Counts, George (1889–1974)

George Counts, raised in a Populist household in Kansas, was (perhaps second to John Dewey) arguably the most renowned American progressive educator of the 20th century. Counts became famous in pedagogical circles during the 1930s as the leader of a group of radicalized educators who called themselves “frontier thinkers”or “social reconstruction-ists.”They wanted to construct American society along socialist lines via education.

Counts gained fame for a speech at the 1932 annual meeting of the Progressive Education Association titled, “Dare Progressive Education Be Progressive?”Counts implored that education emancipate itself from the influence of the elite. Counts had long focused on class discrimination. In an earlier work, Counts argued that the nation's boards of education were anti-democratic in composition, because they were drawn from the favored economic and social classes. But in his famous lecture before the Progressive Education Association, Counts redirected his analytical lens to educators themselves, exposing them for a tepid commitment to reform.

The amplified radicalism of Counts was partially forged during trips he took to the Soviet Union in the late 1920s, including one in 1929 when he drove the width of the country in a Ford he had shipped there. Counts was favorably impressed by his observations during his trip, after which he called the Soviet project the greatest social experiment of history. Counts placed the fate of the Russian Revolution in education. Counts hoped that progressive educators could reconstruct American society in similar fashion to the Soviets.

However, by the late 1930s, Counts joined numerous other American leftists in their disillusionment with the Soviet Union and Communism. Soon after learning that his Soviet counterparts had been purged and possibly executed by Stalin, the attention he paid to the Soviet schools was to offer a withering critique. This in turn altered his approach to how he wrote about the United States in its relations with the Soviet Union, Communists, and the Popular Front. He believed the American Communist Party had been completely repudiated. Such a strong belief was what compelled Counts to lead an anti-communist faction of the American Federation of Teachers union to power in the late 1930s. He was elected president of the union in 1939 and 1940.

In 1939, Counts and Dewey helped found the Committee for Cultural Freedom, an organizational attempt to separate pragmatic radicalism from communism. By making such a separation, Counts and the Committee for Cultural Freedom argued that communism was barely better than fascism, anticipating the Cold War conflation of the two, what became known [Page 400]as “red fascism.”But despite his virulent anticommunism, Counts is probably best remembered for the work he did in the early 1930s when he exposed the class biases of those who controlled the American school system.