EDUARD LINDEMAN AND WORKERS' EDUCATION
David W. Stewart
“Already the most vital sector of the adult education
movement. . . .”(1) So Eduard Lindeman characterized workers' education in his
classic small volume, The Meaning of Adult Education, first issued in
1926. This was an over-optimistic assessment. Worker education might have a
"brass-band style of inauguration," as Lindeman's friend Mary Parker
Follett termed it, (2) but its tenure as an adult education success story was
brief.
It was fashionable for left-wing intellectuals in the
1920s to support the cause of workers' education. This was not necessarily a
blessing from the workers' point of view. Labor unions were gratuitously
invaded by a host of educators bound and determined to make a
revolution--educational or otherwise. Classes were authorized and taught--often
by teachers who cared enough to work without pay-but attendance was frequently
sparse.(3)
In this environment, not all of the adult education
leadership was impressed with what happened in the name of workers' education.
Everett Dean Martin, for one, was thoroughly skeptical of the workers'
education movement. “Much of it,” he said, “is little more than a recrudescence
of antiquated radical propaganda, designed to enable the proletariat to
'emancipate itself from the slavery of capitalism,'
and to get it 'ready for a millennial industrial democracy.' The initiative
often comes not from studious minded workers, but from enthusiastic
intellectuals and idealistic uplifters. The cultural gesture is often pathetic
or comic. It is not uncommon for those who have completed the courses of study
in a 'workers' college to find themselves more unadjusted than they were before.”(4)
There were further difficulties. Sharp divisions
within the labor movement about issues of importance made educational
programming a delicate matter. Also, impartial consideration of labor-related
subjects seems to have been the exception, rather than the rule, in courses of
study sponsored by educational institutions.(5)
Lindeman was aware of the "highly developed
habits of conflict and almost none of cooperation," especially among the
old guard unionists (significantly called "war-horses"). He was
anxious to promote workers' education as a means of (encouraging
"reason" rather than "coercion," the "rational
head," rather than the “hard hand.”(6)
These were noble aspirations, but Lindeman was no
more successful than others of his breed in realizing them. Even by the late
1920s, much of the steam was out of the worker education fad. John Hader, with
whom Lindeman worked in research and writing on worker education and related issues,
was less than impressed by much of what he learned about workers' education as
actually practiced in 1929. The Workers Education Bureau itself--supposedly the
epicenter of the movement--had "no spark, no zip," reported Hader,
though it was located "right out the back door" of the bustling New
School for Social Research.(7)
If the workers' education movement as an adult
education enterprise was a flash in the pan, the intellectual precipitate of
work done in its name has enjoyed a better fate. In articulating adult learning
as the essence of workers' education, Lindeman made important and lasting
contributions to the generic conceptual development of American adult
education.
Lindeman proceeded systematically as he acquired the
information that would fuel his interest in workers' education. He was an avid
learner on events of interest to the American worker education movement on his
trips abroad. The churning European labor movements in particular captured his
attention.
In 1925 he attended the Trades Union Congress in
London. The gathering was being held in the midst of a severe industrial
recession in Britain. The desperation of many of that nation's unemployed was
not matched, in Lindeman's view, by any excess of imagination or zeal on the
part of their leaders in the Labour Party. It seemed to Lindeman that the Labour
Party was growing more conservative-a stance that was driving "minority
radicals" to the left.(8)
The Congress itself was disappointing. If the older
delegates exerted little leadership, the younger ones were "the victims of
phrases." Resolutions were introduced and set off endless and futile
debates. And there was a tiresome general principle: :If they wanted a program
for organizing shop committees they were obliged to include in the resolution a
sentence affirming that by this means the capitalist system could best be overthrown.”(9)
Lindeman wasn't much more impressed with the 58th
Trades Union Congress held in Bournemouth, England the next year. Encouraged by
an editorial in The New Statesman that suggested workers' education
would be the most significant item on the agenda, Lindeman went with high
hopes. Everything, it seemed, was in place for the right kind of action.
