Insights for the Astute from a Best-Outlawed Sport

Brutal,

brain-bashing,

best-outlawed,

football
as seen in

reflections
on viewership

at youth

nevertheless
offers two
important insights

for the astute:

 

The first comes
with the observation

that what separates
the superior

running back

is not

speed

or

size

but rather

the ability
to see the hole,

the opportunity,

that comes

fleetingly,

determining

loss

statis

or

gain.

 

The other comes from

watching
the best

quarterbacks
for whom

height

and

arm strength

are enormous pluses

but for whom

the most important

skill

is the ability to

survey the landscape,

call the audible,

thereby on a

foundation

of

knowledge

and

preparation

manifest

the

perceptivity
of

response

to the

exigencies

of the

moment,

time,

LIFE.

Summary of Chapter Four in Diane Ravitch’s >Left Back: A Century of Battles Over School Reform< : “IQ Testing: This Brutal Pessimism” (Seventh in a Multi-Article Series)

Key points from Chapter Four of Diane Ravitch’s Left Back:  A Century of Battles Over School Reform are as follows:

 

During World War I, psychometricians in the United States administered intelligence tests to soldiers to determine whether those serving were best fit for roles in the regular field of battle or as officers.  Both achievement tests and intelligence tests had already been developed and used in a limited number of schools.  A leader in this effort was Edward L. Thorndike of the Teachers College (Columbia University);  the assessment that he had developed tested for acuity in reading, arithmetic, spelling, handwriting, written composition, geography,  and other academic subjects.

 

In 1921, Ross Finner of the University of Minnesota declared educational problems to be amenable to solutions via the exact science of testing.  Finner was typical among psychologists of this period, and most school districts in the United States were persuaded by the results and claims based on those results made by psychometricians.  School administrators became convinced that standardized achievement and intelligence tests were more reliable than tests devised by individual teachers;  the standardized tests were also faster and easier to grade than tests that had a subjective component, including long-form essays.

 

These tests were put to use in the service of curriculum differentiation and tracking according to counselor-determined vocational destiny.  These approaches were consistent with the drive for social efficiency in an age of mass production; students were evaluated for their capacity to perform functions in the realms of business, factory, and the trades. 

 

Thorndike was among the chief proponents of testing for ability to determine intelligence, character, and skill;  and he was convinced that such ability could be thoroughly understood, controlled, and directed for the social good.  Thorndike was certain that intelligence is hereditary and immutable.  He recognized three main types of intelligence:  abstract, social, and mechanical;  his bias as to superiority was toward the abstract form of intelligence, which he regarded as best able to determine high character.  He was among those who had ready answers for critics who thought his tenets antidemocratic;  he and others in fact thought that differentiation according to ability and projected role in society best served the needs of a democracy.  He asserted that “In the long run it has paid the masses to be ruled by intelligence.”

 

The Early Days of IQ Testing

 

In the first years of the 20th century, Francis Galton (a cousin of Charles Darwin) established the “Anthropometric Laboratory” in London, testing for reaction time and mental acuity in human subjects.  Galton was a fervent believer in the ability of the human race to improve mental capacity via astute breeding;  he held that various races and nationalities have innate characteristics, and that some were more mentally capable than others.

 

In France, Alfred Binet and his colleague Theodore Simone sought to identify mentally defective children so as to provide for the instruction most likely to serve their needs.  They devised a test featuring tasks of increasing difficulty pertinent to attention, memory, visual discrimination, imagination, and verbal fluency.  They concluded that the most important component of intelligence is judgment, involving practical sense, initiative, and adaptability.  In his book, Modern Ideas About Children (published in 1909), Binet emphasized the capacity of education to improve intelligence, rejecting the notion of intelligence as fixed and immutable;  but in the aftermath of his death in 1910, those who drew upon his work did not hew to the principle of the improvability of intelligence.

