Third in a Multi-Article Series >>>>> Summary of Chapter Two in Diane Ravitch’s >Left Back: A Century of Battles Over School Reform< : “A Fork in the Road”

This is the third 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. 

The second article presented Chapter One, “The Educational Ladder.”  This article presents Chapter Two, “A Fork in the Road.” 

 

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

 

By the second decade of the 20^th century, the work of the Committee of Ten (see summary of Chapter One) was under attack from two major forces---  business leaders and education professors in the new colleges of education set up at universities and rapidly replacing the old normal schools for training teachers.  Although they differed in emphasis, two of the foremost members of the Committee, Harvard President Charles Elliot and United States Commissioner of Education W. T. Harris, were united in advocating for a substantive liberal arts education delivered as a uniform curriculum to all students.  This was a continuation of the spirit of the K-12 “common schools” that in the 19^th and very early 20^th centuries had delivered such an education to students at grades one through eight (1-8).

 

Business leaders and education professors thought that a common curriculum for all students was inappropriate and wasteful.  Business leaders wanted a labor force with verbal and arithmetic skills sufficient for jobs in their factories and offices;  college preparatory and higher academic education could be reserved for those destined for the professions and for corporate management positions.

 

Education professors held forth at institutions such as Teacher’s College of Columbia University and teacher training colleges at Stanford University, the University of Chicago, and Harvard University.  At teacher’s colleges the presiding professors in psychology, sociology, and pedagogy far outnumbered field specialists in history, literature, mathematics, natural sciences, and the fine arts.  Generations of teachers would be affected by the sort of instruction they received in these colleges of education, as would school administrators:  Superintendents would undergo a transformation from learned academicians to heavily administrative sorts whose identity lay in managerial efficiency.

 

By far the most influential of the new institutions was the Teacher’s College of Columbia University.  Teacher’s College had roots in a group called the Kitchen Garden Association, formed in the mid-19^th century and evolving into the Industrial Education Association by 1884.  Emphasis in this latter iteration was on vocational fields such as carpentry, other manually skilled labor, and in time on skills pertinent to sewing, cooking, drawing, and domestic service.  In 1887 came a decision from leaders at the Association to specialize in teacher training, at first under the name of New York College for the Training of Teachers;  then in 1889 under the thenceforth abiding name of Teachers’s College, functionally the pedagogical department of Columbia University.  For a decade, the college emphasized courses in history of education, pedagogy, industrial arts, and natural science.  At the behest of philanthropic backers of the college, a statement of principles was issued that stressed the importance of formal discipline and the training of intellectual faculties;  but as the 20^th century loomed, professors of education at the college moved in a decidedly different direction, away from the implicit value of academic education embedded in the formal statement of principles.

 

 

The Progressive Movement

 

The creation of colleges of education was chronologically aligned to the Progressive Movement in politics and society;  and the name “progressive” was applied by advocates for the “New Education.”

 

Historians differ as to whether the disparate strands of progressivism had any unifying thread.  The progressive movement included efforts to expand political participation, regulate monopolies, improve conditions for the urban poor, make taxation more equitable, and reform municipal politics.

Famous progressive activists included Jane Addams of Hull House (Chicago) fame and muckraker journalists Ida Turnbull and Jacob Riis.

 

A search for a unifying thread also has occupied historians of the specifically progressive movement in education.   Herbert M. Kliebard concluded that there was no coherence to the various advocates who appropriated the term, progressive.  But Lawrence Cremin, David L. Angus, and Jeffrey E. Mirel did see certain similarities, including   1) disparagement of 19^th century elitism;  2) emphasis on practical education applicable to vocation and function in society;  3) focus on the “needs” of students;  and 4) assertion of the professional prerogatives of the education profession.

 

This latter assertion led to centralization of the schools into districts at the local level, with teachers viewed as civil servants and community members relegated to the periphery of decision-making.

