David Lentini, a reader in Maine, comments (in response, I promise to do some instruction on this blog about the history of school reform, which has been an American pastime for over a century):
I started reading about the history of education reform in America about 10 years ago, when our national insanity was becoming too extensive to ignore under the reign of “W”. Wondering how a country could boast both the most widely and extensively educated population in history and also have the greatest disdain—if not outright loathing—for intellect, I found my way to Richard Hofstader’s “Anti-Intellectualism in American Life”. Hofstader’s book (which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1964) gives an excellent description of America’s historical distaste for intellectual discourse, instead favoring a volatile combination of fundamentalist religion and laissez-faire capitalism that emphasizes received wisdom over deliberative thought. In discussing this history, Hofstader gives an excellent overview of the heavy influence that business had on the education reform movements that started about 1890 and their brutal treatment of those who wanted to center American schooling around a traditional liberal education model. His comments on the NEA’s “The Committee of Ten” report in 1892, advising a rigorous liberal arts education for all American children and its drubbing by the elites at schools like Columbia’s Teachers College makes rather depressing reading.
Following Hofstader, I came across a copy of the first edition (1940) of Mortimer Adler’s “How to Read a Book”. Adler’s book, which I found to be an excellent tutorial for what we now seem to call “deep reading”, included a blunt discussion of the reformist forces that demanded the end of the traditional liberal arts curriculum and its replacement with electives which he and Robert Maynard Hutchins fought against at the University of Chicago in the ’30s and ’40s. I’ve read both Adler’s and Hutchins’s later critiques of education as well, and, having attended several of the notable schools in this country (including Chicago) and watching the increasing barbarity of our culture the graduates of the schools seem so bent on imposing on us all, I can only say I consider much of what they wrote to have been prescient. I’m a big fan of Adler’s Paideia approach to education.
I also highly recommend Diane’s book “Left Back”, which is a more focused history on reforms in public secondary education than Hofstader, Adler, and Hutchins. Diane, I hope you will write about your book to share the history of our reformist “misery-go-round” in education in which the same tired and failed ideas are recirculated every generation or two, and the wild-eyed, take no prisoners reformers simply move from one fad to the next without any care of the history of reforms. American education reform truly echos Santayana’s famous remark that “those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it.” I’m currently reading “Education and the Cult of Efficiency: A Study of the Social Forces That Have Shaped the Administration of the Public Schools”, by Raymond Callahan. Callahan’s book take a very focused look at the influence that business leaders have had on reform, how they and the elite university Education schools drove a brutal “efficiency” agenda in the early decades of the 20th Century, and how so much of the criticisms we see today are nothing but rehashes of the same straw men, red herrings, and defamation that were common a century ago. Callahan makes many references to the demands of business leaders that schools abandon traditional education in favor of what is essentially job training and the rebuttals from educators, including an excellent excerpt from a school superintendent who called out the reformer’s charade for what is really was (and still is): another public subsidy for big businesses.
From all of this, I have come to some tentative conclusions:
1. Americans won’t ever be happy with public education until they understand that education and job training are two different things, and that we can’t have a functional democracy and market economy—the two most intellectually demanding forms of society imaginable—without the sort of education that historically has done the most to produce sound thinking—a traditional liberal arts education that develops the whole intellect.
2. The reformers will continue their pernicious campaigns until we abandon the childish fantasy that education can be done cheaply, painlessly, and effortlessly by some technical fix. Having earned two degrees in chemistry and a law degree, and having taught my own children as well as the children of others, I know that learning any subject is an intensely personal experience. Good teachers are more like good coaches than sales persons or entertainers. The idea that we can substitute pedagogical training for mastery of actual subject matter, or that filmstrips, radio, television, movies, or computers, or whatever whiz-bang technology comes next can substituted for actual intellectual engagement between a teacher-master and a student is nothing but charlatanism. We—parents, school boards, and tax payers—have to start saying “no” to the self-proclaimed experts reformers who are nothing but shills for corporations that seek to insert they probosces into the tax revenue stream.
