Subjects, Failure, and the Essentials

Bagley’s second large quarrel with progressivism is curricular. The progressives want activities; the essentialists want subjects. The progressives want choice; the essentialists want a common foundation. The progressives want the present; the essentialists want the long inheritance of civilisation. Each disagreement is worth working through.

Subjects, not just activities

The progressive picture of education emphasises activities: students working on real problems, learning by doing, building things, exploring. The essentialist picture emphasises subjects: defined bodies of organised content that students master through systematic study. The difference is real, and Bagley defends the essentialist side directly.

Progressivists, Bagley observes, tend to live in the present rather than in what they would call the dead past. The progressive impulse is to focus on present experience and current problems, on the grounds that those are what students actually encounter and care about. Bagley sees value in this but treats it as incomplete. The past is not dead; it is the accumulated record of human thought and practice that the present rests on. A school that ignores the past in favour of the present cuts students off from most of what is worth knowing.

Progressivists oppose formalism, the strict formal teaching of subjects without integrating activities. They argue, with some force, that purely verbal teaching can degenerate into students reciting words they do not understand. Bagley accepts that formalism gone bad is a real problem. He does not accept that the cure is abandoning organised subjects altogether. The cure is teaching subjects well, with activities supporting the subject-matter rather than replacing it.

Essentialists, Bagley writes, have always emphasised the prime significance of race-experience (the term means the collective experience of humanity through history) and especially of organised experience or culture. The student arrives at school as one person with limited individual experience. The school’s job is to bring the student into contact with the much larger experience that humanity has accumulated. Personal experience is real and matters, but it is a means to interpreting the organised race-experience rather than an educational end in itself.

The progressive emphasis on personal experience as the centre of learning therefore inverts the right relationship. Personal experience is the entry point; the wider organised experience is the goal. A school that stays only in the student’s personal experience never reaches the wider goal, however engaged the student feels in the process.

Flashcard

What does Bagley mean by *race-experience*, and why does he treat it as central?

Tap to reveal

Answer

The collective experience of humanity through history, organised into culture; the school’s job is to bring students into contact with it

The student arrives at school with limited individual experience. The school brings them into contact with the much larger experience that humanity has accumulated. Personal experience is real and matters, but it is a means to interpreting the organised race-experience rather than an educational end in itself. Progressive schools that stay only in the student’s personal experience never reach the wider goal, however engaged the student feels in the process.

Two kinds of freedom

Bagley distinguishes two senses of freedom, one of which the progressives emphasise and the other of which they neglect.

The first is the freedom of the immature learner to choose what they shall learn. The progressive school offers this freedom in some form: students follow their interests, choose projects, work on what matters to them. The freedom is real and progressive theory defends it strongly.

The second is freedom from want, fraud, fear, superstition, error, and oppression. This is the kind of freedom an educated adult needs to live well. A person who is illiterate is not free from fraud, because they cannot read the contracts they sign. A person who lacks scientific basics is not free from superstition, because they cannot evaluate the claims they encounter. A person without historical knowledge is not free from error, because they repeat the mistakes earlier generations have already made and recorded.

Bagley’s claim is that the second freedom is the more important. It is also the freedom that the progressive emphasis on the first kind tends to undermine. A school that lets a student choose to skip arithmetic because the student does not find it interesting has given them freedom-to-choose, but has cost them freedom-from-fraud. The trade-off, on the essentialist account, is bad.

The line that captures Bagley’s position is uncomfortable. The latter freedom occurs, he writes, when the child is initially subjected to slavery to essential subjects. The word slavery is deliberately strong. Bagley means it as an exaggeration to make the point: the discipline of working through subjects the student would not choose looks like servitude from the inside, but it is what produces the substantive freedom of adult life. A student who has not been put through this temporary servitude arrives at adulthood without the freedom that essentialist education delivers.

A modern educator can take the underlying point without endorsing the rhetoric. The choice between immediate freedom-to-choose and long-run freedom-from-ignorance is real, and the long-run freedom usually requires the immediate constraint. A teacher who balances the two does better than one committed to only one of them.

Flashcard

What two kinds of freedom does Bagley distinguish, and which does he treat as more important?

Tap to reveal

Answer

Freedom-to-choose what to learn (progressive) and freedom-from want, fraud, fear, error, oppression (essentialist); the second is more important

The first freedom is what the progressive school offers: students follow their interests and choose what to study. The second is what an educated adult needs to live well: literacy that prevents fraud, scientific basics that prevent superstition, historical knowledge that prevents repeating errors. A school that gives only the first costs students the second. The trade-off, on Bagley’s account, is bad: the long-run freedom usually requires immediate constraint.

