day. They
were converted, mainly through courts and lawyers, into "immortal persons"
with powers and rights beyond the worst nightmares of pre-capitalist
thinkers like Adam Smith or Thomas Jefferson. Half a century earlier, Adam
Smith already warned against this, though he could barely see the
beginnings of it.

Jefferson's distinction between aristocrats and democrats was developed
about a half a century later by Bakunin, the anarchist thinker and
activist, actually one of the few predictions of the social sciences ever
to have come true. It ought to have a place of honour in any serious
academic curriculum in the social sciences and the humanities for this
reason alone. Back in the nineteenth century, Bakunin predicted that the
rising intelligentsia of the nineteenth century would follow one of two
parallel paths. One path would be to exploit popular struggles to take
state power, becoming what he called a "Red bureaucracy that will impose
the most cruel and vicious regime in history." That's one strain. The
other strain, he said, will be those who discover that real power lies
elsewhere, and they will become its bought priesthood, in the words of the
labour press, serving the real masters in the state-supported private
system of power, either as managers or apologists who beat the people with
the people's stick, as he put it, in the state capitalist democracies. The
similarities are pretty striking, and they run right up to the present.
They help account for the rapid transitions that people make from one to
the other position. It looks like a funny transition, but in fact it's a
common ideology. We're seeing it right now in Eastern Europe with the
group that's sometimes called the Nomenklatura capitalists, the old
communist ruling class, now the biggest enthusiasts for the market,
enriching themselves as the societies become standard Third World
societies. The move is very easy, because it's basically the same
ideology. A similar move from Stalinist commissar to celebration of
America is quite standard in modern history, and it doesn't require much
of a shift in values, just a shift in judgment as to where power lies.

Independently of Jefferson and Bakunin, others were coming to the same
understanding in the nineteenth century. One of the leading American
intellectuals was Charles Francis Adams, who in 1880 described the rise of
what is now called the "post-industrial society" by Daniel Bell and Robert
Reich and John Kenneth Galbraith and others. This is 1880, remember. A
society in which, Adams says, "the future is in the hands of our
universities, our schools, our specialists, our scientific men and our
writers and those who do the actual work of management in the ideological
and economic institutions." Nowadays they're called the "technocratic
elite" and the "action intellectuals" or the new class or some other
similar term. Adams, back in 1880, concluded that "the first object of
thinking citizens, therefore, should be not to keep one or another
political party in power, but to insist on order and submission to law."
Meaning that the elites should be permitted to function in what's called
"technocratic isolation," by the World Bank -- I'm being a little
anachronistic here, that's modern lingo -- or, as the London Economist
puts the idea today, "policy should be insulated from politics." That's
the case in free Poland, they assure their readers, so they don't have to
be concerned about the fact that people are calling for something quite
different in free elections. They can do what they like in the elections,
but since policy is insulated from politics and technocratic insulation
proceeds, it really doesn't matter. That's democracy.

A decade earlier, in 1870, Adams had warned -- they were worried then
about universal suffrage, people were fighting for the right to vote -- he
warned that universal suffrage would "bring the government of ignorance
and vice, with power in the hands of the European and especially Celtic
proletariat on the Atlantic coast," those horrible Irish people, "an
African proletariat on the shores of the Gulf and a Chinese proletariat on
the Pacific." Adams didn't foresee the sophisticated techniques that would
be developed in the twentieth century to ensure that policy remains
insulated from politics as the franchise was extended through popular
struggle and to guarantee that the general public would remain
marginalised and disaffected, subdued by the new spirit of the age and
coming to see themselves not as free people who have a right to dignity
and independence but as atoms of consumption who sell themselves on the
labour market, at least when they're lucky.

Adams was in fact expressing an old idea. Eighty years earlier Alexander
Hamilton had put it clearly. He said there was the idea that your people
are a great beast and that the real disease is democracy. That's Hamilton.
These ideas have become ever more entrenched in educated circles, as
Jefferson's fears and Bakunin's predictions were increasingly realised.
The basic attitudes coming into this century were expressed very clearly
by Woodrow Wilson's Secretary of State, Robert Lansing, attitudes that led
to Wilson's Red Scare, as it was called, which destroyed labour and
independent thought for a decade. Lansing warned of the danger of allowing
the "ignorant and incapable mass of humanity" to become "dominant in the
earth," or even influential, as he believed the Bolsheviks intended.
That's the hysterical and utterly erroneous reaction that's pretty
standard among people who feel that their power is threatened. Those
concerns were articulated very clearly by progressive intellectuals of the
period, maybe the leading one being Walter Lippman in his essays of
democracy, mainly in the 1920s. Lippman was also the dean of American
journalism and one of the most distinguished commentators on public
affairs for many years.

He advised that "the public must be put in its place so that the
responsible men may live free of the trampling and the roar of a
bewildered herd." Hamilton's beast. In a democracy, Lippman held, these
"ignorant and meddlesome outsiders" do have a "function." Their function
is to be "interested spectators of action" but not "participants." They
are to lend their weight periodically to some member of the leadership
class, that's called elections, and then they are supposed to return to
their private concerns. In fact, similar notions became part of mainstream
academic theory at about the same time.

[continued in part 2]