| This dissertation is an attempt to elucidate the rise, extension, and demise of the liberal progressive character education movement in public schools, Sunday schools, and the Y.M.C.A. between World War I and World War II. Liberals were responding to a national conservative progressive movement that was devoted to the inculcation of static morality codes and trait actions deemed necessary for cultural survival. Troubled by the moral trajectory of the inter-war period, conservatives saw young people as a threat to the social order and thus sanctioned carefully prescribed approaches.;Liberal progressive character education, developed within the confluence of liberal religion and liberal progressive education, posed an alternative to this conservative scheme. Liberals were optimistic about youth and claimed that rebellious young people were actually developing a new "modern" moral sensibility. Anchored by the insights of education and religious education professors at Teachers College/Union Theological Seminary and the University of Chicago/University of Chicago Divinity School, this movement attempted to utilize the scientific and democratic impulses of liberal progressivism in the reshaping of character education. The liberal religious notion of the democratic Kingdom of God served as the metaphor for the new approach, and it consisted in two ideals: procedural democracy, marked by collaborative student problem-solving, and descriptive democracy, characterized by the attempt to enlist students in securing social justice. Scientific and democratic character education methods were designed to provide for the continual evolution of moral ideals, thus delineating the boundaries of a "modern" morality. However, the success of such a methodological model depended on widespread social participation in moral decision making, and this required efforts to eradicate social divisions on the basis of class, race, religion, gender, and nation.;Although liberals were moderately successful in exporting their ideals, the movement eventually collapsed both because of external forces (the rise of Protestant neo-orthodoxy) and internal tensions fostered by the Depression. Utilizing the primary source writings of movement leaders and archival materials from the Religious Education Association and Y.M.C.A., this dissertation examines the course of this movement which, despite its brevity, served as an important alternative to conservative character education between the wars. |
