“You don't really know what a writer means by democracy, I would argue, until you know what she thinks about the public schools” (viii). This claim drives the compelling project of Jesse Raber's Progressivism's Aesthetic Education, which considers Progressive Era representations of education in the context of the classical Bildung tradition. Raber cannily pairs writers with educational theories in order to open up new understandings of their arguments about citizenship, learning, and democracy. His fluent and interesting book also makes broader claims about the fate of the Bildungsroman in the US, describing a genre that “stands in a different relation to official school institutions than its European modernist cousins,” drawing from a distinctly American vision of Bildung that seeks to “use the public school system, with its potential for mass social coordination and its complex administrative structures” (26, 33).

Raber develops these claims in three rich chapters examining how Abraham Cahan, Willa Cather, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman engage with ideas from the educational theory of their moment. The first of these chapters argues that Herbartarianism's “doctrine of interest,” or something like it, informs Cahan's thinking about audience. Raber shows that Cahan “pursues a Herbartian socialist pedagogy” as he writes in one way for workers while also writing “as a teacher to other teachers” on the pages of, say, The Atlantic (58, 26, 76). The next chapter's discussion of Cather and Montessori rests convincingly on their mutual links to Dorothy Canfield Fisher and McClure's Magazine. Both Cather and Montessori, Raber suggests, “believe that the best response to social complexity is a heightened commitment to simplicity”: they share a “disdain for the machinery of reform” and a “sense that the best way to encourage progress is to let things strategically alone” (89, 91). Perhaps unsurprisingly, the novelist expresses more doubt and more irony about the possibilities of progressive reform than the educator does. In a final pairing, Raber reads Gilman in the context of the social-efficiency education movement. Once again, he observes his author engage energetically but ambivalently with a theory of reform: he argues that “Gilman's idea of aesthetic education, like her educational philosophy in general, begins from premises shared with the social efficiency educators but ends up taking the individual's search for self-realization much more seriously than they do” (139). The final chapter moves into a different mode: “philosophical and normative rather than historical and descriptive,” it brings the subject matter of the preceding chapters into the present, asking “whether John Dewey's theory of aesthetic education … can provide a philosophical grounding for the authority of the educational profession to teach the arts that does not betray the ideals of democratic pluralism” (40, 152).

With notable frankness and humility, Raber in a Preface expresses regret about the book's “neglect of race,” suggesting that it should have included a chapter on African American authors and experiences. It's true that more attention to W. E. B. Du Bois's arguments about Bildung would further enrich this study, but so would more attention to, for example, the role of whiteness in Gilman's thinking about education. More fundamentally, the classical Bildung tradition is about the Bildung of a white male subject, and in this sense, writing about Bildung and the Bildungsroman is emphatically writing about race, and also about gender. More discussion of Bildung's place (and, indeed, public education's place) within Anglo-American liberal thought might have been useful, not least because scholarship on liberalism has worked hard to decenter the white male subject of Bildung. That work has also been undertaken by feminist scholarship on the Bildungsroman, which Progressivism's Aesthetic Education treats in its Gilman chapter, rather than including it in the critical canon that shapes the study as a whole. The book's particular achievement stands out most clearly, however, when its insights are placed in conversation with a more diverse range of interlocutors and contexts. It offers a useful complement to other recent literary studies of democracy and education, such as Peter Schmidt's Sitting in Darkness: New South Fiction, Education, and the Rise of Jim Crow Colonialism, 1865–1920 (2008), Tova Cooper's The Autobiography of Citizenship: Assimilation and Resistance in US Education (2015) and Alison Speicher's Schooling Readers: Reading Common Schools in Nineteenth-Century American Fiction (2016). Within this body of scholarship, Raber's careful attention to educational theory and to the European background of Bildung makes his book a distinctive and important contribution.