Before assigning Aldous Huxley’s dystopian novel Brave New World to high school students, I like to read Plato’s allegory of the cave with them in class. In the passage, Socrates asks Glaucon to imagine that prisoners in a cave accept shadows cast on the wall by anonymous puppeteers as reality. The lucky few who are freed find greater degrees of illumination, truer representations, but liberation is a painful and threatening struggle. Powerlessness is easier. Socrates contends that “in the realm of what can be known, the idea of the good is discovered last of all, and it is only perceived with great difficulty.” In his ideal city, knowledge of the good qualifies people to govern, and few, Socrates argues, are able to attain it. He calls for an elite whose souls are alive to the difficult, beautiful reality of human existence, in order to make the most responsible decisions for themselves and for others.
Thinking about Plato helps students to understand more fully Huxley’s nightmare vision of a world in which stability and consumption are the highest values and a ruling few engineer reality to those ends. In Huxley’s story, the state indoctrinates lab-grown children from birth into believing that their social castes and attendant norms are both desirable and inescapable. Dissent is unthinkable. The meanings of words, the meaning of life itself, are dictated from on high. As the World Controller explains, “It would upset the whole social order if men started doing things on their own.”
I find that the lesson holds adolescents’ attention without much of a plan beyond reading together, both silently and aloud, with breaks for discussion. There are no slides, no quizzes, no worksheets. I have been lucky to teach in schools where I can make these choices without much rationalizing about how they fit alongside scripted curricula or test prep.
As is the case with all else we read together, students do not take the allegory as doctrine. They disagree about the extent to which it makes sense or resonates. They tend to find Glaucon obsequious. They ask about allegory as a literary technique. They may see it as a warning against orthodoxy that can develop from seeking comfort in false premises, as I do, or they might not.
Last year, midway through the class period, a student blurted out: “Wait, they were imprisoned as children? Why? What did they do?” The student’s outburst brings to mind some old questions at the heart of education: What is good for students? And how is the good of students tied to the good of society? It seems to me that current education policy rarely prioritizes these questions. In the name of progress, public education is now pressed into the service of agendas that align with corporate profit, workforce readiness, ideological reproduction and demand for quantifiable results. These aims ignore what progressive education at its best can do, and the students who school ostensibly serves.
●
In December, the New York Times declared, “In American high schools, the age of the book may be fading.” This announcement encapsulated years of pessimistic reporting and commentary about the place of reading in education: prominent humanities professors wondering aloud whether we might abandon teaching books altogether, others lamenting undergraduates’ incapacity or unwillingness to read, journalists and pundits reporting on declining attention spans and falling literacy scores. Complaints about rising generations can sound nostalgic, or cranky, or even adversarial toward the young people in whom we ought to—need to—have faith. But dismissing the problem risks ignoring real, long-term changes in the ways we reward fragmented attention in public school.
The notion, now axiomatic among some administrators, policymakers and teachers, that “language arts” is a “skills-based” subject, void of meaningful “content,” can be traced in part to legislation at the federal and state levels. The Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), signed into law by President Obama in 2015, built on No Child Left Behind’s promises of standardization and assessment as keys to equitable educational quality. ESSA is commendably neutral about the precise sets of standards states adopt, but mandates that “all students in America be taught to high academic standards that will prepare them to succeed in college and careers.” It incentivizes “early college” and requires states to implement “accountability systems.” Whereas NCLB had a provision for funding “literature-rich environments,” even if only for preschoolers, ESSA never even mentions the word “literature.” Instead, states must use “diverse, high-quality print materials” and impart to students “the ability to navigate, understand, and write about, complex print and digital subject matter.”
In most states, compliance with ESSA came in the form of adopting the Common Core State Standards. According to Common Core, “text complexity” is measurable by feeding “text” into programs that evaluate elements like sentence length and vocabulary. Disputes about literature’s place in the scheme soon arose. When the standards rolled out, teachers, professors and journalists across the political spectrum expressed concern in blogs, monographs and newspapers about whether “informational text” and test-aligned excerpts would replace customary and beloved books. Their worries have proven justified. Even standards devised in good faith can be exploited by bad faith.