 

This was manifestly true of Henry Goddard, who was much inspired by Binet’s work but put it to the service of much more determinist applications.  Goddard was the resident director of the School for the Feebleminded in Vineland, New Jersey.  Coiner of the term, “moron,” he was deeply concerned that the feebleminded were proliferating in society and poised to do much harm.

 

In his 1912 book, The Kallikak Family, Goddard detailed the life trajectories of a man who fathered children by two women, one who was feebleminded and another who was mentally capable and from a family of high social standing.  According to Goddard’s account, which struck a resonant chord in the popular imagination, the children born of the feebleminded manifested an array of mental and moral disorders;  the children born of the woman of elevated social standing proved to be respectable and of good character.

 

Eugenics, the purported science of mental capability as distinguishable by race, had many proponents in the early decades of the 20^th century.  Among these were well-regarded professionals who sought to use eugenics for the social good;  proponents included birth control advocate Margaret Sanger;  psychologists Robert Yerkes and Walter McDougal of Harvard;  Edward L. Thorndike of Teachers College (Columbia University);  and Lewis Terman of Stanford University.  But during the 1920s, eugenics attracted racists and nativists, whose views came to be discredited by the use of eugenics by the Nazis.

 

The influence of eugenics could be seen in an emerging view that those who were determined to be mentally defective should be permanently institutionalized and sterilized.  Thirty states legalized the sterilization of people determined to be insane, feebleminded, or criminal.

 

Lewis Terman developed the Standford-Binet Intelligence Test for the measurement of a single Intelligence Quotient (I. Q.) for each individual tested.  The I. Q. score was determined by a person’s mental age, divided by actual age, and multiplied by one hundred.  In examining I. Q. scores, Terman asserted that scores in the 70s and 80s were typical for Mexicans, negroes, and those of Spanish-Indian ancestry in the American Southwest.  He lamented that there seemed to be little prospect of limiting propagation among these groups and considered the offspring of these groups likely to cause harm to society.   

 

Psychologists and the Army Tests

 

Robert Yerkes (President of the American Psychological Association and Chair of the Psychology Committee of the National Research Council) was the designer of the army tests that so inspired the movement for intelligence testing.  He designed two tests, an Alpha Test for those who were literate and a Beta Test for illiterates;  the former included arithmetic problems, analogies, synonyms, antonyms, and various information-based questions;  the latter featured tasks for the completion of incomplete drawings and the comparison of shapes.

 

Lewis Terman’s status among psychometricians was buttressed by his election in 1922 as president of the American Psychological Association.  Along with Elwood P. Cubberly, Terman edited a major textbook series published by Houghton Mifflin that envisioned a future of intelligence testing that was highly compatible with the aims of educational psychologists and administrators regarding curricular differentiation, vocational guidance, and social efficiency.  Terman became a leading designer of intelligence testing for the schools.

 

The Rockefeller Foundation bestowed a $25,000 grant to the National Research Council for adapting the army tests for administration in schools.  During 1919-1920, Terman, Yerkes, and Thorndike joined Guy M. Whipple (professor, University of Michigan) in the design of tests for grades 3-8;  by the mid-1920s, there were 75 different mental ability tests used for assessing students of all ages.  Evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould has observed that anyone who constructed such an assessment was careful not to diverge from the approach espoused by Terman.   Terman’s key guiding principles were that 1) educability limits of any individual were apparent by age five or six;  2) unless those limits were used to guide programming, neither the gifted nor the dull could thrive;  and 3) one-third of students lacked the ability to perform adequately according to a commonly taught academic curriculum.  The solution was to individualize instruction or to group students homogenously;  Terman contended that the former was not practical, given the rise in enrollments, so that grouping students according to ability was the answer.  His suggested groupings were five in number:  1)  gifted;  2) bright;  3) average;  4) slow;  and 5) special. 

