Summary of Chapter Three in Diane Ravitch’s >Left Back: A Century of Battles Over School Reform< : “The Age of the Experts” (Fifth in a Multi-Article Series)

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

 

During the first two decades of the 20^th century, various education movements counterpoised their positions to the academic curriculum that still dominated high schools in the United States.  These movements varied in their particular aim, but they shared in common numerous features.  These included 1) opposition to public education as the ladder for social mobility;  2) assertion of the prerogatives of “experts’ in schools of education;  and 3) definition of democratic education as the provision of a differentiated curriculum, according to the vocational destinies of students.

 

Three progenitors of these “progressive” education movements---  G. Stanley Hall, Edward Thorndike, and David Stedden---  provided impetus for the development of three strands of “progressivism.”  Hall’s postulations influenced the child-centered movement;  Thorndike’s the mental testing movement;  and Snedden’s the social efficiency movement.  By assailing and undermining the commonly understood goal of education as providing knowledge-based curriculum for the purpose of intellectual growth, these proponents of “progressivist” ideas created conditions conducive to the loss of the historical rationale for public education; and they turned the idea of democratic education upside down:  Somehow public education as the ladder to opportunity became education as the pathway to vocations determined by social station and immigrant origin.

 

Having lost its anchor in the academic curriculum, the definition of education itself was up for grabs, vulnerable to every idea, fad, and movement emanating from pedagogical “experts,” popular sentiment, and employers. 

 

The New Role of the Schools

 

The various ideas of “progressive” educators gained considerable circulation, if not immediate acceptance from teachers, administrators, school boards, and parents in local school districts. G. Stanley Hall predicted that in time there would a national embrace of the “new education” emanating from colleges of education.

 

Indeed, anti-academic ideas gained attention in the public press and from educators spanning the nation.  Ladies Home Journal editor Edward Bok ran a whole edition on the negative consequences of homework.  Junious Meriam, Director of University School at the University of Missouri eliminated content-based instruction in his school, calling the teaching of geography and concepts such as mathematical percentages “a serious injustice.”  Curriculum for students in grades 1-3 at University School featured “wholesome” games, free exploration opportunities for students who were encouraged to pursue whatever immediately interested them, and the construction of useful and ornamental objects.

 

The new role of schools as envisioned by “progressive” educators was to be the provision of a differentiated curriculum according to vocational destiny.  Some school districts began to embrace these new ideas.  In Cleveland, Superintendent William H. Elson and Assistant Superintendent Frank P. Bachman oversaw the implementation of a differentiated curriculum.  In their view, only four percent (4%) of their students would go forth to employment in the professions and only one percent (1%) to jobs in business management.  They projected that the other ninety-five percent (95%) were destined for jobs in industry and commerce.  They put students on a common course of study for only four years;  thereafter, the curriculum was differentiated according to projected destiny of employment.  They looked at students living in grungy tenements as having very different prospects from those who lived in substantial houses encompassed by well-groomed yards.

 

By 1910 the concept of the junior high school took hold, providing education intermediate between grades 1-6 and 10-12.  Despite the “progressive” educators best efforts, many of these became training ground for advancement to academically oriented high schools, with students seen as junior scholars aspiring to become senior scholars.  But over time, “progressive” educators prevailed upon some junior high school officials and teachers to use the grades 7-9 years for tracking students according to vocational destiny.

 

In 1915 a tract from the Department of Superintendence in the National Education Association, arguing for differentiation of curriculum from seventh grade forward, drew favorable comment from United States Commissioner of Education Philander P. Claxton.  At this time, William C. Bagley, then a psychologist in the school of education at the University of Illinois, issued one of his first of many anti-“progressive” rejoinders, arguing that this approach to the junior high school curriculum would circumscribe the hopes and dreams of those families who sought better futures for their children.

 

Bagley wrote:

 

Hitherto in our national life we have proceeded on the

assumption that no one has the omniscience to pick out

the future hewers of wood and drawers of water.

 

Such objections did not deter those invested in the “new education.”  William Hughes Mearns, a teacher of poetry and creative writing at the experimental Lincoln School at Teachers College (Columbia University), authored an article for the Saturday Evening Post that pulled on the thread of anti-intellectualism running through the United States public with an article entitled, “Our Medieval High Schools:  Shall We Educate Children for the 12^th or the 20^th Century?” 

 

In the article, Mearns asserted that professional pedagogues possessed the “wisdom of the moment” and asked if it mattered

 

whether your graduate knows how to eliminate x or y

if he is too dainty to paint a roof, or pound hot bolts, or

stoke a stationary engine, or tie up a decent package?

