Micro-Review:
American Socialist Pedagogy and Experimentation in the Progressive
Era: The Socialist Sunday School,
by Kenneth Teitelbaum and William J. Reese. History of Education Quarterly, Vol. 23, No. 4 (Winter,
1983), pp. 429-454.
This was another piece identified in the HEQ 50-Year
Retrospective. This piece jumped
out at me, not because of any familiarity I had with the authors, but with the
specific subject matter it dealt with—Socialism in American Schools. In this case, this sweeping overview of
a segment of the socialist movement in the United States (and the U.K.)
outlines the foundation of and development of curriculum, as well as the impact
of these relatively informal, small, niche institutions had on the culture of
the United States in the opening decades of the 20th Century.
I suspect that there exists a much longer, more detailed
book by Mr. Teitelbaum and Reese on this topic, but this essay provided an
excellent taste. This is much
closer to the sort of history I envision myself writing, but with a stronger
reliance on individual teacher data—a diary, or set of letters relating to the
actual conditions “on the ground” so to speak at school. But the way this essay foregrounds
individual texts like excerpts from the Socialist
Sunday School Songbook, against broader demographic data—numbers of
schools, student enrollment figures, and the economic and government structures
underlying the foundation of these schools is very much in line with the type
of writing I’d like to do for my dissertation.
Ultimately, Teitelbaum and Reese are able to make a much
broader claim about the influence of Socialist Sunday Schools by locating them
in the broader cultural milieu of the time—figures like the progressive public
intellectual and educationalist John Dewey, as well as Eden and Cedar Paul, who
are new figures to me, but who seem to have been doing their part to agitate
for communist education in the English-speaking world of the inter-war
period. Reese and Teitelbaum’s
most powerfully resonant claim in the present day is that socialist education
in the United States in the first half of the 20th century were
something of a “counter-hegemony” in a “war of position,” as described by the
Italian anarchist thinker, Antonio Gramasci in his Prison Notebooks.