 

Terman recommended tracking from the sixth or seventh grade, with careful attention to I. Q. scores.  Terman’s scale to be used for academic tracking based on I. Q scores forecast vocation or profession as follows:  1) below 70 I. Q. >>>>> unskilled laborer;  2) 70-80 I. Q. >>>>> semiskilled laborer;  3) 80-100 I. Q. >>>>> skilled laborer or ordinary clerical worker;  4) 100-115 I. Q. >>>>> semiprofessional;  5) above 115 I. Q. >>>>> professional or corporate manager.  In a speech to the National Education Association is 1923, Terman blasted his critics as sentimentalists who denied the reality of individual differences, maintaining that democracy is best served by citizens who understand their roles and seek work appropriate to their ability.

 

The Political Uses of the Army Tests

 

Assessing available data, leading psychologists concluded that the average mental age among draftees in World War I was thirteen (13) or fourteen (14).  When it became known that those of Nordic origins scored much higher than those of southern and eastern European origins, the test results became fodder for racists and nationalists who sought immigration restrictions.  Eugenicists argued for immigration restrictions for southern and eastern Europeans.  Progressive sociologist Edward A. Ross, well-known as a social control theorist, asserted that based on his observations and reading of the data, eastern and southern Europeans were so inferior as to dilute the American racial stock;  furthermore, they were culturally backward and inclined toward dangerous ideologies such as anarchy and socialism. One commentator proclaimed that “We are being swamped by the off-scourge of Europe.  Those at the lower end of the intellectual scale have brought their social customs, their language, their political ideals.  They cannon assimilate our ideals…  They cannot become citizens in the highest meaning of the word.  We do not need the ignorant, the mentally feeble, the moron.”

 

In 1922, Lantrhop Stoddard in his book, The Revolt against Civilization:  The Menace of the Under Man,  asserted that almost one half of the United States population would never get beyond the mental age of 13 or 14 years.  That same year, research analyst Cornelia James Cannon wrote an article for The Atlantic Monthly in which she asserted that one half of the draftees in World War I were morons and 22 percent were of even more inferior intelligence.  She read the data to show that intellectual inferiority was disproportionately found among immigrants from Poland, Italy, and Russia.  She wrote, “They are a menace that may encompass our mass destruction.”

 

A year later, Terman authored an article of his own for The Atlantic Monthly.  He asserted that the average mental age for the native-born American was 13-14 years and that for the foreign-born was less than twelve (12).  He maintained that Negroes, Italians, and Poles dominated the lower scores, while the higher scores were dominated by native-born whites and immigrants from England and Scotland.  Terman stressed the importance of race for national destiny, as did Carl C. Brigham (Princeton University professor) in his 1923 A Study of American Intelligence. 

 

Other books that added to the momentum for such assertions regarding racial stock and implications for the national destiny included Charles W. Gould’s America:  A Family Matter, Madison Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race, and Willliam Z. Ripley’s Races of Europe.  Historians would come to regard Grant as the nation’s most influential racist, followed by Lanthrop Stoddard.  The latter in 1922 established the Goddard Society, along with Edward L. Thorndike and Henry F. Osborne (of the American Museum of Natural History).  

 

Carl C. Brigham’s classification of races gained much attention and induced similar categorizations;  the classifications were three in number:  Nordic (northern Europeans, notably the populations of Sweden, Belgium, the Netherlands, and England);  Alpine (Romania, Russia, Poland, and Austro-Hungary);  and Mediterranean (Turkey, Portugal, Spain, Greece, and Italy).  Brigham maintained that Germans were forty percent (40%) Nordic and sixty percent (60%) Alpine;  French, thirty percent (30%) Nordic, fifty-five percent (55%) Alpine; and fifteen percent (15%) Mediterranean;  Irish, thirty percent (30%) Nordic and seventy percent (70%) Mediterranean.

 

Maintaining that the purpose of school should be to select and retain the most intellectually capable students, Robert Yerkes analyzed the data as pertinent to school performance.  He concluded that among students in the relevant ages, only fifty percent (50%) were capable of performing well at a first-rate high school;  and that only ten percent (10%) were capable of pursuing a B. A. at the college level.  Yerkes found ingenious ways of reasoning away indications that student performance actually rose as the ill-regarded immigrant populations lived two decades in the United States;  and that students who persisted in their education through high school did improve results on assessments.  Yerkes argued that those who were able to persist were the most capable, so that schooling did little to improve intellectual ability or normed achievement, which depended on native intelligence.

