C. Wright Mills on Public Education BY FAUSTZNE C. JONES

It is the charge of C. Wright Mills that public education has failed abysmally in its task of educating the majority of American youth for the role of in- telligent, active participants in a democratic society, or for any meaningful political role. Mills holds that public education in America has become just another mass medium to serve the ends of the power structure. The schools have become mere occupational and social elevators, and are timid politically at all levels.’ This institutional design has produced grossly ill-equipped people, who lack the know-how, the moral commitment, and the spirit to deal adequately with a power structure which is as astute, or more astute, than has been the case in American society heretofore.

Mills’ charge is that the failure of public education has assisted the power structure because education is not relevant - i.e., it has not provided the majority of the populace with up-to-date knowledge, or with a courageous moral fiber which could be used by them to combat the works of the power structure. Further, public education has failed to develop in its products a disciplined intelligence which could be applied to the solution of today’s social problems. Public schools still emphasize social and political concepts which were valid under the old expectations of a stable social system, and which fail to meet the needs of new and changing social conditions.

For example, while it is doubtlessly important to keep alive the “Spirit of ’76” as symbolic of the beginning of a new system of government dedicated to liberty and democracy, and to respect George Washington as an exemplar of the new democratic way of life, these symbolic images and others like them are inadequate for the industrial and technological twentieth century, 1971. Yet teachers and textbooks dwell on concepts and images of this type. Deserving as the concepts are, and heroic as these men were, they operated in a social context which has changed enormously as far as this nation is concerned. Certainly knowledge about them is desirable for perspective and for continuity between our age and all that preceded it, but a disproportionate amount of time is devoted to their study to the exclusion of concepts and images which would better equip the young to meet the problems and cope with the issues today.

Mills points out also that the failure of public education is camouflaged by emphasis on the spread of education, i.e., that more people today are educated for a longer period of time than ever before in the history of any

FAUSTINE C . JONES is Associate Professor of Adult Education at Federal C i t y College, Washington, D.C.

1C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite (New York: Oxford University Press, Galaxy Book, 1959), p. 319.

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C. WRIGHT MILLS 303

country.2 This is a camouflage because the increased amount of education available to a larger number of people is simply a prescribed, stereotyped kind of training which transmits the attitudes, values, and goals deemed desirable for the public by the power structure. The increased amount of education does not permit most people to achieve a high degree of individual self-realization, or of competence according to their particular needs and interests. Neither does the increased education provide the majority of people with the knowledge and motivation to act consistently in such a way that democracy will be able to survive. Thus the increased amount of public education is a failure both from the viewpoint of the national interest, and from a personal standpoint. Mills describes the situation in this way:

The prime task of public education, as it came widely to he understood in this country, was political: to make the citizen more knowledgeable and thus better able to think and to judge of public affairs. In time, the function of education shifted from the political to the economic: to train people for better-paying jobs and thus to get ahead. This is especially true of Ihe high-school movement, which has met the business demands for white-collar skills at the public’s expense. In large part education has become merely vocational; in so far as its political task is concerned, in many schools, that has been reduced to a routine training of nationalist loyalties.3

The shift in emphasis from political education to vocational education designed to enhance economic position has resulted in a loss of power for the majority of people. While it is important that the schools provide people with vocational skills this is no substitute for liberal education. Public schools have been successful in imparting skills to people - the ability to read, to write, to operate a lathe or a typewriter - a kind of educated illiteracy charac- terized by impoverished minds and lack of political will. Mills holds that we have moved from mass illiteracy to mass formal education, and we are headed toward educated illiteracy, “technological idiocy and nationalist provinciality, rather than to the informed and independent intelligence.”4

He grants that the public schools have accomplished, in addition to training in skills, some education in values. When people are able to debate “stoic, Christian and humanist ways of living,” or when one can evoke from others “an understanding of what they really want out of their lives”5 it is clear that some education in values has been achieved. This means that if on a scale of liberal education skills are placed on one end of the continuum and values are placed on the other end, public education is highly successful in achieving its objectives in the area of skills, and somewhat successful in imparting value objectives. To fit all of Mills’ ideas on this scale of liberal education, one must define the middle range of the continuum as the area of “sensibilities.” It is in this middle range that public education fails to do its job. Such failure is highly significant because it is the middle range of sensi- bilities which is of most relevance to the public.

