3 (of 4) competing influence on education in the period leading up to the 1950s.
- Humanists - A "Classical Education" focused on the Roman, Greek, and Enlightenment traditions with a heavy focus on ancient languages, textuality, history, geometry, and logic. Flaws include: limited applicability to the daily needs of the masses, few teachers had the knowledge to teach it, it was difficult and students were expected to be in class for long hours which competed with their families need for them to work/labor at home
- Developmentalists - The first of the "scientific" theories which emerged out of equal parts German psychology and social Darwinism. The major premise of developmentalists remains influential today: children should learn material appropriate for their social and intellectual capabilities. Flaws include: "science" was a very flexible term that often included "random thoughts of random white guys", initial attempts at gauging children's social and intellectual development followed social-epoch theory, tended to assume that certain classes of people would never develop as far because they weren't as evolved.
- Social Efficacy - Social institutions should reflect the broad needs of society and the nation, including schools. This led to the pairing of schools deciding they needed to teach kids the citizenship values of the nation with the idea that schools should reflect the labor conditions which they were preparing students for. There was a big focus on testing and measurement to eliminate inefficient uses of time and money. Flaws include: immigrants and poors were assumed to have bad values, the masses were destined for factory floors so schools should literally emulate factories, curriculum often scaled back to the basics and applied via highly regimented direct instruction.
Much of the split between these two philosophies came from the practical split between factory labor focused education and farm labor focused education. Up through the 1940s, as much as 20% of the US population was engaged directly in farming and half of the US population was rural through the 1920s. Unlike the factory, where it was uncommon for laborers to live, the demands of farm life necessarily included "domestic" components. These were not cognitively simple tasks, either. Farmers had to track, breed, and/or slaughter livestock, understand the botany and ecology of their crops, and plan both agriculturally and financially for future growing seasons. The early stages of social meliorism emerged out of the feeling that schools should aid their farmer-students in developing the skills to be self sufficient.
It's not hard to see how these ideologies were incompatible. On one hand, there was a move to radically simplify and atomize each step in a chain of labor. Each factory worker only needed to know his (and it was his) job and not the jobs of other workers. On the other hand, every farmer needed to know everything about the labor of farming, the management of a farm, and daily living on a farm.
I want to add some of my own analysis here, too. The social meliorists seem to me to be very closely aligned with the Progressive movement of the early 20th century. It's often assumed that progressive education came much later but I feel there is a deeper connection here. Although the texts I'm pulling from don't make this connection explicitly, the progressive movement was also born out of the economic situation of America's farmers. A lot of hay is made of the need for labor reforms and challenging the phenomenally corrupt state and federal government of the time but the origins came from a popular movement among farmers to challenge the power of the railroads. Farmers relied on the railroads to transport their goods to mills and markets around the nation which made them very sensitive to changes in freight pricing. The railroads operated with effective monopolies over vast areas of farmland and the earliest moves toward "trust busting" were by organized farmers. One early example was a change made in New York to state road laws. Prior to 1898, roads were maintained by local landowners at their own expense, competing directly with railways for the transit of goods over even relatively short distances. Railways would buy up land adjacent to existing roadways and then "fail" to maintain the roads, thus encouraging the use of rail. In 1898, New York assumed the responsibility of roadway maintenance at the state level and levied a transport tax for funding which primarily fell on the railroads. This was done as direct relief to the farmers of New York. By about 1910, most states had followed suit and the first federal agency overseeing roadways was created, the American Association for Highway Improvement. I know it's not a school-specific example but America's large rural population made it influential throughout the early 20th century and it acted as the kickstart for the Progressive era. This has some clear connections to the goals of the social meliorists, as we are about to see.
So, one of the ways this idea of self-sufficiency through broad knowledge entered the curriculum was through "experience curriculum" or, simply put, learning by doing. Obviously this has some important applications to farming and Massachusetts passed the Smith-Hughes Act in 1913 to encourage agricultural vocational training in the state's rural schools. This became a model piece of legislation and saw support from the US Farm Bureau. This legislation funded schools that did something similar to what we call "project based learning" today. Students would learn about farming by doing farming. Later curriculum reforms would be influenced by this approach. One important work was Kilpatrick's The Project Method published in 1918. Kilpatrick took the farming projects and argued that all of education could be based on projects organized around a central theme. Unlike the scientific-efficiency curriculum, inquiry and interests were placed at the center of Kilpatrick's project method. Teachers were "glue" connecting and unifying the educational matter underlying students' interests. From what I'm reading, it seems like Kilpatrick tapped into a current within schools which wanted to resist the influence of the social efficiency crowd because this articulation of this method became a popular alternative to the factory model of schooling.
