In his 1926 work, The Meaning of a Liberal Education, heargued that education’s task is to “reorient the individual, to enablehim to take a richer and more significant view of his experiences, toplace him above and not within the system of his beliefs and ideals.”
Is it possible to be above one's own system of beliefs and ideas? Doesn't the system make them a product of it? Evolving from a base at best?
The idea sounds lovely, but is it possible anthropologically?
As Leon Fink wrote of that period,“education ranked . . . high on the agenda” of Progressive intellectu-als and reformers. Considering the logic of reformers he added: “Ifthe people were to seize their democratic birthright for the greatergood . . . they must engage their higher faculties of reason” and be“schooled in sense of civic duty.” This would make them a “demo-cratic public.”8
Check Fink to see where the seeds of this idea of linking education and democracy sprouted...
TL's references for this:<br /> Leon Fink, Progressive Intellectuals and the Dilemmas of Democratic Commitment (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), 13–14; Robert B. Fisher, “The People’s Institute of New York City, 1897–1934: Culture, Progressive Democracy, and the People” (Ph.D. diss., New York University, 1974), 1, 9; Hugh S. Moorhead, “The Great Books Movement,” (PhD diss. University of Chicago, 1964), 110–111.