The following key points are covered in the
closing sections of Chapter Three (“The Age of Experts”) in Diane Ravitch’s Left Back:
A Century of Battles Over School Reform (New York: Touchstone/ Simon & Schuster, 2001).
Differentiation in the Public Schools
During the first two decades of the 20th
Century, student enrollments in high school increased dramatically and the new
attendees and their parents clearly sought the prevalent academic education
that for them represented a ladder to a more prosperous and engaging life. In Springfield, Massachusetts, both
vocational and more purely academic high school courses were offered but, in a
school district with 883 high school students with only 16 actually going on to
college, students of all demographic descriptors opted heavily for academic
courses.
But professors in the new departments
and colleges of education disagreed with the options exercised by high school
students throughout the United States who sought an academic education. Professor Charles Hughes Johnston (University
of Illinois) wrote, in an article for the journal, Educational Administration and Supervision, that such course
selections by students constituted “vicious habits of election.” He touted the cases of communities wherein
school district decision-makers were providing “differentiated curricula”
according to the class origins and presumed vocational destiny of
students. He wrote with admiration of course
tracks in Newton, Massachusetts, which offered fourteen (14) different curricula
to students according to the vocational pathways onto which they were
guided; and the course tracks in Los
Angeles, California, which featured forty-eight (48) different curricula.
Johnston, a high influential
“progressive” educator, labeled those who opposed differentiated curricula as
“absolutists,” while assigning those who embraced the “new education” as
“experimentalists.” He contrasted the
traditional curriculum of Latin, mathematics, history, natural science, and the
arts with the “modern,” “scientific,” “progressive,” and “professional”
curricula that was differentiated according to those destinies deemed likely
for each student according to economic and social classifications. The term, “scientific,” was appropriated by
“progressive” educators and generously used in every major professional
education journal and organization.
Great emphasis was placed in journal articles and in literature
generated by professional education organizations on social efficiency and
reform based on the findings gleaned from modern science.
The School Survey Movement
Superintendents and school boards representing
school districts wherein the academic curriculum prevailed took frequent
criticism from the emerging education establishment formed by those working in
university settings and at the level of federal and state government. To ward off criticism in professional
education journals, local officials began to engage education survey
specialists to assess the local program.
These local officials hoped to find enough in the professional
assessments that was favorable to programs of which they were proud to counter
criticism and proceed with only minor adjustments; instead, they left themselves open to harsh
attacks from these specialists, who all had ties to “progressive” educators and
often were leaders in the “progressive” movement.
Among the most sought after survey and
efficiency experts were Ellwood P. Cubberly of Stanford University, George
(Teachers College, Columbia University), John Franklin Babbitt (University of
Chicago), Edward C. Elliott (University of Wisconsin), and Paul Hanus
(Harvard). When the Portland (Oregon)
Chamber of Commerce sought nominations for survey administrators, Chamber
members included those mentioned above among their contacts; those contacted tended to mention these
sought-after survey specialists, and when the given specialists were contacted
they tended to recommend each other. The
recommendations from those who conducted the surveys (not in the sense of
popular questionnaires but rather in the sense of district-wide system
assessment for efficiency and differentiation) tended to include curriculum
differentiation, intelligence testing (for student curricular tracking), more
vocational courses, increased staffing at school district central offices, and
more money for facilities and salaries.
A state survey in Texas blamed parents and college officials for
favoring an “absurd” curricular emphasis on ancient history, written
composition, and algebra.
In 1915, a survey team led by Cubberly and
including noted intelligence testing expert Lewis Terman was engaged by Salt
Lake City officials, who were mostly satisfied with their schools but sought
improvement. The team report commended
the city for having “excellent racial stock,” on the basis of Salt Lake City’s
overwhelmingly white and non-recent immigrant population. The report also complimented the district’s
caring teachers, diligent students, and adroit principals. Recommendations included less time allotted
to spelling and arithmetic, even though results in those areas had been
excellent; the commencement of an
intelligence testing regimen for determining course track; and the establishment of junior highs, the
function of which for these survey and efficiency experts was to sort students
for curricular differentiation as they went forth to high school.
