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Civilization-Building and the Modernization Process: A Framework for the Reinterpretation of the History of Education

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 February 2017

R. Freeman Butts
R. Freeman Butts*
Affiliation:
Teachers College, Columbia University
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Extract

If I may give a personal turn to Karl Jasper's cosmic phrase, the year 1959 marked an “axial year” in my thinking about the history of education. It was in that year that I came back to Teachers College from a period of educational service in India. I had taken leave from the teaching of the history of education to take part in one of the new technical assistance programs being launched by AID in key spots around the world. To put it briefly: I will never be the same. The axis of my academic interests and professional concerns had been basically altered. No one who has not lived, worked, and grappled with the staggering problems of a people seeking to become modern yet faced with the mountainous forces of tradition can fully know what I mean. This is not only a phenomenon historic in its present importance; it is a part of a long historical process.

Type
The Uses of History of Education I
Information
History of Education Quarterly , Volume 7 , Issue 2 , Summer 1967 , pp. 147 - 174
Copyright
Copyright © 1967 by New York University 

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References

Notes

1. The Role of the University in Promoting Change (Ithaca: Cornell University, 1962).Google Scholar

2. Vann Woodward, C., “The Age of Reinterpretation,” American Historical Review, LXVI (October 1960), 13.Google Scholar

3. For wide-ranging examples see Cahnman, Werner J. and Boskoff, Alvin (eds.), Sociology and History; Theory and Research (New York: Free Press of Glencoe, Inc., 1964); and Saveth, Edward N. (ed.), American History and the Social Sciences (New York: Free Press of Glencoe, Inc., 1964).Google Scholar

4. Stuart Hughes, H., “The Historian and the Social Scientist,” American Historical Review, LXVI (October 1960), 26.Google Scholar

5. Manuel, Frank E. Shapes of Philosophical History (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1965), p. 4.Google Scholar

6. Recent examples include such authors as: Frankfort, Henri Gordon Childe, V. Grahame, J. Clark, D., Steward, Julian H., Braidwood, Robert J., Willey, Gordon R., Adams, Robert McC., Piggott, Stuart, Kroeber, Alfred L., Redfield, Robert, Godfrey, and Wilson, Monica, Singer, Milton, Bagby, Philip, Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre, Evans-Pritchard, E. E., Bidney, David, Kluckhohn, Clyde, Mead, Margaret, Fairbank, John K., Reischauer, Edwin O., Muller, Herbert J., Coulborn, Rushton, Palmer, R. R., and McNeil, William H. Google Scholar

7. Grahame, J. Clark, D., “Archeological Theories and Interpretations: Old World,” Anthropology Today: Selections, Tax, Sol (ed.) (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962), p. 111.Google Scholar

8. Adams, Robert McC. The Evolution of Urban Society: Early Mesopotamia and Prehistoric Mexico (Chicago: Aldine Publishing Co., 1966), pp. 1–2.Google Scholar

9. Ibid., p. 7.Google Scholar

10. Ibid., p. 12.Google Scholar

11. Piggott, Stuart Ancient Europe from the Beginnings of Agriculture to Classical Antiquity; a Survey (Chicago: Aldine Publishing Co., 1965), pp. 16–17.Google Scholar

12. Grahame, J. Clark, D., World Prehistory; an Outline (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1965), p. 256.Google Scholar

13. Recent examples: in sociology, Talcott Parsons, Edward A. Shils, Daniel Lerner, Seymour M. Lipset, Marion J. Levy, Jr., S. N. Eisenstadt, Robert K. Merton, Gideon Sjoberg, and Leonard Reissman; in political science, Gabriel A. Almond, James S. Coleman, G. Bingham Powell, Jr., David E. Apter, Lucian W. Pye, Manfred Halpern, Dankwart A. Rustow, Myron Weiner, George I. Blanksten, Ralph Braibanti, Leonard Binder, A. F. K. Organski, Howard Wriggins, Joseph LaPalombara, Fred Riggs, Bertram Gross, Ithiel de Sola Pool, and Kalmen Silvert; in economics, Max F. Millikan, Walt W. Rostow, Wilfred Malenbaum, W. Arthur Lewis, Frederick Harbison, Charles A. Myers, Bert F. Hoselitz, Joseph J. Spengler, Eugene Staley, Albert O. Hirschman, Everett E. Hagen, Paul N. Rosenstein-Rodan, Simon Kuznets, and Norton S. Ginsburg; in psychology, David C. McClelland, Alex Inkeles, Leonard W. Doob, Hadley Cantril, and James S. Coleman; and in history, Rupert Emerson, Crane Brinton, Robert R. Palmer, Louis Hartz, and Cyril E. Black.Google Scholar

14. For example, Lucian Pye in the March 1965 Annals of the American Academy of Social and Political Science argued that the recently fashionable empirical doctrine of cultural relativism has left social scientists as a class “grossly unprepared for the demands of post war history” for two reasons. They were so skeptical about the inevitability or desirability of the old-fashioned doctrine of progress that they were also skeptical about the concept of “development” as possibly carrying forward the idea of progress under new dress. And they were so committed to egalitarian theories of cultural relativism that they did not wish to appear to imply that some societies were more “advanced” or “superior” to others. What they overlooked, according to Pye, was that “their doctrines could be cruelly degrading precisely to those to whom it was intended to give respectability. For, when crudely put, the concept of cultural relativism could be read to mean that it was in the nature of some societies to be rich and powerful and for others to be poor and ineffectual. The doctrine could easily be misunderstood as a balm to the poor to make it possible for them to rationalize their lot” (p.3). Pye even argued that a gradual movement toward democracy may be the only way that the new states can achieve both material welfare and political stability. See also Steward, Julian H. Theory of Culture Change (Urbana, Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 1963), chap. 1; George G. Iggers, “The Idea of Progress: A Critical Reassessment,” American Historical Review, LXXI, no. 1 (October 1965), 1-17; and David Bidney, “The Concept of Value in Modern Anthropology,” Anthropology Today: Selections, Sol Tax (ed.) (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962).Google Scholar

15. Black, C. E. The Dynamics of Modernization: A Study in Comparative History (New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1966), p. 4.Google Scholar

16. Ibid., p. 7.Google Scholar

17. Ibid., p. 68.Google Scholar

18. Almond, Gabriel A. and Bingham Powell, G. Jr., Comparative Politics: A Developmental Approach (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1966). pp. 24–25.Google Scholar

19. Ibid., pp. 331-32.Google Scholar

20. Levy, Marion J. Jr., Modernization and the Structure of Societies; a Setting for International Affairs, 2 vols. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1966).Google Scholar

21. Ibid., I, 31.Google Scholar

22. Actually, the term “civilization-building” is redundant, for I take the term civilization literally to mean the making of a “civil” or urban way of life. But I use “civilization-building” as a foil to a popular term of recent years, “nation-building.”Google Scholar

23. See, for example, Cahnman and Boskoff, op. cit., pp. 537-99; and Kenneth V. Lottich, “Some Distinctions Between Culture and Civilization as Displayed in Sociological Literature,” Social Forces, XXVIII, no. 4 (March 1950), 240-50.Google Scholar

24. For a pinpointing of particular towns and parishes of England where technological innovation took place, see Margaret Hodgen, Change and History, Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research (New York, 1952).Google Scholar

25. One of the many criticisms that could be made of Arnold J. Toynbee's monumental ten volume analysis of 21 civilizations in A Study of History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1934-1959), is that he paid so little attention to education. The post hoc effort to impose Toynbee's scheme on the history of education was singularly unenlightening; see Edward D. Myers, Education in the Perspective of History (New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1960).Google Scholar