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.
…………………………………………………………
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.
………………………………………………………………………….
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).
………………………………………………………………………….
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.
…………………………………………………………………………..
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.
.............................................................................
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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