Another Cheer for Democracy

A Hub for the Wheeled Universe

Context: Some of you may have wondered why this newsletter has gone dark for a while.  It was, quite frankly, a misjudgment on my part.  I had felt it was important to write another book, as a sequel to Minding American Education: Reclaiming the Tradition of the Active Mind.  That book reconceived the history of American education as a struggle between two visions, a more constructivist, student-centered view and a more traditional system that stressed education as the transmission of our existing culture, of knowledge already fabricated instead of negotiated.  It is not that I want to see the first vision triumph over the latter—it was that I wanted to end the ceaseless pendulum swings in American education between progressivism and conservatism, between immediate concrete experience and the formulation of that experience into symbols, concepts, and systems.  This view is not original with me but has its roots in American philosophy and literature in works like those of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Bronson Alcott, and William James.  The most extensive and grounded expositor if this view is John Dewey, who expresses it most incisively in his essay “The Child and the Curriculum.”  The major disappointment of Minding  is that it did not reach the audience about whom I most cared, that of teachers, parents, administrators who were working in the field and have the powers to alter that field.  Most of the fault was mine, since some of it was overly academic and philosophical, although another problem of it that coming from a university press; even the paperbound version was overpriced so it was impractical for most teacher education courses.  To try again and write a more accessible book that focused on daily classroom practice, of weaving it into the very texture of what we do with our students, became a recent goal, but the practicalities of the publishing industry would have necessitated a wait of over two years.   I felt I could not wait to help affirm how foundational and constitutive the idea of democracy is to America.   To get off to a quick start I am reprinted an entry I posted on February 8, 2022;  I have not revised it at this point to fit our even more pressing situation now, but I’m hoping you folks will respond with your comments, concerns, and disagreements.  Coming back to the blog I’m hoping we can make it more interactive and dialogical.  Anything you can say will help.

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—Every day it gets worse.  When I open the Washington Post, the first thing I see is “Democracy  Dies in Darkness.”  In better days I took this as just a slogan, like “All the News that’s Fit to Print”; now it has become the news headline for each day—first bit by bit and now at an accelerating pace.  On the day I’m writing this, a major story in the Post was that a conservative-led school board secretly and illegally fired in new superintendent for fear he would make them or the children “uncomfortable” and instill “guilt and shame.”  Nationwide, a movement to rewrite history has gone hand-in-hand with a parallel movement to make certain people, like people of the wrong color, young people, people living in an area that might be too heavily Democratic, not learn and vote.

On this forum in the past I’ve suggested that approaching our teaching from a Reader Response perspective would open our students to other readings and diverse, and I still think this would help.   But now this is not positive and aggressive enough so here I want  turn to the very subject matter many of  us we teach.  For example, I just finished teaching Walt Whitman’s poetry to my classes.  The latest book on Whitman is Mark Edmunson’s Song of Ourselves: Walt Whitman and the Fight for Democracy.  The book helpfully includes the full 1855 text of the poem, but is not quite as radical or powerful, as it could be, so I want to supplement it in this column.  Whitman begins with these lines:

I celebrate myself and sing myself,

What I assume, you shall assume,

For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to me as well belongs to you.

Students, with good reason, tend to take umbrage at what they consider egoism, chutzpah, even narcissism, but I ask them to work more with the language and notice that “you” is used as much as “I” and that vector of the sentence moves from I to you in the very process of reading it, signaled by an abridgement in the second line of the movement in smaller form.  Indeed, the entire long poem enacts this movement from the initial I to the “final” you, 1336 lines later:

I stop somewhere waiting for you

The final period is probably intentionally omitted, especially since we know Whitman himself did some of the typesetting.

Between the beginning and end are crucial lines like:

And there is no object so soft but it makes a hub for the wheeled universe

And any man or woman shall stand cool and supercilious before a million universes

And there is no object so soft but it makes a hub for the wheeled universe

And any man or woman shall stand cool and supercilious before a million universes.

