The Revolt of the Elites

[I ended up going a different direction with this project, but I thought I'd go ahead and post this work anyway, though it is incomplete.]


In the opening line of his book, The Revolt of the Elites, Christopher Lasch notes that much of his work "comes back in one way or another to the question of whether democracy has a future" (3).  When considering the debate surrounding American public schooling—what public schools should do, what they shouldn't do, and whether or not they should even exist—I can't help feeling as if it is to some extent the American public's way of addressing Lasch's subject.  Even more than politics, it seems to me, Americans use public schools, still widely viewed as our nation's most democratic, equalizing institutions, as the subject through which to argue about democracy.

I am primarily interested in approaching American education through the lens of Ivan Illich's, Deschooling Society, but I think Lasch's text is worth considering in tandem with Illich's.  Here then, I will examine a few chapters of Lasch's book, here and there comparing his thoughts to Illich's, but primarily thinking about his ideas in an isolated sort of way.  My own commentary will follow roughly the layout of Lasch's text, examining a few of the themes he lays out in his introduction that I think will be most useful in a larger discussion of Illich's, Deschooling.  These themes include equality, opportunity, and mobility (chapter 3), the democratization of self-esteem as opposed to the democratization of competence (chapters 3 & 4), the deterioration of public debate (chapters 6 & 9, roughly), and the problem of knowledge, opinion, and certainty (chapters 10, 12, and 13, roughly), though this last theme may fall somewhat beyond the realm of Illich's concern in Deschooling.

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1. Opportunity

 

One of the most provocative themes of The Revolt of the Elites is the idea of opportunity in America.  The United States of America is sometimes referred to as "The Land of Opportunity," but what is this opportunity?  Lasch argues that it means something now that is quite different from what it meant up until the Civil War and perhaps a bit after.  "The [...] managerial and professional elites," he writes, 

[...] would like to believe that Americans have always equated opportunity with upward mobility. [...] But a careful look at the historical record shows that the promise of American life came to be identified with social mobility only when more hopeful interpretations of opportunity had begun to fade, that the concept of social mobility embodies a fairly recent and sadly impoverished understanding of the "American Dream," and that its ascendancy, in our own time, measures the recession of the dream and not its fulfillment. (50)

While some may argue that social mobility does not represent a "sadly impoverished understanding of the "American Dream,"" one certainly can not find fault in the time frame Lasch identifies—around 1950, and in the works of Lloyd Warner—for the appearance of "social mobility" in the American English lexicon.  While "social mobility" certainly appears before 1950, the phrase is not used quite the same as it is now.  The Oxford English Dictionary identifies the earliest use of "social mobility" in writing as dating to 1866 and having to do with horizontal labor mobility and labor expansion, not vertical class mobility.  The earliest example of "social mobility" being used in reference to vertical class movement appears in the American Journal of Sociology in 1900, explicitly referring to "mobility of type."  This instance still lacks the flavor of the phrase as it is now commonly used, but part of that is because we commonly employ a different phrase—"upward mobility" (or "upwardly mobile," in reference to a person or perhaps a neighborhood).  The first appearance of "upward mobility" again is found in the American Journal of Sociology in 1949, and its usage is the same as today.

So if equating opportunity with social mobility only gained its current meaning in the middle of the 20th century, how was opportunity understood before then?  Lasch argues that what we might call the whole language of capitalism carried much different meaning than it does today.  He points out that in "the language of nineteenth-century producerism, "labor" and "capital" did not mean what they mean to us.  The term "capitalist" was reserved for those who, producing nothing, lived off speculative profits, while the "laboring class," as a Democratic party broadside explained, referred to "the producers of wealth; the yeomanry who till the soil; mechanics, manufacturers, operatives, traders, whose labor sustains the state"" (57).  Such a wide conception of the "laboring class" was essential to American culture in the nineteenth century, as it served to separate American society from those in Europe.  Lasch goes on to argue that, in Europe, "the laboring classes allegedly lived on the verge of destitution, but it was not only their poverty that staggered Americans but their exclusion from civic life, from the world of learning and culture—from all the influences that stimulate intellectual curiosity and broaden people's intellectual horizons."  This, Lasch asserts, is the key to understanding the older meaning of "opportunity" prior to the twentieth century: in the nineteenth century, "[f]oreign observers noted, often with disapproval, that ordinary Americans had opinions on every imaginable subject and that few of them seemed to have any sense of their proper place, but it was this very lack of deference, as Americans saw it, that defined a democratic society—not the chance to rise in the social scale so much as the complete absence of a scale that clearly distinguished commoners from gentlemen" (58 emphasis mine).

