The following text is a draft of a chapter I am working on for an upcoming book. Text is copyrighted under my name. There are several quotes near the end which are not sourced, but their sources are, in most cases, obvious. I hereby give permission to quote short passages for scholarly purposes. Formatting irregularities are unavoidable.
The Rise and Fall of
Progressive Education
by Martin Cothran
At the beginning
of C.S. Lewis’ The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, Eustace Clarence
Scrubb, a spoiled and troublesome child, finds himself at a “progressive”
school called, “Experiment House” where his progressive parents have sent
him. Eustace calls his teetotalling,
non-smoking, vegetarian parents by their first names, and they wear a special
sort of underwear. Experiment House has
all the interesting quirks his parents have—and more. The subjects in the
curriculum all have familiar names in order to make sure they are “relevant” to
the children. In addition, each subject is taught differently, and Bibles are
“not encouraged.” Discipline is different at the school: instructors do not
consider children who bully other children as “bad,” but rather as “interesting
psychological cases,” and think that “children ought to be allowed to do as
they like.”
If Experiment
House doesn’t sound familiar, it should.
Lewis was obviously lampooning some of the schools in the England of his
day. The sort of romantic educational
permissivism that manifested itself at Experiment House was quite evident at
schools like Summerhill in Suffolk, England, which had become a mecca for
progressivist educators in the 1920’s, 30’s, and 40’s. And England wasn’t the only place you could
find such schools. The romanticism, the
relativism, and the utilitarian rationalism that characterized Lewis’ imaginary
school could be found in the 1880s in places like the Laboratory School and the
Cook County Normal School in Chicago, and the Horace Mann School in New
York. If modern American education went
in search of its roots, it would find them here.
The movement that came to be known as the
“Progressive education movement” had its origins in two impulses that came to
dominate schools in the early 20th century. The first was a utilitarian vocationalism
that attempted to transform schools into glorified job training centers to fit
children into the industrial and agricultural economy; the second was a
romantic progressivism that sought to harness the schools to help realize a
utopian vision of society. Both of these movements had the effect of moving schools
further away from their original academic emphasis. The “Manual Training” Movement of the late 19th
century and the Progressives Education movement of the early 20th
century pulled schools away from their original academic moorings and towards
purposes never before conceived to be educational. Both of these impulses in America’s
educational history are documented in Lawrence Cremin’s The Transformation of the School: Progressivism in American Education
1876-1957. Cremin, a professor at Columbia University
Teachers College for many years, is still regarded as the greatest historian of
American education. His three volume
history of American education, one of which won the Pulitzer Prize, is still
the standard reference work on the subject.
Cremin documents the many attempts to hijack schools to serve some
societal purpose other than actual education.
The Manual Training Movement and progressivism are only the most notable
and general of these attempts.
The Manual Training Movement
What came to be known as the “Manual Training” movement began in the 1870s,
when John D. Runkle, president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
(MIT) happened to walking through the industrial exhibits at the Philadelphia
Centennial Exposition of 1876 and came across the Russian display cases in
Machinery Hall. It was a time when
America, like other Western nations, was becoming more intentional about their
role in the industrial revolution.
Runkle was interested in the problem of how to train students for the
kinds of jobs that were increasingly coming into demand in America’s cities:
jobs that required skilled workers to operate the new machinery that was
driving industrialization. Up to that
point, technical institutions did not really have hands on training of the kind
that was needed to fuel the new industrial economy, but Runkle saw in the work
of the Moscow Imperial Technical School, headed by Victor Della Vos, exactly
what he thought was wanting in American technical schools: construction shops
that would give aspiring workers the hands-on training they needed to service
the nations burgeoning industry. Rather
than having students spend all their time with books, actual experience in what
they were being trained to do had to become a part of the schools daily
activity. He wanted a schooling that
would “marry the mental and the manual.”
In the meantime
another man, Calvin M. Woodward of Washington University in St. Louis was
already preparing the way by having become an outspoken critic of the exclusive
emphasis on academic instruction in the nation’s schools. Woodward too had become convinced—by his own
experiences unsuccessfully trying to teach students how to work in a
woodshop—that students needed hands-on vocational training along with the
academic instruction they were receiving in schools. He concluded that the traditional book-oriented
method used by schools, with its emphasis on gentlemanliness and culture, was
outmoded and that it “oftener unfits
than fits a man for earning his
living.” Initially, Woodward claimed that he was not
asking for schools to change their purpose from academic institutions to trade
schools, only that they should include manual training in their larger academic
mission. He also claimed that he was not asking for schools to teach with
specific and immediate vocations goals, but only that schools teach the basic
manual arts that would fit them for a wide range of trades. “The trades are many,” he said, “but the arts
are few.” Training students in the
general manual arts would be the best preparation for fitting them for the
trades. To limit the education of
students to purely academic subjects when many of them would be entering trades
was to ill serve them, he argued. We
must therefore teach the “whole boy.”
Woodward’s cause
was not unpopular. In fact, it attracted
an increasing number of adherents during the 1870s and early 1880s until
finally its detractors counterattacked.
At its national meeting in 1882, Woodward was challenged to what
amounted to a showdown by Albert P. Marble, superintendent of Worcester,
Massachusetts school system. Marble
argued that the kind of manual training championed by Woodward simply did not
fit the mission of the school:
[T]he
schools we have to conduct are to train boys and girls in those directions that
are common to everybody, and one of the things that the boys and girls ought to
learn in those schools is how to get information from books. There is no information stored up in the
plow, hoe handle, [or] steam engine; but there is information stored up in
books … The saw is brought into the recitation room, and the teacher says,
“now, saw.” It is a thing that does not belong to the school at all. It belongs
outside, and ought to be attended to outside.
But the most
significant opposition to Woodward’s manual training ideas came from William
Torrey Harris, the influential superintendent of St. Louis schools. Harris argued that Woodward’s idea of the
“whole boy” reeked of “Rousseauianism”—a reference to the French philosopher
Jean Jacques Rousseau, whose romanticism would, according to many later
critics, come to be one of the chief influences on the philosophy and practice
of schools. As for tool work being
educative, recounts Lawrence Cremin, “Harris noted that so were marbles,
quoits, baseball, and jackstraws, but this did not command for them a place in
the school … To teach a child carpentry, Harris warned, is to give him a
limited knowledge of self and nature; to teach him to read is to offer him the
key to all human wisdom.” And to punctuate the point, he added, “It is the
difference between a piece of baked bread, which nourishes for the day, and the
seed-corn, which is the possibility of countless harvests.”
But the Manual
Training Movement continued to gather steam, and the subject became the topic
of even broader debates at the NEA’s 1889 meeting. Not only did the impetus for this come from
the industrial interests, it also had support among the nation’s still
prominent agricultural interests. While
Woodward and others were pushing to make room for industrial training, people
like “Uncle Henry” Wallace of the influential Wallace’s Farmer and William Dempster Hoard, editor of Hoard’s
Dairyman, were battening at the doors of the educational establishment
demanding that schools spend more time training farmers. More and more of the common schools not only
introduced manual training in schools, but began to displace their academic
programs to make for them.
In 1903,
Woodward, who had claimed he was pressing for manual training but not direct
vocational instruction, dropped any pretense that vocationalism should be just
part of the schools’ curricula, announcing that “by multiplying manual training
schools we solve the problem of training all the mechanics our country needs.”
The debate about whether schools should be involved in vocational instruction
as a major goal was essentially over, the only question remaining being, not
whether to do it, but how it should be done.
The final stroke came in 1917, when the U. S. Congress passed the
Smith-Hughes Act, which launched the federal involvement in the promotion of
vocational training in schools that has lasted to this day.
