Paul A. Olson. (2002). The Kingdom of Science: Literary Utopianism and British Education, 1612-1870

	Paul A. Olson. (2002). The Kingdom of Science: Literary Utopianism and British Education, 1612-1870. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press. Pp. xiv + 375 $65     ISBN 0803235682 Reviewed by Larry Freeman September 8, 2003 According to the author, Paul A. Olson, this book is "about how power creates knowledge and knowledge creates power." Olson examines this theme by studying literary utopias as they rehearse "the rise to power of new groups and the historical arrangement for the production of knowledge and myth demanded by those groups." Thus, the subtitle: "Literary Utopianism and British Education, 1612-1870." As this approach suggests, this is no ordinary history of education, the kind that recounts the major thinkers and their influence, major related legislative acts, and the various actions and reactions. Olson's book is a different kind of history of education and deserves close and careful reading by all in the U.S. who are concerned about where our schools and other institutions of formal education should go. It is, in short, a brilliant explanation of historical influences creating American schooling, including explorations of the choices confronted, paths taken, and the costs paid, most often by those who have the least. Olson relies on Mannheim's study of utopias, Ideology and Utopia, to frame his approach. Utopia, as Mannheim proposes, and Olson uses it, encompasses both the customary genre of a fictional commonwealth and fictions and ideas lying outside the genre that give rise to mass social movement. Olson traces the utopia and its implications for education from the steady-state world utopias of More and Shakespeare through the Baconian view of enlarging "the bounds of Human empire to the effecting of all things possible'' to Adam Smith's version of state-run compulsory education designed to create an intellectual "common" necessary to create basic social units. From Smith on, Olson traces the development of educational thought and action by Utilitarians such as Jeremy Bentham who produced an educational utopia in his Chrestomathia and James Mill who reformulated associationist psychology to serve as a technology to provide the social control that would realize Bentham's utopia. He then follows the progeny of these Utilitarians as they jettison Smith's notion of education as creating a social and intellectual common to develop a form of education focusing almost exclusively on the individual and centering in competition, a form of education that in Olson's view "would power industrial progress and extend human empire everywhere." But Olson does not make the history of educational thought and action so easy as this brief sketch suggests. He takes great pains to show how the Tory wits, Swift and Pope, created dystopias and outright attacks on educational schemes rooted in the views of the two Moderns they hated most, Bacon and Descartes. Later he examines the socialist response of Owen to the Utilitarians which, according to Olson, appropriates "for secular purposes, the assumptions of the first of the utopians discussed in this book, Sir Thomas More." And finally, Olson takes up Dickens' Hard Times and some other pieces that offer commentary about how the Utilitarian forms of education deny what children naturally know, deny basic human development patterns, deny imagination's role in creating the social order, and deny responsibility to the nonhuman natural world. This point-counterpoint approach lays out in clear fashion choices that were available to British society at crucial points in its development, choices that would turn on conceptions of human nature, the responsibilities that accrue to humanity as it inhabits the natural world, and versions of what humans should aspire to. The choices made lead, in Olson's view, to a society, and an educational system to support it, that ignores critical and imaginative thought and relies on an "unquestioning and unquestioned myth of infinite progress, kindly Panoptical surveillance, political economy as ethics, and routinized work/competition." Olson argues that this system of education has supported the enlarging of the human empire to accomplish everything possible, as Bacon envisioned, and has led to creating "a different human being to be the emperor—one who is no longer the human species among species and is not their steward either," "one who no longer has confidence that the god within will prompt the learning of what needs to be learned but who requires the coercive power of the state to force learning and to certify that it has taken place." The chapters on Smith and the Utilitarians—both the first and second generations—are most instructive because they represent the precursors and in some cases the intellectual progenitors of the US educational system. Adam Smith is often cited by 21st century defenders of charter schools noting that he proposes to break the "complacency of the endowed colleges and public schools" by permitting students to change institutions, teachers, and tutors as they wish. At the same time, Smith carves out an exception for education in his vision of free markets—only education will be a state monopoly and the coercive power of the state will be behind it. These positions are evident in much of the current rhetoric about education, though Smith is not interested in narrow vocational preparation and mere learning of facts. Smith argues for an intellectual common, the basis for creating the sense of a social unit. It is unclear whether the 21st century supporters of charter schools, vouchers, and No Child Left Behind legislation envision the same ends for education as Smith does or whether the purposes they attribute to education are closer to those of the second-generation Utilitarians—the acquisition of unrelated facts. Olson traces how phrenology provided the "scientific basis" for the educational schemes worked out by the second-generation Utilitarians. According to Olson, "phrenology provided a solution to the problems that Associationism created by emphasizing an almost infinitely malleable mind that could be shaped by education." That solution anticipates the measurement of intelligence, places the blame for the failure of education on the natural deficiencies of the child, and serves as the basis for a rationale for a compensatory education for those whose phrenological bumps meant they could not learn or could learn only in different ways. As Olson notes, this pseudo-scientific approach "provided a rationale for racism in education in both England and the United States." Perhaps equally important, education was now "scientific" and no longer one of the moral sciences. (Note 1) It is but a short step from using the "scientific" claims of phrenology to serve as the basis for proposals for various eugenic initiatives during the early part of this century and later on for the educational testing industry. Olson drives home this point when he writes: Since Combe, English-speaking culture has "measured" human beings "scientifically" on unscientific scales. The measuring, changed to accommodate its critics in each generation and basic to the conception of meritocratic fairness, has few serious questioners in the educational/political establishments that have determined how education is to be funded and that still do so. This remains the case even though contemporary biology, unlike phrenology, appears