 

Terman noted that many teachers objected to his assertion that education could not improve intellectual performance.  He ridiculed them with the statement that their reaction was nothing more than “deep-seated and blind faith that anything was possible for a child.”     

The Disaster of the Anti-Academic Thrust of Putative “Progressive” Educators in the First Two Decades of the 20th Century >>>>> Continuation, Summary of Chapter Three in Diane Ravitch’s >Left Back: A Century of Battles Over School Reform< (Sixth in a Series)

The following key points are covered in the closing sections of Chapter Three (“The Age of Experts”) in Diane Ravitch’s Left Back:  A Century of Battles Over School Reform (New York:  Touchstone/ Simon & Schuster, 2001).

 

Differentiation in the Public Schools

 

During the first two decades of the 20^th Century, student enrollments in high school increased dramatically and the new attendees and their parents clearly sought the prevalent academic education that for them represented a ladder to a more prosperous and engaging life.  In Springfield, Massachusetts, both vocational and more purely academic high school courses were offered but, in a school district with 883 high school students with only 16 actually going on to college, students of all demographic descriptors opted heavily for academic courses.

 

But professors in the new departments and colleges of education disagreed with the options exercised by high school students throughout the United States who sought an academic education.  Professor Charles Hughes Johnston (University of Illinois) wrote, in an article for the journal, Educational Administration and Supervision, that such course selections by students constituted “vicious habits of election.”  He touted the cases of communities wherein school district decision-makers were providing “differentiated curricula” according to the class origins and presumed vocational destiny of students.  He wrote with admiration of course tracks in Newton, Massachusetts, which offered fourteen (14) different curricula to students according to the vocational pathways onto which they were guided;  and the course tracks in Los Angeles, California, which featured forty-eight (48) different curricula.

 

Johnston, a high influential “progressive” educator, labeled those who opposed differentiated curricula as “absolutists,” while assigning those who embraced the “new education” as “experimentalists.”  He contrasted the traditional curriculum of Latin, mathematics, history, natural science, and the arts with the “modern,” “scientific,” “progressive,” and “professional” curricula that was differentiated according to those destinies deemed likely for each student according to economic and social classifications.  The term, “scientific,” was appropriated by “progressive” educators and generously used in every major professional education journal and organization.  Great emphasis was placed in journal articles and in literature generated by professional education organizations on social efficiency and reform based on the findings gleaned from modern science. 

                                                                             

The School Survey Movement

 

Superintendents and school boards representing school districts wherein the academic curriculum prevailed took frequent criticism from the emerging education establishment formed by those working in university settings and at the level of federal and state government.  To ward off criticism in professional education journals, local officials began to engage education survey specialists to assess the local program.  These local officials hoped to find enough in the professional assessments that was favorable to programs of which they were proud to counter criticism and proceed with only minor adjustments;  instead, they left themselves open to harsh attacks from these specialists, who all had ties to “progressive” educators and often were leaders in the “progressive” movement. 

 

Among the most sought after survey and efficiency experts were Ellwood P. Cubberly of Stanford University, George (Teachers College, Columbia University), John Franklin Babbitt (University of Chicago), Edward C. Elliott (University of Wisconsin), and Paul Hanus (Harvard).  When the Portland (Oregon) Chamber of Commerce sought nominations for survey administrators, Chamber members included those mentioned above among their contacts;  those contacted tended to mention these sought-after survey specialists, and when the given specialists were contacted they tended to recommend each other.  The recommendations from those who conducted the surveys (not in the sense of popular questionnaires but rather in the sense of district-wide system assessment for efficiency and differentiation) tended to include curriculum differentiation, intelligence testing (for student curricular tracking), more vocational courses, increased staffing at school district central offices, and more money for facilities and salaries.  A state survey in Texas blamed parents and college officials for favoring an “absurd” curricular emphasis on ancient history, written composition, and algebra.