The consequences
if this change in the purpose of schools is still being felt today, but even
early on, the problem with schools trying to anticipate the vicissitudes of the
economy was clear. The old
apprenticeship model, where young men spent time with those in a particular
trade and learned it first hand from someone who did it for a living was in the
course of being replaced by hands-on instruction in the schools. That trades are learned better through
apprenticeship rather than school instruction—even it is hands-on—will seem
common sense to some. Was it a purpose,
in other words, that was best served by schools? In addition, there was the problem with the
idea that schools were capable of anticipating the kind of jobs that would be
available for the students graduating from manual training programs—and it
didn’t take long to determine how big a problem that was. In 1921, just four years after the passage of
the Smith-Hughes act, the evidence began coming in. Cremin writes:
As
Paul Douglas pointed out in a perceptive criticism written shortly after World
War I
the very sort of craft-oriented instruction to which the Smith Hughes Act had
committed the nation had already been left behind by the onrush of
technological advance. The craftsmen who
left industry to become the teachers of vocational subjects too easily isolated
themselves from the mainstream of industrial innovation. With the machinery purchased for school use
was itself soon outmoded by technological improvement. It took less than forty years for American
industry, facing a new apprenticeship crisis after World War II, to reclaim for
itself educational responsibilities it had so easily abandoned in the early
decades of the century.
Not only has
this problem of school keeping up with the economy to which they have been
charged with fitting students not improved: it has become even worse thanks to
the increasing pace of technological innovation. The question is not whether Marble and Harris
were right in the criticisms, but whether they were more right than they could
have known.
The Educational Science
As the advocates
of vocationalism were trying with increasing success to force the nation’s
educational enterprise onto a new course, the champions of science and
psychology were tugging it in another direction. The 19th century
saw the exaltation of the sciences to a position of cultural influence and
authority far beyond the dreams of scientists themselves. When Charles Darwin published The Origin of Species in 1859, he was
surprised at the enthusiastic reception it received. He couldn’t figure out why a book which went
into painful detail about beetles and barnacles and the process of their
development had captured the imagination of so many people. There was
increasing interest and respect for this new field which promised to explain so
many things that had thus far remained a mystery. The explanatory powers of science had been
evident for some time. Copernicus had
published his heliocentric hypothesis in 1514; Galileo had invented the
telescope in 1609; and Isaac Newton had announced his three laws of universal
motion in 1687. But for a movement to
have wide influence and appeal, it needs a name and a distinct identity. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the term “scientist” didn’t even exist
as a distinct term until the 1800s, and was only coined in 1934, coming into
popular use only around the turn of the century. Before that time, scientists considered
themselves “natural philosophers.”
A number of
thinkers and events conspired to bring the influence of science to bear on
education in America. The first of these
was Herbert Spencer, a British philosopher and political thinker who was one of
the first to fully appreciate the broader significance of Darwin’s ideas. In fact, it was Spencer, not Darwin, who
coined the expression, “survival of the fittest.” Spencer took Darwin’s ideas on evolution and
began to apply them to areas of thought outside natural science. He wrote on ethics, religion, and psychology,
and it was Spencer who earned the dubious distinction of being the inventor of
what later came to be known as “social Darwinism.” But it was his book Education that had the greatest influence on Americans. In it, he propounded the idea that the purpose
of education was to “prepare us for a complete living.” And for such a goal, which to Spencer
involved instruction on the necessities of life, the discipline of offspring,
social and political relations, as well as gratification of tastes and
feelings, the thing needed was science.
Spencer’s
influence was directly felt on what came to be known as the Report of the
Committee of Ten. It is hard for those
of us living at a time in which reports on education seem to be a daily event to
appreciate the significance such a report could have in a far less jaded
time. Headed by Charles Eliot, who 24
years earlier had been elected President of Harvard, the Committee of Ten
collected together a group of scholars and education professionals who, under
Eliot’s leadership, attempted to restate what it was that schools were
for. It articulated what Eliot had long
been saying: that the nation needed a “new education,” on which placed science
on a parity with the other disciplines.
This “new education” would emphasize applied sciences, modern languages,
and mathematics. But ironically,
Spencer, along with his American disciple, William Graham Sumner, a political
and social science professor at Yale, were among the most ardent opponents of
sweeping reform schemes of the kind working themselves out in people like Eliot
and groups like the Committee of Ten. Social
Darwinism of the kind Spencer propounded (along with Sumner, his American
lieutenant) spurned the idea that the natural and inevitable forces of
evolution could be stymied. But while
Spencer and Sumner believed in a sort of inevitable evolutionary determinism,
those who believed evolution could be guided and controlled had them
outnumbered, and Eliot was among the most prominent of those who believed in a
reform-minded social evolution.
For Spencer
evolution was essentially purposeless, but for Eliot and others it was amenable
to the purposes of reformers like themselves. So Eliot and figures like
paleontologist Lester Frank Ward took Spencer’s idea that the school should
prepare students for a living, and left Spencer’s determinism behind. For them,
students were not a social tool in the hands of an inexorable evolutionary
process, but rather education was the malleable enterprise in the hands of
society for society’s betterment. And here we have the origin of the modern
idea of Education as the great panacea.
Education, in the minds of Eliot and others, became a road to utopia—a
scientific enterprise that could reform society. Education from this time forward would
command an almost religious devotion. It
had now become something much more than it was before. Before, education could only bring children
to a knowledge of the truth; now it could change society. It could also change human nature itself.
Along with the
rise in the influence of the hard sciences, came the rise of psychology. Over the last 200-300 years, the hard
sciences—biology, chemistry, physics—have soaked up most of the intellectual
spotlight. Science gained an
intellectual prestige which other academic disciplines came to envy. After all, science “works” in a way that
other disciplines do not. In fact, “to
work” in the sense of practical application, is part of what science is in a
way that it is not for other disciplines.
But by the 19th century, many of what we used to call the
“moral sciences,” such as history, economics, and political philosophy (now
recast as “political science”) were re-categorized as “social sciences.” In fact, the whole idea of “social sciences”
is a testimony to the desire of other disciplines to acquire some of the
prestige of the hard sciences. The
result was a set of disciplines which mimicked the language, the practices, and
the goals of science. The academic robe
once worn by the old educational masters was figuratively replaced with a white
coat, and every subject wanted to be science when it grew up. Enter psychology.
The first
doctorate in psychology granted by Harvard University was conferred on
Granville Stanley Hall in 1878. After
studying in Germany for a few years, he returned to America and took a
professorship at Johns Hopkins University, where he taught many students. One of them was a young man named John
Dewey. Hall’s influence in the new field
of psychology grew to massive proportions, and (thanks in part to his influence
on Dewey) it spilled over into education.
A friend once introduced him to an audience as the “Darwin of the Mind,”
largely because of his introduction of evolutionary concepts into
psychology. According to his “general
psychonomic law,” the development of an individual mimics the evolution of the
race; in other words, individual humans go through stages of development on the
path toward adulthood in the same way that human beings go through stages of
evolution on their path toward becoming a human.
Hall became the
first of many thinkers who made child development the center of their study. It
was Hall, armed with this new view of child development, and glowing with the
scientific aura that attended it, who first urged that the contents of the
curriculum should be determined on the basis of “the data of child
development.” “Here,” says Cremin, “his
key concept concerned the difference between the scholiocentric and the pedocentric
school”—between,
in other words, the scholarship-centered school and the child-centered school.
