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.

 

Roots of the Terrible Quality of K-12 Education in the United States >>>>> The Social Efficiency and Industrial Education Movements, 1895-1915

Addendum to a Multi-Article Series  >>>>>  Summary of Four Sections Concluding Chapter Two in Diane Ravitch’s Left Back:  A Century of Battles Over School Reform, “A Fork in the Road”

 

During the years 1895-1915, the movements for social efficiency and industrial education greatly degraded the quality of public education in the United States and provided the roots to the terrible quality of education that we have in the nation today.  An account of these movements and their impact on the given time span and the development of K-12 education in ensuing decades is given in the four sections below:

 

The Crusade for Social Efficiency

 

Three professional groups provoked the debate over the driving purpose of public education in the United States during the years 1895-1915.  All of these professions were newly formed as certified fields of specialization.  Advocates were eager to advance the prerogatives of the individuals trained in these nascent fields of educational psychology, educational sociology, and educational administration.  Educational psychologists sought to establish education as a precise science.  Educational sociologists asserted that schools should serve the interests of society.  Professors of educational administration advocated for the application of principles of management, deemed scientific, to the school administration and curriculum design.

 

Members of these three professional entities thought along similar lines.  They stated that academic subjects had to demonstrate value, which lay heavily in immediate utility to the world of work and to the social order.  Educational psychologist Albion Small sought to change the curriculum pertinent to history and government in ways that would eventually appear in the curriculum as “social studies,” not fully defined as a subject area until the mid-20^th century.  Small and his successors maintained that rather than study history and government focused on international and national domains, students should learn about their local communities and units such as family, neighborhood, religious institutions, and social organizations.   

 

The Industrial Education Movement

 

The industrial education movement was heavily influenced by the Report of the Massachusetts Commission on Industrial and Technical Education of 1906.  According to this report, the aims of public education should be the development of “industrial intelligence”(ability to function in the workplace) and “productive efficiency” (skills and attitudes conducive to worker productivity), so as to benefit the worker, the employer, and the nation, the latter in the interest of achieving the “greatest technical success.”.  Advocates for the principles espoused in the report promoted a “technical” rather than “literary” education, counterpoising themselves to defenders of the prevailing curriculum of Latin, mathematics, history, civics, geography, literature, and the arts.

 

In the same year of the influential report, the National Society for the Promotion of Industrial Education was established, attracting funding from industrialists, labor groups, social workers, and “progressive” educators.  Those who were inclined toward the classical and liberal arts curriculum expressed astonishment at the “mental epidemic” they observed, as the ideas of the industrial education enthusiasts spread quickly.  Members on the Commission on the Economy of Time in Education, already assembled in 1903, enthusiastically embraced the ideas of the industrial education movement.  And in an address of 1907, President Theodore Roosevelt sounded themes resonant with those of the industrial education movement, promoting vocational practicality and service to the nation.

 

Many sociologists embraced the industrial education movement, deriding the liberal arts curriculum as “selfishly unsocial.”  Professors of education were among the avid enthusiasts of industrial education, conveying the view that the pursuit of a liberal arts education was not socially efficient, and that to do so strictly as a personal preference was not civically responsible when others deemed a student better suited to a vocational role.  Teachers College (Columbia University) Professor Henry Suzzalo said that the unique role of the schools was to “distribute men and women to those tasks in life for which their abilities will count most and their defects least.”

 

There was a prevailing belief among industrial education advocates that sociological principles could determine which groups should be educated and what they should learn.  This belief fueled the industrial education movement.  High school enrollment was surging as the 19^th turned into the 20^th century.  Educators wanted the trend to continue.  They thought that the students of the masses would reject the academic curriculum, even though rising enrollments and declared hopes of economically humble parents for their children strongly suggested otherwise.  Columbia University President Nicholas Murray Butler (a founder of Teachers College) expressed the view that the purpose of education was to adapt the “larger proportion of the population to their environment.”

 

Thus, as university field specialists and those trained to impart the classical and liberal arts curriculum advocated continuance of the latter, advocates for industrial education found strong supporters among education professors at the new teachers colleges that were replacing the old normal schools.  Liberal education was counterpoised to differentiated curriculum.  The former would not be cast aside quickly by staff at the level of the local school districts;  but in the new schools of education, professors trained new teacher aspirants on the basis of an anti-academic ideology that did become extremely influential in the ensuing decades.    

 

Lester A. Ward, the great 19^th century advocate for a common liberal arts education for all, had held that “The lower classes of society are the intellectual equals of the upper classes.”

 

Ward’s straying disciple Edward A. Ross would, by contrast, say that public schooling was “an engine of social control” and that the job of schools was “to collect little plastic lumps of human dough from private households and shape them on the social kneading board…  And so it happens that the role of the school master in the social economy is just beginning.”  Ross said that his notion of the schools as “‘an economical system of police’ shocks the public and chills the teachers.  But now and then the cat is let out of the bag. ”  He said that the New Education “will be realistic, and its starting point will be the facts of personal and social life”;  and he asserted that the new role of the emerging system of education would be “to perfect an education in the interests of society.”

