I thought I would dedicate my inaugural blog post to a thinker that has had a deep impact on my views of science education and society. Though he was professionally a religious leader and philosopher by training, Felix Adler was very much committed to the mission of science. Born in Germany but raised in New York in the 1860s, Adler was the son of a rabbi on track to follow in his father’s footsteps. While studying in Germany in the 1870s, however, he became deeply interested in philosophy eventually abandoning his traditional religious views. No longer able to continue a rabbinical career, Adler instead founded the Ethical Culture movement, which functioned and continues to function as a nontheistic religious organization for those interested in the higher ideals of religion without committing to a particular dogma.
One of the first acts of the New York Society for Ethical Culture under Adler’s leadership was to set up a free kindergarten for New York’s poor. Although almost ubiquitous today, kindergartens at that time were rare and rather controversial, and ones that offered free education to the poor were nearly unheard of. The success of the kindergarten lead to the founding of the Workingman’s School which opened up a free education to older children. Among its many noteworthy accomplishments, the Workingman’s School, which would go on to become the Ethical Culture Fieldston School, was one of the first educational institutions to take students on field trips to see the engineering marvels of the day.
The school was very much focused on providing students with marketable industrial skills in addition to a well-rounded general education. But for Adler, technical work was much more than simply increasing one’s economic value in the industrial economy. Adler talked about how by carefully planning out each step in the process for creating a finished products, students could better connect with each small step as part of a greater whole. It would teach discipline and also planning skills. In The Moral Instruction of Children (p. 265) he writes: “The pupils of reformatories should never make heads of pins or the nineteenth fraction of a shoe. Let there be no machine work. Let the pupils turn out complete articles, for only thus can the full intellectual and moral benefits of manual training be reaped.”
Adler may have partly been addressing the concerns of philosopher Karl Marx who argued that workers became alienated from the products of their labor when they were treated as mere instruments in the manufacturing of those products. By the late 19th century when Adler set up the Workingman’s School, craftsmen building their own creations had been replaced by many workers each taking a tiny piece of the production process from the conceptualizing of a design to its manufacture. Indeed, Adler’s progressive agenda to combat the excesses of industrial capitalism was both a recognition of Marx’s central critiques of the status quo while also a rebuke of Marx’s revolutionary alternative that Adler saw as inherently destructive.
In some sense, the high degree of specialization was very much in keeping with Adler’s view of society and the cosmos as a sort of organism with special parts enabling the functioning of the whole. Adler viewed the uniqueness of each individual as a supreme good because it was through each person’s unique worth that the whole was enriched. Adler frequently described the self as emergent from and defined by the relationships with others. Of course, being very much a man of his time, he often used this organicism to justify some deeply problematic Victorian sensibilities on race, gender, and sexuality.
But Adler was not satisfied with people merely functioning as specialized parts of a whole. People had to actually be able to see and appreciate the whole in order to be healthy spiritual beings. This was why it was so important that students take a product from design to completion in their education even if they would never see a product through from beginning to end in their professional lives.
Adler’s view on the importance of a technical education that taught students to appreciate the whole of a creation. Uruguayan philosopher José Enrique Rodó in his influential 1900 work Ariel expressed the view that the utilitarian education found in most Western societies was deeply harmful to individuals because it promoted a specialization that would leave a person highly skilled in certain areas and completely inept in others. This specialization, Rodó claimed, left people mutilated without a general view of how life worked. This also left Rodó with a dim view of democracy which he felt promoted mediocrity by leaving decision-making to the ill-informed masses that were composed of the same mutilated souls of industrial specialization.
In some sense, the sort of specialized education that is necessary to make an individual economically valuable in the modern economy is in tension with a good civics education. Civics education necessarily means seeing the greater whole and understanding its disparate parts well enough to see one’s place in that whole.
Such a view of a civics-oriented STEM education breaks up the myth of science, technology, and mathematics as set apart from human concerns and places them squarely in the democratic process of problem-solving for the good of society as a whole. Each of our highly-specialized economic roles necessitates dialogue, inclusion, and diversity. This is the resolution of the tension between technical and civics education. We must cultivate a specific set of skills to be productive members of society while at the same time cultivating the skills to be in constant dialogue with those who expand our worldview through their own deep knowledge, and we must all have some appreciation of the big picture that we are all functioning as part of a greater whole.