 

Redefining Democracy in Education

 

Even as enrollment in academic high schools surged four-fold between 1900 and 1920, “progressive” educators began a drastic reworking of John Dewey’s conception of democracy in education.  Dewey had wanted to strengthen the tie between school and society, and to give students the sense that what they did in school was connected to the greater world;  but he wanted this education to be available to all citizens in the democracy of the United States.

 

The “progressive” definition of democracy in the schools came to differ markedly from that of the educational philosopher whom many “progressives” considered their forebear.  In 1906, Teachers College Dean James E. Russell suggested that the “new education” would repair the error implicit in the notion of the educational ladder, differentiating the curriculum in such a way as to prepare students for life in ways that most often did not find them scaling the social or economic ladder.

 

Among the most influential among “progressive” educators during the first two decades of the 20^th century was Elwood P. Cubberly.  Cubberly was in the course of his life a teacher, school superintendent, education professor, and Dean of Stanford University.  He vigorously promoted vocational education as the focus of the high school curriculum, and as a professor of educational management advocated administrative principles consonant with the implementation of his preferred curriculum.  Cubberly thought that the United States society was in cultural decline;  in his view, families, churches, and communities had been weakened by immigration, industrialization, and urbanization.  He was alarmed at the levels of immigration from nations in southern and eastern Europe, whose populations he regarded as inferior to those from northern and western Europe.

 

On the matter of the new wave of immigrants, in his 1908 book Changing Concepts of Education, Cubberly wrote:

 

Illiterate, docile, lacking in self-reliance and initiative, and

not possessing the Anglo-Teutonic concepts of law, order,

and government, their coming has served to dilute tremendously

our national stock, and to corrupt our civic life.

 

Cubberly considered the duty of the schools to be the breakup and amalgamation of these immigrant populations.  He thought that that all education was vocational, in the usual sense for the masses but even for elite students;  the latter were training for vocations in the professions and business.  In his observation, most resisters to the “new education” were ultraconservative schoolmasters and teachers who lacked “imagination as well as deep insight into democracy’s problems and needs.”

 

Cubberly thought that the education of either boys or girls for no vocational ends was dangerous, potentially raising hopes that could not be met and imparting ideas that could not be controlled:

‘Disappointment and discontent among the educated classes,” he wrote, “are not good for any nation….  The overeducated man is scarcely possible if an education adapted to his needs and station in life is given to him.”

 

Cubberly’s books on education history and school administration became basic texts for generations of teachers and principals.  In those texts, Cubberly clearly saw the school as an arm of the state, writing that “each year the child is coming to belong to the state and less and less to the parent.”  He worried that too many teachers were academically inclined and entered teaching by passing subject matter exams.  He stated that teachers could only learn about the needs and problems of democracy in courses taught in colleges of education, instructed by pedagogical experts who had deep insight to society:

 

Those teachers who enter the work [of teaching] wholly

by exam have little opportunity ever to acquire this point

of view, and the exam door should be closed as soon as

financial conditions permit.

In 1916, Cubberly’s Public School Administration Principles appeared, giving his precepts for managing complex bureaucracies and getting along with school boards.  In the book, he unfavorably contrasted the “knowledge curriculum” with ”the development kind of course.”  He counseled the provision of a differentiated curriculum after grade 6, touting the implementation of such a curriculum in Santa Barbara, California, and Newton, Massachusetts.

 

…………………………………………………….

 

Professors in colleges of education shared a remarkable hubris for their self-perceived command of psychological and sociological principles, by contrast with those who worked in the schools.  They felt empowered to remake the schools on the basis of the principles that in their self-perception they and they alone understood.  A professor of education at the University of Missouri was typical in proclaiming that the conveyance of social standards, needs, harmony, efficiency, and survival should be in the hands of education professors who understand the needs of society. 

 

Thus as it was as enrollment in high school increase fourfold on the basis of an academic curriculum clearly sought by aspiring students and their parents, the great schools of pedagogy at Teachers College, Harvard, Chicago, and Stanford were touting the merits of the differentiated curriculum in messages sent to the hinterlands.  Kansas State Agricultural College President William A. McKeever was among those who had imbibed the message;  he lamented that girls’ schools were teaching algebra, geometry, and trigonometry, complaining,

 

Will it contribute anything to women’s peace, happiness,

and contentment in the home?  Will it bake any bread,

sew any buttons, or rock any cradles?

 

The stance against the academic curriculum prevailed at all major colleges of education.  At Pennsylvania State College, Professor Lewis W. Rapier argued intensely for cutting non-English languages, algebra, and geometry;  and he advised college admissions offices to do away with all entrance requirements except the possession of a high school diploma.