 

In 1915, a survey team led by Cubberly and including noted intelligence testing expert Lewis Terman was engaged by Salt Lake City officials, who were mostly satisfied with their schools but sought improvement.  The team report commended the city for having “excellent racial stock,” on the basis of Salt Lake City’s overwhelmingly white and non-recent immigrant population.  The report also complimented the district’s caring teachers, diligent students, and adroit principals.  Recommendations included less time allotted to spelling and arithmetic, even though results in those areas had been excellent;  the commencement of an intelligence testing regimen for determining course track;  and the establishment of junior highs, the function of which for these survey and efficiency experts was to sort students for curricular differentiation as they went forth to high school.

 

That same year a survey team told officials in the San Antonio, Texas, school district, which already offered a generous array of vocational courses, that the curriculum was too academic.  The team assailed the enrollment in algebra, geometry, and natural science courses for those “commercial” track students deemed destined for office work (typing, filing, stenography).  The team recommended curricular differentiation based on occupations most prevalent in the community:  farming, manual labor, clerical jobs, and domestic work.  With generous reference to the 1910 census,  the team reported that only six percent (6%) of the San Antonio student body was likely to enter the professions;  and that among women, just seven percent (7%) were destined for employment as teachers, while the others would overwhelmingly become servants, cooks, waitresses, laundresses, saleswomen, or other low-skill workers.

 

In his influential textbook (1916) for administrators, Ellwood P. Cubberly exulted in the importance of efficiency experts (like himself), who should be called upon for the “progressive” revamping of curriculum design.  Recommendations from such survey experts did have the positive features of inducing the construction of more and better facilities, better on-site health care, and attention to student special needs;  but they also had the effect of tracking students according to race, gender, and economic class that determined the life fate of millions of school children and the adults that they would become.      

 

A Different Kind of Education for Black Children

 

In 1917, Thomas Jesse Jones, considered the leading expert in the United States on African American communities, issued a two-volume report for the United States Bureau of Education, underwritten by the Phelps-Stokes fund.  Born in Wales, Jones was educated in public schools of the United States;  he served eight years as a teacher at the Hampton Institute, received a doctorate from Teachers College, and worked on the 1910 census as chief compiler of “Negro statistics.”

 

Jones reported that at the time just fifty-eight percent (58%) of African American children ages 6-14 attended school;  few went beyond the fifth grade, and high school attendance was rare.  Half of the schools in the United States for African Americans (still residing overwhelmingly in the South) were privately funded by northern white philanthropists and church organizations.  There were in the South 1,238 public high schools for white students, just 64 for black students;  and as to enrollment, white students outnumbered African Americans tenfold.  There were no African American high schools in the entire states of North Carolina and Louisiana and only one in South Carolina.  African American communities were at the mercy of all-white school boards.  Spending for white schools was six to twelve times more than for African American schools.  African American teachers received half the pay of their white counterparts.  Schools for African Americans served such a wide geographical area that many African American students walked six to seven miles to school.

 

Jones sought to address some of these inequities and to increase African American enrollment in school.  But he did not address the ludicrous assumptions and practices of the Jim Crow system, or the economic inefficiencies necessarily entailed in maintaining separate facilities by race in small communities.  And his vision for the African American student was limited in the extreme, assuming that most young black people would go forth to jobs as servants, farmhands, blacksmiths, and other positions requiring manual labor.  He advocated “hands-on” industrial training rather than use of the “printed page,” expressing great frustration that almost all African American high schools featured the academic curriculum that black communities and parents tended to prefer.

 

W. E. B. Du Bois, the great African American intellectual, holder of a Harvard Ph. D., and co-founder of the NAACP and editor of its journal, Crisis, assailed Jones’s report and recommendations.  In a 1918  article for Crisis, Du Bois wrote that “The object of a school system is to carry the child as far as possible in his knowledge of the accumulated wisdom of the world.”  He also wrote that

 

Anyone who suggests by sneering at books and

literary courses that the great heritage of human

thought ought to be discarded simply for the reason

of teaching the techniques of modern industry is

pitifully wrong, and if the comparison must be made,

more wrong than the man who would sacrifice modern

technique to the heritage of ancient thought.     