Standardized tests, which are administered by profit-oriented entities like the College Board, measure ESSA-mandated benchmarks. (The company’s current CEO, David Coleman, was one of the architects of the Common Core.) The College Board in particular has enshrined its testing through state contracts that incentivize or mandate its Common Core-compatible Advanced Placement courses in public schools and require public higher-educational institutions to legitimate the exams through admissions or course-credit policies. Even as states have renamed or revised Common Core standards, then, exams like these still incentivize “skills-based” approaches and curricula that, in many cases, make teaching complicated books risky. One course, AP Seminar, which the company is now marketing as a replacement for tenth-grade English, is explicitly career-focused and intended to build “relevant” skills like “working in teams” and “presenting.” Books are inessential even for AP English Literature: excerpts are fine for honing “course skills” and “enduring understandings.” And across the AP model, students can take tests without taking courses. All prep is possible virtually and individually. Still, AP is among the best forms of test prep—other versions are even more scripted and constrained.
This ambivalence about literature, teachers and classrooms runs through much of K-12 education these days, especially as artificial-intelligence tools have become widely available. In December 2025, the National Council for Teachers of English (NCTE) announced a Google-sponsored initiative to “lead the creation of a scalable framework for responsible AI use within the discipline.” This development followed a 2022 NCTE position paper arguing that “the time has come to decenter book reading and essay writing as the pinnacles of English language arts education.” Meanwhile, this summer, the American Federation of Teachers, the second-largest teachers’ union in the country, made a multimillion-dollar deal with companies like OpenAI to start an AI teacher-training institute. “We felt we needed to work with the largest corporations in the world,” AFT president Randi Weingarten told the Associated Press. “We went to them—they didn’t come to us.” Weingarten says she wants teachers to “have a seat at the table,” but it’s not clear to me why a union leader would rush into such an arrangement instead of rejecting the premise that tech companies ought to be deciding the future of public education.
In the world of LLMs, all words become “content,” fodder for algorithms and platforms that promise to eliminate the discomfort of truth-seeking even as they threaten to replace hard-won knowledge with nonsense. Giving young readers the chance to engage with refined, intentional forms of self-expression, with well-educated teachers, in conversation with peers, in physical classrooms, we might help them understand that ease is not always rewarding and that they, too, can have new insights. To read and think seriously in this way in high school can also help students understand the concept of perspective—how experience and evidence can intertwine to produce a way of seeing the world that is both particular to an individual and worth making legible to others.
●
With standardized testing and the tech-driven innovations it’s enabled dominating both public education and some of its private alternatives, the classical-education movement has emerged as one of the few staunch proponents of books in schools. Among its most vocal leaders is Jeremy Wayne Tate, founder of the Classic Learning Test and self-proclaimed champion of “Western Civilization,” who sees his company as rivaling the College Board as America’s standard setter. Tate wants to destroy the College Board, in part, because he believes its standardized tests represent a form of “progressive education.” As evidence, he points to the fact that the SAT once included an op-ed written by Bernie Sanders.
State and federal policies now increasingly reflect Tate’s politics. In 2023, Florida became the first state in the country to adopt the CLT as an alternative to the SAT and the ACT—several others are now following suit, along with the country’s military-service academies—and more recently was also the first state to adopt the Heritage Foundation’s Phoenix Declaration. The declaration, which includes Tate among its signatories, emphasizes teaching “America’s founding principles” and roots students’ education in “the broader Western and Judeo‑Christian traditions.” Its seven guiding principles—among them “truth and goodness,” “citizenship” and “parental choice and responsibility”—frame schooling as a vehicle for transmitting the shared cultural heritage of “our constitutional republic.” Some red states, meanwhile, in addition to banning certain books outright, are experimenting with mandating whole books and testing students on their interpretations. Many of the works on these lists are worth teaching. But arbitrary mandates cannot force students to appreciate art, nor will they allow teachers to model the liberal habits of mind that many of the selections, in my view, celebrate. Still, all these plans—a supposed corrective to the emptiness of the visions of “innovators” like Coleman—fit within ESSA’s framework, so long as states commit to measuring outcomes.