No longer would the child be forced to approximate some scholarly ideal devised
by the community of learned people: now the ideal would have to adapt itself to
the child. Under the Manual Training
Movement, there was a shift from academics as the material cause of education
to job skills. Under the New Psychology,
there was a shift in the formal cause of education: from being determined by
academics to being determined by the psychology of the child. “The shift was truly Copernican,” said
Cremin, “its effects legion”:
On
the one hand it hastened the acceptance of academic studies long barred from
the school by reason of tradition, custom, or simple apathy. On the other hand, it opened the pedagogical
floodgates to every manner of activity, trivial as well as useful, that seemed
in some way to minister to “the needs of the children.” Reformers had a field
day, as did sentimentalists, and American schools were never quite the same
again! (Cremin, p. 104)
But Hall did not
break ranks with Spencer on the issue of changing the student to fit some
outside purpose. Like Spencer, Hall’s
view of evolution involved only adaptation to environment, and his educational
views involved only helping to adapt the child to his environment: it did not
involve changing the environment to which he had to adapt. He was not
“reform-minded,” he was “adaptation-minded.”
Another thinker was required in order to complete the progressivist
picture: William James.
James, a
philosopher who gained great influence and repute within his lifetime, was one
of several American philosophers called “pragmatists.” James, also an adherent
to the evolutionary gospel, scorned the idea of naturalistic determinism and
believed that, in addition to the environment molding humans (where Spencer and
Hall stopped), humans molded their environment.
We are ever reacting to our environment in manifold ways, and the kinds
of reactions we choose ultimately form themselves into habits. But, by the decisions we make, we have a role
in determining what these habits eventually become. The purpose of education, thought James, was
to actively guide the impulses and reactions of youth in such a way as to turn
the child into a “purposeful, thinking adult” who will “use his talents to the
fullest in the struggle for a better life.”
The educational enterprise was now not only child-centered, but focused
on improving the child around whom education was centered—and, that once done,
improving the environment by which he was surrounded.
But how exactly
to change the child who would then go on to change society? This required one
more thinker: Edward L. Thorndike.
Thorndike was a student of James at Harvard University who inaugurated
his scientific life by studying the instinctive and intelligent behavior of
chickens. He went on to write his
dissertation on animal intelligence—a dissertation which Cremin calls a
“landmark in psychology.”
Through his experiments with cats in what he called a “problem box,” Thorndike
discovered that, through a process of conditioning, animals could figure out
that certain behaviors had certain favorable and unfavorable consequences, and
could learn over time to follow the behavior that was associated with favorable
responses and avoid those with unfavorable consequences. Thorndike simply took this stimulus/response
model, which he called “connectionism,” and applied it to humans—who, according
to evolutionary theory, were only advanced animals anyway.
But the most
significant aspect of Thorndike’s ideas was his rejection of the concept of the
mind as anything other than the response of the organism to its environment:
As
Thorndike later pointed out in his classic three-volume work Educational
Psychology, this conception does more than render psychology a science by
making it the study of observable, measurable human behavior. In one fell swoop, it discards the Biblical
view that man’s nature is essentially sinful and hence untrustworthy; the
Rousseauan view that man’s nature is essentially good and hence always right;
and the Lockean view that man’s nature is ultimately plastic and hence
completely modifiable. Human nature,
Thorndike maintained, is simply a mass of “original tendencies” that can be
exploited for good or bad, depending on what learning takes place.
These thinkers in
the late 19th century had begun by applying science to education; they ended in transforming
education into a science—a science
that, they believed, could improve children, and through the improvement of
children, could improve society itself.
All of these
sometimes competing tendencies in education were brought together in the
thinking of John Dewey. A one-man
clearing house for the experimental educational thinking going on around him,
Dewey brought together the emphasis on the importance of preparing students for
real life preached by Calvin Woodward; the child-centered focus of G. Stanley
Hall; the reform-oriented pragmatism of William James; and the “connectionism”
of Edward L. Thorndike. All these
thinkers, with Dewey ultimately at their head, were opposed to the old
classical system, with its exclusively academic emphasis, its focus on fitting
the child to the curriculum, its emphasis on passing on a culture, and its idea
of a perennial human nature. Dewey’s Democracy in Education, published in
1916 stands as the ultimate statement of educational progressivism.
Progressivism
seemed to be sweeping the field, but there were a few of the old guard who
refused to go down without a fight. The
year 1917 was also the publication of R. W. Livingstone’s A Defense of Classical Education, a clarion call to man the
battlements of the old classical education.
“The nation is discontented with its education,” he begins, “probably
too discontented.” Indeed it was. But Livingstone was still hopeful, thinking
that it would all blow over: “When the black fit passes,” he assured, “we shall
take a more reasonable view of our deficiencies.” As compelling as was the book’s case for
Latin and Greek instruction, his hope that educational sobriety would follow
the progressivist binge was misplaced.
Soon would come the end of World War I, and as many observers have
pointed out, the end of an age. What
many called the “Great War” (World War I) had destroyed many things, and what
many called the “Old Order” itself was weakened or crumbling. The European map had to be completely redrawn
to reflect the reconstitution of entire nations, and those who ruled before the
war could not be counted upon to remain. What was once taken for granted could
no longer be relied upon. It was a time
of wholesale cultural change, and this was more the case in Europe than in
United States, but America felt it too:
By
the time the Armistice was signed in 1918, calls for commercial and useful
knowledge on both sides of the Atlantic, combined with blasted ideals and the
horror of those fine young men now lying in foreign graves, carried too much
firepower to resist … A new world waited to be built. Time had run out for the niceties of learning
the words of the dead.”
Greek, says
Tracy Lee Simmons, was no longer even required to enter Oxford by the
1920s. Only Latin remained, and even that
classical language was eventually expelled from the lower grades and relegated
to the high school, and the focus on systematic Latin grammar began to yield to
newer methods. A handful of classical
scholars put up a brave defense: “Scholars like Gilbert Murray, J. W. Mackail,
and Richard Livingstone became evangelists and hit the lecture circuit with the
zeal of men on a military campaign,” says Simmons. “They didn’t want to go down without a fight.” Had there been bridges to burn in their
retreat, they would have burned them, but what classical structures were left
standing could be counted on to be destroyed by the Progressives anyway. Where
classics were still taught, translations took the place the original Greek or
Latin, and classical studies themselves were taken over by the experts,
rendering them the exclusive domain of the experts.
As
often happens with lost causes, by the time those apologists had erected their
buttressed defenses, the brave had fallen.
It remained only to collect the wounded.
Whereas once Latin and Greek, together with their literature and all
else they drew in their train, were thought to make the complete human being
and lay a foundation for higher culture, now they were dead weight in a
leveling age, millstones dragging down the new day dawning. People began to think that classical
knowledge closed more doors than it opened; it shut out the light; it slowed
the pulse of a quickening world. All
things were to be made new. What good is
climbing a Parnassus within when we can build skyscrapers without? The dikes could hold back the waters no
longer. Pres nous le Deluge.
The gaggle of progressivist ideas that had been taking shape since 1876
had now been brought together into a tenuous alliance, but they needed to be
permanently housed in something more substantial than the mind of John Dewey. In 1919, Stanwood Cobb, the principal of
Chevy Chase Day School, founded the Association for the Advancement of
Progressive Education, which later became the Progressive Education
Association. They met on April 4 of that
year, and they left the meeting with the feeling of missionaries being sent out
to save the world. “Our aim from the
very beginning,” said Cobb, “had in it little of modesty. We aimed at nothing short of reforming the
entire school system of America.” But the group began under something less than
favorable auspices when Dewey himself refused to join, a slight that was
compensated for by Charles Eliot agreeing to become the organization’s first
honorary president.
Through
conventions, bulletins, and journals, the hopes of its founders seemed to have
been well-founded. The Journal of Progressive Education in
particular became the organization’s chief propaganda tool, and it seemed to
work. By 1928, Margaret Nauburg, writing
for The Nation, could write with some
plausibility, “Anything less than ‘progressive education’ is now quite out of
date in America. No one wishes any longer to be called conservative.” Indeed the organization had gained such
widespread favor that, in 1926, Dewey himself finally agreed to accept the
honorary chairmanship upon the death of Eliot.
It was a heady time.
