Defining education/Cremin

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2. What did Cremin leave out?

In 1960, the Harvard historian, Bernard Bailyn, sensitized scholars to the importance of defining education effectively in efforts to show the role of education in American history.  Publication of his critique, Education in the Forming of American Society, caused a stir among educational historians.  Cremin was quick to review it, very favorably, in The Mississippi Valley Historical Review.  He commended Bailyn's call to deal with education "as an aspect of American history writ large," not as a parochial, internal history for a self-conscious profession.  He quoted Bailyn's broad understanding of education — "not only as formal pedagogy but rather as the entire process by which culture transmits itself across generations" — and he noted how it extended the educational historian's attention far beyond the development of schools and schooling.  Cremin concluded with the hope that Bailyn's hypotheses would "set in motion the kind of informed historical scholarship that to date has been all too rare in the field of American education."^[1] 

Bailyn issued a challenge; Cremin followed through in response.  In 1961, he published The Transformation of the School, a professional breakthrough for Cremin, just as Bailyn's essay was reaching its readers.  In The Transformation, Cremin showed little interest in questions of how the historian should define education, but he wrote a full, masterful narrative, clearly to the norms of mainstream history, for an inclusive audience interested in progressive education as an aspect of American history.  With this book Cremin demonstrated how historians could deal with education when they overcame the split between the professional schools and the historical profession, and he even managed to note, at a key juncture in his narrative, that "the unfortunate consequences of the split . . . are brilliantly discussed by Bernard Bailyn in Education in the Forming of American Society.^[2]  At 36 Cremin triumphed,  with a full academic career still ahead of him.  The Transformation of the School won the Bancroft Prize, awarded annually to recognize "books of enduring worth and impeccable scholarship that make a major contribution to understanding the American past."  As a youth from City College, rising through the ranks in a school of education, Cremin had established his scholarly reputation and showed that work in the history of education could meet the highest academic standards.

What comes next?  That is the inevitable question on finishing a work and looking ahead to the rest of life.  Cremin had a powerful pedagogical presence in the classroom.  As a lecturer he was clear, engaging, endowed with a gift to make history meaningful to a large and diverse audience.  His big course, History of Education in the United States, drew numerous auditors Monday evenings, every autumn.  In 1964, opportunity arose for someone to write a work on the topic of his big course with sponsorship by the U.S. Department of Education as part of the nation's Bi-Centennial observances, which were beginning to loom in official minds.  Having taught, and taught well, the full scope of the narrative many times, Cremin expected to finish the work in three volumes by 1976, a miscalculation.  Thus it came about that from the mid-1960s until shortly before his death in 1990, writing a comprehensive history of American education dominated Cremin's scholarly labors.  And through it, developing and illustrating a historically sound definition of education was a key component of his effort. 

To define and to illustrate: that was Cremin's agenda.  Two short books laid the ground work for it: The Wonderful World of Ellwood Patterson Cubberley (1965) explained the problems of definition, and The Genius of American Education (1965) sketched the key themes illustrative of education, broadly defined, in American history.^[3]  Work on the first volume of American Education proceeded quickly, resulting in its publication in 1970.  In his "Preface," Cremin briefly explained the background to his formal definition of education and enunciated the initial version of it:

Throughout the work, I shall view education as the deliberate, systematic, and sustained effort to transmit or evoke knowledge, attitudes, values, skills, and sensibilities, a process that is more limited than what the anthropologist would term enculturation or the sociologist socialization, though obviously inclusive of some of the same elements.  Education, defined thus, clearly produces outcomes in the lives of individuals, many of them discernible, though other phenomena, varying from politics to commerce to technology to earthquakes, may prove more influential at particular times and in particular instances.^[4]

In nearly 600 pages, the book described with a panorama of particulars the colonial educational experience delimited by this definition.  Cremin detailed the cultural heritage brought to the British colonies and the educational configuration of it in household, church, school, college, and community; he then surveyed the appearance in this configuration of characteristic American qualities of denominationalism, utilitarianism, and republicanism; and finally he summed the first volume up by depicting the institutions, configurations, and characteristics of the first great era of American education, that of provincial education.

