American Industrial Society(1910–1911) reveals the
institutionalist approach at its best.
A similar revolution struck sociology in the mid-
1880s. Prevailing opinion up to that time rejected
the idea of government interference with the organi-
zation of society. The influence of the English social
Darwinist, Herbert Spencer, who objected even to
public schools and the postal system, was immense.
Spencer and his American disciples, among them
Edward L. Youmans, editor of Popular Science
Monthly, twisted the ideas of Darwin to mean that
society could be changed only by the force of evolu-
tion, which moved with cosmic slowness. “You and I
can do nothing at all,” Youmans told the reformer
Henry George. “It’s all a matter of evolution. Perhaps
in four or five thousand years evolution may have car-
ried men beyond this state of things.”
Herbert Spencer, Social Darwinismat
http://www.myhistorylab.com
Progressive Education
Traditionally, American teachers had emphasized the
three Rs and relied on strict discipline and rote learn-
ing. Typical of the pedagogues of the period was the
Chicago teacher, described by a reformer in the
1890s, who told her students firmly, “Don’t stop to
think, tell me what you know!” Yet new ideas were
attracting attention. According to a German educa-
tor, Johann Friedrich Herbart, teachers could best
arouse the interest of their students by relating new
information to what they already knew; good teach-
ing called for professional training, psychological
insight, enthusiasm, and imagination, not merely facts
and a birch rod. At the same time, evolutionists were
pressing for a kind of education that would help chil-
dren to “survive” by adapting to the demands of their
rapidly changing urban environment.
Forward-looking educators seized on these ideas
because dynamic social changes were making the
old system increasingly inadequate. Settlement house
workers discovered that slum children needed training
in handicrafts, citizenship, and personal hygiene as
much as in reading and writing. They were appalled by
the local schools, which suffered from the same
diseases—filth, overcrowding, rickety construction—
that plagued the tenements, and by school systems that
were controlled by machine politicians who doled out
teaching positions to party hacks and other untrained
persons. They argued that school playgrounds, nurs-
eries, kindergartens, and adult education programs
were essential in communities where most women
worked and many people lacked much formal educa-
tion. “We are impatient with the schools which lay all
stress on reading and writing,” Jane Addams declared.
This type of education “fails to give the child any clew
ReadtheDocumentto the life about him.” The philosopher who summa-
rized and gave direction to these forces was John
Dewey, a professor at the University of Chicago.
Dewey was concerned with the implications of
evolution—indeed, of all science—for education.
“Education,” Dewey insisted in The School and
Society (1899), was “the fundamental method of
social progress and reform.” To seek to improve con-
ditions merely by passing laws was “futile.”
Moreover, in an industrial society the family no
longer performed many of the educational functions
it had carried out in an agrarian society. Farm children
learn about nature, about work, about human charac-
ter in countless ways denied to children in cities. The
school can fill the gap by becoming “an embryonic
community... with types of occupations that reflect
the life of the larger society.” At the same time, edu-
cation should center on the child, and new informa-
tion should be related to what the child already
knows. Children’s imagination, energy, and curiosity
are tools for broadening their outlook and increasing
their store of information. Finally, the school should
become an instrument for social reform, “saturating
[the child] with the spirit of service” and helping to
produce a “society which is worthy, lovely, and har-
monious.” Education, in other words, ought to build
character and teach good citizenship as well as trans-
mit knowledge.
The School and Societycreated a stir, and Dewey
immediately assumed leadership of what in the next
generation was called progressive education. Although
the gains made in public education before 1900 were
more quantitative than qualitative and the philosophy
dominant in most schools was not very different at the
end of the century from that prevailing in Horace
Mann’s day, change was in the air. The best educators
of the period were full of optimism, convinced that
the future was theirs.Law and History
Even jurisprudence, by its nature conservative and
rooted in tradition, felt the pressure of evolutionary
thought and the new emphasis on studying institu-
tions as they actually are. In 1881 Oliver Wendell
Holmes Jr. publishedThe Common Law. Rejecting
the ideas that judges should limit themselves to the
mechanical explication of statutes and that law con-
sisted only of what was written in law books, Holmes
argued that “the felt necessities of the time” rather
than precedent should determine the rules by which
people are governed. “The life of the law has not
been logic; it has been experience,” he wrote. “It is
revolting,” he added on another occasion, “to have
no better reason for a rule of law than that so it was
laid down in the time of Henry IV.”Law and History 515