“Liberalism in its Original Sense”: Milton Friedman in Conversation with Progressive
Education
Jacob Fay
Harvard Graduate School of Education
Society of U.S. Intellectual History Conference, November 1, 2013
Please do not cite or circulate without author’s permission.
In a single narrative of school reform, John Dewey and Milton Friedman are
rarely, if at all, juxtaposed. This is an arresting thought. On the one hand, Dewey is
ubiquitous in the vast majority of scholarship about the progressive education movement.
On the other hand, historians of education describe Friedman—even his early writings
from the 1950s—as the originator of the school choice movement that gained traction in
the 1980s.1 But Friedman can also be seen as part of the backlash against progressive
education that marked the late 1940s through the 1960s. This conflict is typically
portrayed as an attack on progressive pedagogy.2 While not incorrect, this misses a
profound aspect of the midcentury criticism of progressive education: its part in a broader
struggle over the meaning of American liberalism. Friedman certainly participated in that
broader struggle yet, with few exceptions, he is absent from historical scholarship about
progressive education in the 1950s.3
Easily lost amidst the talk of child-centered schools, individual growth, and
education for democracy is the way educational progressives sought to reframe American
political values through education in first half of the twentieth century. Dewey’s
Democracy and Education, perhaps the definitive text of progressive education,
exemplified this reframing project. For Dewey, human experience was inextricably social
and was defined by a constant of growth and development. Experience was also, to some
extent, teleological; it aimed for ever-greater freedom. Because growth happened in a
1
For a history of school choice, see Diane Ravitch, The Death and Life of the Great American School
System: How Testing and Choice are Undermining Education (New York: Basic Books, 2010), 113–148.
2
See Lawrence Cremin, The Transformation of the School: Progressivism in American Education, 18761957 (New York: Vintage Books, 1961); Patricia Graham, Progressive Education: From Aracady to
Academe (New York: Teachers College Press, 1967); Diane Ravitch, The Troubled Crusade: American
Education, 1945-1980 (New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1983); David Tyack, One Best System: A History of
American Urban Education (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974).
3
The list of histories of progressive education that contain no mention to Friedman is extensive. For one in
which he is considered, albeit briefly, see Andrew Hartman, Education and The Cold War: The Battle for
the American School (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2008).
1 social context, the expansion of freedom, Dewey thought, was inextricably linked to
forms of social organization. Some forms of social organization encouraged the
expansion of freedom while others, by their nature, restricted it. For Dewey, democracy
was the form of social organization most characterized by a greater diversity of interests
and “freer interaction between social groups.”4 In this way, democracy was liberatory; its
very qualities created an ever-expanding and changing set of shared purposes between
individuals that broke down “barriers of class, race and national territory which kept men
from perceiving the full import of their activity.”5
Dewey believed that liberalism had played a crucial part in bringing human
history to the point of democracy, but he wondered what role, if any, liberalism still had
in contemporary society. To answer that question, Dewey examined the evolution of
liberalism, beginning with John Locke’s illumination of a set of rights—life, liberty and
property—that individuals held prior to any sort of political association. Freedom, on the
Lockean account, was the exercise of these rights free from the constraints of other
individuals or groups. Dewey pointed out how this form of liberalism had been
instrumental in “emancipating the individual from the restrictions imposed on them by
the inherited form of social organization.”6 But the Lockean liberal project, he continued,
had not given enough consideration to the importance of social organization in promoting
individual freedom. Through their criticism and analysis, early liberals had released
important forces from their constraints, but they had not given these forces any direction.
4
John Dewey, Democracy and Education (New York: MacMillan and Co., 1916), 100.
Ibid, 101.
6
John Dewey, “Liberalism and Social Action,” in The Later Works: 1925-1953, Vol. 11: 1935-1937, ed. Jo
Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1987), 23.
5
2 Dewey concluded that Lockean liberalism was not applicable to the social
organization of democracy. For one thing, Lockean liberalism was overly individualistic
to the extent that it set the individual in opposition to “organized social action.”7 Using
the rapid growth of free-market capitalism as an example, Dewey argued that the
emphasis on individual freedoms actually had the inverse effect of limiting individual
freedoms for the majority of people in society. Building from that point, Dewey claimed
that Lockean liberalism assumed that the individual possession of rights was enough to
guarantee freedom. Again, Dewey argued that the example of industrial capitalism
demonstrated otherwise. The possession of rights was a necessary but not sufficient
premise, because it did not account for how rights were experienced. The effective
exercise of rights was irrevocably connected to the form of social organization. For
liberalism to continue to be relevant to modern society, it had to recognize the
relationship between the individual and society and it had to account for, in particular,
democratic social organization.
For liberalism to cohere with democracy, it had to address how freedom, in
Dewey’s words, “shall be fed, sustained and directed.” 8 This meant a number of
adjustments to the working conception of liberalism. Freedom was, first and foremost
always a social question, not an individual one. For the liberties that any
individual actually has depends on the distribution of powers or liberties
that exists, and this distribution is identical with actual social
arrangements, legal and political—and, at the present time, economic, in a
peculiarly important way.9
7
Ibid, 7.
