May 4, 2018

Second in a Multi-Article Series >>>>> Summary of Chapter One in Diane Ravitch’s >Left Back: A Century of Battles Over School Reform< : “The Educational Ladder”


This is the second in a multi-article series detailing chapters from Diane Ravitch’s Left Back:  A Century of Battles Over School Reform.  The first article summarized the Introduction to the book. 

This article presents Chapter One, “The Educational Ladder.” 

 

Ravitch’s key observations in Chapter One are as follows:

 

At the end of the 19th century, people in the United States took great pride in the public schools.  Oscar Robinson, a high school principal in Albany, New York, spoke of the public schools as the institution by which people with “a foot in the gutter” could “rise to the university.”  A similar sentiment was expressed by William A. Mowry, superintendent in Providence, Rhode Island.

 

Ninety-five percent (95%) of the school age population attended “common schools” that encompassed grades 1-8 for some portion of those years.  But high schools were few in number and attended by only five percent (5%) of the pertinent age group.  Most people who attended one of the nation’s 1,000 colleges and universities trained for those fields considered “professional”:  law, medicine, and the ministry.

 

Nothing properly termed an “educational system’ existed.  Localization was extreme.  There was a federal bureau of education headed by a United States Commissioner of Education, who when making pronouncements did so from what was akin to a bully pulpit;  whatever influence that person had was persuasive, not regulatory.  State organizations of education were also weak and lightly administered.  In Baltimore, two superintendents presided in a district that had 1,200 teachers.

 

“Common schools” for grades 1-8 emphasized the proverbial reading, writing, and arithmetic, and the impartation of associated skills in spelling, grammar, and cursive script.  There was also great emphasis on moral values and patriotism.  Discipline was strict, with corporal punishment administered as deemed necessary by the teacher.

 

Many teachers held forth in classrooms on the basis of limited training and tended to rely on recitation from textbooks.  These textbooks were lucrative for publishers, who tended to copy one another as to form and content.  Reading books were typically presented in four to six graduated texts, with 1-2 books dedicated to reading skill and subsequent texts providing good literary selections in which were embedded firm moral and ethical codes.  Educators emphasized building a common reading tradition from stories, poems, speeches, allusions, aphorisms, and fables encountered by all students.

 

The most popular of the reading books were the McGuffey Readers, issued by a publishing house established in 1836 that came to dominate the market by the late 19th century;  by 1900, the company had sold 120 million books.  The readers contained selections from Shakespeare, Hawthorne, and Dickens.  They were handed down from sibling to sibling.  When President Theodore Roosevelt referred to “Meddlesome Matties,” millions of people in the nation recognized the reference from a commonly read story in McGuffey Readers.

 

Selections from the McGuffey Readers became cultural touchstones;  these included Robert Southey’s “The Battle of the Blenheim,” Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s “The Village Blacksmith” and “Paul Revere’s Ride,” John Greenleaf Whittier’s “The Barefoot Boy,” and the Marc Antony oration in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar.

 

In the common schools, there was great emphasis placed on proper elocution, public speaking, and reading aloud.  There were daily lessons in the pronunciation of words and syllables with accuracy and care.  Tongue twisters served to focus student attention on pronunciation, thus the familiar, “Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers,” and “She sells seashells by the seashore.”  Patriotism was embedded in student consciousness through the study and often memorization of speeches from Patrick Henry, George Washington, Daniel Webster, Abraham Lincoln. 

 

There was a great deal of rote memorization in the study of history and geography. 

 

Study in history focused on the American Revolution and the Civil War.  The American Revolution was taught as a triumph for liberty and independence in the resistance against tyranny.  Teaching of the Civil War depended on the region of the country:  In the North, the stress was on victory over the rebellious confederates in the interest of preserving the Union;  in the South, emphasis was placed on southern heroes such as Jefferson Davis, Robert E.  Lee, and Stonewall Jackson.  Among speeches committed to memory were Whittier’s “Barbara Frietchie” and the ‘Debate Between Hayne and Webster”;  Lincoln’s “Gettysburg Address”;  and Alfred Lloyd Tennyson’s “The Charge of the Light Brigade.”

 

Chants and rhymes were utilized to convey factual detail in geography for acquisition of recognition of mountains, continents, oceans, and rivers;  the technique was also used in teaching the alphabet and multiplication.

 

There was a wide consensus among educators and the public that the aim of the common schools was to promote sufficient learning and self-discipline so that people in a democratic society could be good citizens, read newspapers, get a job, thrive in a competitive economy, and contribute to community well-being.