That same year a survey team told officials in
the San Antonio, Texas, school district, which already offered a generous array
of vocational courses, that the curriculum was too academic. The team assailed the enrollment in algebra,
geometry, and natural science courses for those “commercial” track students deemed
destined for office work (typing, filing, stenography). The team recommended curricular
differentiation based on occupations most prevalent in the community: farming, manual labor, clerical jobs, and
domestic work. With generous reference
to the 1910 census, the team reported
that only six percent (6%) of the San Antonio student body was likely to enter
the professions; and that among women,
just seven percent (7%) were destined for employment as teachers, while the
others would overwhelmingly become servants, cooks, waitresses, laundresses,
saleswomen, or other low-skill workers.
In his influential textbook (1916) for
administrators, Ellwood P. Cubberly exulted in the importance of efficiency
experts (like himself), who should be called upon for the “progressive”
revamping of curriculum design.
Recommendations from such survey experts did have the positive features
of inducing the construction of more and better facilities, better on-site
health care, and attention to student special needs; but they also had the effect of tracking
students according to race, gender, and economic class that determined the life
fate of millions of school children and the adults that they would become.
A Different Kind of Education for
Black Children
In 1917, Thomas Jesse Jones, considered the
leading expert in the United States on African American communities, issued a
two-volume report for the United States Bureau of Education, underwritten by
the Phelps-Stokes fund. Born in Wales,
Jones was educated in public schools of the United States; he served eight years as a teacher at the
Hampton Institute, received a doctorate from Teachers College, and worked on the
1910 census as chief compiler of “Negro statistics.”
Jones reported that at the time just
fifty-eight percent (58%) of African American children ages 6-14 attended
school; few went beyond the fifth grade,
and high school attendance was rare.
Half of the schools in the United States for African Americans (still
residing overwhelmingly in the South) were privately funded by northern white
philanthropists and church organizations.
There were in the South 1,238 public high schools for white students,
just 64 for black students; and as to
enrollment, white students outnumbered African Americans tenfold. There were no African American high schools
in the entire states of North Carolina and Louisiana and only one in South
Carolina. African American communities
were at the mercy of all-white school boards.
Spending for white schools was six to twelve times more than for African
American schools. African American teachers
received half the pay of their white counterparts. Schools for African Americans served such a
wide geographical area that many African American students walked six to seven
miles to school.
Jones sought to address some of these
inequities and to increase African American enrollment in school. But he did not address the ludicrous
assumptions and practices of the Jim Crow system, or the economic
inefficiencies necessarily entailed in maintaining separate facilities by race
in small communities. And his vision for
the African American student was limited in the extreme, assuming that most young
black people would go forth to jobs as servants, farmhands, blacksmiths, and
other positions requiring manual labor.
He advocated “hands-on” industrial training rather than use of the
“printed page,” expressing great frustration that almost all African American
high schools featured the academic curriculum that black communities and parents
tended to prefer.
W. E. B. Du Bois, the great African American
intellectual, holder of a Harvard Ph. D., and co-founder of the NAACP and
editor of its journal, Crisis,
assailed Jones’s report and recommendations.
In a 1918 article for Crisis, Du Bois wrote that “The object
of a school system is to carry the child as far as possible in his knowledge of
the accumulated wisdom of the world.” He
also wrote that
Anyone who
suggests by sneering at books and
literary
courses that the great heritage of human
thought
ought to be discarded simply for the reason
of
teaching the techniques of modern industry is
pitifully
wrong, and if the comparison must be made,
more wrong
than the man who would sacrifice modern
technique
to the heritage of ancient thought.