3. Our political and economic structures are founded on certain ideas that grew out of a region of the planet we call the “West”. These political and economic structures thus reflect certain cultural ideas and practices that are different (not necessarily better, just different) from the cultural ideas and practices found in other parts of the world, and are expressed in a large body of history, philosophy, literature, and art that all who want to be citizens of our country should understand. These ideas and practices are open to all people, not just to those who claim some vestigial cultural heritage (like northern European Protestant ancestry). The best way to create a tolerant society is to teach everyone about that society’s cultural heritage, so that the members of that society have a sound foundation from which to study and understand other cultures. (I have to agree with Allan Bloom on this point.) The key however, is that we recognize there are differences among cultures, that we have to accept that our way is unique (but not necessarily better), and that we first must understand our culture and ourselves before we can understand other cultures and others. Now, I fear, we start from the premise that all cultures are equally valued; therefore all are the “same”; therefore there is no need to learn about our history, philosophy, literature, and art; therefore we should just learn what we need to in order to get a job. And we wonder why America is beset with bullies and war mongers.
Diane, I hope you will comment more on the history of reform movements in America, so that we all can better communicate the current reform charades we are plagued with. And any comments on my thoughts are most welcome. I expect some will find point 3. controversial, I can only say that I make my points without prejudice to anyone.
This is wonderful. I’d like to share it with grad students. Too many current educators do not know the history and what it has taken to get fro where we were to where we are – the good and the bad. Just fyi, if I may – my two short takes are that are in blogs at http://thinkingaboutschools-jhstlny.blogspot.com/ “What Will They Say About the 2010’s and Ed Reform” and scroll down two more to “How We Got Into This Mess?
I am also very interested in the history of education and was likewise deeply impressed by Hoffstader’s book, and also by the article “What Should Children Learn” http://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/issues/95dec/chilearn/chilearn.htm published in the Atlantic Monthly in some years ago (in 1995).
It seems to me that if we still followed a version of the historical method recommended by the Harvard Committee of Ten, we wouldn’t be having a lot of the problems we are now having.
On the other hand, not everyone is a fan of Mortimer Adler, and the points of his critics are well taken, in my opinion.
For anyone interested, in a general overview, I recommend Gerald Graff’s Professing Literature: An Institutional History
for starters, and of course, Miss Ravitch’s books.
and a useful NYT article:
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/08/education/edlife/harvard.html
about the liberal arts.
I’m sure there are others that I’m not aware of, since I consider myself still only a beginner in my explorations of this field.
I must say that I am intrigued by this post. I am incredibly interested in the history of education and ed reform, so I now have an extensive reading list to study. I need to learn more about the forces that have shaped my profession. Although I have mostly been shielded from the worst aspects of ed deform so far, I know what I have been lucky enough to avoid so far, and I need to be prepared for when the worst aspects of deform reach the well to do suburbs.
Until I read Left Back, I really didn’t understand education. I now can seen how what I observed in school, and what I have seen since and now, are connected. “Now I see.” I especially liked to hear how teachers have always had to cope with the latest scheme. I came in just before New Math. (Cue Tom Lehrer now)
My own teaching has been influenced by the history of mathematics, and statistics. Not just motivation or anecdotes, but the fundamental view of how it all came about and how best to learn it. It didn’t arrive well packaged. It was an ugly process. And fun.
Left Back should be required reading in programs in education.
David,
Well written comment about the need for educators (and the population in general perhaps) to better “know” and “understand” history and public school history. I put the two words in quotes because knowing and understanding are two very difficult ideas to define/pin down intellectually. Is knowing and understanding the bible or astrological charts the same as knowing and understanding chemistry or physics? Is either of those the same as knowing and understanding and then using a second language? Epistemological, ontological and axiological questions and concerns abound, and have since the dawn of history. How do we know that someone has learned and understood something/anything? These questions get at the heart of what you are saying. What constitutes valid knowledge and who determines what counts?