It was a matter
of dogma with progressives that they had no particular program or position—or
even philosophy. They had set down a
“statement of principles” when the Progressive Education Association was
founded which was carried in each edition of the journal, but the journal
dropped them in 1930 just to underscore that they, in fact, didn’t have
any. They got around the somewhat
untenable position that what they stood for was not standing on anything by
saying that their movement was characterized by a “spirit,” a “method,” an
“outlook.” So
averse were they to any kind of explicit authority or philosophical rigidity
(this, after all, was what they were using the authority of their position to
get schools themselves to avoid) that they ended up dropping the reformist
emphasis of their early years. Dewey
himself, only two years after accepting the organization’s honorary presidency,
rebuked the Association for its failure to live up to its original ideals. The
term “progressive,” after all, assumed progress, and progress was the movement
toward some goal. For Dewey the goal was
reforming society to make it more explicitly democratic, and the progressive
movement, which had gotten caught up in fitting children to society, had forgotten the original goal of changing the society they were being fitted to.
Dewey’s rebuke
reverberated throughout the movement, and it gave the more left-leaning
political forces within the movement an excuse to assert themselves. At the Progressive Education Association’s
1932 convention, George S. Counts delivered a fateful address, entitled, “Dare
Progressive Education be Progressive?”
His rallying cry was heavy on Marxist rhetoric, and directed much of its
venom against capitalism and tradition, advocating a more socialist economy and
a new tradition. He also scolded the progressive
movement for shrinking from the practice of indoctrination in dealing with
students:
You
will say, no doubt, that I am flirting with the idea of indoctrination. And my
answer is again in the affirmative. Or, at least, I should say that the word
does not frighten me. We may all rest assured that the younger generation in
any society will be thoroughly imposed upon by its elders and by the culture
into which it is born.
Counts views
were the result of the ferment at Columbia University Teachers College, where
he and others such as William H. Kilpatrick and R. Bruce Raup had been meeting
in a study group since 1927 to discuss the effects of social change on
education. His speech lit a fire among
the conference participants, who talked in the halls late into the night about
its implications. The scheduled talks
for the next day were abandoned as excited delegates talked on about Counts’
speech. Two days later, the Association
appointed a committee to deal with the issue, with Counts at its head.
Counts speech
was undoubtedly an overreaction to Dewey, and one which Dewey himself would
probably have disapproved of, but it was not Dewey whom the progressives would
ultimately have to worry about. When his
committee later issued what came to be called the “Counts Report,” it set the
stage for the final battle the Progressive Education Association would have to
fight—and which it would not be able to win.
The Report, says Cremin, “branded the stigma of radicalism on the PEA,
like it or not. It was a stigma destined
to exert growing influence as the decade progressed.”
But the
immediate effect of the report was to prompt a new debate among the
progressives about what exactly their movement was about. And what better way to settle the issue than
convene yet another committee. In 1938,
the Association appointed a committee on the philosophy of education which in
1940 rendered another report, which set forth the principles of progressive
education along Deweyan lines. But these
principles were never formally adopted, and they came too late anyway. The larger progressive era was over, and the
public had become more conservative. The
Progressive Education Association began to take on public fire for its more
widely known radical political and social positions. By the early 1940s, the organization had
begun to bleed members until it came into imminent danger of collapse, and by
the spring of 1944, at its lowest ebb since its founding, the Association
finally adopted a set of principles. “The Association was by 1944 a shadow of
its former self,” recounts Cremin, “indeed there were so few members that or
the first time in its history it adopted a formal policy statement … After a
quarter-century, the PEA finally had a creed; but few people cared, and even
fewer read it.”
Although
weakened and with little actual remaining influence on education policy in the
country, that didn’t prevent the Association from bearing the brunt of the
public fury that was already building.
The ideas that the Association and the larger progressive movement
espoused—displacing academics with social skills; moving the locus of authority
away from the teacher and to the student; deemphasizing thinking in favor of
doing; abandoning the curricular emphasis in favor of “child-centeredness,” in
addition to its increasingly radical political priorities—were to mark the
movement’s impact on schools, and the forces opposed to them were now taking
shape.
At the same time
as the movement was acquiring a politically and socially radical image, another
force was at work. The Progressive
Education Association was not the only institution pushing progressivism, and
among the other influential forces was the U. S. Office of Education. In 1947, after convening regional gatherings
to study problems in the nation’s secondary schools, it set up a nine-member
Commission on Life Adjustment Education for Youth. It had decidedly non-academic purposes in
mind. It’s purpose, it said, was “to equip all American youth to live
democratically with satisfaction to themselves and profit to society as home
members, workers, and citizens.” It was one particular strain of the
progressive movement, and it ended up being the one to take most of the heat in
the national educational crisis of the 1950s.
It had its last hurrah in 1954, but by that time it was clear that all
it had succeeded in doing was to simply give the critics of progressivism more
ammunition to use against it.
The opposition
to progressivism had been building since the 1940s. It was aggravated by a number of societal
changes going on in the country. There
were a host of economic problems consequent upon the end of World War II,
particularly a lack of money for things like school buildings and the problem
of rampant inflation. And at a time when
the “war babies” were descending upon the schools, teachers were leaving the
profession in droves—some of the female teachers perhaps, because they were
having babies. In addition, there were
increasing national security concerns as a result of the expansionist communism
of the Soviet Union and communist China.
The public, in other words, was in a bad mood. So when the problems which progressivism had
wrought in schools began to be made, progressive educators made an easy target.
When Willard E.
Goslin, a nationally known progressive educator, was fired in June of 1950 as
superintendent of schools in Pasadena, California, the battle began in
earnest. Goslin had been deposed by an
array of conservative groups who saw educational progressivism as one of the
many tentacles of a larger political and cultural menace. It was the Cold War, and many Americans were
now looking askance at individuals and organizations which had been a part of
social progressivism, which they saw, with some reason, to be a part the larger
global socialist movement now associated with America’s chief international
nemeses, the Soviet Union and communist China.
The Korean War began in the same year, and Americans were once again
sending young men to be killed in foreign places they had never heard about,
fighting armies who professed a political agenda which seemed to many to be
similar to that espoused by those who were directing the nation’s schools. The radical rhetoric of the Progressive
Education Association’s “Counts Report” was now a part of the identity of
progressive education, and the public was now taking notice. Counts had succeeded in painting a target on
the door of the organization’s headquarters and the enemies of progressivism
were taking aim.
There was plenty
of anti-communist sentiment that was as reactionary as progressivism was
radical. The National Council for
American Education, for example, published a pamphlet entitled, “How Red is the
Little Red Schoolhouse?” “The pamphlet’s cover,” said Douglas T. Miller and
Marion Nowak, “pictured a Soviet soldier injecting a hypodermic labeled
‘organized Communist Propaganda’ into the Little Red Schoolhouse.” But there were other, less reactionary conservative
critics concerned about the state of education. In the same year, Life Magazine devoted an entire issue to
the crisis is American schools. There were also a number of books by more
level-headed critics. The response of
the progressivists was to accuse its critics of being “enemies of education,” a
tactic they have often used since against those who disagreed with their
educational philosophy. But that defense
did little to deflect the onslaught.
The perceived
political radicalism of the movement, along with it the lack of academic
emphasis combined to doom progressivism.
Its real problems were bad enough, but these were aggravated by the
practices of its less competent adherents, who took what were already bad ideas
and made them worse:
As
progressive education became the new orthodoxy in the second quarter of the
century, however, it was seldom practiced as originally preached. Much of the intellectual vitality of the
movement seemed sapped. School curricula
had been vastly expanded but often at the expense of learning basic skills
thoroughly. In some schools students
could choose from such subjects as how to date, dance, dress properly, drive a
car, decorate a living room, flycast, shop, cook, curl hair, budget money. These were functional skills to be sure, but
not when they nearly replaced reading, writing, and mathematics.