“At heart, progressives tend to view education as preparing a person to be a worker,” one of the declaration’s champions, former Heritage Foundation fellow Jay P. Greene, argued. “The predominant understanding of education on the left is that a human being is a tool, and education should shape that tool to be productive and serve the needs of others.” Echoing Greene, Tate proclaimed on X, “Progressive education has produced technicians without vision and consumers without culture. It has stripped education of its formative power, turning schools into credentialing factories rather than places of cultural transmission and moral formation.” I agree that art belongs in schools, and that we can’t ignore the profound potential education holds to shape students’ outlooks. But calling our current public-education policy “progressive” is, read most generously, imprecise.
And in their zeal to dismantle all forms of progressivism, these self-professed conservatives risk destroying much more besides. It’s telling that in a recent op-ed, Tate lamented but accepted that “generative AI will almost assuredly make us less capable of forming sustained arguments and writing them with clarity” and suggested, through a line of reasoning I must confess I can’t quite follow, that somehow the technology might produce more people like Socrates. (He did not acknowledge that we only know of Socrates because Plato wrote about him.) Such claims indicate less care for students’ agency and intellectual growth than for accommodating the imposition of powerful machinery.
Greene and Tate are by no means the first to caricature “progressive education.” The education-reform advocate Alfie Kohn has written about “the tendency to paint progressive education as a touchy-feely, loosey-goosey, fluffy, fuzzy, undemanding exercise in leftover hippie idealism,” and even teachers sometimes think it amounts to simply “being nice,” avoiding any criticism of students. Amid this confusion, software platforms and ed-tech companies have been able to use terms like “student-centered” and “personalized learning” to market themselves as progressive. But these developments are a distortion of progressive education, not a fulfillment of them.
On social media, Tate has repeatedly claimed that G. K. Chesterton was “right about everything.” I disagree, but he did write a parable many of us would do well to heed:
There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, ‘I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.’ To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: ‘If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.’
Before discarding progressive education, we should, as Chesterton advised, first try to see more clearly the use of it.
●
One reason it’s easy to build straw men about progressive education is that there is no doctrine. In broad terms, the goals are recognition of a student’s humanity, respect for their lived experience and acknowledgment that learning is social. Progressive education, according to one of its leading lights, the philosopher John Dewey, rejects passivity in pursuit of meaningful learning. In his model, excellence is a matter of each individual flourishing, not at the expense of others but in collaboration with them. And it was measured not by crass outcomes like college-admission rates or career readiness but by what happened each day in the classroom: he argued that “preparing or getting ready for some future duty or privilege” could result in “evil effects,” and urged instead “taking advantage of the needs and possibilities of the immediate present.”
“Plato defined a slave,” he wrote in his famous Democracy and Education, “as one who accepts from another the purposes which control his conduct. This condition obtains even where there is no slavery in the legal sense. It is found wherever men are engaged in activity which is socially serviceable, but whose service they do not understand and have no personal interest in.” Dewey appreciated Plato’s faith in reason as a means for “breaking through the limitations of custom and getting at things as they really were.” But he warned that fully realizing Plato’s theory of education would result in “the lumping of individuals and their original powers into a few sharply marked-off classes” defined by a unitary, top-down vision of the good. Dewey called instead for greater degrees of fluidity and self-determination in the classroom—a form of education that would help young people participate in public life by empowering them to make choices and develop meaningful judgments, about work and otherwise. Morality, for Dewey, was likewise not a series of laws dictated from on high but derived through lived experience with others: “To possess virtue does not signify to have cultivated a few nameable and exclusive traits; it means to be fully and adequately what one is capable of becoming through association with others in all the offices of life.”
