Educationist Reactionaries

LUCIEN ELLINGTON is UC Foundation Professor
of Education and Co-Director of the University of
Tennessee at Chattanooga Asia Program.

J. Wesley Null and Diane Ravitch, eds., Forgotten Heroes of American
Education: The Great Tradition of Teaching Teachers
(Greenwich, CT: Information Age Publishing, 2006)

J. Wesley Null, A Disciplined Progressive Educator: The Life and Career of
William Chandler Bagley (New York: Peter Lang, 2003)

J. Wesley Null, Peerless Educator: The Life and Work of Isaac Leon Kandel
(New York: Peter Lang, 2007)

For over eighty years, American K–12
public school establishment elites, including
most education professors, administrators,
and local, state, and federal
bureaucrats have espoused educational
progressivism and attempted to implement
their versions of John Dewey’s theories
in the nation’s classrooms. Despite progressive
education’s heterogeneity, certain
key ideas, including a rejection of teachercentered
instruction, animosity toward socalled
“useless facts,” promotion of learning
through “hands-on” activities, a denigration
of traditional curriculum and values, a perception
of the school as a social laboratory,
and an over-emphasis upon the “science”
of education, have profoundly changed
American public and even some private
schools.

Despite some exceptions, progressive
education has substantially harmed the
schools. Most public elementary and
secondary school humanities curricula are
incoherent. Children’s historical studies
were long ago replaced with murky “social
studies,” and organized attempts to introduce
children to classic literature have been
supplemented by trend-obsessed language
arts. Teachers are often required to waste
students’ time with frequently useless and
noisy “collaborative learning,” intended
to promote thinking skills, but partially
responsible for easily distracted students
who often don’t listen to adults. Many progressive
educators espouse values relativism
and condemn “judgmental” teachers. Welleducated
mostly middle- and upper-class
parents often either remediate their children
or escape this educational mediocrity.
Poor children, generally lacking familial
educational resources, are saddled with
wasted educations.¹

Teacher education is a critical reason
for progressive education’s resilience
through the decades. Most aspiring elementary
teachers must devote the greater
part of their university years learning
only progressive educational theory and
practice with little time for work with
either academic subject-matter or traditional
pedagogical techniques. Although
future secondary educators receive less
progressivist indoctrination than their
elementary counterparts, certification regulations
mandate that virtually all who wish
to teach in public schools and many who
desire employment in private education
must first study Dewey and his interpreters.
Universities and colleges that provide
future teachers with a rich liberal education,
knowledge of and passion for subjectmatter,
and solid professional experiences
that include both appropriate preparation
in moral education and practical schoolbased
work remain the exception in the
United States.

Despite their many successes, progressive
educationists have been valiantly and
sometimes effectively opposed on other
fronts in the education wars for almost
a century. In the past, critics such as
Josiah Royce, Robert Maynard Hutchins,
Mortimer Adler, Mortimer Smith, Bernard
Iddings Bell, Russell and Annette
Kirk, and Theodore Bestor garnered public
attention through their criticisms of an
educational philosophy so clearly against
what Burke called the “Permanent Things.”
E. D. Hirsch, Chester Finn, Diane Ravitch
and others continue the fight against progressive
education’s excesses. Occasionally,
opponents of progressive education have
successfully won federal and state policy
battles. The 1983 Nation at Risk report is a
case in point. It helped to create significant
improvement in some state standards and
stimulated increased academic requirements
for high school graduation.

In contrast, would-be reformers of
teacher education have more limited success.
Alternative teacher licensure opportunities
have greatly expanded, but while
some programs are effective, many are
controlled by progressive education professors,
and others have no intellectual and
professional coherence because the most
critical objective is viewed as licensing
candidates as quickly as possible.

Far-reaching changes within colleges
and universities regarding the education
of future teachers are imperative, and
there is some cause for optimism. Intellectual
opponents to educational progressivism
within education colleges gained
more national attention in the late twentieth
century and the early years of this
one than at any time since William C.
Bagley and colleagues began the Essentialist
movement over seventy years ago. The
late Bruce Frazee was an effective national
advocate of the elementary-school liberal
arts Core Knowledge curriculum. Kevin
Ryan resuscitated ethical and character
education, making it potentially part
of teacher education through founding
Boston University’s Center for the
Advancement of Ethics and Character.
James Leming created the Contrarians,
who challenge the basic teacher-education
premises of the National Council for the
Social Studies.