The Life
Adjustment Movement was a sort of break-off group from the main column of
progressivism. It was the central split
resulting from the chief fissure in the philosophy of progressivism: that
between the social reform ideal and the ideal of preparing children for “real
life.” Dewey had tried to keep the two
ideas together, but they came apart readily, and the Life Adjustment movement
marched under the latter banner. It was
even more self-evidently anti-academic.
“We shall some day accept the thought that it is just as illogical to
assume that every boy must be able to read,” declared one professional educator
addressing the National Association of Secondary-School Principals in the early
fifties, “as it is that each one must be able to perform on the violin, that it
is no more reasonable to require that teach girl shall spell well than it is
that each one shall bake a good cherry pie.”
The public anger at this kind of touchy-feely attitude among those who were
supposed to be readying their children for college caused a firestorm of
protest.
Not only was the
political and social reform aspect of progressivism undermining American
values, but it was dumbing down the younger generation. Numerous pamphlets and books were produced by
the critics. In 1955, Rudolf Flesch
published Why Johnny Can’t Read and What
You Can Do About It. Flesch was an
editor at the Saturday Evening Post
and had written several popular books on how to write clearly and
understandably. The book, an assault on
the new “look-say” method of reading used by the progressivists (one species of
the larger genus of whole word reading strategies that neglected decoding skills)
and a defense of the systematic phonics they had thrown out of schools, was a
model of the clear and compelling prose he preached. Although it did not directly attack
progressivism, it fit in perfectly with the wider critique of the progressivist
attempt to dumb down a nation. “[A]s the
book sat on the best-seller list week after week, giving rise to dozens of
articles in national magazines, it strongly reinforced the notion that the
progressive educators were the culprits.”
Although much of
the criticism of progressivism seemed itself a bit radical, the
anti-progressivism movement also produced some of the most reasoned and
articulate defenses of traditional education ever penned. Among the bevy of anti-progressive books
published during the period was Educational
Wastelands, by Arthur Bestor. It was
Bestor who proved to be the progressivists’ worst enemy. “[It] was Bestor,” said Cremin, “whose
attacks were destined to exert the most telling impact on the progressive
movement.”
Bestor was a history professor who did a short stint at Columbia Teachers College
but had also taught at Stanford and the University of Illinois. His scholarly
credentials were impeccable, and no one could plausibly accuse him of
radicalism. He launched his attack in
the American Scholar, the Phi Beta
Kappa society’s flagship journal. And
that was only the beginning. “There
followed,” says Cremin, “a series of brilliantly polemical essays in The New Republic, the Scientific Monthly, and the American Association of University
Professors Bulletin that ripped savagely into the theory and practice of
the life-adjustment movement—and then, in 1953, Educational Wastelands.”
Educational Wastelands stands as the
quintessential case for traditional education.
It may well be the single greatest defense of traditional education ever
written.
“If we really
believe that education is vital to our safety,” said Bestor, “then we need to
know exactly what kind of schooling constitutes genuine education, and what
kind is merely a gaudy show.” Freely
quoting Thomas Jefferson, he articulated clearly and succinctly what he thought
education was:
The
kind of schooling that is vital to a democratic society is the kind that
results in the "spread of information" and the "diffusion of
knowledge, … the kind that recognizes that "the general mind must be
strengthened by education;" the kind that aims to make the people
"enlightened" and to "inform their discretion." These are
the ends that the schools must serve if a free people are to remain free.
These, be it noted, are intellectual ends. Genuine education, in short, is
intellectual training.
Bestor slammed
the progressives, not for failing to educate well, but for failing to educate
at all. The problem, he argued, was not
that the nation’s educators were not implementing education properly or not
teaching well. The problem was that they
were opposed to education itself. They
had redefined what schools were for: “The concept of education that I have just
stated is not guiding the American public schools today,” he charged. “It is a
concept which professors of education have repudiated, and which they
caricature at every opportunity.”
Progressive educators were not failing to meet the nation’s education
goals; rather, they simply did not have education goals. The schools had detached themselves from the
scholarly world altogether, setting up what he called an “interlocking
directorate” made up of educations bureaucrats, education professors and
teaching colleges, all of which served to house the enemies of learning.
Bestor’s book, along with Albert Lynd’s Quackery in the Public Schools, Robert
Hutchins’ The Conflict in Education,
and Paul Woodring’s Let’s talk Sense
about Our Schools, served to provide the intellectual grounding for the
rejection of progressivism.
So discredited
had the progressive movement become that in 1955 that the New York Times announced that the Progressive Education Association
was closing its doors. Its publication, Progressive Education continued
publication for two more years, and then folded. Then, on October 4, 1957, an event occurred
that served to drive a stake through the heart of the whole progressive
education movement, and it came from outer space.
“Sputnik” was
the name of the first orbiting satellite launched into space, and it was
launched by the Russians. It was
followed a month later by another Russian satellite which carried a live
dog. It was a stunning public relations
victory for the Soviet Union, which could now plausibly claim that it had
proven its technological superiority over the United States by beating the U.S.
into space. A stricken nation now looked
for the cause. What had happened? How had the Russians been able to fly past
America on the road to scientific progress?
There was only one answer: the schools. All fingers were now pointed
toward progressive education. “After two
Sputniks,” lamented Douglas T. Miller and Marion Nowak in their irreverent and
defensive treatment, The Fifties: The Way
We Really Were:
the
already swelling outcry against the educational system became a deafening
roar. Everyone joined in—the President,
the Vice-President, admirals, generals, morticians, grocers, bootblacks,
bootleggers, realtors, racketeers—all lamenting the fact that we didn’t get a
hunk of metal orbiting the earth and blaming this tragedy on the sinister
Deweyites who had plotted to keep little Johnny from learning to read. Special commissions were set up. Congressional hearings were held. TV and radio stations interrupted the flow of
commercials and soap operas to air educational grievances.
Blood was in the
water, and a full feeding frenzy was on.
In 1958, Life magazine devoted
four full issues to the “Crisis in Education.” “The schools are in terrible
shape,” it said, “…What has long been an ignored national problem, Sputnik has
made a recognized crisis.”
It was “the deepest educational crisis in the nation’s history,” said Cremin.
By the end of
the 1950s, the progressive education movement was completely discredited, its
utopian, child-centered, social reformist agenda in tatters. It is hard to find any other popular cultural
movement in American history that had experienced so fine a rise and so final a
fall. So successful had it become in the 20s, 30s, and 40s that it was
irrefutably the reigning pedagogy in nation’s schools, but in the 50s it had
met its cultural Waterloo. Now nothing
was left to do but gather up the wounded—and retreat to the teachers colleges.
The Swinging Pendulum
Diane Ravitch
has referred to the “pendulum swing” that has characterized education policy in
the 20th century: the movement from a progressivist emphasis in
schools to a traditionalist one and back again.
When the Life Adjustment movement was driven from schools at the end of
the 1950s, there was a short-lived attempt to return to the trappings of more
traditional academic programs. But the
attempt was unenthusiastic and short lived, perhaps due to the lack of
understanding and training on the part of professional educators.
Since the early
20th century teacher education has been conducted largely at the
hands of teachers colleges, where progressivism in its various guises has
always found a refuge. Like the monster
in Stephen King’s horror novel, It,
progressivism runs in cycles lasting from 20 to 30 years that go something like
this:
·
Acquires a new label and is trotted out of
university education departments as a novel educational idea;
·
Enjoys brief public support through appealing
rhetoric;
·
Attracts
critical attention when it lowers academic achievement;
·
Is expelled from schools by parents and the
general public, going back into hibernation in teachers colleges;
·
Acquires a new label when the public forgets how
badly in worked the last time, as the cycle begins again
In other words,
once the progressivist monster has eaten its cultural fill, it is driven out of
schools by torch and pitchfork-wielding parents, going into hibernation in
teachers colleges, and awaiting the right time to return once again.