But recognizing the value in multiple possibilities is not to say that all value judgments are made equal, which is part of the reason why matters of taste, and celebrations of refined creative effort, are at the heart of Dewey’s philosophy of democratic education. Dewey worried about mechanized living in industrial society and wrote about aesthetic experience as an antidote to it that served democratic, rather than aristocratic, aims. He was skeptical of museums, whose inaccessibility or preciosity could make fine art “seem anemic to the mass of people” and result in a taste for the more thrilling “cheap and the vulgar.” He argued instead that refinement should be a regular part of public life. “Imaginative vision,” Dewey wrote, “elicits the possibilities that are interwoven within the texture of the actual.” According to Dewey, art, and perhaps literature above all, “is a mode of prediction not found in charts and statistics, and it insinuates possibilities of human relations not to be found in rule and precept.”
Just as Dewey both admired Plato and criticized him, I don’t take Dewey’s work as gospel, but his case for democratic education shows how exposure to literature can help individuals learn how to live well, in ways teachers can’t always foretell. In balancing emotional and cognitive responses to art, attuning themselves to language and learning from their peers’ and teachers’ outlooks, students have a chance to cultivate their own distinct sensibilities, and to cultivate minds whose activity is an end in itself. This process, though difficult, is always a kind of liberation. Dewey called it the “freedom of intelligence”: the “freedom of observation and judgment exercised in behalf of purposes that are intrinsically worthwhile.” Or, as a former student wrote in a recent email, “that old liberal arts cliche about learning ‘how to think’ really means being conscious and aware enough to choose what to pay attention to and how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed.” A critical mass of literate citizens is a necessary, if insufficient, condition for a more democratic society. Reading books in schools is not the only way to cultivate this freedom and awareness at scale, but it is one way.
●
“Literature and the fine arts are of peculiar value because they represent appreciation at its best—a heightened realization of meaning through selection and concentration,” Dewey wrote. In my classroom, I want students to try to make sense of something they might not have the life experience to immediately understand and to appreciate the value in a work of art that defamiliarizes habitual modes of thought. I like intricacy. I want students to take pleasure in learning strange words and in other forms of surprise. I want them to read about marginalization—about the forms cruelty can take and the choices an individual can make in the face of attempts to keep them down. Beyond any other principle, I try to assign books that are worth contemplating, discussing and writing about for a sustained period of time.
Literary critics sometimes dismiss Brave New World as gimmicky. Harold Bloom called it “threadbare.” But in spare prose, Huxley demonstrates how common terms like “beauty” and “history” can serve power when the things they signify become incontestable. Students often find his initial deployment of those words startling, and it takes time for them to figure out, first in writing and then in discussion, why they respond this way. Huxley’s playfulness and accessibility can bely the seriousness of his undertaking, but he lays bare the infrastructures—rhetorical, political, technological, pedagogical—that can limit what a society allows its citizens to know.
In Brave New World, the outcast John receives a copy of Shakespeare’s complete works as a gift. But he reads alone, without a teacher, without peers, without any historical or literary context. He recognizes the poems and plays as, in some way, beautiful, but he cannot understand them: “he had these words, these words like drums and singing and magic,” Huxley writes. “These words and the strange, strange story out of which they were taken (he couldn’t make head or tail of it, but it was wonderful, wonderful all the same).” For John, Shakespeare becomes like catechism. In moments of stress or anger, rather than speak for himself, he quotes Shakespeare at people who do not understand his references. His human potential remains unrealized. Old books do not save his life.
At the end of the novel, the World Controller—who turns out to be a Shakespeare reader himself—explains to John, “You’ve got to choose between happiness and what people used to call high art. We’ve sacrificed the high art. We have the feelies and the scent organ instead.” In the Republic, Socrates warns that poets make people worse rather than better by exciting emotions and unsettling the soul and the city. In both the ideal city and the World State, realizing the common good seems to require sacrificing artistic richness. Like Huxley, like Dewey, I think there are better ways for us to live together, and public education has a vital role to play. In English class, teachers can show students what has moved others to use language with care and pleasure, and invite them to join a long tradition of people who have found a way to say something new. Given the current impediments in so many classrooms, maybe the best thing we can do right now is keep that idea alive.
Art credit: Jan Pietersz Saenredam after Cornelis Cornelisz van Haarlem, Plato’s Cave, 1604. Engraving on laid paper. 33.7 × 45 cm. Collection of the National Gallery of Art.