The previous Congress, insipid as it was, had at
least taken a few steps in the direction of consolidating the various workers'
education movements.(10) More importantly, the
Countess of Warwick, an advocate for labor and adult education, had donated
Easton Lodge, her estate, to be equipped as a university for labor and as a
centralizing agency for relevant educational projects. Ruskin College, the
London Labour College, the Workers' Educational Association, and the various
programs of the National Council of Labour Colleges were to be involved.(11)
Unfortunately, the Boumemouth Congress was not
"educationally disposed." The minds of the delegates were focused
almost exclusively on something else-the massive General Strike of the previous
May. A resolution asking for a levy of one penny per affiliated member for a
period of three years in order to create an Easton Lodge fund was soundly
defeated. The miners opposed it on grounds that they could not very well ask
members to contribute to education while their families were on the verge of
starvation. Jack Jones of the General and Municipal Workers' Union had a more
theoretical reason for his opposition. According to Lindeman, Jones proclaimed
the time had come for workers to turn their backs on "these youngsters who
go to Ruskin College for a few months to wear worker's clothes and then blossom
forth with halos and plus-fours demanding good jobs in the labor movement"(12)
As an educator, Lindeman found the debate on this
matter "deplorable." The real issue, i.e., "the essential
conflict between resident teaching and classes conducted, in the local
community," was hardly mentioned. Neither was the larger question of
education and its place in the modern labor movement What
had happened? According to Lindeman, the vote on the resolution had not been a
vote on education at all. It was instead an opportunity for the delegates to
embarrass their General Council whom they blamed for their recent failure with
the General Strike.(13)
Somewhat more promising were concurrent events on the
European continent--in Germany. Lindeman was influenced to a substantial degree
in his thinking about adult education by the worker education development that
was taking place after World War I at the Frankfurt Academy of Labor. With the
demise of the old monarchy and the birth of what would be an extremely fragile
new republic, Germans were struggling to find ways in which workers could
involve themselves in the task of rebuilding the nation.
One of the characteristics that drew Lindeman to the
Frankfurt Academy of Labor was its commitment to education as a tool for
national regeneration. The old world was not to be annihilated; it was to be reorganized.
In short, labor's intelligence was assumed to be more effective than its
capacity to use force.(14) This was encouraging to the
thoroughly non-Marxist Lindeman.
The Academy of Labor, though it was affiliated with
the University of Frankfurt-am-Main, was by no means in the business of
knowledge and scientific education for its own sake. Rather the central
question from which its curriculum started was: "How can our needs be met?
How can we meet our. situation?"
Universities and high schools might "give knowledge," but the
Academy "must learn how to arrange, review, criticize, coordinate knowledge,
not for purposes of a logical system but to the end that it is incorporated as
a living, healing power. The task is not to balance theory and practise but
rather to transform theory."(15)
An understanding of the program of the Academy of Labor and Lindeman's interpretation of it need to take into account the context of the times in which there was within the European labor movements a strong strain of dissatisfaction with the capitalist system. Lindeman noted that the average worker came to the Academy “believing thoroughly that the present economic order is about to decay and deserves nothing but condemnation.”(16)
The "anonymous and impersonal character" of
the capitalist view of economic life was cited by Lindeman as a further
environmental element affecting the philosophy of the Academy of Labor. The human
being "no longer stands at the center of the economic order. In his place
is an anonymous sack of capital with objective profit-motives. .." Amidst
these forces, the individual lost significance. "In discussing economic
events even . . " newspapers prefer to use the
same categories with which they speak of the weather." In this
environment, the aim of workers' education was “to bring into existence an
economic order in which man will again become in a ,
more perfect manner the sovereign of his fate.”(17)
Eduard Lindeman's most impressive work in workers'
education is represented by the monograph entitled Education Through Experience that he coauthored with Martha
Anderson in 1927. Published by The Workers' Education Bureau Press, Inc., this
piece was essentially a description and interpretation of the methods used by
the Academy of Labor at Frankfurt-am-Main in Germany. Miss Anderson's role was
primarily that of Lindeman's research assistant and translator. It was
characteristic of him that he allowed her coauthorship with her name listed
first on what would become an important document in the history of adult
education.
The authors examined the content, method, and
philosophy of workers' education as enunciated in the writings of Eugen Rosenstock,
Ernst Michel, and Wilhelm Sturmfels, among others. The analysis required close
collaboration between translator Anderson and Lindeman for as they said in the
"Preface," their intent was to convey "what Germans have said
expressed in the way Americans think."
Adult education was not for everyone--certainly not
for the person who "merely knows something." Knowledge derived from
experience, on the other hand, was the essence of adult education. The worker
would seek education "because he has reason for personal complaint."
