“We should, however, give to our children a vision of the possibilities which lie ahead and endeavor to enlist their loyalties and enthusiasms in the realization of the vision.”
– George Counts, Dare the School Build a New Social Order?
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As I’ve just finished immersing myself in John Gatto’s powerful arguments for unschooling – the crux of which is that compulsory education is not to be seen as a lever of change, but as a fundamental imposition – I thought it was time to revisit what is perhaps the second most powerful (behind Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed) call for educational social reconstruction that I’ve ever read: George Counts’s 1932 pamphlet “Dare the School Build a New Social Order?” While I’d read this years ago, I’d never written about it, while I’ve written at least two or three times about Freire. It was time.

Although it’s not nearly as long as Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Counts’s work is powerful, lucid, beautifully written, and direct. He begins by outlining the stakes that the country faces, the tremendous and grinding economic deprivation of the Great Depression. Then he moves on to chastising teachers, on the one hand, for their hitherto passive political role, and – famously, scandalously – the “child-centered” educational progressives who prioritize the individual comfort and security of their positions (and their children’s) over meaningful political engagement and care for the less privileged:
“The weakness of Progressive Education thus lies in the fact that it has elaborated no theory of social welfare, unless it be that of anarchy or extreme individualism. In this, of course, it is but reflecting the viewpoint of the members of the liberal-minded upper middle class who send their children to the Progressive schools.”
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