You stated: “The key however, is that we recognize there are differences among cultures, that we have to accept that our way is unique (but not necessarily better), and that we first must understand our culture and ourselves before we can understand other cultures and others. Now, I fear, we start from the premise that all cultures are equally valued; therefore all are the “same”; therefore there is no need to learn about our history, philosophy, literature, and art; therefore we should just learn what we need to in order to get a job.”
I don’t necessarily agree that we “must first understand our culture and ourselves before we can understand other cultures”. Can’t and mustn’t the learning of ourselves and culture and that of others go hand in hand and actually complement each other, and that by seeing another way of being we greatly enhance our own way of being? I don’t think that one has priority over another other than the fact that as a being from the time we are born we are constantly expanding our mental horizons and by definition one’s own personal geographical and mental world has to start with that which is most proximate and expand outwards.
I’m not sure that anyone necessarily has been stating/promoting that “the premise that all cultures are equally valued;” or that “all are the same”. Some (many?) do state that it is important to learn and understand other cultures, times, places etc. . . and that seems to me to be a valid idea. But to jump to the conclusions that you have that “all are the “same”; therefore there is no need to learn about our history, philosophy, literature, and art; therefore we should just learn what we need to in order to get a job” seems a bit strained. I don’t know that I’ve ever heard/read anyone espouse that conclusion.
What I hear is a subtle plea in defense of American exceptionalism and/or Western thought in general. I don’t know that either of those two categories should be so vigorously defended as the “ultimate” human achievements throughout time and history. Yes there are and have been many other human endeavors/cultures that have come and gone (as everything must and will do including the current version of Western thought/American exceptionalism) and have lasted many more centuries than our current version of thought/being.
Only now the danger is that this “culminating achievement of mankind” (turn off sarcasm) has brought us to the brink of extinction due to a number of reasons-wars, environmental degradation due to the wanton usage of finite resources, anthropogenic global warming, nuclear disasters-wait for Fuji to go and see what happens on that front, etc. . . .
Maybe we can and should learn about and from those supposedly inferior other modes of being that are and have been embraced by others.
Duane,
Thanks for your kind review and interesting reply. I agree that questions of what can be known, how can we know anything, and what is worth knowing are very much at the heart of education. But I also find these questions to be very academic and philosophical; and spending too much effort to define these terms precisely has done nothing but generate division among those of us who take seriously the idea of education as primarily the development of intellectual faculties rather than just make our children “job-ready” or “college-ready”. In reading your comment on this point, I was reminded of a quote from one of “W’s” aides in the New York Times Magazine (17 October 2004):
“We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”
In other words, while we in the “reality-based world” gaze at out navels contemplating what’s knowable and what we should teach, the world keeps on turning and others are free to act; in short we have to define educational goals, an associated curriculum, and standards and techniques for measuring competence, or suffer those who blindly push faith-based learning. If we get too lost worrying about abstract questions, others, like the aide mentioned, are free to insert their views that often have no intellectual basis at all.
I stand by my view that we should teach our children about our shared history and culture, and that such a foundation is key to understanding other cultures. One certainly can–and should–also teach about other cultures–my comment didn’t preclude that in any way–but we have to define a focus on making sure that our children have a strong foundation in American culture when they leave public school. Lumping all cultures into a relativistic equality only invites the sort of intellectual apathy that we’ve suffered for decades now; and intellectual apathy only ensures our children will not be interested in expanding their mental horizons.
From my own experience as a father of two who spent years in California’s public schools, and the experience of my wife who has taught in private and public schools in both California and Maine, I feel quite certain there is plenty of evidence to support the “equality becomes sameness becomes apathy” argument. Indeed, this argument has been stated quite well by the French philosopher Alain Finkielkraut in his book “The Defeat of Mind” (http://www.amazon.com/Defeat-Mind-Alain-Finkielkraut/dp/0231080239/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1347134871&sr=1-1&keywords=alain+finkielkraut). (I don’t agree with Finkielkraut on all of his points, but I think the thrust of his thesis is sound.) Allan Bloom also makes this point. If you want to see evidence of this at work, just review the arguments made by those favoring globalization–under the skin, we’re all just selfish actors looking for a good deal. Ever wonder why both the GOP and DLC find no problem in freely trading with Communist China?