 

A Few Critics Disagree

 

Although across the nation most school systems were still set up on the academic model, the anti-academic current among writers for professional education journals and participants in professional educational associations was so strong that few school officials openly stood against the tide.  An exception was William Henry Maxwell, superintendent in New York City. 

 

At a courageous talk before those assembled at a 1915 meeting of the National Education Association,

Maxwell said, “When the university professors ‘make good’ in their own field, we shall welcome them into ours.”  Fearing that the realities of poverty and social conditions would become rationales for failure, Maxwell insisted that children from poor homes and poor districts could learn just as much as children from rich homes and districts.  Having spent many years in education, he assailed the faddishness to which he had too often been witness, including such fleeting trends as “vertical penmanship,” the encouragement of “ambidextrous writing,” the termination of recess, and the incidental (as opposed to explicit) teaching of penmanship, grammar, and writing.  Maxwell said that the purpose of general education is to impart the “spiritual inheritance to every child” and that the nation needs “men, not slaves.”  Further, Maxwell told those gathered at the NEA convention that “We must set reasonable bounds to the arrogant demands of manufacturing capitalists.  Convinced that much of education research was biased and interpreted to fit the convictions of the so-called “progressives,” Maxwell said that there should much less stress placed on “time-wasting, energy-destroying statistical research” to fit the presumptions of those eager to sort students according to perceived academic potential.   Having already introduced an abundant vocational curriculum in New York City, he nevertheless argued that liberal education is for all students in a democracy.  Rather than succumb to the notion of junior high as an institution for sorting students according to vocational destiny, Maxwell argued for the retention of the 1-8 grammar school with common liberal arts curriculum imparted to all.

 

The Classicists Protest

 

In the years just prior to 1920, scholars of Greek and Latin vociferously opposed the attacks on their fields by “progressive” educators.  Their ire had been particularly aroused by the advocacy of Abraham Flexner and Charles Eliot that Latin, at the time widely taught and very popular as a course of study, should be eliminated.  Flexner had written in his book, The Modern School, that algebra and Latin, then valued by supporters for the inculcation of mental discipline, should be removed from high school curricula.  As members of the General Board of Education, Flexner and Eliot persuaded colleagues at Teachers College to establish the Lincoln School as a “progressive” school featuring project, group, and “hands-on” experiences, with an emphasis on child-driven learning and an absence of instruction in Greek or Latin.  In 1919 Eliot became honorary president of the new Progressive Education Association, giving him a prominent platform from which to oppose the classical curriculum.

 

Ranged against Flexner and Eliot was Paul Shorey, a University of Chicago classicist who said, “A real education must be based on serious, consecutive, progressive study of something definite, teachable, and hard.”  Further, he said that

 

The majority still believe that modern civilization

can find not only entertainment but also instruction

and all the culture which it requires in the contemplation

of moving pictures of itself, whether in the five-cent

theater, the ten-cent magazine, and the one-cent newspaper.

 

in a 1917 article, “Assault on Humanism,” Shorey contemplated with dismay the prospect of a society completely ignorant of the ideas and literature of the Western world.  With reference to “progressive” educationists, Shorey wrote that

 

Greek and Latin have become mere symbols and pretexts.

They are as contemptuous of Dante, Shakespeare,

Milton, Racine, Burke, John Stuart Mill, Tennyson,

Alexander Hamilton, or Lowell, as of Homer,

Sophocles, Virgil, and Horace.

 

……………………………………………………………..