These education professors and likeminded
colleagues reject most progressive
nostrums and embrace a vision of teaching
rooted in a deep affinity for the importance
of the teacher. They uncompromisingly
focus upon liberal, academic, and moral
education as imperative in creating good
teachers. Virtually all of these educators
who challenge progressive dominance also
have significant experience as school teachers
themselves—a point not to be ignored.

Although younger by approximately
two decades than any of the aforementioned
education reformers, Wesley Null,
an associate professor of curriculum theory
and pedagogy at Baylor University, is probably
now the most articulate proponent
of a coherent conceptualization for the
education of future teachers that provides
a viable alternative to the moribund status
quo. Null is a former middle school
teacher who works with aspiring educators
and schools on a regular basis. Of equal
importance, Null, who is an historian of
education, has produced three books that
draw on the wisdom of prominent teacher
educators of the past, such as William C.
Bagley and Isaac Kandel, who, in the first
half of the twentieth century, vigorously
contested educational progressive extremists.
Although Bagley and Kandel lost the
struggle for intellectual control of America’s
schools, their thought and writings now
live again largely through Null’s scholarship.

In his biographies of Bagley and Kandel
and a co-edited volume of their and
others’ writings, Null presents an alternative
to progressivism’s incoherent curricula
and values relativism rooted in liberal and
moral education as well as professional
experience. While he in no way romantically
depicts the past as a panacea, Null’s
reconstruction of this past, especially when
contrasted with progressivism’s many
abject failures, constitutes a quite appealing
reactionary perspective.

William C. Bagley (1874–1946), the
subject of A Disciplined Progressive Educator,
was an upper Midwesterner who received
most of his elementary and secondary
education in Detroit. Bagley then graduated
from Michigan Agricultural College.
Intending to be a farmer but with no land
or money, Bagley began teaching in a rural
school in the Upper Peninsula and found
his life’s work. After teaching for two
years, Bagley, interested in psychology,
went on to receive an M.A. in that discipline
from the University of Wisconsin
and a Ph.D. in psychology and education
from Cornell.

Significantly, Bagley’s mentor at Cornell
was the well-known structural psychologist,
Edward B. Tichner. German-influenced
structuralists, who focused on understanding
consciousness and the components
of the mind through introspection,
were a minority in the United States and
were strongly opposed by an ascendant
functionalist/behavioralist school championed
by William James and John Dewey.
Rather than focus upon consciousness,
functionalists concentrated upon overt
behavior, which they viewed as the
purpose of consciousness. Functionalists
greatly admired Charles Darwin and dogmatically
worshipped objective education
“science.” Although Bagley found some
aspects of behavioral psychology useful
for teachers, as the years passed he grew
more and more disenchanted with its overreliance
on empiricism and science as major
tools for improving teaching. Though not
a religious man, Bagley deeply respected
the great importance of individual cultivation
of powerful inner forces such as will
power and integrity that educational scientists
dismissed as subjective or impossible
to measure. He viewed teaching as a craft
that was much more than a technical and
soulless enterprise.

After serving as a school administrator
in the St. Louis public schools in 1900–01,
Bagley accepted a position as a professor
of psychology and education and director
of the teacher practice school at Montana
State Normal School in Dillon. Normal
schools, prevalent in the latter nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries throughout
America, were designed for high school
graduates who wished to be teachers before
the advent of departments and colleges of
education. Although the quality of these
institutions varied, all normal school faculties,
regardless of academic discipline,
shared the common mission of developing
good teachers. Academic subjects and
pedagogical and school studies were not
rigidly separated into different units as is
the case in most contemporary colleges
and universities. Normal school pedagogy
faculty assisted elementary and secondary
schools, worked with practice teachers, and
collaborated with colleagues in the liberal
arts in research and teacher-education
projects. They almost never viewed “what
to teach” and “how to teach” as separate
domains.

In his long career Bagley’s work patterns
were always reminiscent of the normal
school perspective. He never conceptualized
teacher training as the monopoly of
pedagogical specialists and regularly interacted
with academics in other fields such
as historian Charles Beard, with whom he
coauthored an American history textbook.
Bagley, who was deeply interested in philosophy
and history, managed to achieve
national prominence as an educator, published
voluminously, yet never abandoned
working with practicing and aspiring school
administrators and teachers.

