Popular Education and Its Discontents

I discovered this book many years ago. My children were young, and I viewed the elementary school culture as described in the first of his essays. "Violated exclusivity" is one term that I particularly remember...a term describing folks who find comfort having more than others...another was..."bequeathed aspirations," which means that a generation would wish for the next generation, something that they themselves have not been able to achieve. Cremin's essays ring true today and provide evidence as to how difficult the prospects of providing an equal and effective education to all might be...it has remained a favorite of mine for years.

During a poignant lecture during a class on education policymaking and analysis in the fall of 2004, Professor Eric Freeman argued that there are no technical solutions to philosophical problems. Lawrence Cremin resonates that claim in his swan song treatise on the state of education in the United States, aptly entitled Popular Education and its Discontents. In the book's introduction, Cremin dubbed this book a "coda to the trilogy" (p. vii) of his exhaustive three-piece collection of the history of American education, which he apparently spent nearly half of his life to pen. His general message is honest but uplifting: Although schools have failed to be the panacea for social reform, they must continue with the forward progress they have sustained in spite of their usual discontents and critics. According to Cremin, there are three interconnected characteristics of American education that make it unique: popularization, the ever-increasing accessibility of education; multitudinousness, the proliferating and diverse forms of education; and politicization, the "effort to solve certain social problems indirectly through education instead of directly through politics" (p. viii). Cremin's analytical approach is ecological to the extent that he encompasses alternative media as critical educative forces [which he calls "the cacophony of teaching" (p. 59)], such as families, churches, occupations, and even digital media like TV and radio; however, he is careful not to unequivocally vindicate schools for social failures. Rather, in a somewhat Deweyan parlance, he calls for greater collaboration amongst these diverse formal and informal educational institutions. He further admits that schools are best suited to inculcate a specific type of knowledge (academic), and that the cacophony is indeed, in part, a good thing, preserving democracy and diversity in "values, ideas, and aspirations" (p. 78). Unsurprisingly, reference is made to Howard Gardner's theory of multiple intelligences and the perennial diversification of the school curriculum. Another strand of Cremin's argument is that education has become increasingly politicized in the post-World War II era. Drawing on the Aristotelian notion of the inextricability of education and the conception of the good life, Cremin argues that alternative and competing ideas of the good life are inevitable, effectively rendering education as nothing less than a branch of politics. In addition, by drawing on major social crises involving schools in the post-war era, he argues that two historical phenomena are largely responsible for the longstanding faith vested in schools as a tool of social reform: the need to Americanize immigrants, and the notion of novus ordo seclorum--the new order of the ages--which was most likely to be realized by targeting children, who are generally deemed more impressionable (and therefore teachable) than adults. Hypothetically, children would pass on the new order to their