I don’t understand where you get the idea that I make a “subtle plea in defense of American exceptionalism and/or Western thought in general” or that I define Western culture as some sort of “ultimate” achievement; those are your words, not mine. I tried to state clearly that I do not place a value judgement on any culture. My point is that we have a culture and history, and in order for our children to be effective citizens of both the US and the world, they should know this culture and history. To be more precise, I would teach history as the development of sound, evidence-based arguments that explain our past–warts and all.
I believe setting a high standard of intellectual rigor will set the stage for learning from other cultures. Simply bashing our own culture with a lot of snark does nothing valuable for anyone.
Has anyone read from C.S. Lewis and supporting liberal arts education?
http://ashbrook.org/publications/onprin-v7n2-dunn/
This is an excellent post. I, too, have read and reread Anti-Intellectualism in American Life and Left Back and am sad to see theold mistakes of education reform being made over and over again, and the old limiting assumptions rehashed.
Yes, indeed, we must distinguish education from job training (or even career preparation), though the careful study of a discipline does end up preparing students for a range of occupations. “Skills” are only oart of what students learn, and they make sense only in context.
Yes, it is essential to teach the Western intellectual and cultural traditions, because students need to know them, because they are interesting, because they allow for curricular coherence, and because such background allows students to understand other cultures.
A book I highly recommend is Andrew Delbanco’s College: What It Was, Is, and Should Be.
Reblogged this on Kmareka.com and commented:
Great post about the history of education in America, and why without knowledge of this history, we are doomed to repeat it.
This is indeed an excellent post. There seems to be a thread running through the responses. Could someone list the important books on education. I’m from the 60’a and read Kozol “Half the House” and others. I would like to read some of the others listed. Maybe Diane could offer a blog that we could respond to and list the books we felt were important. thank you
I second this motion.
I would also appreciate lists/suggestions of important or influential books on education.
Two other excellent reads are: Susan Jacoby’s The Age of American Unreason, and Anthony Kronman’s Education’s End: Why Colleges and Universities Have Given Up on the Meaning of Life.
Jacoby’s book is well worth reading. I look forward to reading Kronman’s.
For a fascinatng philosophical pesoective, I recommend An Introduction to the Philosophy of Education (1935) by Michael John Demiashkevich. From that era, I also recommend the work of William Chandler Bagley and Isaac Leon Kandel.
My book Republic of Noise: The Loss of Solitude in Schools and Culture contributes to the conversation as well.
Here’s my list (so far), in no particular order:
Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, by Richard Hofstader
Left Back, by Diane Ravitch
Education for Freedom, by Robert Maynard Hutchins
The University of Utopia, by Robert Maynard Hutchins
No Friendly Voice, by Robert Maynard Hutchins
The Higher Learning in America,by Robert Maynard Hutchins
The Conflict in Education in a Democratic Society, by Robert Maynard Hutchins
The Great Conversation: The Substance of a Liberal Education, by Robert Maynard Hutchins
Great Books, by Robert Maynard Hutchins
The Learning Society, by Robert Maynard Hutchins
The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education, by Diane Ravitch
How to Read a Book, by Mortimer J. Adler (Try to get an edition between 1940 and 1966; the later editions have less discussion on education.)
The Closing of the American Mind, by Allan Bloom
The Opening of the American Mind, by Mortimer J. Adler
The Paideia Proposal, by Mortimer J. Adler
The Paideia Program: An Educational Syllabus, by Mortimer J. Adler
Paideia Problems and Possibilities, by Mortimer J. Adler
The Paideia Classroom: Teaching for Understanding, by Terry Roberts and Laura Billings
The Aims of Education, by Alfred North Whitehead
The Age of American Unreason, by Susan Jacoby
The Assault on Reason, by Al Gore
Come Home, Amercia, by William Greider
The Enlightenment (2 Vols.), by Peter Gay
The Making of Americans, by E.D. Hirsch
The Revolt of the Elites, by Christopher Lasch
Death of the Liberal Class, by Chris Hedges
The Age of Narcissism, by Christopher Lasch
The House of Intellect, by Jacques Barzun
Begin Here, by Jacques Barzun
Dark Ages America, by Morris Berman
Why America Failed, by Morris Berman
The Tyranny of Testing, by Banesh Hoffmann
The Mismeasure of Man, by Stephen J. Gould
Allow me to add Andre Comte-Sponville’s “A Small Treatise on the Great Virtues”.
