Roots of the Terrible Quality of K-12 Education in the United States >>>>> The Social Efficiency and Industrial Education Movements, 1895-1915

Addendum to a Multi-Article Series  >>>>>  Summary of Four Sections Concluding Chapter Two in Diane Ravitch’s Left Back:  A Century of Battles Over School Reform, “A Fork in the Road”

 

During the years 1895-1915, the movements for social efficiency and industrial education greatly degraded the quality of public education in the United States and provided the roots to the terrible quality of education that we have in the nation today.  An account of these movements and their impact on the given time span and the development of K-12 education in ensuing decades is given in the four sections below:

 

The Crusade for Social Efficiency

 

Three professional groups provoked the debate over the driving purpose of public education in the United States during the years 1895-1915.  All of these professions were newly formed as certified fields of specialization.  Advocates were eager to advance the prerogatives of the individuals trained in these nascent fields of educational psychology, educational sociology, and educational administration.  Educational psychologists sought to establish education as a precise science.  Educational sociologists asserted that schools should serve the interests of society.  Professors of educational administration advocated for the application of principles of management, deemed scientific, to the school administration and curriculum design.

 

Members of these three professional entities thought along similar lines.  They stated that academic subjects had to demonstrate value, which lay heavily in immediate utility to the world of work and to the social order.  Educational psychologist Albion Small sought to change the curriculum pertinent to history and government in ways that would eventually appear in the curriculum as “social studies,” not fully defined as a subject area until the mid-20^th century.  Small and his successors maintained that rather than study history and government focused on international and national domains, students should learn about their local communities and units such as family, neighborhood, religious institutions, and social organizations.   

 

The Industrial Education Movement

 

The industrial education movement was heavily influenced by the Report of the Massachusetts Commission on Industrial and Technical Education of 1906.  According to this report, the aims of public education should be the development of “industrial intelligence”(ability to function in the workplace) and “productive efficiency” (skills and attitudes conducive to worker productivity), so as to benefit the worker, the employer, and the nation, the latter in the interest of achieving the “greatest technical success.”.  Advocates for the principles espoused in the report promoted a “technical” rather than “literary” education, counterpoising themselves to defenders of the prevailing curriculum of Latin, mathematics, history, civics, geography, literature, and the arts.

 

In the same year of the influential report, the National Society for the Promotion of Industrial Education was established, attracting funding from industrialists, labor groups, social workers, and “progressive” educators.  Those who were inclined toward the classical and liberal arts curriculum expressed astonishment at the “mental epidemic” they observed, as the ideas of the industrial education enthusiasts spread quickly.  Members on the Commission on the Economy of Time in Education, already assembled in 1903, enthusiastically embraced the ideas of the industrial education movement.  And in an address of 1907, President Theodore Roosevelt sounded themes resonant with those of the industrial education movement, promoting vocational practicality and service to the nation.

 

Many sociologists embraced the industrial education movement, deriding the liberal arts curriculum as “selfishly unsocial.”  Professors of education were among the avid enthusiasts of industrial education, conveying the view that the pursuit of a liberal arts education was not socially efficient, and that to do so strictly as a personal preference was not civically responsible when others deemed a student better suited to a vocational role.  Teachers College (Columbia University) Professor Henry Suzzalo said that the unique role of the schools was to “distribute men and women to those tasks in life for which their abilities will count most and their defects least.”

 

There was a prevailing belief among industrial education advocates that sociological principles could determine which groups should be educated and what they should learn.  This belief fueled the industrial education movement.  High school enrollment was surging as the 19^th turned into the 20^th century.  Educators wanted the trend to continue.  They thought that the students of the masses would reject the academic curriculum, even though rising enrollments and declared hopes of economically humble parents for their children strongly suggested otherwise.  Columbia University President Nicholas Murray Butler (a founder of Teachers College) expressed the view that the purpose of education was to adapt the “larger proportion of the population to their environment.”

 

Thus, as university field specialists and those trained to impart the classical and liberal arts curriculum advocated continuance of the latter, advocates for industrial education found strong supporters among education professors at the new teachers colleges that were replacing the old normal schools.  Liberal education was counterpoised to differentiated curriculum.  The former would not be cast aside quickly by staff at the level of the local school districts;  but in the new schools of education, professors trained new teacher aspirants on the basis of an anti-academic ideology that did become extremely influential in the ensuing decades.    

 

Lester A. Ward, the great 19^th century advocate for a common liberal arts education for all, had held that “The lower classes of society are the intellectual equals of the upper classes.”

 

Ward’s straying disciple Edward A. Ross would, by contrast, say that public schooling was “an engine of social control” and that the job of schools was “to collect little plastic lumps of human dough from private households and shape them on the social kneading board…  And so it happens that the role of the school master in the social economy is just beginning.”  Ross said that his notion of the schools as “‘an economical system of police’ shocks the public and chills the teachers.  But now and then the cat is let out of the bag. ”  He said that the New Education “will be realistic, and its starting point will be the facts of personal and social life”;  and he asserted that the new role of the emerging system of education would be “to perfect an education in the interests of society.”