The year 1960
saw the publication of A. S. Neill’s book Summerhill,
a book Ravitch calls “one of the most influential books of the era.” It described the progressive school Neill
founded in Suffolk, England in 1921.
Neill was perhaps one of the most extreme of the romanticists operating
in the world of education in the 20th century. “I believe that to
impose anything by authority is wrong,” he declared. “The child should not do anything until he
comes to the opinion—his own opinion—that it should be done.” He went on to
refer to any external compulsion imposed on the child as “fascism.”
Summerhill was
the quintessential progressive school.
Ravitch describes Neill’s permissivist approach to education:
Echoing
Rousseau, Neill wrote that “a child is innately wise and realistic. If left to himself without adult suggestion
of any kind, he will develop as far as he is capable of developing.” Neill renounced “all discipline, all
direction, all suggestion, all moral training, all religious instruction.” When
children arrived at Summerhill, it was up to them to ask for lessons. If they did not want any lessons, they were
left undisturbed to play all day, if that was what they wanted, for months or
even years (Neill proudly described one student who had spent twelve years at
Summerhill without ever attending a single lesson). Neill hated examinations, prizes, and marks,
and he was contemptuous of books, which he considered “the least important
apparatus in a school.” Summerhill had no special teaching methods, Neill
wrote, “because we do not consider that teaching in itself matters very
much. Whether a school has or has not a
special method for teaching long division is of no significance, for long
division is of no importance except to those who want to learn it. And the child who wants to learn long
division will learn it no matter how it is taught.
Neill was
nothing if not consistent about his romanticism, and consequently his laissez
faire approach extended to virtually every student activity, including sex,
overlooking sexual liaisons between both students themselves, and students and
teachers. Somewhat along the lines of
Aldous Huxley’s dystopia The Brave New
World, Neill believed the sexual impulse should not only not be suppressed,
but should be encouraged. “He maintained that unfettered heterosexual play was
‘the royal road’ to a healthy sex life,” says Ravitch, and was somewhat
obsessive about the point.
When Summerhill
was published in 1960, not a single American bookseller placed an advanced
order for it. It was not yet time for
the monster’s return. But by about 1964,
the public’s short memory had already forsaken it, and Neill’s book began to
sell, and by 1970 it was selling at a clip of about 200,000 a year, and “was
required reading in at least 600 university courses.” Ravitch wryly remarks on the irony that a
book on educational freedom would be “required
reading in American universities.”
Neill’s book was only the most notable of a spate of books released between
1964 and 1968 championing the new version of educational permissivism. It was essentially the romantic progressivism
of the 1930s repackaged and made to look new again, and it had a tonic effect
on educators always looking for the latest thing and who had undoubtedly
themselves forgotten what had happened in the 30s, 40s, and 50s, history (or
any other legitimate academic subject) not being a strong suit in university
education programs. And it came at just
the right time.
The
counter-cultural revolution of the 1960s, in fact, seems in retrospect to have
been the ideal cultural environment in which such educational ideas could
thrive. The period was marked by a
cultural revolt among many young people whose motto was to “question
authority,” and who professed not to “trust anyone over thirty.” It was a time when a movement marked by
immaturity was reaching maturity and where thousands joined hands, and, together
as a group, proclaimed their individuality.
And, if their parents were wealthy enough to afford the requisite
chemicals, they follow the advice of the Timothy Leary to “turn on, tune in,
drop out.” It seemed the perfect time
for educators too to let it all hang out.
And they did. “Meeting ‘the needs
of youth’ was back in fashion,” says Ravitch, “’Relevance’ became both a slogan
and a goal, to which many campuses responded by creating courses on revolution,
youth movements, rock poetry, popular culture, and other topics intended to
satisfy the student rebels.”
During this era, the word
“requirements” became anathema. College
graduation requirements were reduced, and college entrance requirements,
especially the foreign language requirement, tumbled; this, in turn, removed
one of the most important incentives for studying a foreign language in high
school. The demand for relevance in the curriculum encouraged students to turn
inward and pursue their own interests; the necessity of appealing to students’
interest also spurred schools and colleges to “market” courses with alluring
titles as if students were consumers in a vast education marketplace.
The term
“progressive” having negative historical associations, the monster donned a new
disguise: “Open Education.” But, like
the Life Adjustment movement, its unfortunate consequences quickly tarnished
its reputation. In his book Open Education and the American School,
Roland Barth described his own attempt to impose open education on two inner
city schools. He recruited six teachers
trained in open education who straightway moved their own desks to the back of
the room, removed the rows of student desks, created “learning centers” for the
now heterogeneously grouped children, and stood back and directed traffic. But there was trouble in the new educational
paradise:
The
program succumbed to the resistance of both children and parents. The multitude of choices confused the
children; the more options were available, the less they were able to follow
through on any one of them and the more disruptive they became. Children “ganged up by tens and twenties
outside the bathrooms and at the water fountains. A teacher would turn his back on a class, to
find only three of twenty-five youngsters left in the room when he turned
around again.” The children demanded
“teacher-imposed order” and rejected teachers’ attempts to shift the
responsibility for learning to them.
In three months,
the program joined the growing scrapheap of abandoned progressive schemes. Back came the teachers’ desks to the front of
the room, back came the straight rows of student desks, back came ability
grouping and hall passes and directive instructions. The romanticists were foiled once again by
the need for order and discipline.
Test scores
reached a peak in 1963 and 1964, and then began a precipitous decline. By 1975 parents had once again lit their
torches, grabbed their pitchforks, and headed for the front doors of schoolhouses. Panels and commissions once again set to work
to identify the problem, and once again found that the problem wasn’t education
done badly, but education not done at all.
One study of high school transcripts from 1964 to 1981 found a fractured
curriculum, devalued coursework, and a curriculum overpopulated with
nonacademic classes. Most students were
enrolled in the “general track.” “Neither academic nor vocation,” says Ravitch,
“the general track consisted of courses such as driver education, general shop,
remedial studies, consumer education, training for marriage and adulthood,
health education, typing, and home economics.” Schools were failing to hit
their educational targets because they weren’t aiming for them in the first
place.
The educational
ideology of the 1960s was a rehash of the progressivism of the 20s and 30s, but
with a difference. The older
progressivism was the product of a larger cultural movement: it had come out of
the Progressive Era and had in a sense been derived from it. But the progressivism of the 60s was produced
and sustained by what Arthur Bestor had described in the early 1950s as the
“interlocking directorate” of teachers colleges, state education departments
and teachers unions. While the
progressivism of the early 20th century was partly directed at
breaking the hold of corruptive institutional interests (including labor
unions) on schools, the new progressivism was driven by new institutional
interests that were at least as corruptive.
In fact, as bad as the old labor unions were (teachers jobs in places
like Chicago were handed out as part of the political patronage system), at
least it wasn’t intentionally directed at purging academics from schools. Progressive education—in all its
manifestations—was.
The
progressivism of the 20s and 30s, which morphed into the “life adjustment”
movement of the 40s and 50s, which then became the “modern education” of the
late 50s and early 60s, which was then recast as “open education” in the
mid-60s and 70s, has manifested itself most recently in what is called
“constructivism.” Like all of the
monster’s previous mutations, this one is animated by the soul of
romanticism. Students would be motivated
to learn “only if they were active learners, constructing their own knowledge
through their own discoveries.”
The Corruption of
the Disciplines
But its repeated
chastisements at the hands of an angry public—not to mention the facts—has not
left progressives bereft of lessons learned.
Its advocates are wiser in at least one regard: driving academic
subjects out of schools has become increasingly problematic. Parents have become more aware of the
increasing ideological gulf between them and those who make education policy,
and there is an increasing distrust of experts.
