Today I'd like to look at the next of two trends to develop in that era. Since both were roughly concurrent, I will start with the one which I feel has the strongest connection to today's education reform movement, social efficacy education. Although the developmentalists called themselves scientific, that term would today most look like the social efficacy movement. Let's not forget that it was easy to call yourself a scientist and never really do much more than speculate wildly but with some internally consistent logic. Phrenology was a science and was probably just as valid as culture-epoch theory - that is to say, not valid at all.
So, social efficacy education also emerged from Germany and also depended greatly on Prussian models of schooling. One key difference here is that social efficacy was focused very closely on efficiency. Although the term social efficacy originates in Benjamin Kidd's Social Evolution, the foundation for this way of schooling owes a lot of credit to the writings of Edward Ross. Ross's 1901 Social Control made the case for large scale national organization of society and many of his ideas filtered down to educational sociologists and reformers like Snedden, Finney, Ellwood, and Peters (apparently not everyone has a wikipedia!). According to Ross, all of our social institutions, including schools, should be geared toward building a more moral and civilized society. That these morals and civilization were white, western, and protestant christian was not just beside the point - it was the point. Much like the Prussian system of schooling, America needed to create its citizens through the inculcation of moral rightness. He felt that schools had the opportunity to replace the flaws of parenting and see children educated by "picked persons" who would eliminate anti-social tendencies.
The second half of social efficacy education is probably the one you're more familiar with - the "industrialization" of the school environment. Classes were broken into discrete subjects, students sat in rows, followed a "bell", and generally proceeded through a day in a way which resembled factory labor. These reforms were championed by Frederick Winslow Taylor who, like Ross, was not specifically interested in education so much as in reforming all of society. His Principles of Scientific Management became the definitive book on running any manufacturing in the US. Much like today, schools were under pressure to meet the needs of industry - most students were still not completing high school and just about all of them became some kind of manual laborer, many in factories. Scientific management required that each individual task be broken down into the simplest constituent tasks and managers would order and organize these tasks in ways to cut costs, increase speed, and improve quality.
Taylor didn't just promote his theories of management as the correct way to run a business. He felt they would improve every facet of life. Indeed he actually argued in front of Congress that principles of scientific management would bring about an end to war and that employers would, by the very nature of his principles, uphold the Golden Rule (an especially interesting claim given that two years later the outbreak of WWI would see those same principles march millions to their death). Under scientific management we would see the "substitution of peace for war; the substitution of hearty brotherly cooperation for competition and strife; of both pulling hard in the same direction instead of pulling apart; of replacing suspicion with mutual confidence; of becoming friends instead of enemies" (p.30).
It's not hard to see how Taylor's scientific management and Ross' push for unified moral social institutions came together in schools. When people argue today that schools have not changed in 100 years, they are talking about the schools which this movement created. They are orderly like a factory and they are meant to produce a specific kind of social output by teaching the values American society "ought" to have. Schools nationwide saw another important application of this approach - they could build curriculum around it and point to a real and positive outcome after students completed their schooling: employment.
In Gary, Indiana, John Bobbit remade the school system according to rules adapted from thinkers like Ross and Taylor. The school was renamed a "plant" (as in a place where manufacturing takes place) and the superintendent of schools war retitled "educational engineer". Not to different from today's districts having CEOs and boards of directors! In his classrooms, students were broken into "platoons" (again with the militarism) and he systematized the movement of platoons through the school spaces (if you've been in an elementary school ever, they still do this). With regard to curriculum, Bobbit also applied scientific management. Human experience should be broken into separate fields, the job of each field should be ascertained and specific activities identified. Around those jobs and activities, educational engineers and their staff would create instructional objectives and then build out the curriculum in detail on a day-to-day basis. Interestingly, Bobbit liked measuring students in a variety of ways and grouping them according to ability in order to cut down on educational "waste". After all, women would mostly not be working in factories and had roles at home which required different courses (home ec. anyone?).