You might expect me to be quite positive about the social meliorists and their progressivism but it was not all good. Much like other Progressive Era political reforms, there was a moral element to the social meliorists which sought not just to instruct the individual and promote self-sufficiency but to civilize individuals; that is, they were seeking to teach the then-popular christian values of moderation, temperance, and comity, too. Much like the temperance movement was a protestant effort to reign in the perceived moral failures of catholic immigrants, progressive education also included elements aimed at teaching virtue. This was not all that different from the mission to teach democratic values seen in the efficiency classrooms and, in this area at least, they found some common ground. A project in a progressive school might have revolved around finding ways to behave during public assemblies, like church, and in this way also sought to establish specific cultural norms, albeit through individual discovery. Another example would be John Dewey's Democracy in Education where he combines developmentalist psychology and social meliorist methods to argue that education creates the ideal democratic citizen (a social efficiency conclusion). Dewey was weird. I don't want to talk about him.
Similarly, research by social meliorists resembled research under the other curriculum regimes. Experts in schools of psychology, philosophy, and education departments, along with those in various foundations and think-tanks still held control. It was rare that any teacher had influence over the curriculum which she (and it has almost always been she) taught. Even through the roaring twenties and the formal separation of many schools of education from psychology or philosophy departments, teachers remained somewhat undereducated. Although an increasing portion had completed university education, there were large variations in what kind of training that meant. Decisions about policy and curriculum were considered best left to the experts and developed in academic or laboratory settings. There's a great story I learned recently about the Lincoln School. It was formed by Teacher's College was meant to be a laboratory school showcasing the best ideas in project learning and, controversially, drew its student body from the working class immigrant families of Manhattan. During this school's existence, it was almost impossible to get a faculty member of Teacher's College to actually visit the school because they viewed it as a waste of their time. No faculty of Teacher's College conducted research at the Lincoln School before it was closed in 1946!
Through the teens and twenties, social efficiency and social meliorism competed for dominance among a variety of curricula but during the Great Depression social meliorism truly became ascendant. As thousands and thousands of factory workers lost their jobs and farmers watched their crops blow away in the Oklahoma dust, teachers and schools felt the pain of the depression too. In Chicago, teachers went unpaid for months on end. Nationwide there were cuts to education. The social efficiency movement, associated as it was with the factories and industrial systems falling apart around the world, lost its luster quickly. Progressive educators like George Counts began to argue that letting the industrialists and efficiency movement continue to influence education would inevitably perpetuate the existing social order. In a sense, social justice entered the education world and its doorway was social meliorism.
Counts and others built on Kilpatrick's project method and the self-sufficiency of the previous generation's progressive era schooling to call for a curriculum that developed a sense of the coherent and integrated self - an explicit rejection of the reduction of a student to the task they were set to accomplish. They also sought to improve upon the progressive ideals, arguing that there was no sense of social welfare among progressive educators, only the "anarchy of extreme individualism", according to Counts. In 1932, following a comparative study of the Soviet education system, Counts published Dare the School Build a New Social Order, calling for a complex nationwide overhaul of schools. Among his ideas was the recentering of curriculum on the social welfare needs of the learners and the inclusion of teachers in matters of curriculum as they had more useful local knowledge.
While many of these ideas clearly came from the political left, most progressive educators were not outright Marxists. I would categorize them along the lines of modern democratic socialists who preferred the government and its institutions reign in the excesses of industry. As fascism emerged in Europe and revealed one possible outcome of a cozy relationship between the state and industry, social meliorism gained even more steam as a seemingly anti-fascist approach to schooling. What emerged throughout the country was a kind of hybrid between the structure of social efficiency and the aims of the social meliorists. Bell schedules and age-cohorts remained, as did the efforts to promote a particular vision of American democracy, but the aims of the curriculum were shifting from being about basic preparations for work on an assembly line to preparation for the much broader "duties of life." Teaching higher mathematics, like algebra and geometry, were broadly added to high school mathematics, as were foreign languages, history, and a focus on positive social relationships added to curricula across the country. The seminal Eight-Year Study seemed to confirm the efficacy of this approach and prompted more schools to shift to this version of progressive education. Colleges, however, did not follow the recommendations to relax admissions standards, especially after World War II and the glut of new applicants.