 

This was a transitional time in American education.  In 1910, eighty-five percent (85%) of high schools students studied Latin, German, or French;  along with mathematics, history, and science.  But with regard to enrollment in Latin, the data reveal a story of increasing enrollments in absolute numbers and decreasing percentages:

 

Students in the United States Taking Latin

 

                                          Number of Students                     Percentage of All Students

 

1910                                        405,502                                                        49.6%

 

1915                                        503,985                                                        39.0%

1923-1924                              940,000                                                        27.5%

 

Given the prevalence of teachers and administrators trained in subject areas and oriented toward an academic curriculum, the proclamations of “progressives” that the academic curriculum should give way to differentiation would take time to take their toll.  But those proclamations were persistent, and over time, take their toll they did.

 

Liberal versus Vocational Education

 

Among those brave few who continued to advocate for the wisdom of the liberal arts curriculum for all students, William C. Bagley stands out for the cogency of his arguments and the consistency of his stance.  In 1914 Bagley (then a professor of psychology at the University of Illinois) stood in debate with David Snedden at a meeting of the National Education Association.  Declaring that everyone needs a liberal arts education, Bagley said,

 

It will furnish him with standards of value, through

which he can view his problems in their proportions---

not distracted by local, selfish, sectional, or partisan

points of view.  It will rid his mind of the fallacy of the

immediate;  through the study of history, it will give

him a time-perspective upon his own life and upon

the issues of his own generation which he must help

to meet.  Through science, it will rid his mind of

superstition and error---  those soul-destroying and

energy-destroying forces that reduce strong men to

the helplessness of infancy.  Through literature

and art, it will reveal the finer and more subtle

forces which dominate human motives and so

often determine human conduct. [Failure to provide

a liberal education is a] sin against the children of

the land and a crime against posterity.

The New Goals of High School Education

 

But just six years after Bagley debated Snedden and spoke those works in stout favor of the liberal arts curriculum, William Heard Kilpatrick published what would become a highly influential tract entitled the “Cardinal Principles of Secondary Education.”  He did so at the behest of the National Commission on the Reorganization of Secondary Education (CRSE), which formed in 1918, twenty-five years after the work of the Committee of Ten.  The latter, which argued for an academic curriculum, was comprised mostly of college presidents;  the latter, which argued for differentiated curriculum and other “progressivist” ideas, was comprised mostly of professors of education.  The committee of Ten was chaired by Charles Eliot, then president of Harvard and a stout proponent of the academic curriculum;  by contrast, the CRSE was chaired by Clarence Kingsley, a “progressive” educator who had been a social worker, teacher in the Brooklyn Manual Training High School, and (by appointment of Commissioner David Snedden) Supervisor of High Schools in Massachusetts.     

 

Those on the CRSE stated three reasons for change:  1) social and economic trends [immigration and industrialization);  2) diversification of the high school population [more students of southern and eastern European stock; more African Americans;  more women];  and 3) the emergence of “scientific” educational theory [rendering subject matter “obsolete”].

 

The seven main objectives of secondary education, the CRSE commissioners proclaimed, were 1) good health;  2)  command of fundamental processes [verbal and mathematic];  3) worthy home membership;  4) vocational training;  5) development of citizenship;  6) worthy use of leisure time;  and 7) development of ethical character.  Number two was as close to academic as the recommendations got, and that category had not been listed in the first draft.

 

The proclamations of the CRSE commissioners were among the first of a long rhetorical tradition of inflated pedagogical language characterized by an invocation of democracy and other lofty ends for whatever the proclaimers proposed.  The CRSE endorsed the development of junior high schools for the sorting of students into vocational tracks at twelve (12) and thirteen (13) years of age;  and the training of women in the “household arts” and the pursuit of their “lifelong occupation.”

 

Undergirding “progressivist” advocacy both for curriculum differentiation and for curriculum that would sustain women in their traditional roles was that idea of role maintenance in the service of society.  And indeed socialization was at the core of the CRSE message for the reorganization of secondary education.  By contrast to the core message of the Committee of Ten that academic education would provide the opportunity for individual and familial self-improvement, the overriding goal of the CRSE was social efficiency:  Each person would take her or his appropriate role in a well-functioning and harmonious society;  cooperative role complacency somehow replaced individual opportunity as a democratic ideal.

