When I was living in England I found that the more I lived abroad, the more American I discovered I was. - Daniel J. Boorstin

"For Rosseau, then, education would have to be a way not of instilling the ideals of civilization but rather of liberating the young from civilization and its evils.

Much of the program he described in his didactic novel Emile is what he calls "negative education," an antidote and inoculation against the pervasive evils of civilization. It has come to be called "The Child's Charter"-a basis for modern child psychology. And it would be the prospectus and statement of principles for "progressive education" in the United States, led by John Dewey (1859-1952), who conceived it as a way of bringing democracy into the classroom (The School and Society, 1899; Democracy and Education, 1916). The movement attended tot he child's physical and emotional as well as his intellectual development, favored "learning by doing," and encouraged experimental and independent thinking. The teacher, then, aimed not at instilling a body of knowledge but at developing the pupil's own skill at learning from experience."

"Cultures are organisms," Spengler explains, "and world-history is their collective biography." Like any other vital organism, then, each culture goes through the stages of youth, maturity, and decline. "Culture is the prime phenomenon of all past and future world-history." "Every Culture has its own Civilization...The Civilization is the inevitable destiny of the Culture....Civilizations are the most external and artificial states of which a species of developed humanity is capable. They are a conclusion, the thing-become succeeding the thing-becoming, death following life, rigidity following expansion, intellectual age and the stone-built, petrifying world-city following mother-earth and the spiritual childhood of Doric and Gothic. They are an end, irrevocable, yet by inward necessity reached again and again." Thus, while the culture is a period of ebullient creativity, the civilization that inevitably follows is a period of reflection, organization, and search for material comfort and convenience. For example, classical Greece was the culture; imperial Rome the civilization. From the beauties of Greek poetry to the imperialism of Roman law, we now live in the civilization of Western ("Faustian") culture and cannot avoid the consequences. Among these Spengler foresaw the "megalopolis," the city of faceless masses, the omnipotence of money, and a new Caesarism.

The century after the Civil War was to be an Age of Revolution — of countless, little-noticed revolutions, which occurred not in the halls of legislatures or on battlefields or on the barricades but in homes and farms and factories and schools and stores, across the landscape and in the air — so little noticed because they came so swiftly, because they touched Americans everywhere and every day. Not merely the continent but human experience itself, the very meaning of community, of time and space, of present and future, was being revised again and again, a new democratic world was being invented and was being discovered by Americans wherever they lived.