PEA: Younger Sister of the NEA in the Public Education Movement
By Dr. Mary Byrne
Editor’s Note: The May issue of Education Reporter featured part one of a series by Dr. Mary Byrne, Ed.D., on how the National Education Association (NEA) is molding the future of American education. The May article demonstrated that, before the NEA could succeed in this effort, it first had to itself be remolded. This month, Education Reporter publishes part two of this fascinating exposé.
Patricia Albjerg Graham documented PEA’s history in her book, Progressive Education: from Arcady to Academe.1 PEA was founded in April 1919 by Washington matrons, private school teachers, and a few public-school people. John Dewey agreed to become PEA’s honorary president, lending his name to the fledgling organization to give it credibility and a connection to the history of the progressive education movement. He would also serve as an honorary president of the NEA.
PEA was initially led by private school headmasters.2 In the late 1920s, however, PEA directed its focus on public schools with increased permeation by radical university faculty, especially Teachers College, Columbia University’s George Counts and his mentee, Theodore Brameld.
Fabians in the PEA
A December 1926 PEA pamphlet, “The Progressive Education Association — What It Is, What It Believes, What It Does,” described progressive education as a worldwide movement. “As part of the great forward sweep of human progress, it is akin to other movements in the realms of public health, industrial relations, social conditions, and international affairs.” (p. 3) 3
The pamphlet described the launch of the Progressive Education Association (PEA) as “an informal organization set up in 1919” and touted membership from every state in the United States and a dozen foreign countries. It listed British Fabian Society co-founder H.G. Wells as one of its 1926-1927 vice-presidents, and Teachers College’s Harold Rugg, author of the controversial social studies textbook series, as a member. The pamphlet described Progressive Education and the goal of the PEA as follows:
- Progressive Education is not a plan; it is a spirit. It is not a method; it is an understanding.... Freedom, interest, sympathy, health — these are the elements of the situation which understanding will establish.
- Finally, for what does the Association Stand? For no one method, plan, or device. It approves and encourages every plan that seems genuinely to offer greater freedom and naturalness in school and college and the abandonment of formal and routine learning (emphasis added). (p. 7)4
The PEA pamphlet does not define the meaning of freedom but the term in progressive vocabulary does not refer to individual freedom. PEA drew heavily on the work of John Dewey, “Father of Progressive Education.” A brief study of Dewey’s writing on liberty is instructive in understanding what the writers of the pamphlet intended.5
PEA’s Deweyan-Fabian-Progressive Concept of ‘Freedom’
In his 1935 book Liberalism and Social Action, Dewey distinguished the American Founders’ idea of formal or legal liberty from the progressive notion of effective liberty.6 Rather than define freedom as the absence of governmental interference with natural liberty a concept historically having its origin in the Old Testament (as indicated on the scripture engraved in the Liberty Bell, or as illustrated on Benjamin Franklin’s and Thomas Jefferson’s proposals for the Great Seal of the United States), Dewey suggested that the early American principle of freedom referred to the an economic principle.7,8,9
Using a Marxist lens, Dewey interpreted individual freedom as economic laissez faire liberalism. He attributed America’s social problems to the American principle of limited government because the principle did not allow government to intervene when industrialists abused workers.
The Fabian socialist thought leaders Dewey referenced for his ideas are proponents of a planned economy run by a centralized government. Edward Walton explained how Progressives’ concept of freedom is the opposite of the American Founders’ concept of freedom:
- The implications of this redefinition of freedom are momentous. Men and women are no longer free by nature—they must be made free. Freedom, as Dewey wrote in Liberalism and Social Action, is “something to be achieved.” And it requires not only material means but also enlightened [progressive] decisions (emphasis added).10
The basic assumption about the nature of Man is that humans are naturally good and central government run by humans is for the greater good. Big government proponents are silent on the issue of government power to abuse individuals — particularly dissident individuals who protest authoritarian governments.
FDR’s Four Freedoms Speech illustrates the contrast between Dewey’s formal or legal liberty and effective liberty.11 The first two of the four freedoms — freedom of speech and freedom of religion — are legal liberties embedded in the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution to limit the federal government from infringing on the rights of individuals.12 The last two freedoms — freedom from want and freedom from fear — are derived from Fabian socialist ideology that proposes these are human rights endowed by government.
British Fabian Socialists and American Progressives envisioned a government that guarantees freedom from want (that is, material security) in the form of guaranteed employment, guaranteed basic income, and government-run universal health care. In that vision, the government also guarantees freedom from fear (that is, social and emotional security) in the form of weapons removal at international and individual levels (that is, multilateral disarmament and gun control). Freedom from fear also entails freedom from racial discrimination and has come to mean freedom from “discrimination” of behavior, that is, elimination of laws rooted in codes of conduct and values associated with the Biblical Christian worldview and Western Civilization. Dewey claimed, “Because the liberals failed to make a distinction between purely formal or legal liberty and effective liberty of thought and action, the history of the last one hundred years is the history of nonfulfillment of their predictions.” (pp. 34-35)13
By controlling the narrative about American history — excluding study of the Biblical worldview characteristic of America’s culture at the time of its founding — and interpreting American history though a Marxist lens, Dewey helped form his readers’ opinions about the United States, nudging them to conclude that socialism is the only viable solution to America’s social problems — a propaganda strategy progressive teachers employ in American classrooms today.
