Beineke, John A. And There Were Giants in the Land: The life of William Heard Kilpatrick. New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 1998.
Beineke’s biography generously portrays Kilpatrick as instrumental in the practical manifestations of the progressive education movement of the mid 20th century. Establishing WHK’s early history in White Plains, Georgia, the biography builds from there rather like a tree, a great white oak I should think, trunking up and branching out into chosen arteries of importance. These include: Kilpatrick’s relationship with his Baptist minister father; his tenure as student and then teacher/interim President at Mercer University in Macon, GA; his relationships with his wives and daughter; his tenure at Columbia’s Teachers College; his travels, lectures, and Conferences; his relationship with the philosophies of mentor John Dewey; his politics, his education philosophy, and how the former informed the latter.
Clearly a champion of progressive education, Beineke characterizes WHK as a charismatic, ambitious, fiercely thoughtful man never at peace, never feeling quite good enough. Wars, however, raged around him as much as within him. WHK grew up in a post-Civil War, Reconstruction South. He lived through WWI, WWII, and upon his death in 1965, “His life had spanned more than half the life of the nation, and half of its presidencies–he had lived during the administrations of eighteen presidents” (396), many of whom he’d met. His influence on American education was substantial.
Beineke’s biography focuses on several key areas of conflict within WHK’s life which ended up shaping his influence and his sense of self greatly: his (mostly inward) relationship with his father, his confrontation against heresy charges at Mercer University, and his contentious relationship with Dean William Russell at Teachers College, who orchestrated WHK’s ouster from his beloved Teachers College in 1938. Woven throughout the telling of these stories are overviews of Kilpatrick’s positions and ideas, most lastingly his “project method” of education, based on Dewey’s notion of the “complete act of thought” (139).
This work’s usefulness for my studies can not be overstated. Firstly, I’ve come to an understanding of my discipline’s historical hilly journey between abolitionist calls and reformist calls as an echo of this much larger conversation. Beineke writes, “This essential conflict between the primacy of subject matter and the primacy of the child in the educational process would remain the point of contention between essentialists and progressives throughout the century” (140). This same dichotomy shapes Sid Dobrin’s abolitionist argument in his Postcomposition, although Dobrin, in fully transhumanist fashion, takes the human out of composition by shifting the term “subject” to mean, well, not a subject as in something one teaches, like Reading Writing & Arithmetic, but someone who is taught, like a student. Not “student” or “person”… “subject.” It’s a crafty rhetorical move meant to encourage acceptance of Writing/Composition as a discipline by “the essentialists.” Coming to view Dobrin’s abolitionist call via the lens of the struggle between progressivism and essentialism is useful as inspiration for seeking approaches to teaching composition that circumvent or resist this dichotomy. I’ve also come to understand more clearly the progressive roots of our discipline and the relationship between theory and practice at its heart.
Here are some texts that would be useful to explore to further this understanding:
*WHK’s Foundations of Method, Education for a Changing Civilization, and Remaking the Curriculum
*Dewey’s My Pedagogic Creed, Education and Democracy, Experience and Education
Some limitations of this biography:
Most glaringly is the virtual absence of discussion regarding the influence of “the woman issue” on WHK and his philosophy. The better part of a chapter is dedicated to “the race issue” via “Race, Religion, and the South” (354). Given that WHK came from a family of slaveholders, maintained a strong “southern pride,” and lived through the Civil Rights era, it makes sense to dedicate a substantial discussion to WHK’s treatment of race and race relations given his progressive philosophy and appreciation of democracy. Beineke writes, “Ultimately, Kilpatrick’s record on interracial relations, including his numerous speeches and writings, may be seen as testimony to the degree to which cultural biases could be overcome and horizons expanded through education and intellectual effort. At the same time, his failure to act at a crucial point in the history of the civil rights movement would be a chastening reminder as to the persistence of cultural limitations” (emphasis mine, 388). Even this assessment is fallacious, as it ignores WHK’s own upbringing, his own early education (which was not a progressive one, clearly), as that which formed WHK’s basic emotional understandings and ties to the world. The italicized statement conflates “education” with “life,” and there’s more to life than learning (Experience and Education). To label WHK’s life a kind of informal “progressive education” does disservice to both philosopher and philosophy; if a philosopher must practice what he preaches and “succeed” in order for that theory to be taken seriously, there can be no “progress.”
That said… Although race relations and emerging civil rights wars in America challenged WHK given his emotional attachments to the South and inform the way we understand and respect WHK’s positions and ideas, the suffragist movement and emerging women’s rights struggles in America must also have had a direct and lasting influence on WHK. His personal life was constantly shaped by the influence of women–his wives, his daughter–and his professional life, too, as WHK’s lifetime saw a furthering of the “feminization” of teaching as a profession (see “Feminism’s Real First Wave Was America’s Early Teachers” in The Nation).
Although Beineke mentions, occasionally, WHK’s relationships with women in his field and in his personal life, there is no substantial discussion of the potential influence of women and feminism on his philosophy and his professional life.
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