It was the "field of action" that distinguished the educational
situation of the adult from that of the child. To the learning situation, the
adult brought "guilt, entanglement, want and pain," wrapped in
experiences of a sort still foreign to a child. A child's education flowed with
nature, whereas adult's was in conflict with nature as he or she strove for
self-mastery. "Adult education grows on the graves of those budding dreams
which have not ripened."(18)
As a Deweyan pragmatist, Lindeman was no more
inclined to offer a definition of workers' education than he was of adult
education. To him, such definitions if offered at an early stage tended to
obstruct, rather than advance, philosophical inquiry.(19)
So, in Education through Experience, one has to settle for more nebulous
statements.
What was Lindeman's concept of workers' education?
"Labor will come into its own when workers discover better motives for
production and finer meanings for life," Lindeman said in The Meaning
of Adult Education.(20). Workers' education was to be
distinctive, however, something “more than the transference of
liberal-bourgeois ideals to the working class.”(21)
What was the beginning of workers' education? It must
be "at the lowest boundary, the crossing of which signifies the first
intellectual independence of man." Wisdom was the "final fruit of
man's detachment from the yoke of matter." But workers' education could
not presume to offer wisdom. It must rather “begin by exploring the knowledge
of rights-the right which awakens in him the feeling of responsibility.”(22)
In The Meaning of Adult Education, Lindeman
briefly describes how a mature adult might study economics as part of an adult
education curriculum. This was an example drawn directly from his study of the methods
used at the Academy of Labor and in Education through Experience,
he provides a more detailed explanation.
The starting point would be the "immediate facts
of the worker's life, his position in industry, his role as a
wage-earner." Then, the study of both the economics of production and of
distribution would be undertaken so that economics could be approached as
reality, not theory.(23)
With the student presumably discovering economics as
a characteristic field of action for himself, he was
in a position to study economic questions. This would be done by reading from
standard texts.(24) "Systematic instruction
through co-ordination of discovered facts" would then be undertaken.
"Factual lectures" would follow only after problems had been
"recognized through the mutual work of the groups."(25)
This was essentially a three-step view of the
development of curriculum and instruction: (a) questions arise from the
students' situation, (b) supportive reading begins, and (c) systematic
instruction coordinates discovered facts.(26) This scheme for facilitating
adult learning under girds Lindeman's work in The Meaning of Adult
Education.
Lindeman's concept of the nonauthoritarian role of
the teacher in adult education also came in part from his study of the Academy
of Labor. Here, the "usual assembly of instructors" was being
replaced by "a true community of teachers, coming into being through
discussions, conferences and understanding. . . ." Lindeman noted
furthermore that teachers coming to the Academy from high schools and
universities found it “advisable to burn their college books and abjure their
earlier teaching habits." Teachers of adults had to demonstrate that they
were "collaborators.”(27)
Teachers at the Academy were conscious that they
could not “transmit education but. . . only awaken the
possibility for learning in students. . . . Somewhere knowledge as mere
information changes into knowledge as self-formed wisdom and the Academy wants
to discover this process [emphasis in original].”(28)
The Academy was neither a vocational school nor a
university--though it was noted that both institutions were needed. Instead,
the function of the Academy was to “educate the whole man as worker.”(29)
Parenthetically, it might be noted that the Academy,
supposedly a pioneering adult education institution, had a rather arbitrary
definition of adulthood as it accepted applicants for its programs. Students
under 25 or over 32 were “not welcome.”(30)
One of the more intriguing footnotes to adult education history is represented by Lindeman's introduction to the United States of a term that would much later become used--some might say overused-by adult educators. It was as he did research for his work with the Workers' Education Bureau that Lindeman came upon "Andragogik" as a reference to the method for teaching adults. In a quirky one-paragraph article published in the journal Workers' Education in 1926 Lindeman somewhat offhandedly Anglicized the word and offered it to North Americans.(31)
Lindeman with coauthor, Martha Anderson, used the
term again in Education through Experience. They called andragogy
"the true method of adult learning" . . . in which theory becomes fact. . . words become responsible acts, accountable deeds,
and the practical fact which arises out of necessity is illuminated by theory.”(32)
No one seems to have picked up on this new
terminology and "andragogy" went into limbo until Malcolm Knowles
resurrected it in 1968. Martha Anderson worked closely with Lindeman for five
years but she seems to have been less than attentive when Lindeman inserted the
term in the article they coauthored in 1927. When interviewed about her work
with Lindeman in 1984, just weeks before her death, she had this to say when asked
about their use of andragogy: “I don't even know what it means”(33)
In summary, Lindeman said, the curriculum and the teaching method of the Academy aimed to "(a) induce self-reflection, (b) give science a social setting, and (c) evoke responsible decisions." The student recognized that his intellectual attainments were socially significant “only when they emerge from the field of his necessary life. Life, and especially intellectual life, means responsibility. Responsible activity presupposes a responsible orientation and understanding of the situation which makes action necessary.”(34)
It was logical that Lindeman should find an outlet
for his research and development energies at the Workers' Education Bureau in
New York. The Bureau was established in 1921 as an effort to coordinate the
work of trade-union colleges.(35) It basically
functioned as a clearinghouse for information and as a source of guidance for
labor classes. It also published texts and syllabi for their use.(36)
Eduard Lindeman began as Research Director at the
Workers' Education Bureau on October 1, 1926, just after his return from
Europe. He had served as a member of the editorial board of the organization's Workers'
Bookshelf for five years and had served as instructor for a number of workers'
study classes. In the winter of 1925-1926 he had conducted a class on
"Technique of Workers' Education" at the New School of Social Research--a
class he repeated the next year. The Advisory Committee for Lindeman's research
department included Harry Overstreet, Alfred Dwight Sheffield, Hilda Smith,
George Soule, Florence Thorne, and John Troxell.(37) A
number of these people were, or would become, Lindeman's close friends.