Before assigning Aldous Huxley’s dystopian novel Brave New World to high school students, I like to read Plato’s allegory of the cave with them in class. In the passage, Socrates asks Glaucon to imagine that prisoners in a cave accept shadows cast on the wall by anonymous puppeteers as reality. The lucky few who are freed find greater degrees of illumination, truer representations, but liberation is a painful and threatening struggle. Powerlessness is easier. Socrates contends that “in the realm of what can be known, the idea of the good is discovered last of all, and it is only perceived with great difficulty.” In his ideal city, knowledge of the good qualifies people to govern, and few, Socrates argues, are able to attain it. He calls for an elite whose souls are alive to the difficult, beautiful reality of human existence, in order to make the most responsible decisions for themselves and for others.
Thinking about Plato helps students to understand more fully Huxley’s nightmare vision of a world in which stability and consumption are the highest values and a ruling few engineer reality to those ends. In Huxley’s story, the state indoctrinates lab-grown children from birth into believing that their social castes and attendant norms are both desirable and inescapable. Dissent is unthinkable. The meanings of words, the meaning of life itself, are dictated from on high. As the World Controller explains, “It would upset the whole social order if men started doing things on their own.”
I find that the lesson holds adolescents’ attention without much of a plan beyond reading together, both silently and aloud, with breaks for discussion. There are no slides, no quizzes, no worksheets. I have been lucky to teach in schools where I can make these choices without much rationalizing about how they fit alongside scripted curricula or test prep.
As is the case with all else we read together, students do not take the allegory as doctrine. They disagree about the extent to which it makes sense or resonates. They tend to find Glaucon obsequious. They ask about allegory as a literary technique. They may see it as a warning against orthodoxy that can develop from seeking comfort in false premises, as I do, or they might not.
Last year, midway through the class period, a student blurted out: “Wait, they were imprisoned as children? Why? What did they do?” The student’s outburst brings to mind some old questions at the heart of education: What is good for students? And how is the good of students tied to the good of society? It seems to me that current education policy rarely prioritizes these questions. In the name of progress, public education is now pressed into the service of agendas that align with corporate profit, workforce readiness, ideological reproduction and demand for quantifiable results. These aims ignore what progressive education at its best can do, and the students who school ostensibly serves.
●
In December, the New York Times declared, “In American high schools, the age of the book may be fading.” This announcement encapsulated years of pessimistic reporting and commentary about the place of reading in education: prominent humanities professors wondering aloud whether we might abandon teaching books altogether, others lamenting undergraduates’ incapacity or unwillingness to read, journalists and pundits reporting on declining attention spans and falling literacy scores. Complaints about rising generations can sound nostalgic, or cranky, or even adversarial toward the young people in whom we ought to—need to—have faith. But dismissing the problem risks ignoring real, long-term changes in the ways we reward fragmented attention in public school.
The notion, now axiomatic among some administrators, policymakers and teachers, that “language arts” is a “skills-based” subject, void of meaningful “content,” can be traced in part to legislation at the federal and state levels. The Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), signed into law by President Obama in 2015, built on No Child Left Behind’s promises of standardization and assessment as keys to equitable educational quality. ESSA is commendably neutral about the precise sets of standards states adopt, but mandates that “all students in America be taught to high academic standards that will prepare them to succeed in college and careers.” It incentivizes “early college” and requires states to implement “accountability systems.” Whereas NCLB had a provision for funding “literature-rich environments,” even if only for preschoolers, ESSA never even mentions the word “literature.” Instead, states must use “diverse, high-quality print materials” and impart to students “the ability to navigate, understand, and write about, complex print and digital subject matter.”
In most states, compliance with ESSA came in the form of adopting the Common Core State Standards. According to Common Core, “text complexity” is measurable by feeding “text” into programs that evaluate elements like sentence length and vocabulary. Disputes about literature’s place in the scheme soon arose. When the standards rolled out, teachers, professors and journalists across the political spectrum expressed concern in blogs, monographs and newspapers about whether “informational text” and test-aligned excerpts would replace customary and beloved books. Their worries have proven justified. Even standards devised in good faith can be exploited by bad faith.