Obviously there's a lot more going on here than just these few men. One great example I've totally skipped is the Douglas Commission in 1905 in Massachusetts. Massachusetts was the first state to have compulsory education and, even today, is a leader in education. In short, the Douglas Commission argues that schools in Massachusetts had changed too little in the last 80 years (so, since 1825) and they were doing a poor job of preparing students for the demands of living in an industrialized society. Honestly, you could substitute industry and factories for technology and the internet and this report would read just as well today. All over the US, similar conclusions were being reached and they all fall under the same social efficacy umbrella. Namely, schools need to make two things: citizens and labor. Citizens needed to uphold what were seen as American values. Laborers needed both the basic skills and temperament to work on the factory floor. Schools, it seemed, were in the best position to do this work and many teachers, administrators, and lawmakers were happy to direct them to do it. They were even happier that there was an intense focus on efficiency and cutting waste as it was their responsibility to ensure the proper use of taxpayer funds.
As I said when introducing social efficacy, so much of the movement has lasted down to modern day schooling. Whether it's the physical movement of students through the school day or the idea that schools are engaged in citizenship, we see the work of these reformers continue on. I especially want to note the intermingling of labor needs with curriculum. I think this idea about schooling is probably still the strongest driver of school reform and changes today. Many many people reduce the role of school to preparing students for the workforce and the recent recession followed by a slow recovery has amplified these voices. It's not an accident that schools are under significant pressure to prepare students of all ages for work in STEM fields because that's where the jobs are (you'll all be doctors who program sexting apps!). It's also no mistake that schools are trying to reorganize themselves to look like today's workplaces. If we look back a decade to the NCLB/RTtT era we also see a renewed attempt to apply standardization across all classrooms and curriculua, something which would have made Taylor and Bobbit proud.
But what of research in this era? After all, my recent return to blogging was prompted by my thinking about educational research. Well, unlike the humanists who pretty much didn't do research of any kind, and the developmentalists whose research was something akin to child study, social efficacy researchers came in two flavors. First, the practical research which was done by districts and schools was largely meant to be immediately applied. This was data driven and sought to eliminate wasted time, space, or money and much of it came directly from factory-style management practices. Not a lot was devoted to pedagogy.
Second was standardized testing. Edward Thorndike, an early developer of psychological testing also sought to push schools to implement more standardized testing across ages and schools. His tests, however, were more focused on student's intellectual abilities. Meanwhile, Leonard Ayres, who had just previously run schools in Puerto Rico (recently "acquired" from the Spanish) was hired by a think-tank, the Russel Sage Foundation, to do school surveys. These were early forms of standardized tests which evaluated students knowledge across a variety of topics from curricular subjects to their recognition of important places and objects. Famously, students in Boston failed to identify farm animals and produce leading to one of the first culturally relevant test revisions. By the 1910s schools around the nation were implementing standardized tests on a regular basis as a means to drive curriculum, evaluate teachers, and identify the "feeble-minded". I also want to add that much of this early research was still considered psychological, not educational. It wasn't until later that most schools of education gained some degree of independence (or actually became their own school).
One particular type of standardized test gained prominence among the social efficacy crowd, the IQ test. While at Stanford, Lewis Terman building on the work of German psychologists (who else did we go to during this period?) developed the very first tests for measuring a person's intelligence quotient. Terman's tests were put to use evaluating draftees and recruits and group men according to their mental ability during the US build up to WWI to. Following the war, industry and schools adopted these tests to better sort and group laborers and students. By the 1920s, statistical analysis of schools based on a variety of tests and data was commonplace. Two major trends in education research were well established: research was primarily quantitative, and research was primarily clinical and empirical. These laid the groundwork for the growth of behaviorist studies, which, I think you can see, have an interesting relationship to the ever growing need for factory workers.
In my next post, I will look at the final of the four major influence on modern US education. Like social efficacy education, I feel that this fourth influence still has effects today. In part as a response to the powerful social efficacy movement, but also partly because of progressive era reform politics, the social meliorists sought to use schools to fix society's problems.
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