Wbid., p. 317. Vbid., pp. 317-318. 4C. Wright Mills, Power, Politics and People, ed. by Irving Louis Horcwitz (,New York:

SIbid., p. 369. See also The Power Elite, op. cit., p. 318. Ballantine Books, Inc., 1963), p. 238: p. 229.

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Mill’s sensibilities are cultural, social, political, and technical awarenesses emerging from the process of self-development. They include:

a sort of therapy in the ancient sense of clarifying one’s knowledge of one’s self, . . . the imparting of all those skills of controversy with one’s self, which we call thinking, and with others, which we call debate.6

Sensibilities are a combination of training in skills, and of education in values. Effectively developed sensibilities produce “genuine members of a genuinely liberal public.”

What Must Be Done: A Plan for Public Education

Liberal education, then, is the kind of public education Mills prescribes. By “liberal education” he meaiis liberating education, of which the end product is self-development, i.e., the self-educating, self-cultivating man or woman who possesses skills, sensibilities and values. To achieve this end, Mills out- lines the following procedure:

We must begin with what concerns the student most deeply. We must proceed in such a way and with such materials as to enable him to gain increasingly rational insight into these concerns. We must try to end with a man or a woman who can and will by themselves continue what we have begun: the end product of the liberal education, as I have said, is simply the self-cultivating man and woman.7

Self-cultivating men and women are knowledgeable people who see the relationship between their personal problems and social issues, perceive their relevance for the community and the community’s relevance for them. These people understand that their personal problems defy solution because it is only through modification of social groups, institutions, or perhaps even the social structure itself that such problems might be settled since they are in fact a reflection of conditions in the social order. Because they are knowledge- able people self-cultivating men and women confront issues and are aware of the terms of their human meaning for the individual. In contrast, men in masses are not aware of the meaning and source of their troubles, and cannot therefore convert their problems into issues. They are often troubled without knowing why they are disturbed.8 The task of liberal education, then, is “to help produce the disciplined and informed mind which cannot be over- whelmed; to help develop the bold and sensible individual that cannot be sunk by the burdens of mass life.”g

This kind of mind possesses the sociological imagination, the first fruit of which

. . .-and the first lesson of the social science that embodies it-is the idea that the individual can understand his own experience and gauge his own fate only by locating himself within his period, that he can know his own chances in life only by becoming aware of those of all individuals in his circumstances.10

6Ibid.

8Zbid. See also The Power Elite, op. cit., pp. 318-319, and C . Wright Mills, T h e Sociological Imagination (Evergreen Edition; New York: Grove Press, Inc., 1961) , pp. 3-4.

SMills, T h e Power Elite, op. cit., p. 319; Power, Politics und People, op. cit., p. 367. lOMills, The Sociological Imagination, op. cit., p. 5.

7Ibid., pp. 369-370.

C. WRIGHT MILLS 305

. . . that imagination is the capacity to shift from one perspective to another- from the political to the psychological; from examination of a single family to comparative assessment of the national budgets of the world; from the theological school to the military establishment; from considerations of an oil industry to studies of contemporary poetry. I t is the capacity to range from the most imper- sonal and remote transformations to the most intimate features of the human self -and to see the relations between the two. Back of its use there is always the urge to know the social and historical meaning of the individual in the society and in the period in which he has his quality and his being.11

