Chapter 12: Social Reconstructionist Curriculum Impulses: Pragmatism, Collectivism and “The American Problem”

Social Reconstructionism in education shared time and historical context with the ideas and events driven by figures like Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Neville Chamberlain, Emperor Hirohito, Huey P. Long, Winston Churchill, Haile Selassie, Josef Stalin, Eleanor Roosevelt, Adolf Hiter, Benito Mussolini, Francisco Franco, Gertrude Stein, George Santayana, Thomas Mann, Sigmund Freud, Ernest Hemingway, Carl Sandburg, Virginia Woolf, Pablo Picasso, Frank Lloyd Wright, Paul Muni, Joe Louis, Jesse Owens, Joe DiMaggio, and The Marx Brothers.

The 1930s were not small times. Ideas for new social orders were everywhere, as this list of names from the covers of Time in that decade recalls.¹ These figures and their ideas personified a world in crisis, the turmoil of destruction, reimagining, and reconstruction. The stock market crash of 1929 and the subsequent and sudden depression in the United States snuffed quickly the prosperity of the 1920s, leaving 12 million people—24 percent of the labor force—out of work. The world joined in the economic misery. Fear, anger, and escapism ruled. Everywhere people sought scapegoats and saviors.