| Reviews / Comptes Rendus | Labour/Le Travail, 51

Reviews / Comptes Rendus

Adam R. Nelson, Education and Democracy: The Meaning of Alexander Meiklejohn (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2001)

FROM HIS UNDERGRADUATE years in philosophy at Brown University in the 1890s, to his defence of an absolute definition of the freedom of speech after World War II, the Scottish-born American philosopher and educator Alexander Meiklejohn pursued one idea: to promote institutions that would put into practice the ideal of free and democratic citizenship. Meiklejohn chose higher education as the main field of his activity, moving from Brown to Amherst, Madison, and Berkeley, mainly as an administrator, always as a scholar, in a tireless effort to create a "liberal college." At the centre of his work, historian Adam R. Nelson insists, was the paradox of Socratic teaching: how can one instructor transmit the desire to be free, how can one at once command the authority to teach the practice of self-government without impeding the student's own practice of freedom?	1
The author has followed Meiklejohn's action, thoughts, and vast influence in a thoroughly research essay, identifying, for each period, a surprising variety of intellectual and political contexts. The clarity of his introduction to Meiklejohn's philosophical education and development pays justice to the faith the man himself had in making available complex ideas of the past to all who wished to study. Meiklejohn reflected on the meaning of social life in a secular world. His group of idealist colleagues and students opposed the dominant pragmatists of their time, chiefly John Dewey, for the danger they risked in their uncritical assumptions regarding the values of democracy. In time, he came to be weary of their emphasis on activity at the expense of meaning. In the zeal with which young university-educated Americans curtailed liberties in the name of war, in 1917–1918, for instance, he recognized the relativism of their philosophy and their lack of reflection on the nature of authority in education.	2
Meiklejohn believed that the preservation of democracy resided in strong discussions around agreed terms, which would not only be transmitted, but had to be re-examined by each generation. His conviction that common standards would allow bearers of different opinions to collaborate, brought him in close contact with an exceptional variety of intellectuals, reformers, and philanthropists, of many social backgrounds and political allegiances. The gathering of their hopes around his projects, such as the Experimental College in Madison, Wisconsin, between 1925 and 1932, reveals the remarkable scope of contemporary possibilities, as well as the practical limits of free deliberation in American society.	3
He met many setbacks, as he pondered why the very democratic institutions he promoted decided to curtail freedom: the promotion of professional sport by assemblies of students against his own ideal of amateurship; the decision by his colleagues at Brown to enlist campuses in "military preparedness" during World War I; and the opinion of the closest of his colleagues that Communist propaganda and extreme right opinions had no place in a free public world and their subsequent failure to defend from imprisonment citizens who refused to answer the questions of the House Un-American Activities Committee.	4
With experience and a changing context, Meiklejohn's practical propositions evolved. Initially, he sought material support for his endeavours amongst philanthropists by appealing to the sense of their social position. With the Depression, he came to rely on the state as the necessary provider of the support for education. In doing so, he developed a demanding understanding of the conditions of existence of a democratic state. Initially, also, he believed in setting the college apart from society, a haven of excellence untouched by the pressing demands of the material and political world; only with this distance could scholars and students make sense of their world, with the help of their intellectual forebears. With time, he envisaged institutions of learning in closer relation to their world, a position that asked for different ways to maintain the intellectual integrity of the college, especially the protection of the First Amendment.	5
His belief in a dynamic search for meaning took the form of a permanent quest for a unified understanding of society, a philosophical synthesis that should at once make sense of the modern world and pay justice to past thinkers. To this end, Meiklejohn promoted unified curricula in the early years of the college. Open programs represented an abandonment of the responsibility of teaching. Vocational courses, he further believed, had no place in the modern college. Typically, he proposed a year or two of study of the institutions of Greek democracy. To this ever-present core, he added years on the enlightenment, on modern America, or on the social problems of industrialization. Around carefully selected lists of books, his method remained the same: a vast amount of personal readings followed by open discussions led by demanding tutors. To register in his program of adult education in the 1940s in San Francisco, all one had to promise was to participate in discussions and be open-minded.	6
The history of the many institutions of Meiklejohn's making is also marred with the problems of idealism: the importance of charisma in his teaching and his relations with colleagues often made for uneasy relations with older faculties; the inordinate amount of authority and proximity vested in tutors' prerogatives worried parents and students; his own uneasy relation with the truth in the face of colleagues' opposition; and excessive spending at the institution's expense jeopardized academic solidarity. While Nelson provides many insights into the joys and excesses of Meiklejohn's family life, he could have discussed further his thoughts about the role of families in the education of citizens.	7
Concerning the history of labour and of the working class, Meiklejohn attempted to make higher education eligible for all who wished to study. Aware of the extraordinary discrepancy of incomes and privileges, partly thanks to his own working-class origins, he sought to find fair and dignified ways of helping struggling students. His various colleges were typically more open to a variety of classes, ethnic, and religious groups than their contemporaries. He also established institutions of adult and workers' education related to universities, with the conviction that the practice of democracy was a constant exercise. His efforts culminated in 1934 and 1940, with the San Francisco School of Social Studies and its branch, the Pacific Coast School for Workers, which taught hundreds of people organized in rigorous discussion groups "not only in the methods of critical deliberation and democratic debate but also in the practical methods of labor organization, from bookkeeping and arbitration to wage contracts and collective bargaining." (211). Curiously, Nelson explains, such institutions bloomed in the 1930s because of unemployment. Meiklejohn's second wife, Helen Everett Meiklejohn, a reformer and adult educator in her own right, collaborated with many trade unions and contributed to various institutions of workers' education, such as the Summer Institute for Social Progress offered to women workers by Wellesley College, (Massachusetts) in the 1930s.	8
His defence of free deliberation led to involvement in many sectors of America's public life. His theoretical elucidation of the First Amendment exerted a considerable influence in the defence of the Hollywood Ten, and in the struggle of lecturers against university administrations that asked them to sign statements of political belief during the McCarthy era. His reflection on the central place of education in democracy helped to lay the intellectual parameters of UNESCO.	9
Nelson's biography represents a journey through more than half a century of American educational, social, and political reform through the eyes of a man who never ceased to believe in the promises of the use of reason. At the time of his death, in 1964, he counted colleagues, former students, and close friends amongst the leaders of the Civil Rights Movement and he witnessed with them the violent repression that had just followed the early victories of the movement.	10
Dominique Marshall Carleton University

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