ABSTRACT
The right of teachers to determine the ends of education and to disregard entirely the will of their clients seemed self-evident a century or even half a century ago when their work was principally among the working classes. The working classes were virtually synonymous with the ‘criminal classes’ and teachers had the obvious and self-justifying task of civilizing them. Their ends had the self-evident validity of the Victorian missionary’s in Africa. The teacher is thus essentially the servant of the culture in which he finds himself, ‘for whatever else education may mean, it must mean primarily the self-perpetuation of an accepted culture - a culture which is the life of a determinate society’. The American teacher has had less success against the deep-rooted political radicalism of his society, which insists that its teachers, like its congressmen, shall recognize the sovereignty of the people.