Attention by Cremin to his definition of education and to the historical elucidation of it continued apace.^[5]  At the University of Wisconsin, Cremin delivered The Merle Curti Lectures for 1976, giving three concise overviews of what each volume of his large work would cover, and he added "A Note on Problematics and Sources" to the published version of the lectures.  This 30-page note, combined with his Dewey Lecture for 1975, especially the second section, "Toward an Ecology of Education," constituted an important reflection on his definition of education, leading to a rewording that amplified it somewhat.^[6]  As a result of these considerations, in the subsequent two volumes of American Education (1980 and 1988), Cremin added a third key verb to his definition of education — "acquire," along with the original "transmit or evoke," — and he enlarged the summational part concluding each volume, originally comprising three chapters on "Institutions," "Configurations," and "Characteristics," to include one more, "Lives." 

All together the trilogy presents a great kaleidescope of pedagogical activity with thousands of people and groups twisting over time in endlessly different configurations producing a churn of distinctive results.   In three lectures at Harvard in 1989, Cremin presented as a coda to American Education the themes that stood out, in his judgment, from the whole of his survey:

First, popularization, the tendency to make education widely available in forms that are increasingly accessible to diverse peoples; second, multitudinousness, the proliferation and multiplication of institutions to provide that wide availability and that increasing accessibility; and third, politicization, the effort to solve certain social problems indirectly through education instead of directly through politics.^[7]

Almost as if he knew they would be his final words, these lectures, published as Popular Education, convey the implications of his life work for the practice of education.  Here he made the case for the value of defining education the way he did: first, it allowed educators to situate schooling in a more realistic pedagogical context; second, it enabled public leaders to appreciate the full scope of concerns that needed to be brought within the purview of educational policy; and lastly, it indicated the scholarly imperative to inform the pervasive, public urge to politicize educational issues with more knowledge, sound and comprehensive, about the human implications of educational action in all its forms.  These are big implications to a work fully achieved.

To those of us who knew the man, it has been astonishing how quickly after his death his work has lost influence.  Its burden continues to become all the more timely as schools operate as if in a pedagogical vacuum.  Cremin argued against the stupidity of concentrating public attention exclusively on formal educators while paying little attention to informal educators, despite their growing educational influence.  Yet the makers of public policy now bear more imperiously on formal educators, while they blithely ignore the educational role of informal educators as the custodians and owners of these, uncaring and indiscriminate, pursue more and more power and wealth. Cremin argued that education was something happening pervasively in the lived experience of each and every person.  Yet the establishment of educational researchers swells steadily with scholars pretending, ever more exclusively, to achieve universal findings valid for all, independent of time, place, and condition.  Something is missing to weaken the effects of very timely work.

For those of us who knew the man, Cremin's personal presence was so prepossessing that we projected it into our reading of his work, which would otherwise appear flat and hard to follow.  In comparison to The Transformation of the School, Cremin's trilogy lacked narrative flow, especially within each volume.  Historical exposition gains vigor from a strong sense of chronological direction but the text of each volume unfortunately cycled repetitively through its chronology, undercutting the overall sense of coherent movement through time.  Cremin would recount how each component of key educational configurations developed through the whole period in question and then he would flip back to the beginning again, explaining the development of the next component, and the next: it was exhaustive, but too exhausting for many readers.^[8]  Additionally, as his narrative cycled forwards and backwards in time, Cremin further burdened his readers by confronting them with a profusion of proper names, strings of organizations and individuals, with the role each played just briefly mentioned.^[9]  So showered with detail, a reader will easily loose the point, and many in his audience have undoubtedly put his work aside, partially read at best.  But these stylistic matters simply indicate that American Education is difficult work — many difficult works exert a powerful and lasting influence on an interested public.  Something more problematic than complexities of detail and chronology may have detracted from the power of Cremin's major work to win, hold, and shape a following of active influence.

Consider the key terms in Cremin's definition of education: "deliberate," "systematic," "sustained," "transmit," "evoke," "acquire," "knowledge," "values," "attitudes," "skills," "sensibilities," "learning," "effort," "direct," "indirect," "intended," and "unintended."  None of these are univocal.  Whether, when, where, how, and why an interpreter might apply each of these terms to characterize a specific human action requires the interpreter to make a nuanced judgment, about which different interpreters might undoubtedly disagree.  To become operative, Cremin's definition required complex criteria controlling its application to historical experience.  These criteria remain hidden in his work.  Of course, a scholar cannot make explicit in the formal statement of a carefully crafted definition all the criteria of judgment that he might use in applying it.  But surely, in the course of its voluminous use, readers can expect that those criteria will become increasingly clear to them.  Yet with Cremin's work they do not. 