Dewey’s Ideas on Curriculum Were Not Original, They were British
In so many words, the PEA pamphlet proposed to replace academic instruction with a vaguely defined political ideology focusing on social problems as recommended by John Dewey. What is not well understood is that Dewey’s area of expertise was not curriculum and instruction, but philosophy. His proposal for public school curriculum was not original to him, but derived from British philosophers, specifically, Fabian Society founder Sidney Webb, who derived his ideas from British philosopher Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832).
Webb proposed replacing the classical, private education structures with a vocationally directed system based upon science, technology, social sciences, and European studies.14 Webb’s recommendations are consistent with what Robert Beck described as polytechnical education.15 According to Beck, “Soviet polytechnical education is rooted in the Marxist-Leninist ideology, which remains a powerful influence... (p. 1).16 The goal of polytechnical education at the secondary level is “parity of esteem” of vocational and academic preparation. In contemporary terms, “parity of esteem” is referred to as equity, which is realized in a common set of standards purportedly designed to prepare all students for college and career, that is, the Common Core State Standards.
Fabian Biography Tract No. 11 (1927) included a description of Bentham’s perceived purpose of education which included curriculum for secular character education and conditioning students to accept a particular political persuasion, as well as a movement away from classical studies to “useful” subjects:
- ... Benthamites ... recognized the potency of education in the formation of character; in their hands it was to be an instrument to drill the nation in utilitarian politics and economics.... Bentham heartily co-operated, and he elaborated a new educational programme ... The curriculum embraced all “useful” subjects. The classics could not be included, and thus there began the controversy as to the merits of a Classical as compared with a Modern education.
- ... The roots of English state education are embedded in the Poor Law, and the State care of the poor had then become the object of grave enquiry.... The School of Bentham incorporated the teaching of Malthus [that is, population must be controlled in response to limited resources], and demanded State education as part of the machinery of utility in order to teach the workers of England sobriety and self-help ... The Benthamites aimed by state education at teaching citizens what their true interests were (emphasis added). (p. 14)17
In other words, Bentham’s curriculum was a secular curriculum designed to shape students’ thoughts in service of the State’s interest. Dewey, like Bantham, promoted the idea that public education curricula should be functional and experiential rather than academic. The Bentham-Webb-Dewey progressive ideas about the purpose of education are evident in The Goals 2000: Educate America Act, signed by President Clinton in 1994 — legislation that Phyllis Schlafly vigorously opposed in her April 1997 article, “School-to-Work and Goals 2000.”18
The British-American education policy connection becomes apparent when analyzing Bill Clinton’s education history and the history of several board members of the National Center for Education and the Economy (NCEE) identified on Marc Tucker’s “Dear Hillary” letter discussed in Schlafly’s 1997 article.19 Bill Clinton attended Oxford University in London as a Rhodes Scholar in 1968. At Oxford, the definition of democracy is the socialist “participatory democracy,” as opposed to the American ‘representative democracy’.20,21
NCEE’s letterhead lists Ira Magaziner and David Rockefeller, Jr. as members of Marc Tucker’s NCEE board.22 Clinton met Magaziner as one of the Rhodes Scholars at Oxford.23 David Rockefeller, Jr., who had written his senior dissertation at Harvard about the Webbs and the Fabians, then attended the Fabian-founded London School of Economics (LSE) that had been generously funded by his grandfather.24
Clinton was a global partner in governance and friend of British Prime Minister Tony Blair, a British Fabian who wrote pamphlets on socialism for the Fabian Society.25,26,27 Blair wrote Fabian pamphlet No. 588, “The third way: new politics for the new century.”28 Clinton shared Blair’s views about a hybrid free-market economy with “freedom from want” guaranteed by the government. School-to-Work takes the form of that guarantee in Clinton era education legislation.
Blair and Clinton collaborated to promote a center-left “trans-Atlantic, one-nation politics of a new third way” to the world.29 In short, Clinton’s personal, philosophical, and political connections to British and American Fabian thought leaders give credibility to the claim that the influence of British Fabian Socialism on American progressive education has been ongoing for over a century.
Radicalization of the PEA
Employing the “Policy of Permeation” and capture (see Education Reporter, April 2023), Marxist-leaning university faculty supplanted PEA leadership and shifted the focus of the organization from pedagogy to political and social issues. At a February 1932 national PEA meeting, Teachers College professor George Counts criticized the PEA for not having a social theory to guide education with the reading of his paper “Dare Progressive Education be Progressive.”30 He argued that teachers should serve as leaders effecting social change and called for schools and teachers to help foster a planned collective economy.
