3. 1 - Progressive educators’ open-mindedness, flexibility, and capacity to recognize their fallibility prevented
the continued spread of democratic education as a means of indoctrination.
- “Interwar proponents for teaching social issues emphasized the need for an updated curriculum that
imparted a collectivist and cooperative ideology, but postwar theorists emphasized the
deliberation/discussion process itself as the purposeful avoidance of ideology” (Fallace, 2016, p. 508)
- “During the 1910s and 1920s, social studies reformers introduced social issues into the middle and high
school curriculum mainly as an ideological tool to reorganize the curriculum to promote social reform”
(Fallace, 2016, p. 509).
- “reform-oriented progressive educators fully embraced Dewey’s idea that the road to authentic democracy
was a citizenry informed about the present realities of social and economic life […] However, they diverged
from Dewey in the belief that teachers ought to be disinterested arbitrators in the classroom […] Instead,
they argued that teachers ought to organize and present a compelling case for a specific ideological vision”
(Fallace, 2016, p. 511).
- “Consequently, former radical theorists, including Counts, joined Dewey in opposing the inclusion of
Communists in teacher unions because Communists were dogmatic and opposed to the open-mindedness
required in a democracy (Hartman, 2008, pp. 38–44). Counts (1941) even repudiated his earlier praise for
the Soviet’s “ridged dictatorship” and contrasted it with the “honesty, fair- mindedness, restraint and
scientific spirit” of democratic life” (Fallace, 2016, p. 516)
4. 2 - Despite the efforts to maintain segregation in college education to allow the transmission of an ideology
of inferiority to black students, African Americans were not deterred from offering intellectual spaces
inspired by the contemporary postwar progressive educators’ view on democratic education.
- “State College was not designed to prepare Negroes for literary and professional careers. Negroes were to
be prepared in agriculture and the trades. Every student had to take a trade whether he liked it or not”
(Baker, 2006, p. 71)
- “As much as State’s governing board wanted to train students at the college in “fundamental labor”, the
vast majority of students who graduated from State entered the teaching profession” (Baker, 2006, pp. 74-
75)
- “We are not fighting this war just to win. We are trying to win this war, so that we may establish a new
economic, social, and political order” (Baker, 2006, p. 75)
- “Hoping to limit black access to the professions, Callcott urged the legislature to establish an out-of-state
scholarship program that would provide black students with the subsidies to pursue professional programs
in other states, “as long as these programs “were available for white students within the state of South
Carolina”” (Baker, 2006, p. 76).
- And as Dewey and his peers entered the more conservative environment of the 1940s and 1950s, he
maintained his faith in open-ended discussion and scientific thinking as the essential foundations for a
democratic education (Fallace, 2016, p. 515).
- “In essence, postwar theorists of democratic education emphasized that the means of democratic
education as deliberation, persuasion, and debate was as important—if not more important—as the
selection and transmission of subject matter” (Fallace, 2016, p. 517).
5. 3 - NAACP’s arguments in litigations in favor of desegregation, drew from postwar progressive aspirations for
democratic education through a pragmatic approach.
- “In 1950, in the NAACP's first victory before the Supreme Court since 1938, the Court ruled that the
separate African American law school at Texas Southern University was not equal to the University of Texas.
There were limits to how much students could learn "in isolation from individuals and institutions with
which the law interacts," Chief Justice Frederick Moore Vinson wrote in Sweatt v. Painter. In South Carolina
these limits had less to do with the faculty and facilities than with the inability of students at State to
interact with students, professors, and alumni of the university’s law school in the state capital in Columbia.
“Few students and no one who has practiced law would choose to study in an academic vacuum, removed
from the interplay of dideas and the exchange of views with which the law is concerned”” (Baker, 2006, p.
83).
- “[…] political problems should be approached pragmatically and incrementally, not subsumed into some
grand narrative, universal truth, or ideological system” (Fallace, 2016, p. 516)
