Vanessa Orense

English 1B

THEODORE BRAMELD (1904–1987)

Theodore Brameld was born on 20 January 1904 and he is a philosopher and

educator as well. He claimed that schools were the ultimate source of political and
social transformation. He was a proponent of the reconstructionism of culture. Let
me tell you how it happened.

At the University of Chicago in 1931, Theodore Brameld earned his doctorate in

philosophy. At New York University and Boston University, he spent most of his
career teaching. He was shaped by John Dewey's. In the 1930s, at Teachers
College, Columbia University, Brameld was attracted to a social activist group of
scholars. He wrote in The Social Frontier, an educational and political criticism
journal. In 1945, his book Minority Problems in Public Schools was published. He
stated in 1950 that a reconstructed perspective was required for education. Many of
his thoughts arose from his experience of adapting his philosophical views to a
school environment. Brameld did not consider a problem beyond the boundaries of
dialogue and objective study.

In his conviction that theory must be linked to real-life problems, Brameld never
wavered. Philosophers as well as educators, he reiterated, must act decisively on
their values. He remained confident and brave in the face of threats and
persecution by the McCarthyist forces that tried to muffle his resolute voice in the
1940s and 1950s.
His cultural understanding of four education ideologies was created by Brameld. He
regarded essentialism as a theory of education that deals primarily with the
conservation of culture. Brameld maintained that any philosophy that regarded
values as pure or unchanging was opposed by reconstructionists, including
progressivists.

IIn his many publications, Brameld went on to refine his philosophy. A small but
powerful book, Education as Strength, was published in English, Spanish,
Portuguese, Japanese, and Korean editions in 1965. (and was reissued in 2000).
Education as Force explicitly and concisely outlines many of reconstructionism's key
tenets..

There are two main functions in education: transmitting culture and changing
culture. The second of these positions, that of altering and innovating, becomes
more significant when American culture is in a state of crisis. Reconstructionism,
Brameld concluded, is a theory of crisis; the reconstructionist is "very clear as to
what path mankind should follow, but not at all clear as to which road it will take."

The capstone of reconstructionistic philosophy and practice is the reclaiming of

collective self-realization. Attention is also given to politics, human relations,
religion, and the arts by Brameld. In reconstructionism, defensible partiality is a
fundamental principle. There is constant a devotion to existential humanism. The
curiosity of Brameld in culture led him to write Education's Cultural Foundations: An
Interdisciplinary Exploration. Brameld studied culture and education in Puerto Rica.

A visionary description and culmination of many of his lifelong hopes and

convictions is one of Brameld's last novels, The Instructor As World Citizen: A
Scenario of the 21st Century (1976). Printed as if looking back from the eve of the
year 2001, the teacher-narrator recalls the previous quarter century's global shifts.
Some critics have considered the educational theory of Brameld too goal-centric
and utopian. His promotion of teachers as activists of social change annoyed some.
More than half a century later, his unpopular contribution to intercultural education
was more generally accepted as multicultural and global education.Brameld taught
at Springfield College in Massachusetts and the University of Hawaii until becoming
professor emeritus at Boston University in 1969. He took part in protests against
nuclear power and, as a teacher, traveled around the world.

Suddenly at the age of eighty-three, Theodore Brameld died in October 1987 in

Durham, North Carolina. Established in the late 1960s by Brameld's former doctoral
students and others influenced by his theories, the Society for Educational
Reconstruction (SER) continues to sponsor conferences and symposia focused on
different aspects of education's reconstructionist theory.