Some 2,000 pages, rich in detail, convey little sense of Cremin's deliberations as he applied his definition within his vast scope of awareness.  He describes much; he explains little.  Why, given all the inclusions, did he exclude some things?  We do not learn, for instance, how something, which he might have excluded because it was deliberate and sustained but not systematic (social criticism?), or because it was systematic and sustained but not deliberate (technological innovation?), differed in his view from something like the influence of mass media, which he seems to have held to have been sufficiently deliberate, systematic, and sustained to merit extended treatment as an important twentieth-century educative agent.  Cremin chose to minimize notes that might have illuminated such judgments, and his bibliographies, mentioning nearly everything that he possibly could mention as remotely relevant to anything he included, discussed little of the literature in depth and does not illuminate the why and the wherefore of his judgments at all.  Cremin worked to inventory a diverse pantheon of educators, not to explain the distinctive particularities of how they functioned.  Thus, radically different efforts to evoke distinctive sensibilities appeared through his descriptions as if they were remarkably similar: for instance, Jonathan Edwards, in a seventeenth-century religious context, and Harvey Cox, in the twentieth, both step forth, bright young men getting a good education, then acquiring some experience, and then succeeding by speaking with conviction and insight to the needs of their parishioners.  In both cases, and in many others, Cremin gave readers an epitome of the messages delivered, glossing over the difficult, jarring particulars of each with a reassuring "of course" or "inevitably," but little hard analysis of just how and why each message worked in its unique way to educate those who responded to it.^[10]

Cremin pointed to a multitude of educational instances that fell within his definition of education, describing briefly what each did, but not explaining how each did what it did.  He was remarkably disengaged with respect to prominent efforts to explicate in depth a "deliberate, systematic, and sustained effort to transmit, evoke, or acquire knowledge, attitudes, skills, values, or sensibilities, and any learning that results from the effort, direct or indirect, intended or unintended."  For instance, in the first volume of American Education, Cremin mentioned Max Weber's Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism in describing Benjamin Franklin's life and character, but neither Cremin's text nor the associated bibliographical references recognize that an informed reader might see Weber's reflection as a remarkably full attempt to analyze how education, understood in a fashion similar to Cremin's definition, actually might work out, in the inner life of several generations of recipients, in historical consequences remarkably different from those who did the educating originally intended.  Cremin acknowledged a severely watered-down version of Weber's argument and merely noted that it had caused considerable controversy among scholars, neither taking nor explaining a position of his own about it.  Here is Cremin's discussion of Weber's reflection:

Whether Franklin's education was ultimately the source or the outcome of his enterprise must always remain problematical: at the least they were inextricably intertwined.  He may well have been, as Max Weber and others have portrayed him, the living embodiment of a secularized Puritanism, demonstrating in his life the explosive power of calling, though one can, of course find Catholics who were no less vigorous in their enterprise and Congregationalists who seemed called to nothing but lassitude.  However one resolves the time-honored controversy — and the interplay of men and traditions in the eighteenth century would seem to make any final resolution improbable — there can be no denying that a spirit of aggressive enterprise was widely manifest in provincial America and that it supported and was in turn strengthened by a variety of educational arrangements, both formal and informal.  In the process, men rose from rags to riches.^[11]

Weber wanted to explain a profound pedagogical irony: how could a culture of deep religious conviction, strongly averse to material pretense, engaging vigorously in the deliberate, systematic, and sustained effort to transmit and evoke profound angst over the prospect of eternal damnation, produce in the span of several generations such leading examples of a spirit of aggressive enterprise, like Franklin, raising men from rags to riches?  Such explanation does not seem to have been an important goal for Cremin.