to tell us that each species is stronger if it contains a multitude of individuals possessing a range of differentiated skills. The defect in the rhetoric of "the failure of education" seldom locates the failure in the Faustian project itself—the march in the wrong direction of the project for the enlarging of human empire itself. (pp. 251-252) Olson relies on Charles Dickens' Hard Times to show how the compulsory utopia of the second-generation Utilitarians results in the denial of "nature" and substitutes an approach that "denigrates the eicastic imagination and privileges statistics and disembodied abstractions, occasionally applied to oversimplified putative real-world situations." Schooling on moral and political topics becomes "essentially indoctrination posing as education." Much of this critique is applicable to current U.S. education, though we insist that the emotional climate and behavior of teachers and administrators must be "nice." To this reviewer, the similarities between the "teaching" satirized in Hard Times and so-called "direct instruction" are striking. As the similarities between the influences and directions chosen by the British and the Americans in the area of schooling should lead us to expect, we are witnessing the re-packaging of proposals tried and abandoned in England in the 19th century such as creating a system that is competitive top to bottom, one in which "teachers engage in a race as unrelenting as that of the students and monitors." Merit pay is nothing new: "As early as 1862, Lowe proposed the Revised Code providing for payment of teachers by results." And the results were predictable: a narrowing of the curriculum to the areas where results counted in the payment of the teacher. Now this narrowing of the curriculum travels under the banner of "Back to the Basics." This reviewer's observations suggest that the narrowing of the curriculum occurs least in wealthy suburban schools and occurs most in schools serving poor minority children—a predictable outcome of the influences of the utilitarians' "scientific" approach to education. Kay-Shuttleworth's critique of Robert Lowe's design for education, quoted by Olson, lists a series of proposals that should be familiar to all of us who have witnessed educational reform since the publication of A Nation at Risk in 1983: [Lowe's design for education} can be briefly described as an attempt to reduce the cost of education of the poor by conducting it by a machinery—half trained and at less charge;—to entrust it to a lower class of ill-paid teachers, and generally to young monitors as assistants;—to neglect the force of a higher moral and religious agency in the civilization of the people—and to define natural education as a drill in mechanical skill in reading, writing, and arithmetic." (p. 261) I have only occasional arguments with how Olson proceeds or what he concludes. I think he underplays the role of Descartes and his influence. Especially for Swift, it was Descartes and not Bacon who rent the natural and divine orders, paving the way for what Swift regarded as all kinds of silliness and wickedness. The discussion of George Eliot's role and contribution to the second generation Utilitarians feels like it is included because Eliot is a 19th century author with a tangential relationship to developments in education; the case is not made for her as a primary mover and shaker. My final quarrel is with the conclusion that feels premature. By stopping in the mid-nineteenth century, Olson leaves us with only a few hints of how he views the contemporary Marxist and post-modernist educational thinkers or contemporary novelists, poets, and film makers. Do they offer real choices? Are they the analogues of the Tory wits? Perhaps the highest praise for a book is to say that I want more—a sequel that takes us up to the present. . Olson brings to this work and its argument a lifetime of reading, scholarship, thinking, and action. He is particularly adept at explicating and clarifying the ways in which literature, the life of the imagination and the more prosaic aspects of culture relate to major theoretical, political, and practical arguments of the day. He is at his best when he is analyzing how those envisioning a desired future suppress facts and opinions obstructing that future in the interest of mobilizing significant numbers of people to develop a yearning for that imagined future, what he refers to as the "dominant wish." He pursues these analyses equipped with the subject literatures clearly in hand, the critical traditions surrounding each literary piece and writer reviewed and analyzed in detail, and the capacity to dispassionately examine and judge opposing views. And he is always mindful of the practical implications of what he is looking at, a mindfulness that is absent from the writings of many who write about education, a mindfulness that likely has its source in Olson's experience in working out management schemes to support the various educational ventures he has launched throughout his career. Finally, Olson's erudition is evident in the extensive notes to the text. These notes not only reliably direct the reader to sources but provide illuminating and sometimes riveting running commentary on issues and arguments tangential to the text. The implications of Olson's work for education in the U.S. deserve considerable attention, if only because they call into question much of what passes for reform in the U.S., reforms that appear only to reify in ever more detail the worst impulses of the Utilitarians. The salient question is what are the choices that exist and are being made now. This is the conversation that appears to be lacking in the present situation. Olson's book provides a unique launching pad for this conversation as it eschews the languages and jargons that currently plague talk about education and forces us to look deeper at what we are getting, what we want, and how we might develop into more decent and humane communities and societies. Note 1. The perception that phrenology provided scientific underpinnings for education is evident in this response by the New York Superintendent of Schools in 1865 to John Hecker's tract, The Scientific Basis of Education: " [Your] views," he wrote, "are in my judgment of the highest practical importance as well to teachers as pupils based upon the soundest principles of physical, mental and moral science, and admitting of practical application by every teacher who will take the pains of acquainting himself or herself with the principles upon which they are founded." [Quoted from Paul LaFarge, Head of the class, The Village Voice, January 17 - 23, 2001. Viewed at http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0103/lafarge.php on July 21, 2003.] About the Reviewer Lawrence D. Freeman Email: lfreeman@comcast.net Phone: 708-957-0877 Larry Freeman began his career teaching English but soon assumed a number of administrative roles including Director, Teacher Education Program Approval at the Illinois State Board of Education; Dean, College of Education, Governors State University, IL; and other administrative positions at Governors State. Freeman's research and writing has focused on legal issues in teacher education; the role of language in creating, developing and changing organizations; cultural pluralism; and the uses of literature in illuminating educational policy. He is now retired and is devoting much of his time to researching alternative teacher education programs.