A Few Critics Disagree
Although across the nation most school
systems were still set up on the academic model, the anti-academic current
among writers for professional education journals and participants in
professional educational associations was so strong that few school officials openly
stood against the tide. An exception was
William Henry Maxwell, superintendent in New York City.
At a courageous talk before those
assembled at a 1915 meeting of the National Education Association,
Maxwell said, “When the university
professors ‘make good’ in their own field, we shall welcome them into
ours.” Fearing that the realities of
poverty and social conditions would become rationales for failure, Maxwell
insisted that children from poor homes and poor districts could learn just as
much as children from rich homes and districts.
Having spent many years in education, he assailed the faddishness to
which he had too often been witness, including such fleeting trends as
“vertical penmanship,” the encouragement of “ambidextrous writing,” the termination
of recess, and the incidental (as opposed to explicit) teaching of penmanship,
grammar, and writing. Maxwell said that
the purpose of general education is to impart the “spiritual inheritance to
every child” and that the nation needs “men, not slaves.” Further, Maxwell told those gathered at the
NEA convention that “We must set reasonable bounds to the arrogant demands of
manufacturing capitalists. Convinced
that much of education research was biased and interpreted to fit the
convictions of the so-called “progressives,” Maxwell said that there should
much less stress placed on “time-wasting, energy-destroying statistical research”
to fit the presumptions of those eager to sort students according to perceived academic
potential. Having already introduced an abundant vocational
curriculum in New York City, he nevertheless argued that liberal education is
for all students in a democracy. Rather
than succumb to the notion of junior high as an institution for sorting
students according to vocational destiny, Maxwell argued for the retention of
the 1-8 grammar school with common liberal arts curriculum imparted to all.
The Classicists Protest
In the years just prior to 1920,
scholars of Greek and Latin vociferously opposed the attacks on their fields by
“progressive” educators. Their ire had
been particularly aroused by the advocacy of Abraham Flexner and Charles Eliot
that Latin, at the time widely taught and very popular as a course of study,
should be eliminated. Flexner had
written in his book, The Modern School,
that algebra and Latin, then valued by supporters for the inculcation of mental
discipline, should be removed from high school curricula. As members of the General Board of Education,
Flexner and Eliot persuaded colleagues at Teachers College to establish the
Lincoln School as a “progressive” school featuring project, group, and
“hands-on” experiences, with an emphasis on child-driven learning and an
absence of instruction in Greek or Latin.
In 1919 Eliot became honorary president of the new Progressive Education
Association, giving him a prominent platform from which to oppose the classical
curriculum.
Ranged against Flexner and Eliot was
Paul Shorey, a University of Chicago classicist who said, “A real education
must be based on serious, consecutive, progressive study of something definite,
teachable, and hard.” Further, he said
that
The
majority still believe that modern civilization
can
find not only entertainment but also instruction
and
all the culture which it requires in the contemplation
of
moving pictures of itself, whether in the five-cent
theater,
the ten-cent magazine, and the one-cent newspaper.
in a 1917 article, “Assault on
Humanism,” Shorey contemplated with dismay the prospect of a society completely
ignorant of the ideas and literature of the Western world. With reference to “progressive”
educationists, Shorey wrote that
Greek
and Latin have become mere symbols and pretexts.
They
are as contemptuous of Dante, Shakespeare,
Milton,
Racine, Burke, John Stuart Mill, Tennyson,
Alexander
Hamilton, or Lowell, as of Homer,
Sophocles,
Virgil, and Horace.
……………………………………………………………..
This was a transitional time in
American education. In 1910, eighty-five
percent (85%) of high schools students studied Latin, German, or French; along with mathematics, history, and
science. But with regard to enrollment
in Latin, the data reveal a story of increasing enrollments in absolute numbers
and decreasing percentages:
Students in the United States Taking
Latin
Number
of Students Percentage
of All Students
1910 405,502
49.6%
1915 503,985 39.0%
1923-1924 940,000
27.5%
Given the prevalence of teachers and
administrators trained in subject areas and oriented toward an academic
curriculum, the proclamations of “progressives” that the academic curriculum
should give way to differentiation would take time to take their toll. But those proclamations were persistent, and
over time, take their toll they did.