In his five years at Montana State Normal
School, Bagley served as superintendent
of the local school district, created the
first regional educational journal, spoke at
teacher institutes throughout Montana,
and achieved national recognition with
his first major work, The Educative Process
(1905), which became a standard introductory
educational psychology text. Although
Bagley, along with progressive educational
theorists, respected the practical value of
educational psychology for the classroom
teacher, even early in his career he never
hesitated to challenge what he viewed as
a growing progressive obsession with the
child and accompanying derisive disregard
for traditional pedagogical beliefs and
practices.

In Bagley’s Montana years, prominent
American psychologist E. L. Thorndike had
recently published a widely touted empirical
study disproving the “formal disciplines”
rationale for school curricula. Formal
disciplines proponents believed that
if students mastered difficult subjects like
Latin, they would be better equipped to
learn unrelated subjects such as algebra,
since the mind was thought to be a muscle
strengthened by mental exercise. Progressives
celebrated Thorndike’s findings as a
complete refutation of prior beliefs about
the virtues of rigorous curricula. While
recognizing the validity and usefulness of
Thorndike’s work, Bagley asserted that if
progressives overemphasized these findings
and successfully reduced the number
of difficult courses students were required
to study, there would be harmful educational
results. The repudiation of the
idea that a subject such as mathematics
or ancient history is worth study for its
intrinsic value would be one, but not the
only, negative outcome of attacking the
traditional curriculum.

Thorndike’s findings were based on controlled
laboratory experiments that have an
inherent weakness; development, or the
lack thereof, of personal habits such as fortitude
and self-confidence that are often
strengthened by mastery of difficult content
cannot be assessed in clinical settings.
Loss of a demanding core curriculum
meant attendant diminishment of moral
education. Bagley predicted that if the
nation’s schools implemented weakened
curricula, many future high school graduates
would likely be both more ignorant
and less disciplined than in the past. History
has proven this to be largely correct.

After a brief but successful few years as
a professor and administrator at Oswego
Normal School in New York State—one
of the nation’s most prestigious institutions
of its kind—and nine years building
an education department at the University
of Illinois, Bagley attracted the attention
of a prominent Columbia University
administrator because of his defense of
liberal arts education for all citizens in a
well-publicized National Education Association
debate with prominent progressive
educator, David Snedden, who advocated
restricting study of the liberal arts to only
a few college-bound elites. In 1917 Bagley
was hired as professor of normal school
administration at Teachers College, in part
to provide aspiring teacher educators with
a different vision than the one promulgated
by Dewey’s most avid progressive followers.
Dewey, also at Teachers College, was a
notoriously ineffectual classroom instructor.
However, his Columbia supporters,
particularly “the million-dollar professor”
William Heard Kilpatrick, profoundly
influenced thousands of graduate students
who went on to staff newly created colleges
of education in universities. The
basic message Kilpatrick and his colleagues
emphasized was that school teachers should
largely ignore traditional academic content
and promote student’s skill-acquisition,
problem-solving, and social cooperation.

Bagley strongly disagreed with his
colleagues’ opinions that schools would
improve through further denigration of
subject-matter. Throughout the 1920s,
Bagley increasingly criticized progressives
for promoting such practices as the elimination
of comprehensive school examinations,
low graduation standards, and
the increase of superfluous electives in
high schools. He also took a dim view of
deliberate attacks by some progressives on
schools that taught such values as pride in
achievement for its own sake and respect
for authority.

Bagley came to believe that progressive
ideas were in part responsible for a fundamental
shift in Americans’ conceptualization
of educational opportunity. Formerly,
equality of educational opportunity primarily
meant working toward the goal of
giving enthusiastic and competent students
a chance for an education. Bagley felt that
partially because of progressive influences,
large numbers of the public had come to
define equality of educational opportunity
as the schools being mainly responsible
for making education at all levels attractive
and pleasant for as many youngsters
as possible. Schools existed to create and
graduate happy students. Bagley predicted
that this sea-change in thought about the
very meaning of educational opportunity
promised to weaken the fiber of future citizens
through devaluing the genuine currency
of education.

It is important to note that while Bagley
is most famous for clashing with progressives,
he also had a few fundamental differences
with educational traditionalists such
as Robert Maynard Hutchins. A portion
of Null’s title, “A Disciplined Progressive
Educator” provides key clues as to where
Bagley parted company with both traditionalists
and progressives.

Bagley and traditionalists agreed that the
liberal arts were important and that knowledgeable
teachers should educate students
and not merely pander to their interests. Like
traditionalists, Bagley stressed the importance
of fostering good work habits and
ethics and believed such values were critical
for both individual success and the greater
society. Bagley and traditionalists viewed
those progressives who asserted that education
was a purely scientific field, as denying
the existence of anything deeper within
the student than a propensity for action
resulting from configurations of stimuli.
Nevertheless, Bagley disagreed with many
educational traditionalists’ views on school
teachers, teacher education, and education
for democracy.