School Climate, Curriculum, and Methodology

What school climate, and what kind of curriculum would provide for the liberal education Mills advocates and insure the development of the crucial sensibilities, as well as the skills and values needed by the present generation? Mills proposes that schools for adolescents provide a climate hospitable to deep and wide political debate where the concerns of the students may be aired openly and frcely. Such discussions will lead adolescents to acquire rational insights into their personal troubles and to connect those troubles with larger issues. Mills does not want a passive atmosphere to prevail in public schools. He does not want an ideology of conformity or acquiescence to exist, because such an ideology encourages acceptance of conditions of apathy and hopelessness such as are apparent today. Mills urges an atmos- phere of free and open inquiry in order to promote “the struggle for in- dividual and public tran~cendence.”~~ He means by this the re-creation of a society of publics through which individual persons might effectively express themselves, and through which interest groups could again become agents of public opinion which could be exerted to counteract the power elite.

The same kind of atmosphere would prevail in schools for adults. Mills takes up the question of the task of the liberal college for adults in detail in Power, Politics and People; the specifics of his proposals for adults will follow the curriculum discussion in this paper. Here it is important only to point out that free and open discussion must continue to prevail at the adult level. Mills advocates much small group discussion, and holds that some of the skills of the group therapist must be possessed by the classroom teacher.13 Open discussion in schools is not to be held for its own sake, or for its therapeutic effect alone. It must be centered around troubles, problems, and issues felt by the discussants to the end that the discussants emerge knowing more about themselves, their communities, their social institutions and their society. Mills says that

explicit attention [should be paid] to a range of public issues and of personal troubles; and they should open up for inquiry the causal connections between

W b i d . , p. 7. IZMills, The Power Elite, op. cit., p. 319. 13Mills, Power, PoZitics and People, op. cit., p. 370. Mills’ proposals here resemble the

open discussion ideas of R. Bruce Raup, George E. Axtelle, Kenneth D. Benne, and 8. Othanel Smith in The Improvement of Practical Intelligence (New York: Teachers College, Columbia University, 1950). Raup, et al. offer a much fuller development of the open discussion method.

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milieux and social structure. In our formulation of problems we must make clear the values that are really threatened in the troubles and issues involved, who accepts them as values, and by whom or by what they are threatened. Such formu- lations are often greatly complicated by the fact that the values found to be imperiled are not always those which individuals and publics believe to he im- periled, or at any rate not the only ones.14

In the classic tradition of social science, problems are formulated in such a way that their very statement incorporates a number of specific milieux and the private troubles encountered there hy a variety of individuals; these milieux, in turn. are located in trrms of larger historical and social structures.

No problem can be adequately formulated unless the values involved and the apparent threat to them are stated. These values and their imperilment constitute the terms of the problem itself. The values that have been the thread of classic social analycis, I believe, are freedom and reason; the forces that imperil them today seem at times to be co-extensive with the major trends of contemporary society, if not to constitute the characterizing features of the contemporary period.15

The school curriculum would continue to include training in skills, but it must not be merely vocational. There must be high standards of cultural level and intellectual rigor. In The Sociological Imagination Mills states clearly and unequivocally that the social and psychological sciences are coming into their own as the common denominator of cultural life today.l6 They are replacing both the physical and biological sciences which have been held in highest esteem in the modern era, and language and literature which tradi- tionally have occupied an exalted position.

When MiIls speaks of the social and psychological sciences becoming the major common denominator and signal feature of life today, he means the in- tellectual common denominator in whose terms men can state their strongest convictions. Other styles of thought exist coterminously with the common denominator, but the common denominator prevails and other styles of reflec- tion are reduced to a position of inferiority. Mills points out that

in every intellectual age some one style of reflection tends to become a common denominator of cultural l i fe . . . . Each of these intellectual universes became an influence that reached far beyond any special sphere of idea and imagery. In terms of them, or in terms derived from them, unknown scholars as well as fashionable commentators came to re-focus their observations and re-formulate their concerns.