I couldn’t agree more with this essay, especially point #3. Americans have been anti-intellectual from the day the first Puritan landed at Plymouth Rock. The Puritan experiment was ant-intellectual to its core, and we have been so ever since.
As a history and English teacher, I agree we should be teaching the liberal arts in order to create an educated citizenry, not to supply the workplace with those who have “21st century skills.” when I first started teacher 28 years ago, teachers were on the front lines fighting against the encrouchment of the demands of the Chamber of Commerce. We felt a lot less threatened back then, our unions were stronger, and we were much more confident in our mission as educators.
Today, many teachers nod their heads in agreement with the skills based schooling that is being served up. 21st century learning is rarely question, but the means to it, as far as testing or Common Core is concerned, seems the only thing questioned by many of us. We dont seem to fight for the true nature of our profession–the well-rounding liberal arts and sciences education for the young. Not to ready them for the workplace, but to ready their minds for thinking and enjoying the fruits of thought. This is a huge difference from 28 years ago. We as educators have lost our way. We can’t just demand the end of testing. We need to be certain we know what an education is supposed to mean. If you fight this foundational fight, the rest of the reformers agenda might be more easily thwarted.
Thank you Candace again for your clarity. I couldn’t agree with you more on this.
Candace,
I agree. If we are to fight the current trends, we must do so by having specific goals that drive our own reform agenda. We must be able to stand together with a clear voice and strong message. The only way to prepare our children for the future is to teach them how to think and how to create, by arming them with the tools they need to think and to access the vast knowledge that is now available to them. We are no longer the keepers of the knowledge that used to only be available in books. The gates are wide open to them. We must teach them how to navigate the vast wealth of knowledge that they now have access to. If we are to take back our profession, we must understand the new environment that children today are living in. We can not continue to use old outdated practices. The question now becomes, How do we teach the children who enter our classrooms today and prepare them for a future that we can not yet even imagine? We do so by teaching them how to think!
I keep hearing this “cry” to get kids to think. It’s being used as a selling point to push Constructivism in the classroom. Yet many teachers I talk to hate the idea of being pushed to the sidelines in favor or group think…oops I mean group project learning.
So I have an automatic concern when I heart these different factions telling ME they are going to teach kids HOW to think.
Here is my reply to that: Who thinks better about an operation, a surgeon or an accountant?? It’s easy, the surgeon.
Why? Because he’s been taught the information NEEDED to be able to understand and think about an operation. The Accountant has not.
So in my opinion, the more truth and information a person has, the better equipped they are to actually THINK.
I’m a better critical thinker, the more I learn about a subject. The less I know, the less I’m able to think critically. To me, it’s as simple as that.
WE have kids who are not being taught grammar, basic math skills, real science, vocabulary, etc. ie…they are illiterate.
We wonder why kids can no longer think ?
I addressed an envelope the other day and wrote in cursive. I wondered if the poor kids growing up without knowing cursive will be denied a job at the post office someday because they cannot read cursive writing.
I don’t think there’s anyone who does NOT want a child to think. However it’s HOW to get them to think that is important.
I’d like to know HOW anyone thinks this should be accomplished. I want MY kids to be educated. To graduate literate in all areas of the liberal arts. I don’t want them denied basic knowledge in order to fulfill someone’s fantasy that they can teach critical thinking skills through another fad.