Gunnar Myrdal's extensive analysis of An American Dilemma provides another prominent example of Cremin's reluctance to engage in the causal analysis of educational processes as he identified them.  Cremin mentioned Myrdal's extensive work in introducing the educational activities of the NAACP in his third volume and returned to it in summing up the characteristics of metropolitan education at the end of the volume.  Cremin accentuated Myrdal's recognition of national idealism, the "American creed," an amalgam of values derived from the Enlightenment, with roots in Christianity and English law, that Americans shared with many other peoples, while identifying with it more strongly and more vocally than others.  Myrdal perceived this creed "of progress, liberty, equality, and humanitarianism" to function as a real social force in American public life, the point with which Cremin most fully resonated.  For Myrdal this creed interacted in a complex reciprocal tension with baser motivations, no less real, "where personal and local interests; economic, social, and sexual jealousies; considerations of community prestige and conformity; group prejudice against particular persons or types of people; and all sorts of miscellanous wants, impulses, and habits dominate [the American's] outlook."  For Myrdal, these two sides of the American character were interacting according to what Myrdal called "the principle of cumulation."  In it, all sorts of different developments, potentially positive and potentially negative, would interact in patterns of reinforcement in which the cycle could persist, with the adverse status of African-Americans unchanged, or degenerate into a vicious circle of further degradation, or ascend in a virtuous circle of achieved equality and integration.  For Myrdal, the dynamic operated, embedded in American historical life, its outcome contingent on political choice and public effort.  Cremin acknowledged the tension, but de-emphasized the degree to which Myrdal held the outcome to be contingent on sound social engineering informed by a thorough analysis of the many different causal factors at work.  By leaving out a key qualification in Myrdal's text, Cremin quoted him as if the American dilemma were simply a matter of serious cultural lag, whereas Myrdal was actually asserting that the dilemma consisted in the still contingent struggle between the best and the worst in American character, which the American people had to resolve, overcoming deep-seated weaknesses pervasively embedded in all the structures of American life and character.  That was the moral urgency motivating the full and many-sided causal analysis that Myrdal's work comprised, an anxious urgency that Cremin's optimism too easily obscured.^[12]

Characteristically, in American Education Cremin described, but did not explain.  He depicted numerous educators acting in complex configurations occasioning a complexity of results.  He rarely sought to explain their actions or deeply interpret their meaning.  At the end of Traditions of American Education, Cremin concluded his "Note on Problematics and Sources," declaring the importance of "a clear, consistent, and precise theory of education."  This declaration merits close attention.  Alluding to the authority of the philosopher, John Herman Randall, Cremin observed that "any history is always the history of something in particular, and the explanatory categories the historian uses in writing about that something in particular are almost invariably drawn from other domains — from politics or philosophy or economics, or from ordinary common sense."  Cremin then, perhaps unwittingly, declared that the source of truth and meaning in any account of historical experience would derive from sources external to the historical, lived experiences that people suffer and enjoy.

As soon as the historian attempts to go beyond mere chronicle, as soon as he seeks not only to arrange events in the order in which they occurred, as soon as he tries to view events in their multifarious relations, he must perforce reach beyond the events themselves to some set of laws, principles, or generalizations that will help make sense of them.  And those laws, principles, or generalizations almost always come from outside the discipline of history.

Here is a basic problem in the philosophy of history.  Is the meaning of lived experience something immanent in the experience that the interpreter has to draw out of it, making explicit what is immanent?  Or is the meaning something external to the historical experience that the historian finds elsewhere and applies to it?  In general, Cremin was very reticent about such questions, but here he seemed to adopt the second view, for he again invoked the authority of Randall and averred: "apart from some intelligent conception of education itself, there can be no truly intelligent conception of the history of education."  This conviction puts a significant constraint on what is possible in the history of education, namely the correct and fruitful understanding of education cannot emerge from the study of historical experience, but must be brought to the historical experience from other sources of formal knowledge.  In this view, the history of education will illustrate an understanding of education generated through modes of reflection and inquiry other than the historical.^[13]  Cremin went out of his way to avoid debating both alternative explanations pertinent to events he interpreted and his reasoning for and against the many judgments that went into his work.  Was this avoidance sound?  Does historical scholarship secure its proper place in the study of education by deriving ideas about education from other sources and applying them to past educational experience?  These questions are important and difficult, and to pursue them, we need to turn again to the educational historiography of Bernard Bailyn, for Cremin's answers to them were not at all unique, but ones widely shared among the academic historians from whom Cremin sought to win some recognition.