As was the case with many progressives,
Bagley fervently believed school teaching
was a calling and should be an honored
profession. He also agreed with progressives
that a primary mission of schools
was to improve American democracy,
although he strongly differed with dominant
theorists on the means to achieve this
end. Bagley, like the progressives, firmly
opposed those traditionalists who were
condescending toward teachers and skeptical
about the possibility of education
improving democracy.

Bagley considered these perspectives
and the attendant traditionalist notion that
teachers need only know subject-matter to
be dangerously elitist. Bagley shared the
strong belief contemporary educational
reformers such as Diane Ravitch and E.
D. Hirsch still hold: high-quality universal
education is the only way to maintain
and strengthen democratic government.
While valuing the primacy of teacher
knowledge of content, Bagley’s extensive
school experience strengthened his beliefs
that knowledge of subject-matter alone
was not enough. He was a strong advocate
for teacher education programs that
encompassed educational philosophy and
history, child and educational psychology,
and practical experience in school settings
with master teacher mentors.

Throughout his career, Bagley opposed
progressivism’s excesses while respecting
the progressives’ legitimate contributions
to education, most notably, their concern
for making school enjoyable and interesting,
provided that this enhancement of
the school climate did not fundamentally
weaken teaching and learning. Bagley’s
opposition to both progressive orthodoxy
and a purely exclusive embrace of educational
traditionalism is somewhat reminiscent
in another context of Wilhelm
Röpke and Russell Kirk’s vigorous opposition
to state socialism but rejection of an
unqualified belief in the perfection of free
markets.

In his last years at Teachers College,
Bagley and his allies attempted to create a
national movement in opposition to progressivism
through founding the Essentialist
movement. Bagley described the movement’s
tenets at a national meeting of school
administrators in Atlantic City, New Jersey
on February 26, 1938. In his afternoon
address, Bagley sharply criticized American
education as weak and ineffectual compared
to other advanced countries and asserted
that extreme progressives were influencing
the public schools to abandon rigorous
standards and discredit formal academic
subjects. He also reiterated his strong belief
in education for democracy but warned
that if progressives left student personal
responsibility and self-discipline out of the
equation, democratic government would
one day vanish.

The Essentialist movement garnered
substantial publicity in educational circles
and coverage in the New York Times as well
as attention in a few periodicals of national
importance. Leading progressives such
as Kilpatrick vehemently dismissed the
group as inconsequential. Dewey, whom
Bagley respected and who had substantial
reservations himself about how followers
interpreted his ideas, nevertheless criticized
Essentialist principles as too general
and refused to take issue with the aggressive
attacks of progressives on Essentialists.
Progressive dominance, World War II,
Bagley’s impending retirement, and the
death of Michael John Demiashkevich, an
educational philosopher who named the
movement and played an important role
in its birth, caused Essentialism to have no
immediate impact as an educational reform
movement. An alternative perspective was
established, however, that would provide
sustenance as time passed for an increasing
number of intellectual opponents of
progressivism including E. D. Hirsch,
founder of the Core Knowledge movement
who dedicated his seminal book, The
Schools We Need and Why We Don’t Have
Them to Bagley.

An examination of the life of Teachers
College professor Isaac Kandel (1881–1965),
a colleague and close friend of Bagley, is also
of great value to all who think it critical to
provide aspiring teachers with a different
vision of philosophy and pedagogy than
the one that has been dominant for almost
a century. Kandel, a Romanian Jew who
was educated in Britain before immigrating
to America, agreed with Bagley on
the fundamentals of teacher preparation:
strong liberal learning, clear attention to
moral education, first-hand knowledge
of schools, and education for democracy.
However, Kandel, because of his own
education, drew even more heavily than
Bagley upon classical philosophy and the
early history of the West to bolster his
beliefs as he battled progressives. Fluent in
several foreign languages, Kandel also rose
to international prominence as one of the
founders of comparative education.

As a youngster, Kandel received a scholarship
to Manchester Grammar, one of
England’s more famous public schools and
imbibed deeply the institution’s classical
education that was rooted in the humanities
and ancient and modern languages. Kandel
also received a thorough grounding in Christianity
at Manchester Grammar School, in
addition to his religious education in synagogue
and home. Kandel majored in classics
at Manchester University and then taught
Latin in local Manchester schools and German
to future teachers while also earning
an M.A. in education from his undergraduate
institution. Kandel would use both his
broad liberal education and his first-hand
school experience throughout his career. A
prolific publisher and author or co-author
of more than forty books, monographs, and
reports, Kandel produced both theoretical
and applied education scholarship.