 

In the high school, the pursuit of the socially cooperative ideal espoused by CRSE would play out as follows:

 

Among the means for the development of attitudes

and habits important to democracy are the

assignment of projects and problems to groups

of pupils for cooperative solution and the

socialized recitation whereby the class as a

whole develops a sense of collective responsibility. 

Both of these devices gives training in collective

thinking.

 

Associated with the CRSE was the Committee on the Problem of Mathematics, chaired by William Heard Kilpatrick.  Kilpatrick had already achieved fame as the advocate for the Project Method;  now he would lead the committee that would advocate for “progressivist” approaches to constructing mathematics curriculum.  Thus Kilpatrick and his fellows on the committee asserted that curricula in mathematics should be constructed for four categories of students:  1) general readers (who needed only very basic mathematics skills);  2)  those destined for the trades (who would need a bit more);  3) those with viable aspirations to be engineers (who needed to acquire necessary mathematical skills for application in their jobs);  and 4) specializers (who would need the mastery of the mathematician).  Even for these latter, though, Kilpatrick counseled efficiency, with careful attention to the inclusion of concepts truly necessary in professional applications.  For the “progressives,” utility was all;  all subjects in the curriculum were to have direct application to life and one’s future role in society.

 

David Eugene Smith, Kilpatrick’s colleague at Teachers College, assailed the Kilpatrick-led enunciation of the four levels of mathematics learners.  He argued for general mathematic literacy of high competence for all learners and tried to prevent from the Kilpatrick report from being published.  But the decision was referred to United States Commissioner of Education Philander P. Claxton, a friend of Kilpatrick and fellow “progressive.”  In 1920 the report on mathematics went forth to publication.

 

Transforming History into Social Studies

 

In the aftermath of the meeting and pronouncements in favor of an academic curriculum from the Committee of Ten in 1893, the four-year sequence typically followed by high schools in the United States focused on ancient history, European history, English history, and American history;  in addition, the curriculum usually included a course in civics. 

 

But as part of the activity of the CRSE, a Committee led by Thomas Jesse Jones (who had gained recognition for his two-volume Negro Education and drawn the ire of W. E. B. Du Bois) made recommendations that in time would change the focus away from history toward the emerging public school course of “social studies.”  Jones argued for a socially efficient “new history” in which students would focus not on the remote past or people far away but rather on the community in which the young people and their families lived.  And the “new history” was to contain very little actual history;  instead, the focus was to be on the present, the locality, that which lay within the pupil’s own interest, subjects that had “genuine social significance,” and those topics that prepared students for the exercise of “good citizenship.”

 

One can recognize in this vision of a “new history” or “social studies” the curriculum that now prevails in the public schools, in which some history is taught in the middle and high schools but throughout the K-12 years provides much less content knowledge than had been the case when history and civics were such a prime part of the public school curriculum.  

 

The Legacy of the Cardinal Principals

 

The CRSE emphasized social efficiency and curriculum differentiation at the conclusion of the sixth or seventh grade.  The historian Lawrence Cremin views the “Cardinal Principles of Secondary Education” as having launched a “pedagogical revolution” into a “whole new age” of secondary education.

 

In Cremin’s view, the convening of the CRSE and the publication of “Cardinal Principles of Secondary Education” constituted a triumph for the anti-academic approach to the high school curriculum that emanated from schools of pedagogy;  victory also could be claimed by those who argued for social efficiency, whereby each subject had to be justified in terms of immediate application to student lives or the preparation for jobs to be pursued as appropriate to one’s station of life at birth and performed as a contributing member of society.

 

The curricula recommended by the Committee for the Reorganization of Secondary Education were not implemented immediately in most school districts;  too many academically trained teachers still presided in classrooms.  But as a harbinger of things to come, a consensus for a non-academic, differentiated, vocational approach to curriculum had formed among those at colleges of education, state departments of education, and the United States Bureau of Education that would have great impact in the decades to come.