Liberal versus Vocational Education
Among those brave few who continued to
advocate for the wisdom of the liberal arts curriculum for all students,
William C. Bagley stands out for the cogency of his arguments and the
consistency of his stance. In 1914
Bagley (then a professor of psychology at the University of Illinois) stood in debate
with David Snedden at a meeting of the National Education Association. Declaring that everyone needs a liberal arts
education, Bagley said,
It
will furnish him with standards of value, through
which
he can view his problems in their proportions---
not
distracted by local, selfish, sectional, or partisan
points
of view. It will rid his mind of the
fallacy of the
immediate; through the study of history, it will give
him
a time-perspective upon his own life and upon
the
issues of his own generation which he must help
to
meet. Through science, it will rid his
mind of
superstition
and error--- those soul-destroying and
energy-destroying
forces that reduce strong men to
the
helplessness of infancy. Through
literature
and
art, it will reveal the finer and more subtle
forces
which dominate human motives and so
often
determine human conduct. [Failure to provide
a
liberal education is a] sin against the children of
the
land and a crime against posterity.
The New Goals of High School Education
But just six years after Bagley
debated Snedden and spoke those works in stout favor of the liberal arts
curriculum, William Heard Kilpatrick published what would become a highly
influential tract entitled the “Cardinal Principles of Secondary
Education.” He did so at the behest of
the National Commission on the Reorganization of Secondary Education (CRSE),
which formed in 1918, twenty-five years after the work of the Committee of
Ten. The latter, which argued for an
academic curriculum, was comprised mostly of college presidents; the latter, which argued for differentiated
curriculum and other “progressivist” ideas, was comprised mostly of professors
of education. The committee of Ten was
chaired by Charles Eliot, then president of Harvard and a stout proponent of
the academic curriculum; by contrast, the
CRSE was chaired by Clarence Kingsley, a “progressive” educator who had been a
social worker, teacher in the Brooklyn Manual Training High School, and (by
appointment of Commissioner David Snedden) Supervisor of High Schools in
Massachusetts.
Those on the CRSE stated three reasons for change: 1) social and economic trends [immigration
and industrialization); 2)
diversification of the high school population [more students of southern and
eastern European stock; more African Americans;
more women]; and 3) the emergence
of “scientific” educational theory [rendering subject matter “obsolete”].
The seven main objectives of secondary
education, the CRSE commissioners proclaimed, were 1) good health; 2)
command of fundamental processes [verbal and mathematic]; 3) worthy home membership; 4) vocational training; 5) development of citizenship; 6) worthy use of leisure time; and 7) development of ethical character. Number two was as close to academic as the
recommendations got, and that category had not been listed in the first draft.
The proclamations of the CRSE commissioners
were among the first of a long rhetorical tradition of inflated pedagogical language
characterized by an invocation of democracy and other lofty ends for whatever
the proclaimers proposed. The CRSE
endorsed the development of junior high schools for the sorting of students
into vocational tracks at twelve (12) and thirteen (13) years of age; and the training of women in the “household
arts” and the pursuit of their “lifelong occupation.”
Undergirding “progressivist” advocacy both for
curriculum differentiation and for curriculum that would sustain women in their
traditional roles was that idea of role maintenance in the service of
society. And indeed socialization was at
the core of the CRSE message for the reorganization of secondary
education. By contrast to the core
message of the Committee of Ten that academic education would provide the
opportunity for individual and familial self-improvement, the overriding goal
of the CRSE was social efficiency: Each
person would take her or his appropriate role in a well-functioning and
harmonious society; cooperative role
complacency somehow replaced individual opportunity as a democratic ideal.
