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Irving Babbitt's New Humanism

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Irving Babbitt's New Humanism IRVING BABBITT’S NEW HUMANISM: AN OUTSIDER’S PERSPECTIVE ON CURRICULAR DEBATES AT THE TURN OF THE 20TH CENTURY By Copyright 2010 Kipton Dale Smilie Submitted to the graduate degree program in Educational Leadership and Policy Studies and the Graduate Faculty of the University of Kansas in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. ________________________________ Chairperson John Rury ________________________________ Suzanne Rice ________________________________ Mickey Imber ________________________________ Susan Twombly ________________________________ Phil McKnight Date Defended: November 11, 2010 ii The Dissertation Committee for Kipton Dale Smilie certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation: IRVING BABBITT’S NEW HUMANISM: AN OUTSIDER’S PERSPECTIVE ON CURRICULAR DEBATES AT THE TURN OF THE 20TH CENTURY ________________________________ Chairperson John Rury Date approved: November 11, 2010 iii ABSTRACT This dissertation examines the educational ideas and beliefs of Irving Babbitt (1865-1933). As the co-founder of the New Humanism, Babbitt advocated throughout the beginning of the 20th century for an education that helped put a check on the naturally expansive tendencies of the individual. Babbitt believed in a dualism found in the inner life of each individual: a part of us that is capable of exercising control and a part of us that needs controlling. Babbitt bemoaned the gradual loss of this inner control within each individual, a loss that was precipitated by the “new” education. In this dissertation, Babbitt’s place within the humanist faction of the curricular battles of the early 20th century is explored, along with the historical and philosophical basis for his New Humanism. In addition, Babbitt’s criticism of humanitarianism, in opposition to his “genuine” humanism, is examined. His definitions and criticisms of sentimental and scientific humanitarians are applied to two of the curricular factions of the time: the child-study advocates and the social efficiency experts, respectively. Babbitt argued that these two stances, despite their profound differences, at least on the surface, actually shared the same philosophical foundations and reinforced each other within education. Additionally, Babbitt’s philosophical qualms with Charles W. Eliot and John Dewey, the two figureheads of American education in Babbitt’s lifetime, are explored. I conclude by contemplating Babbitt’s theoretical response to the latest attempts to introduce a humanist curriculum back into American schools. iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Thank you, family: Madeline, Mom, Dad, Ethan, Amanda, Helena, Anna, Buddy, Sabrina, and, especially, Grandma. v Table of Contents Introduction......................................................................................................................... 1 Chapter 1: Babbitt and the New Humanism ..................................................................... 12 Chapter 2: Babbitt’s Beliefs.............................................................................................. 43 Chapter 3: Babbitt and the American School Curriculum................................................ 83 Chapter 4: Babbitt and Eliot ........................................................................................... 135 Chapter 5: Babbitt and Dewey........................................................................................ 170 Conclusion: Babbitt and the Humanist Curriculum: Present and Future........................ 200 Works Cited .................................................................................................................... 220 1 Introduction “Dualistic philosophers have been rather rare in Kansas but let us hope that your activities there may bear fruit.” --Babbitt, letter to Paul Elmer More, March 2, 1913 Socrates advised his male listeners to marry no matter what. If you are fortunate enough to marry a good wife, his reasoning went, then your life will become blissful. But if you marry a bad one, it will force you to become much more philosophical. In the end, for Socrates, either outcome was desirable. After a number of years of teaching in a high school classroom, I have begun to apply Socrates’ counsel to my profession. And after a rather miserable first year of teaching high school English, I too became much more philosophical about my field. If I were so dejected, and both other teachers and many students displayed some of the same levels of despondency, I began to ask questions, to myself, concerning “how” and “why.” How did we get to such a point? Why are things the way they are? Why do we keep soldiering on the way we do? I quickly found myself in a Ph.D. program in Social, Historical, and Philosophical Foundations of Education to search for answers. In a break during summer session classes, I entered a used bookstore and accidentally came across a book entitled Literature and the American College: Essays in Defense of Humanities by Irving Babbitt. After reading an intriguing couple of pages, I decided to purchase the book (for five dollars). This dissertation was thus born. 2 I quickly devoured Babbitt’s Literature and the American College and moved to his other books. His ideas throughout my first readings remained remarkably consistent, even though his works spanned decades. More importantly, though, his ideas resonated with many of my questions and difficulties within my classroom experience. But initially I was also intrigued with Babbitt’s place in the history of education, especially his leadership of the New Humanism (a term then unbeknownst to me). I had sporadically read Robert Maynard Hutchins and Mortimer J. Adler, along with briefly studying Great Books programs, but I really did not consider their historical contexts – I did not hold a good conception of the place of humanistic education in American schooling, especially in the public schools. Babbitt, though, rarely addressed the lower schools in his works. His first book (Literature and the American College: Essays in Defense of Humanities), published in 1908, focused solely on higher education, the place Babbitt knew best, as he began teaching at Harvard in 1894. Babbitt remained at Harvard in the Romance Languages Department until his death in 1933, and his focus on higher education reflected this. Gradually I came to realize that Babbitt and the New Humanists marked the first revolt against the changing university curriculum, a stance later taken by Hutchins, Adler, and others. Yet as I read Babbitt’s works, primarily consisting of literary criticism, certain philosophical strands kept repeating themselves. And though Babbitt concerned himself mostly with literary works and figures, he nearly always commented on education’s fundamental place in all philosophical questions and beliefs. Further, even though Babbitt’s target was the university curriculum and its methodology, my perspective as both a teacher and as someone fascinated by the curricular battles in the public schools at 3 the turn of the 20th century, his views on higher education struck a chord for me in both roles. In short, even though Babbitt wrote solely on higher education and subsequent scholars focused only on this facet of his ideas on education, I came to believe that his ideas could easily (and appropriately) be applied to the public schools. This notion stemmed from both Babbitt’s definition and subsequent warnings of “humanitarianism” – strands that run deeply through all of Babbitt’s works. The idea will be explored much more in detail in Chapter 3, but Babbitt believed that the humanist curriculum (and consequently the humanistic way of life) was being overrun by two strands of humanitarianism, the sentimental and the scientific. The strands at their core promote a ceaseless expansion, something Babbitt spent his works fighting against. The sentimental humanitarian, following the precepts of Rousseau, seeks an unwavering expansion of emotions, feelings, and sympathy. In higher education, for Babbitt, the sentimental humanitarian’s influence brought about the elective system, as students’ interests and desires were to override all other concerns in choosing their course of study. The scientific humanitarian, taking his/her cue from Sir Francis Bacon, follows a ceaseless expansion towards scientific knowledge, material progress, and efficiency. Babbitt pointed to the new research-based universities and the promotion of the specialist as being products of Bacon and his scientific humanitarianism. Babbitt’s humanism was to serve as the antidote to these strands in higher education. Again, though, both my job and my academic interests resided in the public schools. As a high school teacher, I was fascinated by the seemingly continual conflict amongst my colleagues on how to characterize the nature of our duties. One group adamantly believed that our job was largely to prepare our students for the “real world,” 4 the world of work. As such, it was our duty to impart those skills and habits needed in their future workplace. Any sort of student complaint about “too much work” or about the tyranny of school rules was deflected with the belief that we were looking out for their future well-being. In providing training for future careers, efficiency played an integral role- the efficiency of running the school and classroom certainly gave students the experience of the desired efficiency of the workplace. But on the other hand, some teachers strongly defended the notion
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