George S. Counts

During the 1920's, George S. Counts got a reputation for being an American education policymaker with a determinedly radical bent. Yes, school reform was Counts' passion, but in the reading I did on Counts in gradual school he seemed anything but a radical. I still remember pondering a fairly complex graph showing the location of school-aged high school children in a one-city case study. Counts was quick to note that those who either dropped out or were in the most devalued curriculum had the lowest IQ test scores. And he emphasized that that was as it should be. My incomplete reading of Counts quickly disabused me of the notion that he was a socialist, a far-left leaning populist, or even what, in the '60's, we would have called a liberal democrat. Instead, hew was a true-blue American capitalist meritocrat -- a place for everyone, everyone in his rightful place, and compensation distributed accordingly. The placement tool of first importance, moreover, was the then relatively new IQ test, in which Counts seemed to have unqualified faith. Hernstein and Murray's polemic The Bell Curve might usefully be construed as an update of Counts for the 1990's. Based on an incomplete reading of his body of work, Counts was no radical, at least not in political philosophy or public policy. As best I can determine, he was assigned the characterization radical simply because that word appeared in the title of one of his books.

This book is a 170-page summation of the life and thoughts of one of our foremost educators, written by a loyalist. Why would you care? Because people like George Counts are prisms. You can understand a lot about American history during the 20th century by meeting him. My own first encounter with the eminent educator occurred in the New York Public Library 20 years ago. That's when I ran smack into his most famous statement. It's still jarring: "Historic capitalism, with its deification of the principle of selfishness, its reliance upon the forces of competition, its place of property above human rights, and its exaltation of the profit motive, will either have to be displaced altogether, or so radically changed in form and spirit that its identity will be completely lost." Made in 1932, this quote gives a keen sense of what the Depression did to our intellectuals. They were gaga in love with Russia, Stalin, and planned economies. The USA needed to be revamped. Well, it was a tense time. Revolution seemed likely. Counts got shrewder in the 1940s. He figured out that Stalin was a bad character, and the new USSR still had DNA from Czarist Russia. In 1949 Counts co-authored "The Country of the Blind" about Russian mind control. Counts was a sincere sort of Liberal, always trying to live on the progressive cutting edge without falling off that edge. Not well known now, Counts was nonetheless second only to John Dewey from 1925 to 1955 in our pantheon of Educators with a capital E. George Counts considered himself an Educational Statesman. Like Dewey, he was a Mack truck of productivity--writing nearly 10,000 pages of books and articles, all lecturing Americans on what we should believe and do. Like Dewey, Counts never had a job outside of a school but he thought himself fully qualified to redesign this country. That's my main point of morbid fascination with George Counts and his hubristic pals. Also intriguing is the language games these guys played. Starting with Dewey around 1900 and continuing through Counts up to the 1960's, the secret goal was a socialist America. The public schools would be used as a staging area for this transformation. Here is how Gutek sums up what George Counts wanted: "The American school should strive to develop a sense of personal competence and adequacy in those who attended it. It should cultivate allegiance to human equality and brotherhood, and emphasize the democratic processes of discussion, criticism, and decision making. Its orientation should be both democratic and scientific." What mush! And no mention of which knowledge the students might learn. Dewey, Counts and the rest of this gang can't discuss their real intentions, so everything is in code. "Democratic" means "collectivist." Even "pragmatic" and "scientific" are code--they essentially mean that society should be controlled by the right people--i.e., them. No use denying it. The more I've studied American education, the more cynical I got. Wha