. . . The social sciences are becoming the common denominator of our cul-

Following Mills' line of thought, then, the school curriculum would neces- sarily emphasize all of the social studies courses and psychology, in so far as psychology is concerned with people. An inter-disciplinary approach to these fields, rather than a specialized departmental approach, is to be preferred. A substantial core of social science courses would be required for all students,

tural period.. . .17

14Mills, The Sociological Imagination, OF. cit., p. 130. IJMills, The SocioZogicuZ Zmcagination, op. c k , pp. 129-130. Mlbid., pp. 13-14; pp. 18-19. W b i d . , pp. 13-14.

C. WRIGHT R ~ I L L S 307

other subjects becoming electives. Emphasis would be placed on the problem approach rather than on the subject approach. Orientation must be centered around problems, the solution of which requires information, conceptions, and methods of all the social sciences.18 Senior high school students and adults can obtain the information they need from the disciplines using this approach, rather than the traditional separate-subject approach.

Such orientation poses intellectual and practical problems which would have to be worked out by theorists and practitioners in the field. Intellectual problems would stem from relations of institutional orders at given periods of time and in different societies. “Tin-foil concepts,” by which Mills means weak, contrived, or outdated notions, in distinct fields would necessarily be replaced by “iron problem areas” cutting across the several disciplines. “Iron problem areas” are the real troubles faced by people trying to live fully in this twen- tieth-century urban, industrial, racially-divided, internationalized society. These real problems are “iron” because they are difficult, complex, and often defy individual or personal solution.

Practical problems to be solved would include linguistic confusion; re- designing curricula, textbooks and the academic careers of persons already active in the educational endeavor, the prospective job-market for graduates of each field in the social sciences.lg

Mills is not suggesting that each teacher can, or should, master all the materials, conceptions, methods of every one of the social science disciplines; this is not what he means by the “unity of the social sciences.” What he intends is this:

To state and to solve any one of the significant problems of our period requires a selection of materials, conceptions, and methods from more than any one of these several disciplines. A social scientist need not ‘master the field’ in order to be familiar enough with its materials and perspectives to use them in clarifying the problems that concern him. It is in terms of such topical ‘problems,’ rather than in accordance with academic boundaries, that specialization ought to occur. . . .”m

Mills does not spell out further details of a desirable curriculum, such as the inclusion and function of other subjects such as art, music, physical education, etc. In a footnote which appears in two places in his writings, Mills says concerning specific educational outcomes:

I agree with A. E. Bestor, who writes that “if the schools are doing their job, we should expect educators to point to the significant and indisputable achieve- ment in raising the intellectual level of the nation - measured perhaps by larger per capita circulation of books and serious magazines, by definitely improved taste in movies and radio programs, by higher standards of political debate, by increased respect for freedom of speech and of thought, by marked decline in such evidences of mental retardation as the incessant reading of comic books by adults.”21

W b i d . , pp. 139-140.

mIbid., p. 142. ZlMills, The Power Elite, op. cit., p. 319, and Power, Politics, and People,

IQIbid., pp. 141-142.

p. 369. op. cit.,

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However, although Mills agrees with Bestor on educational outcomes, it is very important to remember that Mills differs from Bestor on the means of achieving those outcomes. Mills points out repeatedly that he wants instruction organized around social problems, and that the problem approach is crucial to attaining the understanding necessary to attack these problems and to effect social change in the direction of democratic ideals. Bestor, on the other hand, wants separate subjects taught.

That Mills does not subscribe to the separate subject approach can be located in many of his works, but the fact is crystal clear in The Sociological Imagination. Mills says:

Intellectually, the central fact today is an increasing fluidity of boundary lines; conceptions move with increasing ease from one discipline to another. There are several notable cases of careers based rather exclusively on the mastery of the vocabulary of one field and its adioit use in the traditional area of another. Specialization there is and there will be, but it ought not to be in terms of the more or less accidentally built disciplines as we know them. It should occur along the lines of problems the solution of which requires intellectual equipment tradi- tionally belonging to the several disciplines. Increasingly, similar conceptions and methods are used by all social scientists.