Standardized tests, which are administered by profit-oriented entities like the College Board, measure ESSA-mandated benchmarks. (The company’s current CEO, David Coleman, was one of the architects of the Common Core.) The College Board in particular has enshrined its testing through state contracts that incentivize or mandate its Common Core-compatible Advanced Placement courses in public schools and require public higher-educational institutions to legitimate the exams through admissions or course-credit policies. Even as states have renamed or revised Common Core standards, then, exams like these still incentivize “skills-based” approaches and curricula that, in many cases, make teaching complicated books risky. One course, AP Seminar, which the company is now marketing as a replacement for tenth-grade English, is explicitly career-focused and intended to build “relevant” skills like “working in teams” and “presenting.” Books are inessential even for AP English Literature: excerpts are fine for honing “course skills” and “enduring understandings.” And across the AP model, students can take tests without taking courses. All prep is possible virtually and individually. Still, AP is among the best forms of test prep—other versions are even more scripted and constrained.
This ambivalence about literature, teachers and classrooms runs through much of K-12 education these days, especially as artificial-intelligence tools have become widely available. In December 2025, the National Council for Teachers of English (NCTE) announced a Google-sponsored initiative to “lead the creation of a scalable framework for responsible AI use within the discipline.” This development followed a 2022 NCTE position paper arguing that “the time has come to decenter book reading and essay writing as the pinnacles of English language arts education.” Meanwhile, this summer, the American Federation of Teachers, the second-largest teachers’ union in the country, made a multimillion-dollar deal with companies like OpenAI to start an AI teacher-training institute. “We felt we needed to work with the largest corporations in the world,” AFT president Randi Weingarten told the Associated Press. “We went to them—they didn’t come to us.” Weingarten says she wants teachers to “have a seat at the table,” but it’s not clear to me why a union leader would rush into such an arrangement instead of rejecting the premise that tech companies ought to be deciding the future of public education.
In the world of LLMs, all words become “content,” fodder for algorithms and platforms that promise to eliminate the discomfort of truth-seeking even as they threaten to replace hard-won knowledge with nonsense. Giving young readers the chance to engage with refined, intentional forms of self-expression, with well-educated teachers, in conversation with peers, in physical classrooms, we might help them understand that ease is not always rewarding and that they, too, can have new insights. To read and think seriously in this way in high school can also help students understand the concept of perspective—how experience and evidence can intertwine to produce a way of seeing the world that is both particular to an individual and worth making legible to others.
●
With standardized testing and the tech-driven innovations it’s enabled dominating both public education and some of its private alternatives, the classical-education movement has emerged as one of the few staunch proponents of books in schools. Among its most vocal leaders is Jeremy Wayne Tate, founder of the Classic Learning Test and self-proclaimed champion of “Western Civilization,” who sees his company as rivaling the College Board as America’s standard setter. Tate wants to destroy the College Board, in part, because he believes its standardized tests represent a form of “progressive education.” As evidence, he points to the fact that the SAT once included an op-ed written by Bernie Sanders.
State and federal policies now increasingly reflect Tate’s politics. In 2023, Florida became the first state in the country to adopt the CLT as an alternative to the SAT and the ACT—several others are now following suit, along with the country’s military-service academies—and more recently was also the first state to adopt the Heritage Foundation’s Phoenix Declaration. The declaration, which includes Tate among its signatories, emphasizes teaching “America’s founding principles” and roots students’ education in “the broader Western and Judeo‑Christian traditions.” Its seven guiding principles—among them “truth and goodness,” “citizenship” and “parental choice and responsibility”—frame schooling as a vehicle for transmitting the shared cultural heritage of “our constitutional republic.” Some red states, meanwhile, in addition to banning certain books outright, are experimenting with mandating whole books and testing students on their interpretations. Many of the works on these lists are worth teaching. But arbitrary mandates cannot force students to appreciate art, nor will they allow teachers to model the liberal habits of mind that many of the selections, in my view, celebrate. Still, all these plans—a supposed corrective to the emptiness of the visions of “innovators” like Coleman—fit within ESSA’s framework, so long as states commit to measuring outcomes.