Consequently, progressivists began to shift their strategy. Rather than simply try to push academic
subjects out of the curriculum, they began an effort to change the academic
disciplines themselves.
This seems to
have occurred first in reading instruction, which began in the 1930s to
deemphasize phonics in favor of word guessing methods. The typical example of this method is the
Elson readings, better known as the “Dick and Jane” books, which began
publication in 1930. They used the
“whole word” or “look-say” method of simply having children memorize whole
words instead of sounding them out according to letter-sound correspondences. It was this method that Rudolf Flesch savaged
in his Why Johnny Can’t Read for
producing a nation of illiterates. [quote from Flesch’s book here].
The long
battle—what Harvard reading specialist Jeanne Chall called the “reading
wars”—was thought by some to be over in 1967, when Chall concluded on the basis
of extensive research, that children need to know both how to decode words
(phonics) and how to read good literature.
The problem with progressives was that they were not particularly
concerned with what actually worked but seemed more concerned with the ideology
of reading which, from their romanticist perspective, required freeing children
from the oppressive idea that there was an actual order inherent in language
that was being forced on children. But
in the 80s and 90s the debate flared up again with the onset of the “whole
language” movement. Whole language was a
wholly constructivist approach to reading described by its originators as a
“psycholinguistic guessing game” which purported, as with all progressive
approaches, to address the “whole child” by giving him “authentic” reading
experiences. Reading instruction, said
whole language advocates, had to be “whole, real, and relevant.” Consequently,
it spurned not only phonics, but explicit instruction in spelling, punctuation,
and grammar. Children were encouraged to use “invented spelling,” and teachers
were warned against correcting the writing of their students. Children were to read when they wanted to
read, not by being forced by a teacher to do it.
The
nation’s schools of education, long committed to progressive educational ideas,
provided a ready audience of a theory that said that children are naturally
motivated to learn and that they need to be insulated from instruction,
textbooks, tests, and anything else that might interfere with their natural
desire to learn.
A 1985 report, Becoming a Nation of Readers, found,
once again, that children taught using phonics are better readers, as did
another 1990 report by Marilyn Jager Adams.
But the most damning setback for the movement came after California
launched a statewide whole language program in 1987, which it implemented over
a nine-year period, only to land the state at the bottom of National Assessment
of Education Progress (NAEP) scores in 1996.
The statewide whole language experiment, far from improving reading, put
the Golden State behind Mississippi in national reading comparisons. Bill Honig, the state superintendent of
public instruction over the period, was so chastened by the experience that he
public repudiated the very plan he had instituted—surely one of the few times a
public official has admitted publicly that he had blown it.
The corruption
of mathematics instruction came in the 1960s with what came to be called the
“New Math.” The professed purpose of the New Math was to place more emphasis on
concepts as opposed to procedures. Like
whole word—or look-say, or whole language—reading methods, the New Math was
entirely progressive. It too would
liberate children from medieval methods of classroom instruction. There would be no more “drill-and-kill”
memorization of multiplication tables and “boring practice” of long
division. Instead, students would be
introduced early to more advanced mathematical concepts. As a result, facility with basic mathematical
operations was replaced with “the concepts and language of sets, algebraic
properties of number systems, non-standard numeration systems, informal
properties of number systems, and number theory.”
Once again the progressives ignored the order of learning, confusing it with
the order of knowledge. As Morris Kline,
a prominent mathematician and writer who excoriated the movement in his 1973
book, Why Johnny Can’t Add pointed
out, the proponents of the New Math were promoting an entirely top-down
approach to teaching mathematics. A
method Bestor had earlier compared to trying to build a house “by starting with
the roof first.” They really thought that the best way to teach the subject was
by beginning with the abstract, rather than the concrete. “In every case,” said
Kline, “learning proceeds from the concrete to the abstract and not
vice-versa.”
The
logical approach to teaching [Kline’s term for the top-down approach] is
reminiscent of a reply that Samuel Johnson gave to a man who asked Johnson for
further explanation of some argument he had given. Johnson barked, “I have found you an argument
but I am not obliged to find you an understanding.”
Kline criticized the New Math approach for its
deductive, rather than inductive approach, and for “the premature teaching of
abstractions such as abstract algebraic concepts, linear vector spaces, finite
geometries, set theory, symbolic logic and fundamental analysis…”
But if Kline was the New Math’s chief critic, he also gave the appearance of
serving as its undertaker. “By the early
1970s,” he declared, “the New Math was dead.”
But was the New
Math monster—a Grendel terrorizing the educational mead hall, spawn to its
progressivist mother—really dead? Or had
it simply slunk off to the teachers colleges to lick its wounds?
With 1967 as the
peak of New Math influence, by the mid-1970s it was driven out, followed by the
customary interregnum of a more sober but merely ostensible traditionalism that
always follows a progressivist binge. And,
as usual, it didn’t last long. By 1989,
the thing was back, this time in the form of the National Council of Teachers
of Mathematics Standards (NCTM), with a program known among many educators as
“Reform Math.” But it soon became
apparent that the NCTM authors, like the New Math proponents that preceded
them, were intent on driving drill and practice out of schools again, only this
time to replace them with “student-led activities, mathematical games, working
with manipulatives (e.g. blocks and sticks), using calculators, and group learning…” It also “discounted the importance of correct
answers.” Again—like the progressivists of the 20s and 30s, who were replaced
by the life adjustment movement—the meliorists were out, and the pragmatists
were in, both being variants of the old romanticism:
The underlying approach of the
NCTM standards was solidly grounded in the familiar principle of progressive
education that learning should be student-centered, not teacher-led, and
dependent on students’ activities rather than teachers’ direction. The new theories of the 1980s were similar to
the pedagogical thinking of the 1920s and 1930s but were called
“constructivism,” rather than progressivism.
The sheep’s
clothing was marked “Reform Math,” but the wolf underneath was the “New
Math.” Some simply called it the “New
New Math.” Again the torches were lit
and citizen posses formed. They formed a group called “Mathematically Correct,”
made up of mathematicians, parents, and citizens, mostly from California, where
a particularly malignant form of mathematical progressivism had metastasized.
One of the forms in which the constructivist math reappeared was in such
programs as “Everyday Math” or “Chicago Math.”
These programs were tried in, among other places, Penfield, New York,
which, because of the close proximity of companies such as Kodak, Xerox, and
Bausch & Lomb, housed a significant number of engineers and scientists. In
2004-2005, they became the advance guard of the parent educational militia
there.
When in the
spring of 2005 Jim Munch became the town’s top math student, the school
district paraded him around as an example of the success of the district’s
constructivist math program. But it
turned out that Munch, far from having benefited from the schools’ program, had
in fact succeeded despite it. “My whole
experience in math the last few years has been a struggle against the program,”
he told a New York Times
reporter. “Whatever I’ve achieved, I’ve
achieved in spite of it. Kids do not do
better learning math themselves. There’s
a reason we go to school, which is that there’s someone smarter than us with
something to teach us.” One parent
complained that she had taken her daughter to McDonalds for lunch and realized
she couldn’t calculate the change from a $20 bill. Another told the reporter that her daughter
had to solve a multiplication problem by “counting 23 groups of four apples.”
As it turned out, many of the parents in Penfield were taking their kids to
Kumon to learn their math because of the school’s insistence on the
constructivist idea that students should “construct their own knowledge”
through their own reasoning process.
If the schools refused to actually teach them, they would take them to someone
who would.
In 1997, the
state of California abandoned the NCTM standards, and other states and
localities have since followed suit.
“Reform math” still lives in the form of a new version of the standards
was released in 2000, which was written to quell some of the dissent. But the newer version still has much of the
progressivist emphasis of the original.