Varied competencies

Bagley accepts something the strongest essentialist position tries to avoid: students differ in their capacity to handle abstract subject-matter, and the differences matter.

The organisation of experience in the form of subjects involves the use of large-scale concepts and meanings. A certain proportion of the members of each generation, Bagley writes, are unable to master these abstract concepts. The point is empirical rather than moral. Some students have intellectual capacities that easily handle abstraction; others do not. The differences are real and an education theory that pretends otherwise will fail many of the students it claims to serve.

For immature learners and for those who never grow mentally past a certain point, a relatively simple educational programme is needed. The programme should be limited, in the earliest years and for slower learners throughout, to the most simple and concrete problems. The complex abstract subjects belong with the students who can actually work them.

Essentialism, on Bagley’s reading, recognises the difference between competent and slow learners. The progressive theory tends to discredit formal, organised, and abstract learnings as a category, and in doing so discourages even competent learners from attempting studies that are exact and exacting. The competent learners are then held back to match the slower learners, and the slower learners are then asked to manage abstract material they cannot really handle. The progressive system fails both groups.

The essentialist alternative is differentiated instruction with shared standards. Competent learners are pushed toward the demanding abstract subjects they can master. Slower learners are given a simpler programme that they can actually complete. Both groups are held to the standards their programmes can reach. Neither group is failed by being asked to do what the other group should be doing.

The essentialist also recognises that failure in school is unpleasant and that repetition of a grade is costly and often not effective. The recognition matters: Bagley is not arguing that failure is good in itself or that grade repetition is the right response to every difficulty. He is arguing that the absence of any stimulus that keeps the learner to their task is a more serious injustice, both to the student themselves and to the democratic group that has a stake in their education.

A school without standards that students must meet leaves the slower learners adrift and the competent learners under-stretched. A school with standards differentiated to the actual student capacities pushes each student to do what they can. The differentiation is what makes the standards workable in practice.

Flashcard

How does Bagley want a school to handle varied student competencies?

Tap to reveal

Answer

Differentiated instruction with shared commitment to standards: push competent learners toward abstraction, give slower learners a simpler programme, hold both to the standards their programmes can reach

The progressive system, by discrediting formal organised learning as a category, holds back competent learners and asks slower learners to manage abstract material they cannot really handle. The essentialist alternative differentiates the programmes while keeping the standards. Each student is pushed to do what they can; neither group is failed by being asked to do what the other group should be doing.

The essential arts

Bagley closes the diagnosis with a positive statement of what an essentialist curriculum must include. The list is short and is meant to be.

The arts of recording, computing, and measuring are first concerns of organised education. These three are the foundational arts that every civilised society depends on. Recording covers reading, writing, and the storage of information for later use. Computing covers arithmetic and the basic mathematics that practical and economic life requires. Measuring covers the practical numeracy needed to engage with the physical world: lengths, volumes, weights, times, quantities of all kinds.

Every civilised society has been founded upon these arts. The claim is historical. Civilisations that develop the three arts grow into something more complex; civilisations that fail to develop them stay small and simple; civilisations that lose them collapse. When the arts have been lost, civilisation has invariably collapsed. The line is strong and Bagley means it. A modern society that fails to teach reading, basic arithmetic, and measurement to its young is setting itself up for the kind of collapse historical record shows.

Beyond the three foundational arts, Bagley adds other essentials. Knowledge of the world beyond one’s immediate experience is part of universal education: the student should know about other places, other times, and other ways of living. Investigation, invention, and creative art add to the inherited heritage; they are part of how each generation contributes back to the cultural inheritance rather than just consuming it.

He also lists health instruction, the elements of natural science, the fine arts, and the industrial arts as essentials. The list is broader than the strictest essentialist might have proposed. Bagley is not arguing for a purely intellectual curriculum; he is arguing for a curriculum that gives every student the basics of practical, intellectual, aesthetic, and physical life.

The combination is what Bagley would have called the recognised essentials: the things every educated person needs, regardless of what particular career or life they will go on to lead. A modern educator can debate the exact list (and modern essentialism has updated it in various ways) without giving up on the principle that some such list is needed. The principle survives even when specific items are revised.

Flashcard

What three foundational arts does Bagley name as the first concerns of organised education?

Tap to reveal

Answer

Recording, computing, and measuring

Recording covers reading, writing, and information storage. Computing covers arithmetic and the basic mathematics of practical life. Measuring covers the practical numeracy needed for engagement with the physical world: lengths, volumes, weights, times. Every civilised society has been founded on these arts; when they are lost, civilisation collapses. The claim is historical, and modern societies that fail to teach these to their young are setting themselves up for the same outcome.