Why the School Wars Still Rage

...The textbook that John Scopes used in Tennessee was a 1914 edition of George William Hunter’s “A Civic Biology,” published by the American Book Company. More than a guide to life on earth, “Civic Biology” was a civics primer, a guide to living in a democracy.

“This book shows boys and girls living in an urban community how they may best live within their own environment and how they may cooperate with the civic authorities for the betterment of their environment,” the book’s foreword explained. “Civic Biology” promoted Progressive public-health campaigns, all the more urgent in the wake of the 1918 influenza pandemic, stressing the importance of hygiene, vaccination, and quarantine. “Civic biology symbolized the whole ideology behind education reform,” Adam Shapiro wrote in his 2013 book, “Trying Biology: The Scopes Trial, Textbooks, and the Antievolution Movement in American Schools.” It contained a section on evolution (“If we follow the early history of man upon the earth, we find that at first he must have been little better than one of the lower animals”), but its discussion emphasized the science of eugenics. Hunter wrote, of alcoholics and the criminal and the mentally ill, “If such people were lower animals, we would probably kill them off to prevent them from spreading.”

At bottom, “Civic Biology” rested on social Darwinism. “Society itself is founded upon the principles which biology teaches,” Hunter wrote. “Plants and animals are living things, taking what they can from their surroundings; they enter into competition with one another, and those which are the best fitted for life outstrip the others.” What did it feel like, for kids who were poor and hungry, living in want and cold and fear, to read those words?

When anti-evolutionists condemned “evolution,” they meant something as vague and confused as what people mean, today, when they condemn “critical race theory.” Anti-evolutionists weren’t simply objecting to Darwin, whose theory of evolution had been taught for more than half a century. They were objecting to the whole Progressive package, including its philosophy of human betterment, its model of democratic citizenship, and its insistence on the interest of the state in free and equal public education as a public good that prevails over the private interests of parents...

Jill LePore
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/03/21/why-the-school-wars-still-rage?utm_source=onsite-share&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=onsite-share&utm_brand=the-new-yorker

"you indeed need experience"

"But James's own robust faith was that the very caprices of the spirit are the opportunity for the building up of the highest forms of the spiritual life; that the unconventional and the individual in religious experience are the means whereby the truth of a superhuman world may become most manifest. And this robust faith of James, I say, whatever you may think of its merits, is as American in type as it has already proved effective in the expression which James gave to it. It is the spirit of the frontiers man, of the gold seeker, or the home builder, transferred to the metaphysical and to the religious realm. There is our far-off home, our long-lost spiritual fortune. Experience  alone can guide us towards the place where these things are; hence you indeed need experience. You can only win your way on the frontier in case you are willing to live there. Be, therefore, concrete, be fearless, be experimental. But, above all, let not your abstract conceptions, even if you call them scientific conceptions, pretend to set any limits to the richness of spiritual grace, to the glories of spiritual possession, that, in case you are duly favored, your personal experience may reveal to you. James reckons that the tribulations with which abstract scientific theories have beset our present age are not to be compared with the glory that perchance shall be, if only we open our eyes to what experience itself has to reveal to us."

William James, and Other Essays on the Philosophy of Life" by Josiah Royce: https://a.co/9S6DQt3

Dewey knew how to teach democracy and we must not forget it

Did you attend a public school in the United States and perform in a school play, take field trips, or compete on a sports team? Did you have a favourite teacher who designed their own curriculum, say, about the Civil War, or helped you find your particular passions and interests? Did you take classes that were not academic per se but that still opened your eyes to different aspects of human experience such as fixing cars? Did you do projects that required planning and creativity? If the answer to any of these questions is yes, then you are the beneficiary of John Dewey's pedagogical revolution... (continues)

In Praise of William James

Just stumbled across this...

"The Varieties of Religious Experience" is a generous and endlessly insightful book about human nature.

I've devoted a significant chunk of this one life I have to reading, though I really don't believe that books offer any greater chance of salvation than, say, windsurfing. Yet I can't help feeling that I was saved, for a while, by William James.

