Ep. [preview] Origins of Utopian Socialism and American Public Schooling

(FULL AUDIO: 99 MINUTES) In Pursuit of Utopia (Episode 8) New Harmony, Part 2

What was the ideal for New Harmony, as well as what life was actually like there. What was the theory? How was it practiced?

Education at New Harmony: Last time we discussed his philosophy of "love" super-ceding classical instruction, concluding that Pestalozzi (while he might have meant well) developed a "soft-power" approach to education, which then came to New Harmony via F.J.N. Neef. We discuss how exactly that system of instruction manifested at New Harmony; what do we know about the actual techniques as they were applied?

In this episode and the next, we discuss how New Harmony ties into this series as a whole. It is a quintessential utopia, reminiscent of those that came before (More, Bacon, the Puritans), and foreshadowing those yet to come (Progressive America and the USSR).

New Harmony is a reference point going forward, as a kind of metric by which all subsequent utopian experiments are measured.

We’ll conclude next month by revisiting our conversation about ideology from the last episode, no longer tangential, but the perfect bow to tie up our conversation. Ideological possession (to steal a term from Jordan Peterson) is the heart and soul of utopianism. In the mind of the possessed, the promise of utopia fosters an ends-justifying-the-means mentality, which always seems to wind up in catastrophe.

Released April 3rd, 2020 on Patreon, A/V Club and SubscribeStar.

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