Ibid, 25.
9
John Dewey, “Liberty and Social Control,” in The Later Works: 1925-1953, Vol. 11: 1935-1937, ed. Jo
Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1987), 362.
8
3 The form of social organization determined the degree of individual freedom in society.
Dewey also imbued liberty with a positive quality; as he put it, liberty was the “effective
power to do specific things.”10 Freedom was not simply possessed it was experienced.
While both of these claims may have been shocking to a Lockean liberal, it was the way
that Dewey interpreted these claims that truly highlighted what he thought was a
paradigm shift in liberalism. He suggested that a democratic state might be justified in
limiting the individual powers or rights central to Lockean liberalism if the goal of such a
limit was greater social efficiency, which Dewey meant as greater effective freedom to
all.11 Moreover, this form of social control was something to which Dewey argued
liberalism was committed12—it liberated individuals through the development of their
capacity for freedom. Thus, social change, he wrote, “has to be so controlled that it
will move to some end in accordance with the principles of life, since life itself is
development.”13
It was precisely Dewey’s reinterpretation of liberalism that Friedman rejected. For
Friedman, the individual was at the core of liberalism, and this fact entailed a sharp
division between the individual and society. “To the free man,” he claimed, “the country
is the collection of individuals who compose it, not something over and above them.”14
For Friedman, there was no meaningful collective sense of freedom, no social
10
Dewey, “Liberty and Social Control,” 360.
John Dewey, “Force and Coercion,” in The Middle Works: 1899-1924, Vol. 10: 1916-1917, ed. Jo Ann
Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1980), 244–251.
12
Dewey suggested that liberalism supported social control through “intelligent action” rather than
indoctrination. Intelligent action, as opposed to indoctrination, was a process whereby knowledge was
acquired without “impregnating the individual with some final philosophy”; but rather “by enabling him to
so understand existing conditions that an attitude of intelligent action will follow from social
understanding.” See John Dewey, “The Challenge of Democracy to Education,” in The Later Works: 19251953, Vol. 11: 1935-1937, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1987),
183.
13
Dewey, “Liberty and Social Action,” 41.
14
Milton Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2002 [1962]), 1–
2.
11
4 organization that guaranteed freedom. The proper name for the political and economic
viewpoint of the free man, Friedman thought, was liberalism. But the term as understood
by Dewey and other progressives had, in Friedman’s view, been so grossly misused in the
United States that it had become unrecognizable. Worse, he thought, the perpetrators of
this confusion had succeeded in positioning supporters of traditional liberalism as
conservatives, a label he rejected in his 1962 work Capitalism and Freedom. Thus, he
explained:
Perhaps because of my reluctance to surrender the term to proponents of
measures that would destroy liberty, partly because I cannot find a better
alternative, I shall resolve these difficulties by using the word liberalism in
its original sense—as the doctrines pertaining to a free man.15
Though articulated in greater detail in 1962, Friedman’s commitment to the form
of liberalism that Dewey had spurned was already present in an article entitled “The Role
of Government in Education” that he published during the height of the criticism of
progressive education. The ideal society guiding Friedman’s work in that article was “a
society that takes freedom of the individual, or more realistically the family, as its
ultimate objective, and seeks to further this objective by relying primarily on voluntary
exchange among individuals for the organization of economic activity.” 16 He also
stipulated that in such an economy, the primary role of government was solely to
“preserve the rules of the game by enforcing contracts, preventing coercion, and keeping
markets free.”17 By defining these political and economic ends, Friedman instituted a role
reversal. Dewey—and many other progressives—had used education as a means to
reframe political values, but Friedman used political values to reframe education.
15
Ibid, 6.
Milton Friedman, “The Role of Government in Education,” in Economics and the Public Interest, ed.
Robert A. Solo (Rutgers: Rutgers University Press, 1955), 123–124.
17
Ibid, 123.
16
5 To that end, Friedman argued that in a free society government had a general
interest in funding education, but no more. Interestingly, he justified the state’s role in
funding education on the existence of a neighborhood effect—a distinctly social effect.
As he explained it, “the gain from the education of a child accrues not only to the child or
to his parents but to other members of society; the education of my child contributes to
other people’s welfare by promoting a stable and democratic society.”18 Friedman’s
neighborhood effect was a certainly a gloss, but it represented how much of a knotty
problem education was for him. Liberalism, throughout its history, had spoken very
clearly about politics and economics, but it was arguably less clear on education.
Moreover, Locke, Bentham, Mill, or any of the early liberals, did not write in an age of
universal education. Under Dewey’s stewardship, education had taken an important, if
not primary, place in liberal theory. Thus, defining an education for a liberal society was
an important project for Friedman. But he could not simply ignore the desirable social
impact of education.