After teaching classical languages for
two years at the Royal Belfast Academical
Institution, Kandel met Bagley in the summer
of 1908 when both were studying education
and philosophy at the University of
Jena. Kandel followed Bagley’s suggestion
that he immigrate to the United States for
doctoral studies at Columbia. At Columbia,
Kandel worked on both the historical
and philosophical foundations of
education and comparative studies. In his
doctoral dissertation on German teacher
education, completed in 1910, Kandel
lauded the liberal education of aspiring
German teachers and the marriage of
content and pedagogy but criticized the
bureaucratic impediments that seemed
at times to stifle German academic and
moral education. It took Kandel thirteen
years to secure a full-time faculty position
at Teachers College, and in the interim,
he worked as a researcher at the Carnegie
Foundation for the Advancement of
Teaching, where he participated in a variety
of educational policy studies, but most
notably co-authored a comparative educational
study of six developed nations’ educational
systems.

As a fulltime faculty member at Teachers
College by the mid- to late 1920s, Kandel
was working with foreign students
on American and comparative education
in the International Institute, teaching
comparative education, educational history
and philosophy, and gaining international
prominence for editing and contributing
to the annual Yearbook on International Education,
which was published from 1925–44.
He was also increasingly debating, critiquing,
and reacting in print to progressives.

Although out of the country when
Bagley formed the Essentialists, Kandel
was an ardent supporter and challenged
the array of fundamental progressive tenets
through scholarly publications, including
two books, at least one radio address, and
articles in mass trade publications like
Parents magazine. Kandel offered powerful
refutations of such progressive ideas as:
students can teach other students while the
teacher is merely a guide; children should
play a major role in determining what
they learn; and effective citizenship can
be taught through having students intelligently
discuss the issues of the day with
little or no background knowledge.

Drawing upon his knowledge of history,
Kandel countered progressives’ claims that
their educational philosophy was new by
asserting that sophists had argued for values
relativism and freedom for students in
ancient Athens. Although respectful of science,
Kandel viewed progressive trumpeting
of science as scientism rather than the real
thing and intensely critiqued quantitative
educational studies that ignored cultural
and historical contexts. Teaching, Kandel
argued, was an intellectual and moral
profession, and progressives were trying
to turn it into a purely scientific one. The
progressives’ dismissal of thousands of years
of educational history was a recipe for promotion
of confusion, ignorance, and nihilism
among teachers and students.

As a strong believer in the value of
subject-matter curricula and effective teachers,
Kandel utilized titles for his works such
as “Is the New Education Progressive?,”
“The Fantasia of Current Education,” and
“Alice in Cloud Cuckoo Land” that give
one a sense of his often biting criticism
of the ascendant progressives. Several of
Kandel’s short articles as well as many of
Bagley’s writings and excerpted speeches
are included in Forgotten Heroes. Anyone
who is interested in improving teacher
education should mine this treasure trove
of primary sources.

Kandel was particularly sensitive to citizenship
education because he was a witness
to the rise of a new form of progressivism
in the early 1930s: George Counts’s Social
Reconstructionism and the call for using
the schools as tools for radical social and
economic change. During the same period
in 1935, Kandel, who was closely following
Hitler’s rise in Germany, published
The Making of Nazis. Although it sold few
copies, Kandel’s close examination of education
in the Third Reich depicted how
young Germans were taught to shun individualism.
As a democratic traditionalist,
Kandel recognized the dangers of politicization
of the schools, whether it occurred
in Germany or the United States. Like
Bagley, Kandel was a firm believer that
education could improve society, but he
saw schooling as achieving this goal in an
indirect way, through providing each individual
with the best possible intellectual
and ethical education.

After his retirement from Columbia in
1947, Kandel, who won numerous international
awards for his achievements in comparative
education, remained professionally
active until his death in 1965 and influenced
educational thought and practice in
a variety of countries including Australia,
France, and Japan. Serving as a member of
the Occupation’s influential United States
Educational Commission to Japan, Kandel
chaired the teacher education committee.
Kandel’s footprint is evident today in the
strong academic backgrounds of Japanese
education professors as compared with
many of their American counterparts.

