Word: reconstructionist
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...education is the possession of everlasting, timeless and spaceless principles of reality, truth, and value." The essentialists emphasize the cultural heritage and traditional subject matter. The progressivists treat the schools as laboratories of experience in which students learn chiefly by pragmatic problem solving. From all these, says Brameld, the reconstructionist has borrowed, but he finds each, in its own way, inadequate. Perennialism leads to dogma and false orthodoxies; essentialism stagnates in the status quo; the progressivists, while strong on method, are not sure what they should be educating...
...Group Mind. What should education be for? The reconstructionist's answer: education must try to create a new social order that is as close to Utopia as possible. The reconstructionist rejects all absolutes, thinks that there is no metaphysical design to the universe and that "history has no ingrained purpose, no preordained goal." All he wants to do is to build a future in which "man may be happier, more rational, more humane than he has ever been...
...this sort of thing spreads, not only through education but through all of society, Brameld believes that the school will at last play its rightful role as shaper of a reconstructed world. This, Brameld insists, is not indoctrination (though he believes that the reconstructionist teacher is perfectly within his rights in using a certain amount of propaganda) but education for "defensible partiality." And what sort of society is Brameld himself partial to? Nothing less than a sort of global collectivism in which the workers of the world will unite as world citizens against all exploiting minorities. If only they...
...Reconstructionist. In Hazard, Ky., Oliver Cole, 40, was arrested after neighbors phoned the cops, complained that he stood in the street pounding on a garbage can while loudly campaigning for another term for Abraham Lincoln...
...born on Staten Island in 1862-the rebellious daughter of a staid Republican-was descended from revolutionary soldiers and related to Reconstructionist Thaddeus Stevens. She had met Walt Whitman, Henry Ward Beecher and Robert Ingersoll. Thrice married, she was the mother of six children, wrote children's books. She was 57 when she joined the Communist Party in 1919, certain that it could be an instrument for good...