Education and Democracy: The Meaning of Alexander Meiklejohn, 1872–1964 is the first full biography of Alexander Meiklejohn written by Adam R. Nelson and published by the University of Wisconsin Press in 2001. The title is not a complete biography but draws from five archives to show Meiklejohn through his own words. A popular figure in the early 20th century who has since faded, Meiklejohn was a philosopher and university president who championed unified knowledge, idealism, and Great Books curricula. The book is split into five sections based on the locations in which Meiklejohn lived: his undergrad, faculty, and administrative years at Brown University, his presidency of Amherst College, his time with the University of Wisconsin Experimental College, and his experience with adult education and free speech advocacy at Berkeley. Nelson portrays Meiklejohn as "contradictory, paradoxical, and quixotic" as he grapples with how to encourage students to pursue freedom and how a teacher can teach this while respecting student freedom.
Publication
Education and Democracy: The Meaning of Alexander Meiklejohn, 1872–1964 is a biography of Alexander Meiklejohn written by Adam R. Nelson and published by the University of Wisconsin Press in 2001. In lieu of writing a definitive account of Meiklejohn's life, Nelson portrayed Meiklejohn through the subject's own language to let him "speak for himself". Nelson draws on five archives detailed in copious quotations and a 65-page notes and annotated bibliography appendix. While Meiklejohn was popular in the early 20th century and best known for his stance on academic freedom, he had become a marginal figure by the time this book was published. The book was the first full biography written on Meiklejohn, preceded only by dissertations and a 1981 "short 'biographical study that introduced Meiklejohn's written work. Nelson's title is a response to John Dewey's Democracy and Education. It intends to show the contrast of Meiklejohn's idealism opposite Dewey's pragmatism.
Summary
Work
The work is split into five parts based on the places in which Meiklejohn lived: his undergraduate education at Brown University, his later administrative work there, his presidency of Amherst College, his University of Wisconsin Experimental College, and his work with adult education and other actions in Berkeley. At the core of Meiklejohn's effort to create systems that promote democratic citizenship, Nelson argues, is "the paradox of Socratic teaching": how a teacher can make a student want freedom and how a teacher can teach this while respecting the student's freedom in practice.
Education and it's effect in his belief system
Meiklejohn was born in Great Britain and raised in Rhode Island. He attended Brown and Cornell University, and later returned to the former as a popular ethics professor and its consequent dean of admissions. In place of the popular elective system and science curriculum, he championed a Kantian style of education with unified knowledge, moral development, and pursuit of ideals, and a style of democratic governance where students would lead and reason through their own education. Meiklejohn saw democracy as something imparted and reconsidered by passing generations, and that it was borne in "strong discussions around agreed terms". His suggested curriculum for a unified knowledge included one or two years of ancient Greek classics and added years of enlightenment or modern American classics.
Meiklejohn became Amherst College's president in 1912. Meiklejohn developed a legacy of autocratic treatment of faculty, drastic overspending, and that of a college hermetically detached from demands of the outside world. He was ousted after lying about faculty appointments, whereupon he opened the Experimental College at the University of Wisconsin, a two-year Great Books program with readings from ancient Greece and modern America. There, too, he treated the program as unaccountable to outside influence, and did not produce reports of their work or build rapport with the outside Wisconsin community. The program quickly closed for reasons attributed to Meiklejohn's obstinance and not programmatic design. Meiklejohn then opened a Great Books adult education program in San Francisco where students similarly self-governed and led their own education. As funding dissipated at the outset of World War II, the students chose to shutter the school before "compromising" their ideals. Meiklejohn became an advocate of free speech as an absolute right differentiated from physical action. His stances on this and democracy influenced the United States Supreme Court and the aims of UNESCO.