Country Life: Catalogue Aria

Quest for Community

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.

About the Author

Richard Brookhiser

Historian Richard Brookhiser is a senior editor of National Review and a senior fellow at the National Review Institute.

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Quest for Community

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.