“At heart, progressives tend to view education as preparing a person to be a worker,” one of the declaration’s champions, former Heritage Foundation fellow Jay P. Greene, argued. “The predominant understanding of education on the left is that a human being is a tool, and education should shape that tool to be productive and serve the needs of others.” Echoing Greene, Tate proclaimed on X, “Progressive education has produced technicians without vision and consumers without culture. It has stripped education of its formative power, turning schools into credentialing factories rather than places of cultural transmission and moral formation.” I agree that art belongs in schools, and that we can’t ignore the profound potential education holds to shape students’ outlooks. But calling our current public-education policy “progressive” is, read most generously, imprecise.
And in their zeal to dismantle all forms of progressivism, these self-professed conservatives risk destroying much more besides. It’s telling that in a recent op-ed, Tate lamented but accepted that “generative AI will almost assuredly make us less capable of forming sustained arguments and writing them with clarity” and suggested, through a line of reasoning I must confess I can’t quite follow, that somehow the technology might produce more people like Socrates. (He did not acknowledge that we only know of Socrates because Plato wrote about him.) Such claims indicate less care for students’ agency and intellectual growth than for accommodating the imposition of powerful machinery.
Greene and Tate are by no means the first to caricature “progressive education.” The education-reform advocate Alfie Kohn has written about “the tendency to paint progressive education as a touchy-feely, loosey-goosey, fluffy, fuzzy, undemanding exercise in leftover hippie idealism,” and even teachers sometimes think it amounts to simply “being nice,” avoiding any criticism of students. Amid this confusion, software platforms and ed-tech companies have been able to use terms like “student-centered” and “personalized learning” to market themselves as progressive. But these developments are a distortion of progressive education, not a fulfillment of them.
On social media, Tate has repeatedly claimed that G. K. Chesterton was “right about everything.” I disagree, but he did write a parable many of us would do well to heed:
Before discarding progressive education, we should, as Chesterton advised, first try to see more clearly the use of it.
●
One reason it’s easy to build straw men about progressive education is that there is no doctrine. In broad terms, the goals are recognition of a student’s humanity, respect for their lived experience and acknowledgment that learning is social. Progressive education, according to one of its leading lights, the philosopher John Dewey, rejects passivity in pursuit of meaningful learning. In his model, excellence is a matter of each individual flourishing, not at the expense of others but in collaboration with them. And it was measured not by crass outcomes like college-admission rates or career readiness but by what happened each day in the classroom: he argued that “preparing or getting ready for some future duty or privilege” could result in “evil effects,” and urged instead “taking advantage of the needs and possibilities of the immediate present.”
“Plato defined a slave,” he wrote in his famous Democracy and Education, “as one who accepts from another the purposes which control his conduct. This condition obtains even where there is no slavery in the legal sense. It is found wherever men are engaged in activity which is socially serviceable, but whose service they do not understand and have no personal interest in.” Dewey appreciated Plato’s faith in reason as a means for “breaking through the limitations of custom and getting at things as they really were.” But he warned that fully realizing Plato’s theory of education would result in “the lumping of individuals and their original powers into a few sharply marked-off classes” defined by a unitary, top-down vision of the good. Dewey called instead for greater degrees of fluidity and self-determination in the classroom—a form of education that would help young people participate in public life by empowering them to make choices and develop meaningful judgments, about work and otherwise. Morality, for Dewey, was likewise not a series of laws dictated from on high but derived through lived experience with others: “To possess virtue does not signify to have cultivated a few nameable and exclusive traits; it means to be fully and adequately what one is capable of becoming through association with others in all the offices of life.”