 

The development of the local school district also coincided with the wave of immigration that occurred in the first two decades of the 20^th century.  In 1908, 71.5% of children in New York City had foreign-born fathers;  the corresponding figure for Chicago was 67.3%;  for Boston, 63.5%;  for San Francisco, 57.8%;  for Cleveland, 59.6%;  for Providence (Rhode Island), 59.0%;  and for Newark, 58.9%.  Immigrants during these decades came heavily from southern and eastern European nations nations whose populations were widely perceived in the United States to be inferior to those of northern and western European stock.   For such populations, the best courses of study were deemed to be vocational rather than academic:  The offspring of immigrant parentage identified with the factory or the trades was thought destined for the same life.  Many schools served as health and social service centers as well as providers of education;  for immigrants, that education was mostly to be of the intensely practical sort, training students who might not even graduate for jobs in the workaday world and for citizenship, producing socialized community members not likely to get in trouble with the law or to challenge the social order.

 

Wrote James Earl Russell, a professor at Teacher’s College of Columbia University:

 

How can a nation endure that deliberately seeks to

arouse ambitions and aspirations in the oncoming

generations which in the nature of events cannot

possibly be fulfilled?  If the chief object of government

be to promote civil order and social stability, how can

we justify our practice in schooling the masses in

precisely the same manner as we do those who are to

be their leaders?

 

 

John Dewey

The leading philosopher of progressivist education was John Dewey.  Born in 1859 in Burlington, Vermont, Dewey entered the University of Vermont at age fifteen.  Upon graduation,  Dewey taught high school in Oil City, Pennsylvania.  He later obtained a doctorate in philosophy at Johns Hopkins University and taught at the University of Michigan and the University of Minnesota before becoming chair of the University of Chicago Department of Psychology, Philosophy, and Pedagogy in 1894.  He and his wife Alice opened the Laboratory School at the University of Chicago in 1896 and ran that institution for the application of progressivist principles until John Dewey moved to Columbia University in 1904.

 

Dewey saw the school as an instrument of social reform, undergirded by principles of social science, especially psychology.  He thought that school should represent life and that school subjects should be aligned with children’s own social activities.  School in Dewey’s view should feature the “continuing reconstruction of experience,” a dynamic process whereby students could understand what they learned as it applied to their present and future lives.  Dewey sought to create in the Laboratory School a living community whose participants related to each other as people had once related to each other in rural households. 

 

The emphasis was on problems, processes, and experience.  He himself maintained a considerable role for subject area study, but this was not the case for others whom he inspired in the various strains of progressive education:  the advocates for child-centered education, for doing over reading, for vocational and industrial education, and for social improvement.  In the course of time, private schools tended to emphasize child-centeredness, while public schools emphasized vocational snd industrial training.       

 

Four emphases of progressivist educators became dominant:  1) measurement of intellectual ability with scientific rigor;  2) focus on the child;  3)  social efficiency;  and 4) social reform and social reconstruction.

 

Attacking Mental Discipline

 

The study of the classical subjects of Latin, Greek, and mathematics was thought by educators in the 19^th and early 20^th centuries to be advantageous for inculcation of mental discipline.  Two well-regarded scholars called the notion of training specifically for the development of mental discipline into question.  These scholars were William James and Edward L. Thorndike.

 

William James was a leader in the nascent field of psychology as the 19^th turned into the 20^th century.  Among his many interests was the development of memory.  He conducted a multi-year study of his own ability to improve his memorization of classical poetry, finding in the end that his memory did not improve and that training skill in memorizing one text did not transfer as a generally improved  ability to memorize other texts.

 

In 1898 Edward L. Thorndike was among the first to receive a degree in psychology.  After conducting his famous experiments in animal behavior, his driving interest became the study of training for mental discipline, a matter that he pursued with colleague Robert S. Woodworth.  The two became leaders in educational psychology and in the mental testing movement.  A great number of experiments conducted by Thorndike and Woodsworth seemed to show that mental training ws specific to a given task, with little transfer of improvement to the mastery of other tasks.  In 1914, Thorndike qualified this conclusion with an indication that recent findings suggested some transfer capability from one task to another, but to those who wanted to undermine the notion of training for mental discipline, this qualification made little impression:  Their own conclusions had been drawn and adapted for application to their own ideological dispositions. 

