Article #1 >>>>> Summary of Diane Ravitch’s >Left Back: A Century of Battles Over School Reform< >>>>> Introduction

A Note to My Readers   >>>>>    Diane Ravitch’s Left Back:  A Century of Battles Over School Reform is the second best book that I have read on K-12 education, for application to the K-12 revolution.  E. D. Hirsch’s The Schools We Need (and Why We Don’t Have Them) is the best.  Third in my favor is Amanda Ripley’s The Smartest Kids in the World (and How They Got That Way) (New York:  Simon and Schuster, 2013).  Readers should be cautioned that these days Ravitch is so spooked by privatization forces that she is given to a stout defense of the education establishment while ignoring the very deficiencies that she details so expertly in Left Back.  Her 2016 work Reign of Error mounts such a defense;  it is poorly written, repetitive, and irresponsible for ignoring the very failures that make the public schools susceptible to the advocates of privatization.

 

But Left Back is masterful, a brilliant history of education in the United States, focused particularly on the 20^th century.  Ravitch provides information vital to myself and to anyone who believes fervently in the public schools and seeks to revolutionize the locally centralized school district for the impartation of a knowledge-intensive, skill-replete education for students of all demographic descriptors.

 

In this article I review important information and themes from the Introduction of Left Back.  In subsequent articles in this multi-article series, I consider the succeeding Chapters One through Ten.

 

Please now proceed to my presentation of the key points covered in Ravitch’s Introduction to Left Back:  A Century of Battles Over School Reform:

 

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Key information and observations by Diane Ravitch in the Introduction to her work, Left Back:  A Century of Battles Over School Reform, are as follows:

 

Many people suppose that there was a Golden Age when public schools in the United States were much better.  There was no such Golden Age.  At the cusp of the new millennium, schools were called upon to do something that they had never done before:  educate all students to high standards. 

 

At the turn of the 19^th into the 20^th century, more students were seeking education beyond the Common Schools that consisted of grades 1-8.  This quest induced the creation of institutions that provided additional education intermediate between the Common Schools and universities, thus filling a role that had previously been occupied by private tutors and private schools.

 

The abiding questions in the various debates over public education in the United States became chiefly two:

 

1.  Who is to be educated?

 

2.  What are they to learn?

 

The privately taught classical curriculum had focused on mathematics, Latin, and Greek;  by the end of the 19^th century, instruction also came to include history, geography, and the natural sciences.  The first high schools tended to adopt curriculum that included that combination of classical and newer academic subjects.  But from the business community and from professors of education came strong objections to such an academic education for all students.  Especially from professors in the new schools of education, now ensconced in university settings and replacing the old normal schools, came relentless attacks on the academic mission of schools. 

 

Emphases varied among those who ranged themselves against the academic curriculum.  Appropriating the appellation of “progressive,” anti-academic forces variously called for schools that produced students prepared to take their particular roles in society, schools designed to abet the transformation of society, and schools that provided the vocational skills considered appropriate for the great bulk of the population.  The phrase ”meeting the needs of the individual child” often meant tracking most students for manual labor in the industrializing economy while begrudgingly training a few with college aspirations and deemed to have the ability for a college preparatory course of study.

 

Against this tide of “progressivism” there were always those who defended the academic curriculum and asserted the need for all students in a democracy to receive common knowledge and skill sets;  these proponents of an academic education for all included William Torrey Harris, William Chandler Bagley, and Isaac Kandel.  The ideas espoused by these advocates are central to the reconstruction of schools today.

 

As the ideas of education professors took hold and the academic curriculum was lost as a central focus, the anchor of public education was removed.  Public schools became susceptible to hawkers proposing to meet a variety of needs.  No longer was there a consensus on the central purpose of the schools. 

 

Returning to an academic focus is vital in an age when students need broad and deep knowledge sets to evaluate what they find on the internet and on social media.  The great virtue of the academic tradition is to organize human knowledge so as to make all manner of subjects comprehensible to students.  Knowledge builds on knowledge.  We cannot dispense with the systematic study of subjects with the objective of accumulating large amounts of knowledge without running the risk of mass ignorance.

 

Education enlightens, liberates, and empowers those who seek knowledge.

 

Now is the time to renew the academic tradition.