 

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The Missing Rung of the Ladder

 

In the year 1900, between the common schools and the colleges and universities was a mélange of public high schools, private academies, and preparatory departments of colleges and universities.

 

Until the mid-19th century most secondary education was provided by private tutors or in one of thousands of private academies that varied widely in quality.  Subject area emphasis was on mathematics and on Latin and Greek classics, read especially for learning these ancient languages.  As the United States became more industrial and commercial, history, science, English, bookkeeping,  surveying, and navigation also gained places in the secondary curriculum.

 

As public high schools were established in New York City, Chicago, New Orleans, Detroit, St. Louis, San Francisco, and Dubuque, local educators tended to establish curriculum that featured these classical and modern courses.  Some grumbled that high schools were elitist, unnecessary, and expensive to taxpayers;  but they soon eclipsed the private academies in number.  A salient curriculum in Nineveh, Indiana, included Latin (two books of Caesar, one in Virgil), mathematics, English, history, geography, physics, rhetoric, geography, and civil government.

 

In the first years of the 20th century, people involved in establishing high schools debated the contents of curriculum;  whether such schools should emphasize preparation for college or for work;  and whether high school attendance should be required or optional.

 

All of this discussion took place in the context of high immigration and urbanization;  ideas stemming from the evolutionary biology of Charles Darwin;  and a sense that the old order was rapidly giving way to the new.

 

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Utility or Knowledge?

 

The two positions as to the approach that should be taken in designing systems of public education that emerged in the course of the 20th century were foreshadowed in two thinkers who were born and did much of their seminal work in the 19th century:  Herbert Spencer and Lester Frank Ward.

 

In his Education:  Intellectual, Moral, and Practical, Spencer emphasized practical living and science.  Spencer became enamored of Charles Darwin’s research and ideas on evolutionary natural selection of the species for application to societies and governments:  The survival of people within societies and among nations in competition with one another, he opined, is a matter of the triumph of the strong over the weak.  In such a scenario, Spencer said, schools must equip people with the practical skils that they most need to survive and thrive.  Yale President William Graham Sumner embraced Spencer’s ideas and did much to disseminate them.

 

Lester Frank Ward had a very different view.  Ward, born in 1842, attended public school for a few years and then taught himself advanced Latin, Greek, German, French, mathematics, botany, geology, and paleontology.  Ward served in the Civil War, then worked for the Bureau of Standards, the United States Geographical Survey, and other government agencies.  In his spare time, Ward studied for and received degrees in both law and medicine.  He became an accomplished scientist, a founder of the field of sociology, and President of the American Sociological Society.  Ward was a keen advocate for an active governmental role in social welfare and a passionate egalitarian.  He argued forcefully that the main purpose of education was to equalize society by diffusing knowledge and “directive intelligence”(the training of thought processes through the study of challenging material).

 

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Apostles of Liberal Education

 

During the 1890s, two other intellectuals became important advocates of positions on the direction of education in the United States:  Charles W. Elliot, who eventually became president of Harvard;  and William Torrey Harris, who rose to the position of United States Commissioner of Education.

 

Charles W. Elliot stressed the need for the development of more and better high schools.  During the 1890s the only state that required high school attendance was Massachusetts.  Eighty-eight percent (88%) of colleges and universities maintained preparatory schools.  Elliot argued for more active learning, substantive for all but differentially paced.  Experts could determine exact curriculum and pedagogy in teaching rigorous subject matter for the development of mental discipline, the latter of which he considered the paramount aim of education.

 

William Torrey (W. T.) Harris (b. 1835) espoused an egalitarian traditionalist position.  Unlike Elliot, he considered specified subject matter as the indispensable foundation of liberal education.  He attended Yale University but departed without a degree, seeking more knowledge of science, literature, and history than provided by the classically oriented Yale curriculum, heavily focused on Latin, Greek, and mathematics.

 

At 22 years of age, Harris became an elementary teacher in St. Louis;  at age 33, he became superintendent.  During the encompassing years he became a Hegelian scholar and a founder of the    

Journal of Speculative Philosophy.  In 1880, he moved to Concord, Massachusetts, to work with fellow intellectual Bronson Alcott (father to Louisa May Alcott) on philosophical matters.  In 1889, President Benjamin Harrison appointed Harris United States Commissioner of Education;  he served in that position until 1906.

 

Harris stated clearly that the purpose of education was to impart to students the accumulated wisdom of the human race.  To a classically oriented curriculum, Harris as superintendent in St. Louis added science, art, music, drawing, and kindergarten;  he advocated for a similar broadening of  university curricula.  His reports to the public as superintendent in St. Louis were unlike anything before or since;  he poured his philosophical views into those reports and related them to the system of education that he built.  As a Hegelian, Harris delivered extended disquisitions on the relationship of the state, civil society, family, and the individual.