Lasch recognizes, of course, that nineteenth-century American society was far from classless, but he argues that the idea of a classless society was taken seriously—it was more than an idea, it was an ideal.  But while the ideal of a classless society carried weight throughout the nineteenth century, reality moved in the opposite direction after the industrial revolution.  As Lasch points out, in the second half of the nineteenth century, claims that America is a classless society begin to sound awfully hollow: 

It is hard to avoid the feeling that Americans had come to rely far too heavily on self-serving comparison with Europe, and later with the South under slavery, in their attempt to uphold an idealized image of the laboring classes under capitalism, classes ostensibly free but increasingly subject to the degrading effects of wage labor. [... T]he evils introduced by industrialism into the northern United States could not be disposed of by citing greater evils elsewhere in the world. (62-3)

I think it is also important to note here that nineteenth-century Americans distinguished between labor and wage labor, the former being much more desirable than the latter.  It was the ascendancy of wage labor that startled and disturbed so many Americans, and rightly so.  As long as the American frontier existed, there was at least the hope that a wage laborer could earn a little bit of money and, if he and his family were willing to travel far enough, purchase some land on which their labor would be their own.  But once the frontier closed, wage labor became a serious problem, and, as Lasch notes, it "is significant that "social mobility" entered the academic vocabulary around this time, in the context of uneasiness about the closing of the frontier."  This understanding is reflected in Brownson's, The Laboring Classes, in which he notes,

The wilderness has receded, and already the new lands are beyond the reach of the mere laborer, and the employer has him at his mercy.  If the present relation subsist, we see nothing better for him in reserve than what he now possesses, but something altogether worse.  We are not ignorant of the fact that men born poor become wealthy, and that men born to wealth become poor; but this fact does not necessarily diminish the numbers of the poor, nor augment the numbers of the rich. [...] [O]ne fact is certain, no man born poor has ever by his wages, as a simple operative, risen to the class of the wealthy. [...] The simple market wages for ordinary labor, has never been adequate to raise him from poverty to wealth. (12-3)

 In retrospect, it seems inevitable that this would happen; once horizontal mobility becomes impossible, or at least no longer carries its attendant hope for property ownership, vertical mobility becomes the new preoccupation.  At the same time, Lasch argues, the appearance of "social mobility" in academic language signals class reification in America: "More than any other development, the closing of the frontier forced Americans to reckon with the proletarianization of labor, the growing gulf between wealth and poverty, and the tendency of each to become hereditary" (73).  In other words, Americans could no longer "confuse the ideal with the reality" (64).

•    •    •

2. Democratized Competence vs. Democratized Self-Esteem

If a shift in the American understanding of "opportunity"—from intellectual, civic opportunity to "social mobility"—coincides with the foreshortening of actual opportunity, it seems worth considering how this shift influenced the creation of American public schools.  After all, an emphasis on opportunity as a chance for civic engagement and intellectual freedom invites a different sort of education than that invited by mere social mobility, the former asking of Americans a liberal learning and the latter promoting only that learning which would serve to increase one's wealth.  It is also worth noting that the former understanding of opportunity worked against class stratification, its emphasis on intellectual and civic competence having little to do with money, while the present understanding actually encourages class stratification, both by fostering a preoccupation with money and by assuming that, though one may rise out of it, a lower class will always exist.