Though PEA did not support George Counts’ 1933 call for some new form of national government to replace the “inadequate one” under its auspices, Counts founded and became editor of The Social Frontier (1934 - 1943), a publication designed for the radicalization of practicing teachers.31 Under his editorship (1934 - 1937) the journal became the voice of the educational theory called social reconstructionism, which was based on the theory that society can be reconstructed through education. The publication was renamed Frontiers of Democracy in 1939. The PEA had already been supporting the quarterly journal Progressive Education (1924 - 1957).
Theodore Brameld was drawn to the social activist group of scholars at Teachers College, Columbia University, including John Dewey, George Counts, and Harold Rugg. Dewey contributed comments to Brameld’s 1933 book, A Philosophic Approach to Communism, which was derived from his doctoral dissertation analyzing the writings of Marx and Lenin.32 George Counts, the “Father of Social Reconstructionism” in education, became a mentor to Brameld, who further developed Counts’ ideas and emphasized the need for a global perspective. Both men served in PEA leadership along with Harold Rugg. Brameld served PEA as vice presidential representative of the North Central Region.33
Brameld distinguished four philosophies of education in Patterns of Educational Philosophy: A Democratic Interpretation: progressivism — the philosophy of liberal, experimental education; essentialism — concerned mainly with the conservation of culture; perennialism — centering on the classical thought of ancient Greece and Western Civilization; and reconstructionism — a philosophy of values, ends, and purposes, with a democratically empowered world civilization.34
In Education as Power, Brameld defines social self-realization:
- ... Social-self-realization as a value symbolizes the highest human purpose. It is the realization of the capacity of the self to measure up to its fullest, most satisfying powers in cooperative relationship with other selves. One of the most important ways, moreover, in which we reach social-self-realization is through creativity. (p. 48)35
Brameld discussed humanist evolution in a manner aligned to Fabian Society founder Julian Huxley (see Education Reporter, April 2023),
- Evolution speaks to us in scientific terms as social-self-realization speaks to us in ethical terms. Man is capable of becoming his own master because man is the one animal on earth able to guide his own evolution...
- ... Let us transform education into a gigantic agency through which man shapes his own evolution toward social-self-realization, toward maximum creativity... The first obligation of mankind in an age of crisis is to direct the evolutionary process toward the goal of a world democratic civilization. (p. 49)36
Brameld maintained that reconstructionists and progressives share a common opposition to any theory that viewed values as absolute or unchanging, thereby dismissing perennialism and any notion of eternal truth associated with a Christian worldview. For Brameld, values must be tested by evidence and grounded in social consensus. As such, Brameld’s social reconstruction requires a curriculum that teaches students humanist evolution, directing the course of human events, “like God.”37
Brameld’s End Game and PEA’s End
Brameld was an admirer of Marxist-Leninist philosophy. Like Marx, he believed that philosophy must be related to real-life issues. In fact, In October 1935 Counts’ published Brameld’s article “Karl Marx and the American Teacher,” in the The Social Frontier.38 In the article, Brameld argued that it was part of the teacher’s professional responsibility to reveal the vast differences in wealth in American society—and that since teachers were the creators of wealth, they should align themselves with the working class.39 That is, Brameld promoted criticism of American culture and a curriculum to empower students to become agents of social reconstruction.
In his book, Minority Problems in Public Schools: A Study of Administrative Policies in Seven School Districts (1945), Brameld addressed issues of prejudice, discrimination, and economic exploitation at school.40 Having adopted an anthropological approach to education philosophy, Brameld advocated for multicultural curriculum and the discussion of contentious cultural issues and concerns in the classroom. Today, Brameld’s ideas are evident in the body of literature concerning Transformational Social. Emotional Learning.41
By the 1930s, public school educators became more involved in the PEA. While many of them were progressive (according to Brameld’s own classification), fewer identified with his social reconstructionism. The increase of moderate PEA members confronted with Brameld’s radical position statements written for the organization caused an irreconcilable splintering of the membership.42 The split eventually led to the demise of the PEA and dominance of the NEA as a leader in the public education movement.
The PEA officially disbanded in 1955 with President DeBoer lamenting: "I must admit that some of us have been very much distressed that the Association has never accomplished its fundamental purpose, which was to affect both the administration and the teaching practices of the elementary schools of this country.”43 The radicalization of the PEA was a prelude to the social reconstructionists’ next project — the radicalization of the NEA. Education administrator Gordan Drake explained, “The “respectable NEA would now serve the Frontier Thinkers as their modus operandi.” (p. 24)
See the third and final part of this series in the July Education Reporter.
Dr. Mary Byrne is an educational consultant and a co-founding member of the Missouri Coalition Against Common Core. She holds a doctorate in special education from Columbia University, and has spent the past 38 years in education and education research at all grade levels.
Footnotes:
Want to be notified of new Education Reporter content?
Your information will NOT be sold or shared and will ONLY be used to notify you of new content.
Click Here
Return to Home Page