Generally, historians of American education,
regardless of their perspectives on
progressivism, assert that the publication
of A Nation at Risk in the early 1980s stimulated
an embrace of Essentialist ideas in
much of the American public as well as in
many policymakers. Through his work on
the history of teacher education, Null now
provides academics, teacher educators,
and policymakers who desire to improve
fundamentally the quality of American
elementary and secondary school teachers,
rich sources for new thought and reflection
on the issue that were heretofore largely
unavailable for the last fifty years.

How might the writings of Bagley,
Kandel, and other “forgotten heroes,” as
well as a study of teacher education institutions
before progressivism’s ascendancy,
contribute to significant improvements in
a teacher-training enterprise that is now
transparently dysfunctional and intellectually
bankrupt? Many of us interested
in this transformation believe that success
depends on the articulation and successful
realization of three overarching goals:
liberal education, subject-matter expertise,
and professional education. Bagley, Kandel,
and the theoretical and structural
features of some of the normal schools
provide partial blueprints for attainment of
these goals.

In contrast to normal schools, when
colleges of education were created, administrators
delegated primary, if not exclusive,
responsibility for teacher preparation
to education faculties. For almost eighty
years, teacher training has been largely
ghettoized in the education colleges where
progressives still dominate.

This has substantially damaged the
prospects that future teachers, especially
elementary educators, will leave college
with a good liberal education and subjectmatter
expertise. The dominance of progressive
ideology in the education colleges
has also ensured that most teachers enter
classrooms for the first time with virtually
no training in the art of the lecture,
effective teacher-centered classroom management,
and other practical skills childcentered
progressives scorn. The normal
school belief that preparing school teachers
is an all-encompassing institutional responsibility
must be re-created in American
colleges and universities.

An array of specific strategies and policy
changes within the academy must
accompany this re-conceptualization of
institutional mission. The collaboration
of academics from a variety of disciplines
with teacher educators who respect and
have great affinity for and knowledge of
subject-matter must be encouraged. The
ideological dominance of progressive education
must be challenged at every opportunity
in the marketplace of ideas through
debates, conferences, and dialogue within
and outside of universities. Every future
teacher should be required to enroll in at
least two courses in educational history
and the philosophy of education. The
instructors of these courses, regardless of
their personal beliefs, should have not only
disciplinary expertise, but the integrity
to allow student exploration of multiple
epistemological and historical perspectives
ranging from the Greeks and Confucius to
educational philosophies and practices of
contemporary developed and developing
nations.

Elementary and secondary laboratory
schools attached to universities and colleges
should be revived, and future teachers,
professors from different disciplines,
and teacher educators should be involved in
governance, instruction, and collaboration
in these institutions. Many of the nation’s
most effective school teachers long ago
rejected progressive ideas. They should be
recruited for faculty positions in colleges
of education because of their expertise and
credibility and success as teachers of children.
Within the academy, coalitions must
be built that fight for coherent liberal education
for all future teachers.

The teacher’s role as moral educator
should be a central part of the education of
the pedagogue. Recent American educational
history has proven Bagley and Kandel
correct in their recognition of the vital
interrelationship between the life of the
mind and moral education. Every teacher
is, for better or worse, a moral educator,
and it is imperative that those who prepare
for the classroom understand this critical
aspect of their vocation.

Success will not be easy. Opponents
of change within education colleges still
far outnumber proponents, and the former
have strong advantages, including a
disproportionately high influence in the
politically powerful National Council
for Accreditation of Teacher Education.
Nevertheless, increasing the intellectual
quality and effectiveness of the nation’s
teaching force is a critical intellectual and
moral task that must never be abandoned,
and Wesley Null has substantially furthered
this cause by motivating those of
us who have opposed much of progressive
education to examine the past more closely
for inspiration and guidance.

NOTES

1. What E. D. Hirsch labeled the “thoughtworld”
   of progressive educators has made inroads into
   universities beyond the education colleges, as
   arts and sciences and other professional school
   faculty are advised in seminars on teaching to
   adjust instruction for “multiple intelligences”
   and cater to individual learning styles allegedly
   associated with ethnicity and gender differences.
   Higher education accreditation organizations
   excessively focus upon more scientific identifi-
   cation and formulation of educational objectives
   juxtaposed with estimated outcomes and outputs.
   The deadening and ineffectual brand of managerial
   pragmatism that “efficiency-oriented”
   educational progressives have touted for years in
   K–12 education is now part of many, especially
   state-supported, colleges and universities.