Every social science has been shaped by internal developments of an intel- lectual sort ; each has also been decisively influenced by institutional ‘accidents’ - a fact clearly revealed by the differing ways each has been shaped in each of the major Western nations.. . .

The danger of taking the departmentalization of social science too seriously lies in the accompanying assumption that economic and political and other social institutions are each an autonomous system.. . .22

The Liberal Colbge for Adults

In his educational planning Mills recognizes that adult education is a necessary part of the scheme. Mills proposes a liberal college for adults to “help produce the disciplined and informed mind that cannot be overwhelmed; to help develop the bold and sensible individual who cannot be overwhelmed by the burdens of modern life.”23 Because this level of schooling is spe- cifically for adults it must deal with a different set of expectations than the elementary and secondary schools for children and adolescents.

The liberal college must make knowledge and intellectual practice di- rectly relevant to the needs and social practices of today. For individuals, it must make people knowledgeable enough to be able to see their personal difficulties as part of social issues and problems which are capable of rational analysis and solution. This means, for example, that it cannot be assumed that “transfer of training” takes place automatically so that the social science knowledge gained by individuals in the course of their secondary education will be transferred to the solution of social problems. Further, if the secondary school education is effective, it nevertheless needs reinforcement to remain

22Mills, The Sociological Imagination, op. cit., pp. 139-140. =Mills, Power, Politics, and People, op. cit., p. 367.

c. WRIGHT MiLLS 309

effective. Thus the liberal college for adults would point out and explain the interconnections between theoretical knowledge and day-to-day problems SO that transfer of training is assured and reinforced. If the college functions effectively it will eliminate the need for itself in the lives of the individuals it has touched, for they will become self-educating people who will move on to allow for the liberal education of other adults in the same manner.

For the community, the function of the liberal college is to: fight all those forces which are destroying genuine publics and creating an urban mass; or stated positively: to help build and to strengthen the self-cultivating liberal public. For only that will set them frce.24

These two concerns, ljberation of the individual and liberation of the community, were fused for Mills and were made the focal points of the Center for the Study of Liberal Education for Adults: ‘I. the content and methods of teaching; 11. the development of leadership; and 111. the coordination of the school with other organization^."^^

It has been pointed out that free and open discussion must be the modus operundi of the adult school. It must be added that deep and wide political debate should take place in the adult college so that people will be in touch with the “realities of themselves and of their world.”26 Free and open political debate is desperately needed in the modern metropolitan area.

Another job of the college for adults is to make contact with informal community leaders, because it is around these informal leaders that real publics could develop to counteract apathy and the mass qualities of modern society. What makes an “informal leader,” and what does he do of social importance?

Informal leaders are people in each community who understand social and intellectual problems and issues. They are readily and frequently artic- ulate; they are willing to stand and be counted; they can say something worthwhile that will be listened to. Therefore they serve to channel the flow of talk in the community, and they mediate the impact of the formal media of communication. By their informal discussions they manufacture opinion; they are, therefore, the radiant points of the primary public and a ray of hope to Mills, because it is around these informal leaders that he feels real publics could develop in this modern age.

Informal leaders should be encouraged to view the adult college as a place in which they could express and enhance themselves. In turn, the in- formal leaders would become the liaison with the various publics of the community and could conceivably work to strengthen and animate them. The eventual outcome of this process would be to stir more people and lead them into social concern, social action, and the process of self-education.

Faculty members of the liberal college for adults must be the kind of people who are exemplars of “straightforward conduct, clarified character,

24Ibid., p. 368. 25Ibid. 26Ibid., p. 370.

