Permanent revolution.

John Dewey & the Decline of American Education: How the Patron Saint of Schools Has Corrupted Teaching and Learning, by Henry T. Edmondson III (ISI, 147 pp., $15)

THE 19th-century common-school movement, which we rightly associate with Horace Mann (1796-1859), was a logical, organic outgrowth of the educational thinking and political institutions of the American Founders, especially Jefferson and Franklin. But, as historians and education-policy specialists such as Charles Glenn and E. D. Hirsch have suggested, this commonsense legacy was subsequently mixed with ambiguous, Romanticutopian, even messianic ideas that reached critical mass in the "Progressive" movement of the 1920s and 1930s whose animating spirit was John Dewey.

Yet even Horace Mann was affected by these Romantic ideas. As Glenn has noted, Mann "promised that, given a generation of schooling such as he prescribed, it would be possible to close down the prisons." Such anti-traditional, utopian expectations--which Gouverneur Morris had ridiculed in 1790 as French "lightning" as opposed to sober American "light"--had little consequence in the 19th and early 20th centuries on so decentralized an education system as ours. But the advocacy of Romantic, naturalistic, and pantheistic religious-philosophical ideas by alluring writers of great influence such as Rousseau, Emerson, and Whitman created ideals and expectations that were to find their most influential educational proponent by the 1890s in John Dewey. Eschewing our existing institutions and what he called the "idolatry of the U.S. Constitution," Dewey promoted a futuristic, socialistic idea of "the Great Community," whose "seer" for him was the polymorphous, promiscuous, egalitarian egotist-aesthete Walt Whitman, who sang both of himself and of future "democratic vistas." Democracy, Dewey wrote, "is a name for a life of free and enriching communion," and this mystical-pantheistic idea had its institutional vehicle in the "child-centered" school. As Glenn, Richard Hofstadter, and others, including admirers of Dewey, have noted, Dewey actually had no trust in or loyalty to existing democratic institutions that affected schools, such as school boards or elections of public officials. And as his complimentary 1928 comments on what he saw in Communist Russia indicate, he had no commitment to the rights or virtues of traditional families either.

The American Founders, and several generations of their sensible successors responsible for an eventually free but mandatory public-education system, emphasized the fundamental importance of providing equal access at least at a minimum level for all children to traditional curricular components --literacy, numeracy, science, geography, and history, the funded wisdom of many centuries of human endeavor that was now made available in books. But under the influence of Romantic primitivists such as Rousseau, Emerson, and Whitman, the historical fund of knowledge and skill made available in books to those who were literate was increasingly held in contempt. "I hate books!" Rousseau expostulates in the middle of his interminably long, boring, sophistical, but immensely influential education-theory book Emile (1762). And the writers Emerson and Whitman evince the same counterintuitive contempt for their own metier, in the interests of an ill-defined but pantheistic conception of "nature." Dewey was thus building on a budding barbarian impulse, impatient and contemptuous of the study and transmission of accumulated history and literate traditions that had been central to the classical-Christian and moderate-Enlightenment traditions of the Founding Fathers and their immediate successors down to Lincoln.

Quentin Anderson has described Dewey's resulting "child-centered," primitivist "conception of the school" as "the most extravagant and nationally influential of his fantasies." This school is a present-oriented, limited-literacy, "experiential" tool for the "reconstruction of society." As close, critical observers such as W. C. Bagley, Arthur Bestor, and Glenn have asked, when did Dewey or his disciples ever consult parents or elected officials to ask whether they thought that their children and future citizens should be dragooned into this utopian project? And, as Diane Ravitch and E. D. Hirsch have noted, the 80-year dominance of Dewey's "Progressive" ideas--almost indelibly institutionalized in the world of teachers' colleges, teachers' unions, and certification procedures--has been a gross failure in terms of the educational levels and competences of our public-school graduates. "Standards-based" education reforms at the state level and the bipartisan No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, whatever their defects or difficulties, are well-warranted responses by parents, citizens, and legislators to generations of scholastic decline that have left many of our children and young adults not only functionally incompetent and quasi-illiterate but also vulnerable to an unprecedented tide of polluted cultural effluvia. The "child-centered school" has helped give birth to an infantile culture--one that threatens the very capacity of the American republic to retain and convey its economic accomplishments, social decencies, and civic self-understanding.

Like many thoughtful and liberally educated critics of Dewey, Henry Edmondson is puzzled and depressed at how widespread and long-lasting his influence has proved to be, given the turgid, confusing quality of both his thought and his prose, his logic and his rhetoric. Even admirers of Dewey have conceded the opacity or obscurity of his literary style: Both William Heard Kilpatrick and Sidney Hook started their own academic careers by trying to communicate Dewey's thought to others, recognizing how badly he needed such help. (The experience of having to read large quantities of his prose has been compared to sawing wide logs with a dull saw and to taking a slow subway train to hell.)

Edmondson's critique of Dewey is useful, clear, and brief. He rightly sees Rousseau's primitivism as a major influence, and he rightly distinguishes Dewey from Jefferson, whose reputation and lineage Dewey was eager to claim as his own. Like E. D. Hirsch, but at more length, Edmondson is eager to show how decisively Dewey departs and differs from the heritage of Jefferson and the other Founders on the questions of the centrality of literacy and history in the American K-12 curriculum: Dewey and his disciples and allies promoted "hands-on" experience and "social studies" as against literacy and the study of history.

In addition, Dewey's promotion of what he called "social experimentation leading to great social change" was a working out of Whitman's social, psychological, and sexual radicalism and egalitarianism. Dewey decently defended Trotsky against the Stalinists in the late 1930s--perhaps his finest hour--but his own version of the need for "permanent revolution" has had more long-lasting and insidious effects than Trotsky's, creating a climate and expectation for novelty, change, and experimentation in American public education--uncritical "neophilia" and what Frederick Hess has called bogus "policy churn." Dewey slandered a wide range of more conservative or traditionalist education-policy thinkers and critics as "fundamentalists" obsessed with a fruitless, retrograde "quest for certainty" (the title of his 1929 book). In this regard he is the father--as that agile nihilist Richard Rorty has seen--of our contemporary "postmodern" deconstructionists, with their attacks on "foundationalism" and "logocentrism." But some of the most powerful and enduring criticism of the whole "Progressive" movement of which Dewey is the patron saint came early from thoughtful liberal-traditionalist Columbia Teachers College professors such as W. C. Bagley and Isaac L. Kandel. Kandel protested the illogical riot of Whitmanian "experimentation" in what Diane Ravitch calls his "classic" study, The Cult of Uncertainty (1943). A Jewish immigrant writing in a dark time, Kandel knew that Dewey's influential denial of history, traditional learning, and moral common sense in teacher training and the schools was a new form of barbarism. We are living with its consequences.

Mr. Aeschliman is professor of education at Boston University, adjunct professor of English at the University of Italian Switzerland, and author of The Restitution of Man: C. S. Lewis and the Case Against Scientism.