About 10 years ago I was hurting; not from a broken heart so much as an exhausted one, having spent several of the previous years caring about people whose own hearts and minds were in states of distress. When I picked up "The Varieties of Religious Experience," an edited version of 20 lectures that James delivered in Edinburgh in 1901 and 1902, I wasn't expecting it to be a profound balm, but that's what it was.

I immediately read more work by and about James. I began to verbally annotate everyday life to friends by referring to things he had done or said, with the same frequency with which I had once (no less annoyingly, I'm sure) called on scenes from "The Simpsons." He was a Swiss Army knife of psychological and emotional insight.

It's a cliché for people unswayed by religion to still believe in William James, to allow him access to their souls because of the way he sneaks in through their brains. A psychologist and philosopher (and oldest brother of the novelist Henry), James was not a follower of any church, and had little academic interest in institutional religion, but he was obsessively curious about the inner experiences of believers... (continues, nyt)

Beyond 'Varieties': A William James Starter Kit

'THE WILL TO BELIEVE' Instead of seeing a movie with friends, have everyone read the title essay of this collection and then go somewhere to argue about it.

'A PLURALISTIC UNIVERSE' Another series of lectures; a bit more wonky in its case against absolute idealism in philosophy, but still accessible.

'PRAGMATISM' James was one of the originators of this school of philosophy, and here he describes and defends it.

'THE SELECTED LETTERS OF WILLIAM JAMES' Elizabeth Hardwick writes in her introduction that James's letters show him to be "benevolent, loving, loyal and completely without pompousness or self-importance."

'WILLIAM JAMES: IN THE MAELSTROM OF AMERICAN MODERNISM' If you're like me, reading James will make you want to know more about him. Robert D. Richardson's first-rate biography is the place to start.

nyt

R.B. Perry, The Approach to Philosophy

"philosophy should appear in its vital relations to more familiar experiences"--

Preface
In an essay on "The Problem of Philosophy at the Present Time," Professor Edward Caird says that "philosophy is not a first venture into a new field of thought, but the rethinking of a secular and religious consciousness which has been developed, in the main, independently of philosophy."[ vii:A] If there be any inspiration and originality in this book, they are due to my great desire that philosophy should appear in its vital relations to more familiar experiences. If philosophy is, as is commonly assumed, appropriate to a phase in the development of every individual, it should grow out of interests to which he is already alive. And if the great philosophers are indeed never dead, this fact should manifest itself in their classic or historical representation of a perennial outlook upon the world. I am not seeking to attach to philosophy a fictitious liveliness, wherewith to insinuate it into the good graces of the student. I hope rather to be true to the meaning of philosophy. For there is that in its stand-point and its problem which makes it universally significant entirely apart from dialectic and erudition. These are derived interests, indispensable to the scholar, but quite separable from that modicum of philosophy which helps to make the man. The present book is written for the sake of elucidating the inevitable philosophy. It seeks to make the reader more solicitously aware of the philosophy that is in him, or to provoke him to philosophy in his own interests. To this end I have sacrificed all else to the task of mediating between the tradition and technicalities of the academic discipline and the more common terms of life... R.B. Perry, The Approach to Philosophy

Orwell's writing-"representation true to its subject"

"Clarity, honesty, accuracy, truth are beautiful because in them representation is true to its subject, knowledge is democratized, people are empowered, doors are open, information moves freely, contracts are honored. That is, such writing is beautiful in itself, and beautiful in what flows from it. There are more conventional kinds of beauty in Orwell’s work—natural landscapes from Burmese forests to British meadows, all those flowers, the golden eye of the toad. But this beauty in which ethics and aesthetics are inseparable, this linguistic beauty of truth and of integrity as a kind of wholeness and connectedness, between language and what it describes, between one person and another, or between members of a community or society, is the crucial beauty for which he strove in his own writing."

Orwell's Roses" by Rebecca Solnit: https://a.co/eigNdwg