310 EDUCATIOML THEORY

and open reasonableness.”27 These people arc value models who will attract other people who are “potential rallying points for the genuine liberal public.”28 Without such exemplars as members of the faculty, Mills says:

All talk of liberal education, of personcel and curiiculum and programming and the rest of it, is nonsense if you do not have such men and women on your faculties. For in the end, liberal educntion iq the result of the liberating and self-sustaining touch of such people.

And their existence in a community as a creative minority iq. in the end, the only force that might prevail agaimt the ascendancy of the mass society, and all the men and apparatus that make for it. For in the end, it is around them that liberated and liberating publics come to articulate form and democratic action.29

Can Public Education Re-direct American Society?

Mills doubts that education for adolescents or for adults is the strategic factor in the building of a democratic polity. Because public education is not independent financially, being dependent upon tax support, and because higher education has so often accepted the role of going hat-in-hand to big business for Wants to support research and other educational efforts Mills feels there is an established tradition of financial dependence which wilI inhibit education in any attempt to take the lead in rc-directing American society. In addition, the present personnel and administration in education have been trained and conditioned to accept a subservient social role, rather than a dynamic one. Among other politically relevant organizations, the po- sition of education generally is powerless. Therefore, because of these factors, Mills is negative about the real gains to be made by assuming that public education can re-direct American society. He feels that only by forming an alliance with other organizations which are politically relevant can education be meaningful in affecting real social change.

Only if it were to become the framework within which more general move- ments that were under way - movements with more direct political relevance - were going on, only then would it have the chance to take the place in American political life that it ought to. Only then could it in fact do fully what I have suggested it ought nevertheless to try now to d0.30

What Mills is saying is that public education cannot do the political job alone. It must cooperate and interact with other social institutions by joining the mainstream of American life and abandoning so much of its traditional role as conservator of the past. Educators and education must try to influence decisions of power. Education and educators must feed and sustain discussion of troubles, problems, and issues. This role will not be peaceful or tranquil, because to open up social issues for public debate, discussion, and ultimate understanding is to be called radical politically. Such a role will be upsetting to a power structure nationally, and to many community-level power struc-

27Ibid., p. 372. 28Ibid. Wbid. 3QIbid.

(Continued on Page 319)

WORLD HYPOTHESES 319

replace traditional fields of knowledge with interest in drugs, sex lore, mod clothes, aquatic sports, psychedelic art, and Bob Dylan. ( I suppose this is immediate enough.) In terms of the present model, it does not matter where knowledge begins. Insofar as the student thinks about his interests, the categories - formistic, mechanistic, contextualistic, organistic, logical, and scientific - are part and parcel of his thinking - at least potentially - or else he will have created other categories which may potentially generate new world hypotheses.

Ideally, one should identify all philosophical categories grasped by stu- dents and help them to refine and extend such categories to other areas of knowledge. It is in this sense of connectedness - of connecting disparate fields of knowledge - that world hypotheses become routing patterns for inter-disciplinary curricula, but it is by no means necessary, nor perhaps even desirable, that one allow students to remain with only one set of categories by which to connect knowledge; namely, the set with which they begin.

I submit, therefore, that we provide students with optional sets of cate- gories by which they can organize knowledge. In this sense, Pepper’s four world hypotheses provide such options and are useful. Yet it is doubtful that Pepper’s scheme provides the only adequate systematic options for formulating a structural curriculum. For this reason ,it seems all the more important that other philosophies be examined - that we explore other possible ways of connecting knowledge - ways which may hopefully aid students to increase their range of knowing.

C. WRIGHT MILLS (Continued from Page 310)

lures. When the powerful are upset they may be counted upon to make every effort to defend, sustain, and uphold their position, Nevertheless, the task of education is clear in Mills’ writings:

This is the role of mind, of intellect, of reason, of ideas: to define reality adequately and in a publicly relevant way. The role of education, especially of education for adults, is to build and sustain publics that will “go for,” and develop, and live with, and act upon, adequate definitions of reality.31

Sllbid., p. 373.