Progressivism's Aesthetic Education

214 Pages·2018·2.15 MB·English

by  Jesse Raber

Jesse Raber
P R O G R E S S I V I S M’S
A E S T H E T I C E D U C AT I O N
The Bildungsroman and the
American School, 1890–1920
Progressivism’s Aesthetic Education
Jesse Raber
Progressivism’s
Aesthetic Education
The Bildungsroman and the American School,
1890–1920
Jesse Raber
School of the Art Institute of Chicago
Chicago, IL, USA
ISBN 978-3-319-90043-8 ISBN 978-3-319-90044-5 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90044-5
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Cover credit: Women painting at easels in a class at the Art Students League, Washington,
D.C. Photograph by Frances Benjamin Johnston. Courtesy of the Library of Congress,
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For Clara, who was always in a class of her own
P
reface
In the beginning, I wanted to trace the genre of the bildungsroman, the
novel in which the free individual is reconciled to society by way of aes-
thetic experiences, in American literature. Then this book took on another
dimension, becoming, as well, an attempt to trace the idea of Bildung, or
something like it, in the American philosophy of pragmatism. As I pursued
this theme through John Dewey’s writings, I realized that, on the ques-
tion of aesthetic education’s role in a democracy, his most interesting
interlocutors were educationists, not other academic philosophers. And
the more I studied the writings of these educational thinkers, the more
convinced I became that, though infrequently discussed in intellectual his-
tories, these architects of the public school system have exerted a power-
ful, largely unacknowledged influence on American culture. Instead of
looking for US novelists who were taking up European bildungsroman
templates, as I had first intended, I started looking for novelists who saw
educational debates as significant, who felt that they made a difference to
what it means to be an American artist. Once I had this conception of the
project, I focused on the Progressive Era because it is a uniquely fertile
period in American educational history, when the school system was
expanding rapidly and being shaped by many jostling interests.
My greatest regret about this book is its neglect of race. That the
Progressive Era’s civic idealism was enabled by a brutal exclusion of black
Americans, and other racial groups, from equal participation, and even
from basic rights, is something that I did not start to see in its proper per-
spective until the book’s shape was already set. I considered several possi-
ble subjects for a chapter on African-American experiences of progressivism’s
vii
viii PREFACE
aesthetic education, including the obvious Booker T. Washington and
W.E.B. Du Bois pairing, with the latter’s Quest of the Silver Fleece as a
potential bildungsroman-like text that also directly engages with school
politics. Sutton Griggs’s Imperium in Imperio, though, may have been
more interesting for its strange resonances with the Society of the Tower
plot from Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship. In terms of educational think-
ers, the philanthropists of the General Education Board, and their favored
curriculum theorist Thomas Jesse Jones, would have made good starting
points. I suspect that I never will write this chapter, or article, now, so I
hope someone else takes these hints and runs with them.
A planned chapter on Frank Norris and the kindergarten movement was
also left on the cutting room floor. I will leave its central question here as
a provocation: Why is Trina McTeague murdered in a kindergarten? That
scene has been analyzed through the theme of children, but nobody, I
think, has asked why a kindergarten specifically. The answer, I think, lies
somewhere near the intersection of Norris’s naturalism, Froebel’s philoso-
phy, Norris’s racism, and the marked Germanness of the kindergarten at
that time.
The book that emerged from this circuitous intellectual journey is
transdisciplinary in a way that I hope will be stimulating for several differ-
ent kinds of readers. For students of the bildungsroman, there are three
issues that may be interesting: the role of the genre in US literature, where
it has been relatively neglected; the relation between the bildungsroman
and educationist discourses; and the transformation of the idealist aesthet-
ics of classical Bildung by pragmatism. For scholars of pragmatist aesthet-
ics, who have often stressed themes of novelty, flexibility, and reinvention,
situating Dewey’s aesthetics within his educational thought reveals its
concerns with cultural authority, with the terms on which ordinary people