But recognizing the value in multiple possibilities is not to say that all value judgments are made equal, which is part of the reason why matters of taste, and celebrations of refined creative effort, are at the heart of Dewey’s philosophy of democratic education. Dewey worried about mechanized living in industrial society and wrote about aesthetic experience as an antidote to it that served democratic, rather than aristocratic, aims. He was skeptical of museums, whose inaccessibility or preciosity could make fine art “seem anemic to the mass of people” and result in a taste for the more thrilling “cheap and the vulgar.” He argued instead that refinement should be a regular part of public life. “Imaginative vision,” Dewey wrote, “elicits the possibilities that are interwoven within the texture of the actual.” According to Dewey, art, and perhaps literature above all, “is a mode of prediction not found in charts and statistics, and it insinuates possibilities of human relations not to be found in rule and precept.”
Just as Dewey both admired Plato and criticized him, I don’t take Dewey’s work as gospel, but his case for democratic education shows how exposure to literature can help individuals learn how to live well, in ways teachers can’t always foretell. In balancing emotional and cognitive responses to art, attuning themselves to language and learning from their peers’ and teachers’ outlooks, students have a chance to cultivate their own distinct sensibilities, and to cultivate minds whose activity is an end in itself. This process, though difficult, is always a kind of liberation. Dewey called it the “freedom of intelligence”: the “freedom of observation and judgment exercised in behalf of purposes that are intrinsically worthwhile.” Or, as a former student wrote in a recent email, “that old liberal arts cliche about learning ‘how to think’ really means being conscious and aware enough to choose what to pay attention to and how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed.” A critical mass of literate citizens is a necessary, if insufficient, condition for a more democratic society. Reading books in schools is not the only way to cultivate this freedom and awareness at scale, but it is one way.
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“Literature and the fine arts are of peculiar value because they represent appreciation at its best—a heightened realization of meaning through selection and concentration,” Dewey wrote. In my classroom, I want students to try to make sense of something they might not have the life experience to immediately understand and to appreciate the value in a work of art that defamiliarizes habitual modes of thought. I like intricacy. I want students to take pleasure in learning strange words and in other forms of surprise. I want them to read about marginalization—about the forms cruelty can take and the choices an individual can make in the face of attempts to keep them down. Beyond any other principle, I try to assign books that are worth contemplating, discussing and writing about for a sustained period of time.
Literary critics sometimes dismiss Brave New World as gimmicky. Harold Bloom called it “threadbare.” But in spare prose, Huxley demonstrates how common terms like “beauty” and “history” can serve power when the things they signify become incontestable. Students often find his initial deployment of those words startling, and it takes time for them to figure out, first in writing and then in discussion, why they respond this way. Huxley’s playfulness and accessibility can bely the seriousness of his undertaking, but he lays bare the infrastructures—rhetorical, political, technological, pedagogical—that can limit what a society allows its citizens to know.
In Brave New World, the outcast John receives a copy of Shakespeare’s complete works as a gift. But he reads alone, without a teacher, without peers, without any historical or literary context. He recognizes the poems and plays as, in some way, beautiful, but he cannot understand them: “he had these words, these words like drums and singing and magic,” Huxley writes. “These words and the strange, strange story out of which they were taken (he couldn’t make head or tail of it, but it was wonderful, wonderful all the same).” For John, Shakespeare becomes like catechism. In moments of stress or anger, rather than speak for himself, he quotes Shakespeare at people who do not understand his references. His human potential remains unrealized. Old books do not save his life.
At the end of the novel, the World Controller—who turns out to be a Shakespeare reader himself—explains to John, “You’ve got to choose between happiness and what people used to call high art. We’ve sacrificed the high art. We have the feelies and the scent organ instead.” In the Republic, Socrates warns that poets make people worse rather than better by exciting emotions and unsettling the soul and the city. In both the ideal city and the World State, realizing the common good seems to require sacrificing artistic richness. Like Huxley, like Dewey, I think there are better ways for us to live together, and public education has a vital role to play. In English class, teachers can show students what has moved others to use language with care and pleasure, and invite them to join a long tradition of people who have found a way to say something new. Given the current impediments in so many classrooms, maybe the best thing we can do right now is keep that idea alive.
Art credit: Jan Pietersz Saenredam after Cornelis Cornelisz van Haarlem, Plato’s Cave, 1604. Engraving on laid paper. 33.7 × 45 cm. Collection of the National Gallery of Art.
If you liked this essay, you’ll love reading The Point in print.