Other
disciplines were longer in becoming infected with the progressivist
spirit. In 1994, the Goals 2000 program
was inaugurated, and a federal board created to set state and national
standards in various subjects. The first
set of standards came that year. They
were the national history standards. But
when they were released to the public, it soon became apparent that many of the
left-leaning political and social goals of the larger progressivist movement
had snuck in. That fall, former National
Endowment for the Humanities Chair Lynne Cheney (whose husband Dick Cheney
later became Vice President under George W. Bush) issued a stirring and widely
read condemnation of the history standards in article titled, “The End of
History, published in the Wall Street
Journal:
“Imagine,” she
declared, “an outline for the teaching of American history in which George
Washington makes only a fleeting appearance and is never described as our first
president. Or in which the foundings of the Sierra Club and the National
Organization for Women are considered noteworthy events, but the first
gathering of the U.S. Congress is not.”
She went on to savage the document’s poorly concealed political
correctness:
African and Native
American societies, like all societies, had their failings, but one would
hardly know it from National Standards. Students are encouraged to consider
Aztec "architecture, skills, labor systems, and agriculture." But not
the practice of human sacrifice.
Counting how many times
different subjects are mentioned in the document yields telling results. One of
the most often mentioned subjects, with 19 references, is McCarthy and
McCarthyism. The Ku Klux Klan gets its fair share, too, with 17. As for individuals,
Harriet Tubman, an African-American who helped rescue slaves by way of the
underground railroad, is mentioned six times. Two white males who were
contemporaries of Tubman, Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee, get one and zero
mentions, respectively. Alexander Graham Bell, Thomas Edison, Albert Einstein,
Jonas Salk and the Wright brothers make no appearance at all.
The authors of
the standards consistently portrayed America in a bad light, and the country’s
warts were exaggerated to the point where it seemed as if it had few other
features. But it wasn’t only the
political agenda that so bothered the critics.
As might be guessed, some of the same educational philosophies plagued
the history standards that seemed to have seeped into everything else. UCLA historian Gary Nash, far from trying to
douse the fears ignited by Cheney, seemed happy to throw gasoline on the flames. The goal of the history standards, he said,
which he had helped to formulate, “was to bring about nothing short of a new
American revolution in history education … we want to bury rote learning and
the emphasis on dates, facts, places, events and one **** thing after another.” He
invoked an unlikely vision of American students, apparently crushed under an
avalanche of facts and dates, their minds overstuffed with knowledge. It was the job of educators, he said, to “let
children out of the prison of facts and dates and make them active learners.”
A national
debate ensued, with the initial conservative opposition being joined even by
liberals. U. S. Secretary of State Richard Riley washed his hands of the
project, and by January of 1995, the heat had become so intense that the United
States Senate voted to condemn the standards in a vote of 99 to 1. Review panels were subsequently set up to
correct the most egregious problems, but the taint of controversy permanently
hampered the effort to implement them on any large scale.
In English too,
the progressives attempted to eat away at the foundations of academics. But
they picked a time when the public was on the alert. In fact, the English standards were defunded
almost in embryo. As Ravitch puts it,
they were an “unmitigated disaster.” In
1994, because of a clear lack of content and standards, the Department of
Education simply cut off funding. The
groups writing the English standards, made up of the educational establishment
(now the permanent lair of progressivism), went on with their work under other
auspices, and belched forth another permissivist document that purported to
herald educational success by undermining academics:
The
document buzzed with fashionable pedagogical concepts but lacked any concrete
reference to the importance of accurate language usage, correct spelling and
grammar, great contemporary or classical literature, or what students at any
grade level should actually know and be able to do.
Like
the history standards, the document became target practice for critics across
the political spectrum. “[T]he standards
statement,” said J. Martin Rochester of the University of Missouri,
“essentially says we should not hold students to any standards!” Like
the history standards, the English standards have themselves largely become
irrelevant, but the mischievous influence of the philosophy that undergirds
them lurks behind almost every program and policy invoked by the public school
establishment.
At the end of
the first decade of the 21st century, the nation finds its education
system not fundamentally improved in any important respect, and trapped in a
matrix of structural impediments that prevent the implementation of any real
reform. Extinguished reform proposals
lie about the educational system, to borrow the words of Thomas Huxley, like
strangled snakes around the cradle of Hercules.
They don’t work for two reasons: the first involves the practical concerns
of those who staff schools and state education departments. For them, reform proposals serve a primarily
cosmetic purpose. In the face of what
seem to be intractable education problems, they must at least look like they
are doing something, anything. And they
know that, whatever reform ideas are now being implemented, they will be
replaced by others, equally attractive sounding, which ultimately will have no
fundamental effect. This at least has been the obvious pattern.
The second has
to do with the ideological concerns of those who inhabit the teachers
colleges. The teachers colleges are the
spawning ground for almost every bad education idea that has been devised in
the past 50 years. And they are the ones
who train the teachers and administrators; they are the true believers of
educational progressivism. But, despite
repeated experiments, their ideas have yet to prove to be workable (or wise). They
seem incapable of solving educational problems probably becuase their
philosophy lies at the heart of the worst problem plaguing schools: an
anti-academic attitude that affects not only what courses are taught and not
taught, but how they are taught. If
academic performance has not been improved in America’s schools, it is largely
because those who fashion the proposals to correct the problem are not
primarily concerned with academic performance.
The first thing
that has to happen is for educators and the public to gain a clear picture of
what schools are for. And once that it
is clear, they need to come to a common understanding of how to accomplish that
purpose. It became fashionable at the
end of the 20th century for progressives of all stripes to declare
that we needed to “build a bridge to the 21st century.” But whatever bridge we plan on crossing
should be to something better, not to the failed educational ideas of the past.
Lawrence A. Cremin, The Transformation of the School:
Progressivism in American Education, 1876-1957 (New York: Vintage Books,
1961).
Paul Douglas, American Apprenticeship and the Industrial Revolution (New York,
1921).
R. W. Livingstone, A Defense of Classical Education
(London: Macmillan & Co.), pp. 1-2.
Tracy Lee Simmons, Climbing Parnassus: A New Apologia for Greek
and Latin (Wilmington: ISI Books, 2002), p. 147.
George
S. Counts, “Dare Progressive Education be Progressive?” Progressive
Education, Volume IX, Number 4, April
1932, Pages 257-263.
Quoted in Cremin, p. 336.
Douglas T. Miller and Marion Nowak, The Fifties: The Way We Really Were (New
York: Doubleday & Co., 1977), p. 248.
Quoted in Miller & Nowak, pp.
257-258.
Arthur Bestor, “Aimlessness in
Education,” The Scientific Monthly,
Vol. 75, No. 2 (Aug., 1952), pp. 109.
Miller & Nowak, pp. 259-260.
Quoted by Miller & Nowak, p. 260.
Diane Ravitch, Left Back: A Century of Battles Over School Reform (New York: Simon
& Schuster, 2000), p. 387.
“The Reading Wars,” The Atlantic, Nov., 1997.
The National Advisory Committee on
Mathematical Education (NACOME), Overview
and Analysis of School Mathematics, K-12 (Washington, DC: The Conference
Board of Mathematical Sciences, 1975), p. 9, quoted in Terese A. Herrera &
Douglas T. Owens, “The ‘New Math’? Two Reform Movements in Mathematics
Education,” Theory Into Practice, v.
40, No. 2 (Spring, 2001), p. 86.
Morris Kline, “Logic Versus
Pedagogy,” The American Mathematical
Monthly, v. 77, No. 3, (Mar., 1970), pp. 280-281.
Quoted in Alan H. Schoenfeld, “The
Math Wars,” Educational Policy, v.
18, No. 1, January and March 2004, p. 257.
“’Innovative’ Math, but Can You
Count?” The New York Times, Nov. 9,
2005.
Lynne Cheney, "The End of History," Wall
Street Journal (Oct. 20, 1994).
Quoted in Ravitch, p. 436.