The sailing was not all smooth for Lindeman at the
Bureau, however. Hard-charging, imaginative--and often with erratic work habits--Lindeman
may have run afoul of more conservative elements in the organization. An ambitious
proposal for improved teacher training was printed in Workers' Education in
November 1923, but in the same issue, an anonymous writer (undoubtedly the
editor of the journal) threw cold water on the project. He called for "a
more modest experiment. . . near the national
headquarters in New York City" than the "more comprehensive
program" set forth by Lindeman.
The writer went on to warn "those in charge of
workers' educational activities" that not too many workers would
"respond suddenly to actual systematic study." No other adult groups
in society cared much about study “and the adult worker is no exception to this
rule. If those in charge of our educational activities will take cognizance of
this fact, it will save them unnecessary disappointment.”(38)
A major project for the Bureau was undertaken by
Lindeman (with John Hader) when they examined the content of workers' education
in the United States and Britain in the 1920-1927 period. Also included were
some comparative notes about workers' education in Germany. Lindeman and Hader
issued their booklet under the title What Do
Workers Study? in 1929 but found it necessary to
apologize for the incompleteness of their work. They were among the first to
find that very low on the typical labor leader's agenda is a response to
inquiries from researchers.
Lindeman was every inch the pluralist so it is not all that difficult to predict that he thought workers' education ought to be very diverse in its organizational structure. Specifically, he had four types of workers' education in mind:
· Educational enterprises conducted under the auspices of organized labor, financed by trade unions funds and used to carry out the programs of those who control and support labor movement.
· Educational enterprises possessing a higher standard of excellence and a broader freedom organized within the labor movement but exercising equal control in its councils with other organized branches. This type would, presumably, consist almost solely of labor colleges.
· Educational enterprises which do not in any sense presume to represent existing labor principle and policy but which maintain an independent status for the main purpose of criticism, challenge, and experimentation.
·
Educational enterprises which include
representatives from organized labor, from organized agriculture, and from
intellectual groups promoting a type of education designed to create and
experiment with those values and principles which need to be realized if the workers
are to influence and guide those economic processes which have their setting in
government and the law; in other words, education for future political action.(39)
With these categories, Lindeman was running counter
to more doctrinaire proposals of what workers' education should be.
Specifically, he was reacting against what he observed as a tendency to
"classify workers' education according to 'good' and 'bad'
categories" based on "preconceptions and biases."(40)
Propagandistic workers' education of the
"right" or "left" in objectives was cited as one of the
most obvious of these. Some, for example, did not consider any educational
effort to be part of workers' education unless it expressly affirmed a "revolutionary
purpose." Others discounted all workers' education except that conducted
under the auspices of organized labor--a stance thought lamentable by Lindeman
and Hader.(41)
In contrast, Lindeman urged toleration of all of
multiple educational enterprises and their relationships. In return, he said,
the labor movement might actually move "resolutely and intelligently
toward a changing social order in which enlightened workers and learners could
find new meanings and new motivations for their values." If there were problems in such a diverse set of approaches, no
matter. They would "gradually be absorbed by our enthusiasms."(42)
Lindeman had little patience with long discussions
about the organization and control of workers' education. He thought the focus should
instead be on education itself. "Education, once its light begins to shine,
illuminates all of life's values; those who would reduce its ministrations to a
single interest or value will in the end succeed only in reducing education to
stereotyped training or propaganda."(43)
What was Eduard Lindeman's chief contribution to the workers' education movement? In brief, it was a. proposed philosophical base rooted in the pragmatism of John Dewey and in the tradition of Nikolai Grundtvig. (Lindeman's views of adult education were also influenced by his understanding of Ralph Waldo Emerson, but this aspect of his thought occurred largely after the peak of his interest in workers' education.) Lindeman also tried to help the workers' education movement find its situational and operational bearings. In neither of these endeavors was he notably successful. Workers' education of the variety tried in the 1920s did not root well in the United States.