and cultural elites participate in a shared democratic community. For
teachers of US literature, I wish to inspire a wider interest in educational
discourses and educational history, especially below the college level, as
contexts for literary study. You don’t really know what a writer means by
democracy, I would argue, until you know what she thinks about the pub-
lic schools. Finally, I hope to show students of education, especially those
studying to be public school teachers, how fraught with aesthetic and
philosophical significance the questions of teaching and administration
are, and how the choices made within the school are part of an ongoing
inquiry into what democratic culture really can be.
Chicago, IL, USA Jesse Raber
a
cknowledgments
This book began as a dissertation in the Harvard University English
Department. There, it was shaped by Louis Menand, who showed me not
just what pragmatism is, but how a pragmatist talks, about history, litera-
ture, and ideas; by Lawrence Buell, who cheerfully checked my “self-
indulgent divagation,” and whose office I always left thinking more clearly
than I entered it; and by Werner Sollors, who, whatever strange byways I
followed, always knew just who I should be reading there. My closest
readers, though, were my peers, especially Nick Donofrio, Lesley
Goodman, Maggie Gram, Liz Maynes-Aminzade, and Eitan Kensky. Eitan
also taught me Yiddish in his spare time, though he did not teach me the
Yiddish phrase, which must exist, for such an act of generosity. I received
valuable feedback from many participants in Harvard’s American
Colloquium, including Maggie Doherty, Sarah Wagner-McCoy, Dave
Weimer, and Kaye Wierzbicki, and later from the overlapping New
England Americanists group, where Deak Nabers was especially helpful.
Two chapters were workshopped at the Futures of American Studies
Institute, where I had fruitful conversations with Winfried Fluck, Jennifer
Fleissner, Justin Nevins, Greg Chase, Stephen Pasqualino, and Tom
Perrin, among many others. Very late in the game, Victor Kestenbaum
gave the Dewey material his close attention and prompted some necessary
clarifications.
My wife, Clara Raubertas, talked through this book’s ideas for count-
less hours, patiently endured my ups and downs as I wrote it, and believed
in it unwaveringly. She also, I must admit a little sheepishly, typed up
much of the manuscript. For all that and everything else, thanks. 
ix
c
ontents
1 I ntroduction: Progressivism’s Aesthetic Education 1
2 T he Doctrine of Interest: Abraham Cahan
and the Herbartians 51
3 T he Classroom Démueblé: Willa Cather and Maria
Montessori 89
4 H erland and Zond: Charlotte Perkins Gilman
and the Social Efficiency Educators 119
5 L iving Has Its Own Intrinsic Quality: John Dewey’s
Aesthetic Education 151
Index 201
xi
CHAPTER 1
Introduction: Progressivism’s Aesthetic
Education
What business does a democracy have establishing official institutions of
cultural authority? For, in the context of public education, that is what the
teaching profession is, especially where the humanities are concerned. This
question, about the legitimacy of democratic cultural authority, is adjacent
to, but crucially distinct from, that of democracy’s relation to scientific
knowledge, because while one can acquire a certain kind of expertise in
humanistic subjects, expert humanists are not expected to converge on a
common understanding of what they study. Likewise, it resembles ques-
tions about the role of aesthetic avant-gardes, but differs from them in
that a democratic cultural authority (say, the nation’s corps of high school
English teachers) is supposed to uphold higher standards than those of the
average person, while at the same time serving as an agency through which
the shared culture of the community reproduces itself. The United States
saw the consolidation of such a cultural authority during the Progressive
Era, as teaching and school administration took on the status of a self-
policing profession at the same time that compulsory attendance laws gave
public education an unprecedented importance in national life. (Although
there are certainly parallels with the expansion and professionalization of
higher education, the case of public school teachers raises the question of
legitimate cultural authority more sharply because it is mandatory, and
because it is funded entirely by the state.) What did accepting this new
form of authority mean for Americans’ conceptions of self-government, of
© The Author(s) 2018 1
J. Raber, Progressivism’s Aesthetic Education,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90044-5_1