MOMwithAbrain, I didn’t mention the constructionists classroom. My argument is to be a thinker, one must be exposed to literature, music, history, science, math, art, and philosophy. There can be no thinking without material to ponder. Skills do not an education make, yet students do need to be taught the foundational skills of any discipline, such as grammar in order to write properly and be understood by readers. My complaint is with schools teaching skills needed to be workplace ready.
Why is it that you assume teaching kids to think means excluding the foundational skills? The foundation of reading, math, and writing, are part of the liberal arts education that Candace supports. No one believes that denying basic knowledge leads to critical thinking. What we worry about is that the current narrowing of the curriculum for the sake of workplace skills is detrimental to an educated citizenry necessary for a democracy to thrive.
Thank you Candace for clarifying. This call to get kids to think critically is being used in ways that, in my opinion, does the opposite. The way you describe, with content knowledge is exactly what I believe actually helps a person think critically. 🙂
Bridgit, I think that because I see first hand how our students are not getting the foundational skills yet our district continues to focus on the so called critical thinking skills they say will be the focus.
I’ve also found that with this focus on critical thinking in our district, one that uses IB, there is a political agenda. Critical thinking has a political agenda attached.
Right now my automatic reaction to those who say they want to teach critical thinking skills, is one of genuine concern.
Those who understand that critical thinking comes about from knowledge, I think are the ones on the right track.
IF I recall correctly, Diane Ravitch wrote an article a few years ago saying something like….Want to teach critical thinking?? Give kids knowledge. (or something like that)
Made perfect sense to me!! Unfortunately the anti-knowledge people still don’t get it.
Candace McCall, it is absolutely not true that the Puritans (Calvinists) were anti-intellectual to the core! There is a good discussion of this in Sarah Vowell’s The Wordy Shipmates! Practically the very first thing the Puritans did upon landing was to found Harvard (1636), at Cambridge, Mass. — named after the English university town, which many leaders in the colony had attended. They and their Calvinist brethren in Geneva and Scotland insisted on a Humanistic, liberal arts curriculum based on the classic literary works of Greek and Latin authors, as well as a grounding in the Hebrew language for their ministers. They also tried unsuccessfully to bring over the great educational reformer Johannes Aldus Commenius (1592-1670) as head of Harvard (Commenius’s “Didactica Magna” (Great Didactic) outlined a system of schools that is the exact counterpart of the existing American system of kindergarten, elementary school, secondary school, college, and university, according to Wikipedia.)
The Puritans insisted on literacy for everyone, to be entirely paid for by the community at large. Thanks to them, the United States, throughout the 19th C. had one of the highest literacy rates in the world. Not only that, but they believed (along with Commenius) that education is a life-long endeavor, and that people should never stop trying to improve themselves. See Howe’s “What Hath God Wrought”, a recent volume of the Oxford History of the United States
It was in the American South that the upper classes balked contributing to the education of poorer citizens. According to Southern writer J.W. Cash :
Even at the best and fullest, the idea of social responsibility which grew up in the South remained always a narrow and purely personal one. . . . The Virginians themselves … never got beyond that brutal individualism — and for all the Jeffersonian glorification of the idea, it was brutal as it worked out in the plantation world — which was the heritage of the frontier; that individualism which, while willing enough to ameliorate the specific instance, relentlessly laid down as its basic social postulate the doctrine that every man was completely and wholly responsible for himself. … The individual outlook . . . the whole paternalistic pattern, in fact, the complete otherworldliness of religious feeling . . . all this, combining with their natural unrealism of temperament, bred in [white Southerners] a thoroughgoing satisfaction, the most complete blindness to the true facts of their world.”
He goes on to say:
hardly any Southerner of the master class every even slightly apprehended that the general shiftlessness and degradation of the masses was a social product. Hardly one, in truth, ever concerned himself about the systematic raising of the economic and social level of these masses. And if occasional men [would sponsor a school here and there, the same men] . . . would take the lead in indignantly rejecting the Yankee idea of universal free schools maintained at the public charge . . .” W. J. Cash, The Mind of the South (New York: Alfred A Knopf, 1941).