 

In Defense of Mental Discipline

 

But training for mental discipline most definitely did continue to have advocates.  Among these were Alexander Mieklejohn (president of Amherst College) and researcher Pedro Gato.  Mieklejohn ridiculed Thorndike for his anti-mental discipline stance, challenging his ability to account for a multiplicity of variables and for making claims on the basis of science that defied observation in the real world of everyday events.

 

Pedro Orato asserted that Thorndike’s claims were profoundly misleading.  His own research found that transfer of mental discipline from one task to another occurs when teachers make such transfer a goal of instruction.  He said that Thorndike focused too much on habit formation and drill, without consideration of the acquisition of mental discipline on the basis of sustained diligence and deep concentration in the study of challenging subject matter.

 

Walter B. Kolesnik, a researcher and professor at the University of Wisconsin, has examined a wide swath of research into the matter of mental discipline, finding that to a certain extent and under certain circumstances, transfer of mental discipline from one subject to another can and does occur.

 

The eminent historian Richard Hofstadter has stated that the misuse of experimental evidence by opponents of mental training “constitutes a major scandal in the history of educational thought.”

 

Romantic Pedagogy Versus the Academic Curriculum

 

One of the most influential academicians among those claiming the mantle of educational progressivism was G. Stanley Hall (b. 1846, Massachusetts).  Hall received degrees from Williams College and from Union Theological Seminary;  he went on to receive a doctorate in psychology (from Harvard) in 1878, a date earlier even than the corresponding date for Thorndike.  Hall was quite a polymath:  He also studied philosophy, theology, biology, physics, anthropology, and physiology.   He became a professor of psychology at John Hopkins University, where John Dewey was his student.

 

Hall blended the philosophical and literary Romanticism of Jean Jacques Rousseau with his interpretation of evolutionary science and genetic psychology.  Full of ideas from those realms of thought, Hall asserted that individual human ontology replicates the evolutionary path from prehistoric humans to the “savage” to the “civilized” person.  In 1883, he penned the essay, “The Contents of Children’s Minds.”  In 1888, he became president of Clark University.  And in 1894 he was the leading force behind the founding of the Department of Child Study of the National Education Association (NEA).  With such writing, professional attainment, and vigorous activities giving him great weight among proponents of child-focused education, Hall became a leader of the Child Study Movement.

 

Hall derided the idea of the universal curriculum;  further, he called into question the absolute necessity of learning to read or write, and he also asserted that there was no compelling need to learn grammar, arithmetic, and geography.  He claimed that under no circumstances should a child pursue academic skills prior to age eight.  He thought heredity to be paramount, claiming that whatever they studied, the most naturally gifted would always learn the most, while the less intellectually endowed had severe limitations as to what they could learn and retain.

 

In 1901, the National Education Association (to which Hall had such a strong connection) demonstrated just how deeply those with the organization had embraced Hall’s ideas.  That year, the NEA issued this statement:     

 

We are coming to understand the vanity of mere

scholarship and erudition, and to know that even

ignorance may be a wholesome poultice for weakly

souls.

 

Hall and his acolytes continued in the succeeding years to make other assertions, some provocative in their own time, others that would be dismissed today.  These included castigation of the study of Latin;   and claims of biological destiny for women, following the traditional conception of role as wife and mother.

 

G. Stanley Hall expressed admiration for the views of African American leader Booker T. Washington, whose preference for vocational training and deferred pursuit of full citizenship for African Americans  resonated with putative “progressives” of the early 20^th century.  This stance of Washington was maddening to African American contemporary W. E. B. Du Bois and many others in succeeding decades.