Lasch argues that the nineteenth-century ideal of a classless society meant 

not only the absence of hereditary privilege and legally recognized distinctions of rank but a refusal to tolerate the separation of learning and labor.  The concept of a laboring class was objectionable to Americans because it implied not only the institutionalization of wage labor but the abandonment of what many of them took to be the central promise of American life: the democratization of intelligence. (64)

Industrialization and the attendant growth of wage labor was problematic, then, not only because it tended to fix classes, but also because it worked against democratized intelligence, separating learning and labor.  Here, Lasch brings in the writing of Orestes Brownson, which is notable for the degree to which his critical arguments prefigure those of Illich in Deschooling Society.  Lasch notes that Brownson, in 1840, "was almost alone in his contention that industrialization had fostered the class divisions Americans feared, [but he] combined his trenchant analysis of wage labor with a seemingly arbitrary and irrelevant attack on priesthood" (64-5).  Brownson's line of argument is puzzling to many, for, as Lasch notes, just as he appears to be on the verge of anticipating the conclusions of Marx, he "veers off in an unexpected direction.  Instead of attributing inequality to the appropriation of surplus value by the dominant class, he blames it on the power exercised by "sacerdotal corporations" over the life of the mind" (65).  

In terms of the separation of learning and labor, Brownson's observations clearly anticipate Illich's.  In Deschooling Society, Illich argues that a "major illusion on which the school system rests is that most learning is the result of teaching," asserting that "most people acquire most of their knowledge outside school, and in school only insofar as school, in a few rich countries, has become their place of confinement during an increasing part of their lives.  Most learning happens casually, and even most intentional learning is not the result of programmed instruction" (12).  Likewise, in his response to the Second Annual Report of the [Mass.] Board of Education, Brownson notes,

Educated, in some sense, all our children are, and will be, whether we will or not.  Education, such as it is, is ever going on.  Our children are educated in the streets, by the influence of their associates, in the fields and on the hill sides, by the influences of surrounding scenery and overshadowing skies, in the bosom of the family, by the love and gentleness, or wrath and fretfulness of parents, by the passions or affections they see manifested, the conversations to which they listen, and above all by the general pursuits, habits, and moral tone of the community. [...] The real question for us to ask is not, Shall our children be educated? but, To what end shall they be educated, and by what means?  What is the kind of education needed, and how shall it be furnished? (394)

While both Illich and Brownson point out the fact that education is casual and ongoing, they both also recognize that learning can benefit from planned instruction.  The question, for Brownson, is to what end that planned instruction should be aimed.  His preoccupation with ends, it seems to me, would cause him to find the current structure of American education extremely lacking, both at the secondary and higher educational level.  He writes, "The system of education, which doth not take my child from the cradle, and train him up to go forth into the world a man, in the deep significance of that term, to comprehend the end for which he was made, and the surest and speediest means of attaining to it, is defective, and can never answer the legitimate purposes of education" (Second Annual Report 394 my emphasis).  Even so, I am not sure he would be especially surprised by what it is our structure of education emphasizes.  As he goes on to note,

Individual education is divided then into general education and special, — my education as a man, and my education as a doctor, lawyer, minister, artisan, artist, agriculturalist, or merchant.  Special education appears to be that which we at present are most anxious to make provision for.  Few people think of anything beyond it.  The popular doctrine, we believe, is that we should be educated in special reference to what is to be our place in society and our pursuit in life.  We think more of education as a means for fitting us for a livelihood, than for anything else.  The tendency has long been to sink the man in what are merely his accidents, to qualify him for a profession or pursuit, rather than to be a man. (Second Annual Report 395-6)

The frequency with which so-called "Special" education is the focus of community educational endeavors is problematic for Brownson not because he is concerned with what we might call "self-fulfillment," "self-actualization," or "spiritual fulfillment," but because he sees an overemphasis on occupational education as detrimental to democracy itself.  According to the ideal of American democracy, he asserts,

professions and pursuits are merely the accidents of individual life.  Behind them we recognize Humanity, as paramount to them all.  Here man, in theory at least, is man, not the mere artisan, farmer, trader, or learned professor.  Professions and pursuits may be changed according to judgment, will, or caprice, as circumstances permit, or render necessary or advisable.  Consequently here we want an education for that which is permanent in man, which contemplates him as back of all the accidents of life, and which shall be equally valuable to him, whatever be the mutations which go on around him, the means he may choose or be compelled to adopt to obtain a livelihood. (Second Annual Report 396)

The implication here seems obvious—an education for that which is "permanent in man" is the sort of education that binds one person to another, connecting all citizens no matter what their occupation or economic state.  What is permanent is one's status as human, and so, for Brownson, what is most important in education is that which allows individuals to realize and exercise their humanity.