Perhaps a better question would be: What did the
workers' education movement contribute to Eduard Lindeman's thinking? With his
study of the European roots of workers' education, Lindeman was able to test
and refine his philosophical views about adult education. This was an exercise
that bore fruits to benefit all adult learners in America.
To his work in workers' education, Lindeman applied his axiom that adult education must start with the situation of the learner. "The intelligent worker does not study merely to adjust himself to industry; he proposes also to call forth from industry some adjustments on behalf of his enlarging and evolving needs, desires, and aspirations."(44)
This was not a view looked upon with much
understanding or sympathy by employers in the 1920s--or unhappily by very many
leaders of industry or government today. With its emphasis on development of
what is called "human capital," and its preoccupation with training
for "improved productivity," much of what passes for workers'
education in present day industrial America runs directly counter to Eduard
Lindeman's vision.
NOTES
1. Eduard C. Lindeman, The
Meaning of Adult Education (Montreal: Harvest House, Ltd., 1961), 27.
(Original work published New York: New Republic, Inc., 1926)
2. Mary P. Follett, Creative Experience (New
York: Longmans, Green and Co., 1924), 191.
3. Horace M. Kallen, Education, the
Machine, and the Worker (New York: New Republic, Inc., 1925), viii-x.
4. Everett Dean Martin, The Meaning of a Liberal Education (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1926), 2-3.
5. Harry A. Overstreet and Bonaro W. Overstreet, Leaders for Adult Education (New York: American Association for Adult Education, n.d.), 108-9.
6. Lindeman, "Labor's Outlook to Life," review of The Philosophy of Labor, by C. Delisle Burns, New Republic 48 (25 August 1926): 22.
7. Author's interview with John Hader (21 May 1981).
8. David W. Stewart, Adult Learning in America: Eduard Lindeman and His Agenda for Lifelong Education (Malabar, Fla.: Robert E. Krieger, 1987), 83.
9. Ibid.
10. Lindeman, "The British Trades Union Congress and Workers' Education," Workers' Education 4 (November 1926): 13.
11. Ibid.
12. Ibid., 13-14.
13. Ibid., 14.
14. Lindeman (with Martha Anderson), Education through Experience: An Interpretation of the Methods of the Academy of Labor, Frankfurt-am-Main, Germany. Monograph No.1, Workers' Education Research Series (New York: Workers' Education Bureau Press, Inc., 1927), 5.
15. Ibid., 12.
16. Ibid., 36.
17. Ibid., 37.
18. Ibid., 3.
19. Stewart, Adult Learning, 12.
20. Lindeman, The Meaning, 27.
21. Lindeman, Education through Experience, 13.
22. Ibid., 6.
23. Ibid., 23.
24. Ibid.
25. Ibid., 31.
26. Ibid.
27. Ibid., 25.
28. Ibid., 34-35.
29. Ibid., 40.
30. Ibid., 28.
31. Lindeman, "Andragogik: The Method of Teaching Adults," Workers' Education 4 (November 1926): 38.
32. Lindeman, Education through Experience, 2-3.
33. Stewart, Adult Learning, 108-9.
34. Lindeman, Education through Experience, 40.
35. Margaret T. Hodgen, Workers' Education in England and the United States (New York: E. P. Dutton and Co., 1925), 248.
36. Kallen, Education, xii-xiii.
37. "The Research Department of the Workers' Education Bureau," Workers' Education 4 (November 1926): 39-41.
38. Editorial comments, Workers' Education 1 (November 1923): 5.
39. Lindeman, Relation of Workers' Education to the Labor Movement (New York: Workers' Education Bureau Press, Inc., 1928), 70.
40. Lindeman (with John Hader), What Do Workers Study? Monograph No.2, Workers' Education Research Series (New York: Workers' Education Bureau Press, Inc., 1929), 39-40.
41. Ibid.
42. Lindeman, Relation of Workers' Education, 71.
43. Ibid.
44. Lindeman, "Why the American Labors,"
(n.d.) Adult Learning, 193.
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