The notion that everyone we encounter is a center self to oneself, that everyone else is a consciousness, a person, is a vision that can create empathy, a flipping of our usual perception that our own mind is the only hub.

Dickinson, another poet of consciousness, writes:

The Brain-I wider than the Sky-

For-put them side by side-

The one the other will contain

With ease-and You-beside-

The Brain is deeper than the sea-

For-hold them- Pound for Pound-

The one the other will absorb-

As Sponges- Bucks- do

The Brain is just the weight of God-

For-Heft them-Pound for Pound-

And they will differ-if they do-

As Syllable from Sound-

Melville joins these poets in his paean to:  “The great God absolute! The centre and circumference of all democracy! His omnipresence, our divine equality!”

If, then, to meanest mariners, and renegades and castaways, I shall hereafter ascribe high qualities, though dark; weave round them tragic graces; if even the most mournful, perchance the most abased, among them all, shall at times lift himself to the exalted mounts; if I shall touch that workman’s arm with some ethereal light; if I shall spread a rainbow over his disastrous set of sun; then against all mortal critics bear me out in it, thou just Spirit of Equality, which hast spread one royal mantle of humanity over all my kind! Bear me out in it, thou great democratic God! who didst not refuse to the swart convict, Bunyan, the pale, poetic pearl; Thou who didst clothe with doubly hammered leaves of finest gold, the stumped and paupered arm of old Cervantes; Thou who didst pick up Andrew Jackson from the pebbles; who didst hurl him upon a war-horse; who didst thunder him higher than a throne! Thou who, in all Thy mighty, earthly marchings, ever cullest Thy selectest champions from the kingly commons; bear me out in it, O God!

Democracy to these writers is not simply what we do on Election day, but it is enacted, on all levels of American reality, political, spiritual, philosophical, even, especially in Whitman, the erotic, as in “The Base of All Metaphysics:

See the philosophies all, Christian churches and tenets see,

Yet underneath Socrates clearly see and underneath Christ the divine I see,

The dear love of man for his comrade, the attractions of friend to friend,

Of the well-married husband and wife, of children and parents,

Of city for city and land for land.

To these writers, democracy is not so much a part of the foundations of the country but is our  heritage, constitutive of America, which we see turning to ashes in the mouths of some politicians. For us as educators perhaps the central figure is John Dewey,  who did not have the eloquence of these literary writers but did have a conceptual clarity about the role democracy in education and the role of education in democracy, when he said education should not be the function of society but rather our society should be a function of education.  In fact, Justice Holmes once said of him that he wrote as if God were trying to explain everything to you but he mumbled.  What I use in the classroom is his best written and clearest essay, “The Child and the Curriculum.”  One of Dewey’s helpful insights is that for school to be really democratic and educative, democratic decision-making has to work at all levels, from students and teachers up to principals, superintendents, and school committees.  Everything should be a teaching and learning moment.  Colorado used to be a clearly Republican state, which gave the Board of Regents, whose main task is the choose a president for University of Colorado.  The result was that the last two presidents beside our current more enlightened one were political hacks, each of whom where the subjects of “town meetings” on all four campuses, after which the attendees—mainly faculty, students, and staff--were given paper ballots to vote them up or down.  In both cases, the results were of 90% against, were instated by the thin majority of Regents, only because they had the power to do so.  It might seem undemocratic to deny the vote of elected Regents, but the results were in fact antidemocratic with a vengeance. The two presidents installed through this system worked with the Benson Center for Western Civilization, to appoint John Eastman as a Visiting Endowed Professor two and not let him go even after he had enrolled no students.

I hope we can all find ways to work both alone and together as a group interested in education to push back. As Walt Whitman says, “To the States, obey little, resist much.”

I hope we can all find ways together and as a group of folks interested in education to push back.  As Wa.

lt Whitman says in an apostrophe to the States: “Obey little, resist much.”