 

The rise of educational sociology and the success of the industrial education movement radically changed public discussion of education goals.  The notion of differentiated education, with one curriculum for the small minority of college-bound students, another for the vast majority projected for careers in the manual vocations and the assembly line, became dominant among education professors in the teachers colleges just as enrollments soared to record levels in high schools wherein curriculum in Latin, mathematics, and the liberal arts prevailed.  The masses and the huge contingents of immigrant populations sought the social ascendance and prospective college attendance promised by the academic curriculum.

 

But educational psychologists, educational sociologists, and professors of education had other ideas as to the proper education for the masses.

 

Social Efficiecny and the Academic Curriculum

 

David Snedden was the leading representative of the social efficiency movement.  He was a schoolmaster and superintendent in California, and a founder of the field of educational psychology.  In 1907 he received a doctorate at Teachers College (Columbia University) and during 1909-1916 served as Commissioner of Education for the state of Massachusetts.  In 1916 he took a position as professor of vocational education at Teachers College;  from that professional perch, he became for the next few years the leading advocate in the nation for vocational education.

 

Snedden’s promulgations were all founded in social control doctrine.  He advanced the view that society determines the needs of individuals and that the primary aim in education is to adjust individuals and groups to their social roles and to give them the vocational training necessary for carrying out those roles.  He advocated differentiated curriculum and the determination of vocation for students during ages 12-14.  He maintained that the academic curriculum was elitist and of little civic value.

 

Snedden had unshakable confidence in his postulations, saying that those who disagreed with him by upholding the value of the academic curriculum were “wrapped up in cocoons of blind faiths, untested beliefs, and hardened customs.”  He said that the public schools would take the role of home and church in the new social order emerging in the first decades of the 20^th century.  Saying that little value lay in studying anything by penmanship, civics, and vocational education, Snedden caricatured the traditional school as “repressive,” “monarchical,” “barren and repellant,” requiring “unquestioning submission to authority” by “student automatons.”  The irony of his own  authoritarian pose seemed lost on him.

 

Snedden blasted algebra, Latin, French, history, physics, and classical English literature as courses of study;  he maintained that the need for the creation of new works of art had abated, so that art had become mere “diversion and entertainment.”  He advocated the ideals of “right social action” and defined citizenship as “submission to political order and cooperative maintenance of same.”  Irony once again seemed lost.

 

With regard to the value of studying history, Cornell University historian George L. Burns confronted Snedden with the counterview that history taught “imagination, sympathy, insight, [and] judgment” and that the study of history was the best training for “life and action.”  He said that the only history that Snedden favored was “history with the history left out.” 

 

University of Cincinnati mathematics professor Charles N. Moore noted that the failure of many aspirants for the position of artillery officer during World War I was due to deficiency in mathematics skills, and wrote that

 

I have felt for some time that some of the ill-advised agitators

in the education world who have been advocating swift changes

in our school curriculum without offering any valid reasons in

support of their claim were, perhaps unconsciously, perpetrating

an injustice on the youth of our land who are entitled to the

best available education.”

 

David Snedden shot back that girls rarely aspired to be artillery officers, navigators, civic or electrical engineers, machinists, or architects---  and that this was true for the masses of boys also.  Only when Snedden advocated for separating vocational schools from academic high schools did his star as the foremost advocate for industrial education dim.  In 1924, influential “progressive” educator H. Gordon Hullfish chastised Snedden for his vocational separatism, which ran counter to the views of most other industrial education proponents, who wanted differentiated curriculum within single high school settings.

 

But the main thrust of Snedden’s arguments for an emphasis on vocational over academic education, and for differentiation of vocational versus academic curriculum, remained enormously influential.

 

In fact, the movement for industrial education had already persuaded a longtime advocate of academic education to alter his position.  The person of note was Charles W. Elliot.

 

Charles W. Elliot’s Defection

 

Charles W. Elliot and W. T. Harris had been the leading proponents of liberal education for all and leading forces on the Committer of Ten, which met in 1892, issued its pro-academic education report in 1993, and for many years thereafter influenced the curricula of high schools in the United States.  In a 1908 address to the National Society for the Promotion of Industrial Education, Elliot asserted that students should be sorted according to vocational or collegiate destiny and maintained that elementary school (typically grades 1-8 at the time) teachers should do the sorting before students matriculated at the high school level.


Others who favored a knowledge-intensive liberal arts education would not be so easily converted as was Elliot by the anti-knowledge rhetoric of education professors, but a clear pathway had been laid for the anti-academic approach that would became dominant by the last decades of the 20th century.