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Cults of Ignorance.("Getting It Wrong from the Beginning: Our Progressivist Inheritance from Herbert Spencer, John Dewey, and Jean Piaget")(Book Review)-

Article Excerpt
Getting It Wrong from the Beginning: Our Progressivist Inheritance from Herbert Spencer, John Dewey, and Jean Piaget, by Kieran Egan (Yale, 224 pp., $25)

'Spencer is unreadable today," the literary historian A. O. J. Cockshut has written, "but his immense prestige in his time [1820-1903], which extended as far as Russia, is a clear proof that complete ignorance of human nature will not necessarily prevent a man from becoming an acknowledged expert upon it." Indeed, Herbert Spencer's ideological mix of naive empiricism, laissez-faire Social Darwinism, and faith in inevitable progress swept to great influence in late-19th-century America.

This book is a historical study, analysis, and critique of the educational "Progressivism" and naturalism that Spencer took over from Rousseau and his German-speaking disciples. Spencer developed it into a glamorous "science," which was then further developed by John Dewey and William Heard Kilpatrick in the U.S., and Jean Piaget in Rousseau's hometown of Geneva. This line of descent, affiliation, and influence now forms the fundamental thought-world of American teachers' colleges and schools of education, perhaps most prominently Teachers College, Columbia University, whose initial patron was the conservative humanist...

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