 

The rise of educational sociology and the success of the industrial education movement radically changed public discussion of education goals.  The notion of differentiated education, with one curriculum for the small minority of college-bound students, another for the vast majority projected for careers in the manual vocations and the assembly line, became dominant among education professors in the teachers colleges just as enrollments soared to record levels in high schools wherein curriculum in Latin, mathematics, and the liberal arts prevailed.  The masses and the huge contingents of immigrant populations sought the social ascendance and prospective college attendance promised by the academic curriculum.

 

But educational psychologists, educational sociologists, and professors of education had other ideas as to the proper education for the masses.

 

Social Efficiecny and the Academic Curriculum

 

David Snedden was the leading representative of the social efficiency movement.  He was a schoolmaster and superintendent in California, and a founder of the field of educational psychology.  In 1907 he received a doctorate at Teachers College (Columbia University) and during 1909-1916 served as Commissioner of Education for the state of Massachusetts.  In 1916 he took a position as professor of vocational education at Teachers College;  from that professional perch, he became for the next few years the leading advocate in the nation for vocational education.

 

Snedden’s promulgations were all founded in social control doctrine.  He advanced the view that society determines the needs of individuals and that the primary aim in education is to adjust individuals and groups to their social roles and to give them the vocational training necessary for carrying out those roles.  He advocated differentiated curriculum and the determination of vocation for students during ages 12-14.  He maintained that the academic curriculum was elitist and of little civic value.

 

Snedden had unshakable confidence in his postulations, saying that those who disagreed with him by upholding the value of the academic curriculum were “wrapped up in cocoons of blind faiths, untested beliefs, and hardened customs.”  He said that the public schools would take the role of home and church in the new social order emerging in the first decades of the 20^th century.  Saying that little value lay in studying anything by penmanship, civics, and vocational education, Snedden caricatured the traditional school as “repressive,” “monarchical,” “barren and repellant,” requiring “unquestioning submission to authority” by “student automatons.”  The irony of his own  authoritarian pose seemed lost on him.

 

Snedden blasted algebra, Latin, French, history, physics, and classical English literature as courses of study;  he maintained that the need for the creation of new works of art had abated, so that art had become mere “diversion and entertainment.”  He advocated the ideals of “right social action” and defined citizenship as “submission to political order and cooperative maintenance of same.”  Irony once again seemed lost.

 

With regard to the value of studying history, Cornell University historian George L. Burns confronted Snedden with the counterview that history taught “imagination, sympathy, insight, [and] judgment” and that the study of history was the best training for “life and action.”  He said that the only history that Snedden favored was “history with the history left out.” 

 

University of Cincinnati mathematics professor Charles N. Moore noted that the failure of many aspirants for the position of artillery officer during World War I was due to deficiency in mathematics skills, and wrote that

 

I have felt for some time that some of the ill-advised agitators

in the education world who have been advocating swift changes

in our school curriculum without offering any valid reasons in

support of their claim were, perhaps unconsciously, perpetrating

an injustice on the youth of our land who are entitled to the

best available education.”

 

David Snedden shot back that girls rarely aspired to be artillery officers, navigators, civic or electrical engineers, machinists, or architects---  and that this was true for the masses of boys also.  Only when Snedden advocated for separating vocational schools from academic high schools did his star as the foremost advocate for industrial education dim.  In 1924, influential “progressive” educator H. Gordon Hullfish chastised Snedden for his vocational separatism, which ran counter to the views of most other industrial education proponents, who wanted differentiated curriculum within single high school settings.

 

But the main thrust of Snedden’s arguments for an emphasis on vocational over academic education, and for differentiation of vocational versus academic curriculum, remained enormously influential.

 

In fact, the movement for industrial education had already persuaded a longtime advocate of academic education to alter his position.  The person of note was Charles W. Elliot.

 

Charles W. Elliot’s Defection

 

Charles W. Elliot and W. T. Harris had been the leading proponents of liberal education for all and leading forces on the Committer of Ten, which met in 1892, issued its pro-academic education report in 1993, and for many years thereafter influenced the curricula of high schools in the United States.  In a 1908 address to the National Society for the Promotion of Industrial Education, Elliot asserted that students should be sorted according to vocational or collegiate destiny and maintained that elementary school (typically grades 1-8 at the time) teachers should do the sorting before students matriculated at the high school level.


Others who favored a knowledge-intensive liberal arts education would not be so easily converted as was Elliot by the anti-knowledge rhetoric of education professors, but a clear pathway had been laid for the anti-academic approach that would became dominant by the last decades of the 20th century.              

 

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.