1.

Our contemporary educational protocols have their antecedents, and it is enlightening to survey contributing sources now gone from view.  One such figure from America-past with a pivotal and influential contribution to education theory and practice is Lester Frank Ward (1841-1913).  Never heard of him?  Sixty years ago, historian Henry Steele Commager identified him as a peer in the company of William James, John Dewey, and Oliver Wendell Holmes, formatively influencing twentieth-century America.  A review of his contribution allows us to better understand the authoritarian methods of pedagogy which we have become unfortunately familiar.

Ward was, among other things, a sociologist, and a pioneer in applying Darwinian evolutionary theory to the social sciences.  Ward championed the idea that man, rather than being a mere passive subject of evolution, could now actively control the evolutionary process and thereby engineer social progress.  Not surprisingly, Ward gave substantial attention to the enterprise of education, which he viewed as the “great panacea,” and “the universal remedy for political evils.”

Ward drew from evolutionary theory the idea that our environment essentially designs us.  Accordingly, if that environment could itself be carefully manipulated by man, he could thereby transform the persons subject to the formative influences of that environment.  In such way, and in the context of mass compulsory public education, human consciousness could be redesigned by the benevolent government at the controls.

Consider carefully his method.  Ward (in his Dynamic Sociology) defined education as “a systematic process for the manufacture of correct opinions.”  This manufacture is accomplished, he explains, by the “method of exclusion,” viz., the elimination of access to data upon which undesired opinions are constructed.  He explains:

since opinions are rigidly the products of the data previously furnished the mind, such opinions can not exist, [when] no data for them have ever been received.

While conceding that employing direct coercion to forbid opinions already formed is doomed to fail, Ward insisted that success in manufacturing right opinions is guaranteed by controlling the learning environment so that only that data upon which the preferred opinions may be formed is accessible.

[F]ew intellects can distinguish the chaff from the wheat, at least in youth, when the deepest impressions are made.  An artificial system for assorting impressions, for causing their systematic presentation, for precluding the introduction of false ones, and the drawing of erroneous inferences, is therefore absolutely necessary to the successful creation of progressive states of the human mind.

To those with experience with state educational institutions, all of this may ring eerily familiar.  Ward’s influence continues beyond his life, and even his memory.  Commager writes that Ward “inspired a whole generation of scholars and reformers to believe that it was possible to remake society along happier lines, and a new generation that did not know him worked with his tools and fought with his weapons.”  These adopted methods to shield students from exposure to any data that might allow them to achieve disfavored points of view.

Alan Bloom is less than enthusiastic about this sort of approach, which he calls “tyranny”:  “The most successful tyranny is not the one that uses force to assure uniformity but the one that removes the awareness of other possibilities, that makes it seem inconceivable that other ways are viable, that removes the sense that there is an outside.”

2.

Even though our contemporary communicative milieu is less than the pristine and cordoned-off environment Ward preferred, his methods are fastidiously employed to great effect by influential institutions shaping the public mind.

One significant instantiation of this methodology attends the Supreme Court’s command that all compulsory, tax-funded education in government schools be conducted entirely on non-theistic terms.  The elimination of God as a consideration from all academic pursuits, for all of the formative years of a child’s education, constitutes a relentless (if implicit) indoctrination in God’s irrelevance to matters of civic participation and academic competence.  As Professor Michael McConnell put it, the schools’ “[s]tudious silence on a subject that parents may say touches all of life is an eloquent refutation.”

The same message is conveyed outside the classroom by the social, legal, and media conventions that impose “secular discourse” requirements, by which theological premises are defined as non-rational and publicly irrelevant.  Such systemic restrictions by the institutions that mediate reality to us are powerful in orienting the public mind, now denied use of or exposure to a theistic frame of reference.  Its plausibility thus evaporates.

This helps us understand why an advocate of hegemonic liberalism like Steven Macedo can be content even though American law does not directly outlaw all private religious speech and exercise.  He understands that the exclusion of theological reference from public bodies and civic discourse not only trains the broader community into safely agnostic mental habits, it also creates a social environment leading religious adherents themselves to gradually doubt the objective truth or public relevance of their marginalized beliefs—due to the persistent, subliminal argument embedded in dominant social practice.  Such a tamed religious community is no longer a threat to the liberal secular order.

The Supreme Court and many in our enlightened intellectual class call this regime “neutrality.”  Ward’s phrasing—“method of exclusion”—is preferable for its honesty.