He could, however, downplay education’s social significance. The neighborhood
effect, he argued, had limited implication. He demonstrated that he could comfortably
claim that an educated citizenry was better than an uneducated citizenry, while also
consistently holding that the type of education was of less importance. Given a society
that valued individual freedom, the choice about what education to pursue, Freidman
argued, should be left up to individuals. The state had no role to play in mandating
particular schools or administering them. A free society, for that matter, should not even
countenance a common educational purpose. Friedman rejected the argument that there
was a neighborhood effect in providing a common core of national values that would
18
Ibid, 125.
6 contribute to a sense of social cohesion. On his account, what was important about
education from a social perspective was that everyone had some education, not that they
had the same kind or same amount.
The significance of Friedman’s diminution of education’s social role should not
be understated. Juxtaposing him with Dewey and other progressives highlights this key
aspect of Friedman’s work. For Dewey, education was essential to the sustenance of
democracy. For Friedman, it was essential that education did not get in the way of
freedom. This logic applied to liberalism as well. Liberty was not a quality to be
developed in individuals through any social process; rather it was a quality to be
respected as inherent to individuals.
Friedman’s attempt to transform schools to match his ideal of liberalism fit with
other major arguments against progressive education in the 1950s. Arthur Bestor, one of
the most widely read midcentury critics of progressive education, certainly situated his
argument in the broader debate about liberalism. He argued that schools had a single
purpose: to teach people how to think. By learning how to think, individuals became free.
He wrote:
To make himself truly free, a man must break the intellectual chains that
keep him a serf by binding him to his parish, by binding him to his narrow
workaday tasks, by binding him to accept the authority of those placed
over him in matters temporal and spiritual. A liberal education frees a man
by enlarging and disciplining his powers.19
Bestor was disgusted with progressive education. He believed that it diminished students’
ability to think as individuals and thereby denied many citizens their ability to fully
19
Arthur Bestor, Educational Wastelands: The Retreat from Learning in Our Public Schools, 2nd Ed.
(Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1985), 22.
7 exercise the capacity to be free. He took it as his personal calling to drive progressive
practices out of schools entirely.
Bestor was also part of a growing network of intellectuals that included Friedman.
Bestor helped found the Council for Basic Education, an organization devoted to
restoring basic values to American education. Interestingly, the Volker Fund provided the
Council for Basic Education with start-up capital and also covered the expenses Milton
Friedman incurred travelling to meetings of an international think tank dedicated to
promoting individual freedom, the Mount Pelerin Society.20 Thus, philanthropic channels
such as the Volker Fund suggest indirect ways in which ideological networks were
constructed during the 1950s that linked similarly minded projects across different social
spheres.
Among Bestor’s colleagues on the council was Mortimer Smith, another prolific
critic of progressive education. Smith also had an absolute faith in the power of the
individual. He believed that the most creative periods of human history took place when
society was in a dynamic state, something with which Dewey would have wholeheartedly
agreed. But, in a fashion paralleling Friedman, Smith maintained that the most dynamic
societies were minimally organized; in them, individuals freed from all arbitrary
constraints and able to work free from social influence were the force for change and
progress. “The healthiest society is but a step removed from anarchy,” he wrote, “a
society bound together by the minimum of rules necessary to preserve order and maintain
justice.”21
20
For a thorough treatment of the development of the Mount Pelerin Society and the Volker Fund’s role in
the process, see Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free Markets since the Depression
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012).
21
Mortimer Smith, And Madly Teach (Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, 1949), 86.
8 The problem, as Smith saw it, was that progressive education encouraged the
replacement of the importance of the individual with the importance of the social.
Through Dewey’s philosophy, other progressives’ misinterpretations of Dewey’s
philosophy, and the possibility, as Smith saw it, that through progressive public education
the state would become more intrusive, the individual was slowly being subsumed into
collective and was in danger of being irretrievably lost. He called on parents to assert
their interests against the threat to individual freedom. Perhaps, he hoped, the symbolic
importance of an individual parent sounding the alarm would remind Americans of the
importance of individual freedom.22
Juxtaposing Dewey and Friedman’s contrasting conceptions of liberalism reveal
the ways in which these two thinkers, along with Bestor and Smith, sought to define
American liberalism. That we have treated them so separately is a mistake. It has
contributed to an incomplete view of the midcentury criticism of progressive education,
and perhaps of broader educational history in general. Dewey’s progressive education
was in decline as Friedman began writing. Though the shift was not explicitly evident in
the years following the collapse of educational progressivism, the values Friedman
emphasized gained ground in American education and still have salience today. To
explain that story, we often look to the 1980s, when Friedman’s work, among others,
became popular. But the explanation might actually lie in the struggles of the 1950s,
when, ultimately, Dewey’s democratic vision of liberalism was rejected.
22
Mortimer Smith, The Diminished Mind: A Study of Planned Mediocrity in our Public Schools (Chicago,
IL: Henry Regnery Company, 1954), 141.
9