The advent World War II also saw the needs of the federal government have their first direct impact on the curriculum. Criticisms of American social structures became more muted and perceived as unpatriotic. At the same time, demand for the kinds of people who would win the war increased. Unlike the first World War where it was paramount to have the most soldiers, the government felt technological and material supremacy was more important than outright manpower. Funds were made available for advancing math and science, especially as related to aviation and navigation. History and social science refocused around understanding the war. Industrial education also returned as factories were retooled to build the arsenal of democracy and demand for laborers returned.
In the postwar period, it became increasingly clear that there was a new entrant to the US education system. Whereas up until then, it was largely accepted that the "experts" should decide the scope of curriculum, now many argued that the government should ultimately decide curriculum. The debate between the four influence at the beginning of the 20th century subsided and a new debate emerged: just how much of a role should the federal government have in education? Inroads made during the war were hard to give up and many of the programs were regarded as successful. In my mind, the end of this early era, the Modern origins of our current education system, ended with two major events that cemented the role of the federal government in education. First, of course, was the need to compete against global communism. The launch of Sputnik led directly to the passage of the National Defense Education Act in 1958, legislating for the first time the entrance of the federal government into education. Second was the Civil Rights movement. Brown v. BOE was in 1954 and ruled that segregation of public schools was unconstitutional. What followed were policies of massive resistance in various pro-segregation states and communities which limited meaningful change until the 1960s. Activists increasingly turned to federal level reforms to supercede states, culminating in 1964's Civil Rights Act. In 1965 the Elementary and Secondary Education Act provided federal funding for education and further cemented federal control.
Both of these movements dramatically altered the discourse about education in the US even though none of the tensions between humanism, developmentalists, social efficiency, and social meliorism were resolved. From that point onward, the power over curriculum rested in the hands of policymakers at the federal level. This is not to say those initial four ideologies of curriculum ever went away. The Civil Rights movement drew heavily on the arguments of the social meliorists. Social efficiency ideas found a home with the need to make US technology competitive with the Soviet Union and, later, with a globalized marketplace and the advent of the current testing regime. The science of child development remained an important area of study and continues to drive decisions about early childhood education and literacy. Only the humanists seem quiet today. It's only in certain private schools and classics departments where their version of curriculum remains but the idea that learning "the classics" is essential is still around. While the list of classics may be different, many educators still believe there is value in a canonical set of texts. One major holdover from humanists is the reliance on "close reading" of a text, often to the exclusion of the reader or social context.
There are about a million things which I haven't mentioned. It's not exactly fair to a pair of well-researched academic books to try and cram them into a trio of blog posts but I hope it's been interesting, if not informative. I feel a bit more organized in my thinking about education in that era which was kind of the point of all of this.
That said, there are some important omissions which I ought to point out. The Kliebard text, which is the foundation of my summaries, is a very important text in education. It is one of the only attempts to condense many of the major educational ideas of this period into a manageable and coherent text. I've seen it cited in all kinds of circumstances and it will even be getting a new 4th edition sometime in the next year or two. Yet, it leaves out a really really important set of educators and students from this era: black people! This was the time of debate between W.E.B. DuBois and Booker T. Washington about the uses of education for African Americans. This era saw the advent of Historically Black Colleges and Universities. Separate but equal was enshrined as law by Plessy v Ferguson in 1896 and created an entirely separate class of schools for blacks, especially in the South, which lasted the duration of the period covered by Kliebard. Yet these events barely merit a mention in a book meant to be comprehensive.
Equally omitted, although oddly present, are women. Throughout the text Kliebard makes sure to mention that most teachers are women. He even points out that the reason teachers have low status in the US is partly because it is thought of as "women's work" and has been historically deprofessionalized. But that's it. I had expected an analysis of women striving for educational change, looking for respect in their chosen profession, or really any indication that women were more than the passive recipients of patriarchal oppression in the education field. I found little. It makes no sense, either, because this was an era heavily influenced by Elizabeth Peabody and Margarethe Shurtz. I have to turn to the Lageman text about the the history of educational research to learn, for example, that Ella Flagg Young who conducted her dissertation research at the Chicago Lab School under John Dewey had significant influence on his famous Democracy in Education and was the superintendent of schools for the City of Chicago!
Let's hope that the 4th edition sees the inclusion of these clearly integral parts of modern educational thinking.
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