Progressivism's Aesthetic Education: the Bildungsroman and the Struggle for the American School, 1890-1920

Progressivism's Aesthetic Education: The Bildungsroman and the Struggle for the American School, 1890-1920 The Harvard community has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters Citation Raber, Jesse Benjamin. 2014. Progressivism's Aesthetic Education: The Bildungsroman and the Struggle for the American School, 1890-1920. Doctoral dissertation, Harvard University. Citable link http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:12271800 Terms of Use This article was downloaded from Harvard University’s DASH repository, and is made available under the terms and conditions applicable to Other Posted Material, as set forth at http:// nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:dash.current.terms-of- use#LAA Progressivism's Aesthetic Education: The Bildungsroman and the Struggle for the American School, 1890-1920 A dissertation presented by Jesse Raber to The Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the subject of English Harvard University Cambridge, Massachusetts May 2014 © 2014 Jesse Raber All rights reserved. Professor Louis Menand Jesse Raber Progressivism's Aesthetic Education: The Bildungsroman and the Struggle for the American School, 1890-1920 During the Progressive Era, literary writers such as Abraham Cahan, Willa Cather, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman engaged with ideas emerging from the newly consolidated educational profession about art's capacity to mediate between individual and social development. These ideas varied widely in their philosophical, pedagogical, and political implications, but all reinforced the authority of professional educators at the expense of democratically elected boards of education. Novels working through these ideas can be usefully theorized as Bildungsromane if the definition of the Bildungsroman is refined to be more sensitive to the wide range of educational philosophies that can inform it, and to the range of attitudes, from critical to worshipful, that it can assume toward these philosophies. This reimagining of the genre opens up the possibility that the Bildungsroman, and the Bildung idea more broadly, can have a more positive political valence than most scholars have acknowledged. In particular, a viable project of aesthetic education can be discerned in the philosophy of John Dewey, although it lacks a clear literary corollary. iii Table of Contents Introduction: Aesthetic Education and Social Action 1 1. Abraham Cahan and the American Herbartians: Bending Down to Pick Up the Child 55 2. Willa Cather and Maria Montessori: To Make Oneself Into a Vessel 136 3. Charlotte Perkins Gilman and the Social Efficiency Educators: To Lens-Shape Cruelly Smooth-Ground 237 4. John Dewey's Aesthetic Education: Living Has Its Own Intrinsic Quality 283 Bibliography 351 iv for Clara v Introduction: Aesthetic Education and Social Action Overview At the center of this study are three authors, Abraham Cahan, Willa Cather, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, whose sense of artistic vocation was shaped by and against the rise of a massive new cultural edifice: the American educational profession. In order to understand what the professionalization of education meant to them, we will draw on three related, but seldom actually juxtaposed, scholarly discourses, each of which will hopefully be enlarged by the encounter. First, we will turn to Bildungsroman criticism for a sophisticated account of how the category of the aesthetic can manage (or mask) the conflict between democracy and a self-authorizing educational apparatus; in so doing we will see how Bildungsroman criticism, which has been very profitably applied to literatures of Europe and the Global South, might begin to attend to American literature. Second, we will look to the history of American education for a description of the political, institutional, and philosophical dimensions of educational professionalization; to these we will add an account of leading educators' largely overlooked statements about the arts and their centrality to democratic schooling. Third, we will situate the literary writers and the educators within a broader intellectual history of the American Progressive Era organized around the ideal of social action; this will enable us to better recognize American progressivism as a literary-historical phenomenon, and to talk about a literature of progressivism. Through these interlocking frames, we can see Cahan, Cather, and Gilman as both promoters and critics of three distinctive, and institutionally powerful, visions of aesthetic education for social action, which leave both formal and thematic traces throughout their work. Cahan is engaged with the early progressive education movement known as Herbartianism, Cather with Montessori education, and Gilman with the movement for education based on "social efficiency." 1 Although the bulk of this study is descriptive, it also has a normative dimension that should be acknowledged from the outset. Just as the German Idealist concept of Bildung, especially as articulated by Friedrich Schiller, is distorted by its reliance on a concept of pure reason, so the three varieties of progressivism's aesthetic education just mentioned are compromised by overly rigid conceptions of a "science of education." The idea that democratic education, the induction of free individuals into a free society, could be placed on an objective scientific footing held enormous appeal for the champions of educational professionalization. Without denying that scientific methods can be usefully applied to educational questions up to a point, the argument that educational questions can ultimately be reduced to scientific ones cannot be seriously entertained from the standpoint of either pragmatism or poststructuralism, two perspectives that seem to encompass almost all thinking in humanities departments today. If both the rationalist aesthetic education of German Idealism and the scientific aesthetic education of American progressivism break up on the rocks of contemporary critical consensus, must we conclude that there is no version of the ideal of Bildung or aesthetic education with which the professional humanities might identify? It would be hasty to venture a definitive answer to this question. Although I ultimately answer it in the negative, I hope to present the evidence in a manner that will be useful for those who would answer it in the affirmatve. The following three chapters will reconstruct three different variants of Bildung based in a science of education, each of which might, despite its shortcomings, be suggestive for some readers. The final chapter presents a fourth version of Progressive Era aesthetic education, found in the philosophy of John Dewey, which represents, it seems to me, the most plausible form that the Progressive Era Bildung ideal can take. In Dewey we find a fully articulated reconstruction of the Bildung idea that makes the cultivation of individual freedom and self-realization, of democratic solidarity and social action, and of aesthetic perceptiveness and sensitivity all mutually necessary, and all ultimately facets of one larger project of democratic education. The educational profession that 2 Dewey sees as proper to this project is, pace many of his Progressive Era contemporaries, one founded on firsthand knowledge of the qualitative dimensions of educational experience and only secondarily concerned with the development of a science of education. To say that Dewey's is the most plausible form that the project of aesthetic education can take does not mean that the project itself necessarily remains plausible. The Dewey who produces this idea of aesthetic education is the more metaphysically grounded Dewey described by scholars such as Robert Westbrook, Richard Bernstein, and James T. Kloppenberg, rather than the poststructuralist Dewey favored by Richard Rorty. This more ambitious Dewey, more of a system-builder both philosophically and institutionally, invites at least three important objections, each of which paints him as something of a conformist. First, in the area of institutional education, he is charged with complicity with the corporate state (by education scholars such as Clarience Karier, Michael Katz, and Paul Violas), or even with turning education into a kind of repressive state religion (by Charles Glenn, another education scholar). Second, poststructuralist pragmatists such as Rorty or Stanley Fish would question the validity of the connections among metaphysics (or even epistemology), aesthetics, and politics that this idea of aesthetic education asserts. Third, the idea that aesthetic experience is communicable among different people and thus capable of grounding a community would draw fire (for various reasons) from those, such as Richard Poirier and Stanley Cavell, who emphasize the privacy and idiosyncrasy of the complete and intense experiences of the kind that Dewey calls "consummatory." I believe that these objections can be answered, but to give them the attention they deserve would require another book. Some of these objections will be briefly addressed at the end of this Introduction. Ultimately I do not find them disqualifying, and I believe that Dewey's version of aesthetic education is viable.1 1. Westbrook, John. John Dewey and American Democracy. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1991; Bernstein, Richard J. The Pragmatic Turn. New York: John Wiley and Sons, 2013; Kloppenberg, James T. Uncertain Victory: Social Democracy and Progressivism in European and

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