 

Harris argued passionately for the liberating power of good habits, discipline, and self-control.  He termed mental discipline “directive power,” producing ingenuity, initiative, persistence, and the ability to interact with fellow human beings.  He stressed the importance of specified curriculum, centered on the “five windows of the soul”:  arithmetic, geography, history, grammar, and literature.

 

In advocating for education as a conveyance of the human intellectual inheritance, Harris stressed the difference of the experience of the child with that of humanity:  the former is one-sided and shallow;  the latter is diverse and deep.  Harris was a fierce egalitarian.  He wanted a common substantive curriculum for all students. He did not favor vocational education;  rather he argued for student acquisition of “versatile intelligence” that could be applied to any vocation or profession after high school graduation.  In the encounter with academic subject matter, a person would in Harris’s view go through a period of estrangement from the common and the familiar before incorporating insights learned during this period into one’s personal approach to life.

 

Advocacy for vocational training proceeded apace, though, backed by the business establishment.  In 1884, Baltimore created the first manual training high school.  Private vocational schools were established in St. Louis, Toledo, Cleveland, Cincinnati, New Orleans, New York, and Cambridge (Massachusetts).  By the opening years of the 20th century, public high schools were offering vocational training.

 

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The Debate About the Education of African American Children

 

The contrast between W. T. Harris’s advocacy for specified liberal arts education for all students and the viewpoints of the proponents of a vocational orientation was observed also in the views of African American leaders Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. DuBois.

 

Washington (b. 1856) was born into slavery but upon emancipation gained a modicum of education as a servant in a private household;  he matriculated at the Hampton Institute in Virginia, then founded the Tuskegee Institute (a post-secondary school in Alabama) on similar principles.  Washington was an advocate for a practical, vocationally oriented education for African American youth, dispensed as students developed the personal virtues of thrift, honesty, cleanliness, punctuality, and dependability.  At the Cotton States international Exposition in Atlanta in 1895, Washington sought a practical position for African American youth in the context of the Jim Crow South;  he appealed to white business owners and managers to employ the available African labor in their midst.  To African American young people, Washington counseled patience on the attainment of political parity with whites, stressing the importance of first developing a thriving economic life.

 

W. E. B. DuBois was born in New Bedford, Massachusetts in 1868.  He grew up in a situation of fairly amicable race relations but felt the sting of racism as a young man traveling in the world beyond his hometown.  He obtained a bachelor’s degree at Fisk University and a doctorate in sociology at Harvard.  He was a founder of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1910 and became the editor of the association’s journal, Crisis.  DuBois argued for immediate entry of African Americans into the entirety of the nation’s political life and for liberal education that prepared young people for the exercise of citizenship and for any professional position to which they might aspire.  Leadership in the advancement of civil rights would be found in a “Talented Tenth” of African Americans of the very highest intellectual caliber.

 

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The Committee of Ten

 

In 1892, the National Education Association created a Committee of Ten to formulate a statement on the course of public education in the United States.  In 1893 the Committee, chaired by Charles Elliot and including W. T. Harris, issued its report.

 

The essence of the report was that all students in a democratic society should have the benefit of a uniform liberal arts curriculum.  The Committee urged colleges and universities to make history, science, and foreign languages equal in curricula to Latin, Greek, and mathematics.  Active methods were advocated over rote learning.  The acquisition of an abundance of knowledge and the training for mental discipline were to be core aims of public education.  The matter of whether or not to provide vocational training was left to local decision-makers.

 

Committee Chair Charles Elliot advocated for training teachers who would be such masters of subject areas that they would be capable of teaching students of all ages.

 

The positions of the Committee of Ten drew criticism from both traditionalists and those who viewed themselves as “progressives” in matters of curriculum and pedagogy.   The most caustic critic was the progressive educator G. Stanley Hall, an anti-egalitarian who sought highly differentiated curriculum and courses for students according to perceived ability from an early age.

 

Legacy of the Committee of Ten

 

In 1900, those influenced by the statement from the Committee of Ten established the College Entrance Examination Board for the assessment of student readiness for education beyond high school.  Subject areas tested included those from the classical curriculum and from modern liberal arts subjects.   By 1900, fifty percent (50%) of students studied Latin;  the percentage remained at that level as high school enrollment doubled during the 1900-1910 period.

 

Despite indications of an emerging progressive movement, during that first decade of the 20th century the general consensus among most educators and among parents and community members was that that a liberal education should be imparted to all students, and that mental discipline should be advanced through the study of specified subject areas.  

 

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