Are you telling me that antinomialism, a set of beliefs that says knowledge comes from the in-dwelling spirit, and formal learning is irreligious, is not anti-intellectual? This is a core belief, is it not?
Do you mean “antinomianism”? If so, this doctrine deals specifically with moral law, not with general knowledge. For example, antinomian thought would say that “sola fide” (the justification by faith alone) precludes the need for a written moral law. For all intents and purposes, it is the opposite of religious “legalism.” This has nothing to do with general intellectual pursuit. And even if it did, antinomianism is largely considered heretical by protestant and churches in tradition of the reformation (Martin Luther was a harsh criticism of the belief).
Yes, indeed, that is what I am telling you. Anti-nomianism is the heretical belief that it is permitted to sin if you have been forgiven by God in advance. Quakers, and Bretheren of the Free Spirit and other radical dissenting movements were all accused at one time or another of belief in this heresy, as were Jesuits (who were very intellectual). It was an accusation routinely thrown at each other by warring sects. It has nothing to do with intellectualism.
The Calvinist doctrine of Predestination left them open to this charge (especially in the 18th century). In fact, there is a great 18th /early 19th C. Scottish horror novel, Confessions of a Justified Sinner, by James Hogg, about this very theme. What actually happened is that a lot of New England and Genevan Calvinists were abandoning their belief in Pre-destination at this time. Large numbers of New England Puritans morphed into Unitarians, which was the religion of many of the founding fathers. It was among the Pentecostalists and during the various Great Awakening movements that American anti-intellectualism flourished, chiefly in the South.
First, you have your centuries conflated. Early New England Puritanism was certainly imbued with the belief in predestination, and i have no idea how you have dragged the Jesuits into this.Secondly, Hogg’s novel is very concerned with antinomialism, especially the idea that the protagonist’s brother/cousin ( can’t remember now) who threatens him at every turn, is easily interpreted as a manifestation of the in-dwelling spirit as demon. Also, remember how the protagonist’s father dies, through a sort of spontaneous combustion. The novel is critical of antinomialism because it is anti-intellectual. Hogg himself was a self-taught man and highly valued education.
There is a pretty good wikipedia article about the definition of the term and also an excellent one from a theological glossary published by Duke University.
http://www.duke.edu/web/secmod/pfau/glossary.html#antinomianism
The literal meaning of anti-nomianism is “against the law.”
Pascal’s seventh Provincial letter is considered as accusing the Jesuits of anti-nomianism, i.e., of allegedly saying that in certain circumstances it was ok for priests to break the law.
Hogg’s novel criticizes antinomianism, not because it was anti-intellectual but it led to immoral behavior, like murder.
I advise you to read Daniel Howe’s chapter on education in New England in his book What Hath God Wrought for more on the attitude of the Puritans toward education and to take up your quarrel with him, not me.
Ok, this is the last thing I’ll say on the subject. I don’t want to derail Diane’s blog with our own discussion. Hogg was antinomialist not because he believed it led to murder, but because, the in-dwelling spirit that a man is suppose to listen to exclusively, instead of outside education, or the morals of society, may be a demon. In other words, in the unhinged mind, the spirit, the inner voice, should not be one’s guide. It can’t be trusted.
Candace, I’m sure you meant to write: “Hogg was against antinomianim”. I agree with your characterization. However, it is not true that the Puritans were anti-nomialists, since they had laws regulating the most minor things. Neither were the Quakers, though they believed in the inward light. In fact, no religion ever advocated antinomianism, though many were accused of doing so. Neither were the Puritans anti-intellectual, since they established public schools and universities.
Also, let’s keep in mind that Hogg’s Confessions of a Justified Sinner, wonderful book that it is, is a work of fiction — demons are not real (at least I don’t think so). Furthermore, if Calvinist Scotland was so anti-intellectual, why did 18th c Scotland have the most advanced educational system in the world and produce the Scottish Enlightenment?
Two other excellent reads are: Susan Jacoby’s The Age of American Unreason, and Anthony Kronman’s Education’s End: Why Colleges and Universities Have Given Up on the Meaning of Life.