In the high school, the pursuit of the
socially cooperative ideal espoused by CRSE would play out as follows:
Among the
means for the development of attitudes
and habits
important to democracy are the
assignment
of projects and problems to groups
of pupils
for cooperative solution and the
socialized
recitation whereby the class as a
whole develops
a sense of collective responsibility.
Both of
these devices gives training in collective
thinking.
Associated with the CRSE was the Committee on
the Problem of Mathematics, chaired by William Heard Kilpatrick. Kilpatrick had already achieved fame as the
advocate for the Project Method; now he would
lead the committee that would advocate for “progressivist” approaches to
constructing mathematics curriculum. Thus
Kilpatrick and his fellows on the committee asserted that curricula in
mathematics should be constructed for four categories of students: 1) general readers (who needed only very
basic mathematics skills); 2) those destined for the trades (who would need
a bit more); 3) those with viable aspirations
to be engineers (who needed to acquire necessary mathematical skills for
application in their jobs); and 4)
specializers (who would need the mastery of the mathematician). Even for these latter, though, Kilpatrick
counseled efficiency, with careful attention to the inclusion of concepts truly
necessary in professional applications.
For the “progressives,” utility was all;
all subjects in the curriculum were to have direct application to life
and one’s future role in society.
David Eugene Smith, Kilpatrick’s colleague at
Teachers College, assailed the Kilpatrick-led enunciation of the four levels of
mathematics learners. He argued for
general mathematic literacy of high competence for all learners and tried to
prevent from the Kilpatrick report from being published. But the decision was referred to United
States Commissioner of Education Philander P. Claxton, a friend of Kilpatrick
and fellow “progressive.” In 1920 the
report on mathematics went forth to publication.
Transforming History into Social Studies
In the aftermath of the meeting and pronouncements
in favor of an academic curriculum from the Committee of Ten in 1893, the
four-year sequence typically followed by high schools in the United States focused
on ancient history, European history, English history, and American
history; in addition, the curriculum
usually included a course in civics.
But as part of the activity of the CRSE, a Committee
led by Thomas Jesse Jones (who had gained recognition for his two-volume Negro Education and drawn the ire of W.
E. B. Du Bois) made recommendations that in time would change the focus away
from history toward the emerging public school course of “social studies.” Jones argued for a socially efficient “new
history” in which students would focus not on the remote past or people far
away but rather on the community in which the young people and their families
lived. And the “new history” was to
contain very little actual history;
instead, the focus was to be on the present, the locality, that which
lay within the pupil’s own interest, subjects that had “genuine social
significance,” and those topics that prepared students for the exercise of “good
citizenship.”
One can recognize in this vision of a “new
history” or “social studies” the curriculum that now prevails in the public
schools, in which some history is taught in the middle and high schools but
throughout the K-12 years provides much less content knowledge than had been
the case when history and civics were such a prime part of the public school
curriculum.
The Legacy of the Cardinal Principals
The CRSE emphasized social efficiency and
curriculum differentiation at the conclusion of the sixth or seventh
grade. The historian Lawrence Cremin views
the “Cardinal Principles of Secondary Education” as having launched a “pedagogical
revolution” into a “whole new age” of secondary education.
In Cremin’s view, the convening of the CRSE
and the publication of “Cardinal Principles of Secondary Education” constituted
a triumph for the anti-academic approach to the high school curriculum that emanated
from schools of pedagogy; victory also
could be claimed by those who argued for social efficiency, whereby each
subject had to be justified in terms of immediate application to student lives
or the preparation for jobs to be pursued as appropriate to one’s station of
life at birth and performed as a contributing member of society.
The curricula recommended by the Committee for
the Reorganization of Secondary Education were not implemented immediately in
most school districts; too many academically
trained teachers still presided in classrooms.
But as a harbinger of things to come, a consensus for a non-academic, differentiated,
vocational approach to curriculum had formed among those at colleges of education,
state departments of education, and the United States Bureau of Education that
would have great impact in the decades to come.
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