PROGRESSIVE EDUCATION: DEWEY AND ELIOT

 

RISE OF THE HIGH SCHOOL

 

In 1890, 358,000 students attended high school. But there were 5,355,000 youngsters age 14-17. The students in high school represented only seven percent of high school age youngsters. Of those who attended high school, 57% attended public high schools and 43% attended private high schools (often church-run religious schools).

 

In 1900, there were 699,000 students in high school, out of 6,100,000 young people ages 14-17. Those who attended school constituted 11% of those age 14-17, with 74% of attendees in a public high school (26% at private hs).

 

In 1910 there were 1,115,000 students in high school, out of 7.2 million young people age 14-17. The attendees represented 15% of the age cohort (14-17), with 82% of attendees now at public high schools.

 

In 1920 there were 2.5 million students in high school, out of 7.7 million young people age 14-17. The attendees represented 32% of the age cohort 14-17, with 88% of attendees at public high schools.

 

In school year 1929-1930 there were 4.8 million students in high school, out of 9.3 million young people in the age cohort 14-17. The attendees represented 51% of the age cohort, with 91% of attendees in public as opposed to private high schools.

 

In 1939-1940 there were 7,130,000 students in high school, out of 9.7 million young people age 14-17. The attendees comprised 73% of the age cohort, with 93% of attendees at public high schools.

 

In the early decades, part of the reason that so few youngsters adolescents attended high school was related to child labor. In 1900, there were 3 million children working at least part-time, which was 20% of those age 5-15. In 1900 there were 25,000 boys under age 16 working in mines; and 20,000 children, mostly girls, working in cotton mills.

 

Prior to 1900, some seventy-six percent of clerks and secretaries were male. Increasingly these positions became "feminized."

 

By 1920 the four major job categories for employing women were:

Office work              (25.6%)
Manufacturing          (23.8) especially textiles
Domestic service       (18.2%)
Agriculture             (12.8%)

 

By the turn of the century criticisms of "traditional" education emerged. The critics contended that traditional education in academic subjects and Latin and grammar was rigid; relied on rote memorization; failed to interest and motivate students; was irrelevant to modern industrial society; and was accompanied by a high drop-out rate.

 

Reformers urged that education should provide education in the "needs and interests of the child."

 

However there were two very different interpretations of what this meant.

 

One interpretation was what motivates each child: what each child finds interesting

 

A second interpretation was "the best interests of the child." But this concealed the question, who decides what education is in the best interests of the child. In effect, this brand of Progressive education (and some would question just how "progressive" it really was) said each child should be placed in the academic or vocational "track" for which his or her abilities are deemed best or most suited. But deemed by whom?

 

Some reformers urged an education that emphasized problem-solving through rational means. Francis Parker and John Dewey urged that school life should be "democratic." School should be a democratic community, so that students could begin developing the understandings, dispositions, and intellectual skills necessary for mature participation in a participatory democracy later in life.

 

A different emphasis was encouraged by the "social efficiency" school of thought.

 

DEWEY'S  BRAND OF PROGRESSIVE EDUCATION

 

John Dewey was born in 1859, died 1952. He attended the Univ. of Vermont, and received a Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins. He taught at U. Michigan, U. Vermont, U. Chicago, and Columbia. He said that "for education to be most successful, it is necessary that people participate in democratic forms of life."

He wrote numerous books, including The School and Society; The Child and the Curriculum; Democracy and Education; Reconstruction in Philosophy; and Experience and Education.

 
Dewey argued that:

1.     children are by nature active social learners

2.     they are by nature constructive- they like to explore and to make things (*even when it seems that they are destructive, by breaking things: they are testing them, and taking them apart to see how they are made, and then they try to put them back together again)

3.     they are expressive

4.     they are curious and inquiring

5.     traditional schools penalize children for behaving in accord with their nature; school requires that children NOT interact with one another; to be passive recipients rather than actively and creatively constructive.

 
Dewey felt that, ideally, children should be free to follow their curiosity. He said "A free person is someone who can frame and execute purposes of his own" or her own. (Democracy and Education). In other words, she can decide for herself what she wants to do.

 Dewey encouraged cooperative problem-solving; let the children choose what they want to learn. He advocated a child-centered curriculum. (The School and Society).

In contrast, Sigmund Freud argued that civilization requires the repression and control of the impulses (the id).

 Dewey's brand of progressive education has been characterized as "liberal" and "permissive." It is the stream of thought that did NOT prevail.

 

CHARLES  ELIOT AND "SOCIAL EFFICIENCY"

 Instead, the view that triumphed for many decades was the social efficiency school of thought, advocated by Charles W. Eliot of Harvard. Eliot (born 1834) was president of Harvard from 1869 to 1909. He was a bigot. He referred to African Americans as "savages," and disliked the immigrants who were not from "pure American stock" (by which he evidently meant northern European Protestants).

 Eliot was president of Harvard at a time of mass urbanization and industrialization, and when the immigration from Europe shifted from northern Europe (especially Germany and Scandinavia) to southern and eastern Europe (with ethnic groups such as the Italians, Greeks, Poles, Russians, Czechs, Slovaks, Hungarians (Magyars), Serbs, Croats, Bulgarians, etc.).

 Over time a pattern emerged where the factory owners were native born Protestants, the managers and foremen were native born Protestants or Irish or German, and the "rank and file" were southern and eastern European. (escalator analogy)

 Eliot advocated a differentiated curriculum: different types of education for different types of students, based on the division of labor in the workplace.

 He advocated "social efficiency." One should identify the evident or probable destinies of groups of students and educate them for these respective destinies. It would be in efficient (a waste of time and resources) to provide a college-preparatory curriculum to a child destined for factory work; as it would be to provide a vocational shop curriculum to a college-bound student).

 
Eliot felt that vocational education would prepare students who were destined to become factory workers for their future "place" in the job market. Eliot and others like him also hoped that this education would help young people to ADJUST to managed workplaces and the authority of bosses; and help them to adjust to obeying the instructions of their superiors; and that this adjustment would help to clam and stifle labor unrest. It was hoped that vocational education would contribute to order and stability in society and in the workplace (against the background of unrest such as the Haymarket incident in Chicago in 1886, or the Homestead and Pullman strikes of the 1890s). Education for obedience and compliance and docility on the part of workers, and stability and order, was part of the agenda of vocational education (whether hidden or not).

 

In 1908 Eliot said that there were four classes in America.

 

    1.     the small managing or leading class
2.     the commercial buying and selling class (owners of businesses)
3.     the skilled artisans* [such as contractors, who set their own time and prices]
4.     "the rough workers" [by this he probably meant blue collar workers]

 

Eliot thought that children should receive the education that trained them for the vocation to which they were destined. Under industrial [indeed finance] capitalism [mass production] the majority of students were destined to become part of the industrial working class.

 

In 1914 the U.S. Bureau of Education issued a bulletin that stated candidly "The state maintains schools to render is citizenship [citizens or citizenry] homogeneous in spirit and purpose. The public schools exist primarily for the benefit of the state rather than for the benefit of the individual." Steven Tozer, Paul Violas and Guy Senese, School and Society, p. 112; quoting Violas, The Training of the Urban Working Class, p. 23.

 

Ellwood Cubberly, at Stanford, in 1919, agreed that schooling was being extended from a voluntary institution for the few to a compulsory mandatory institution for the many. Vocational education, night school (where people who worked during the day could take classes at night), adult education, and supervised playgrounds all contribute to a more orderly and stable society (better controlled).

 
Cubberly also emphasized that schools were like factories, that took in students as raw material and shaped and fashioned a finished product.

 
In 1900, most high schools (secondary schools) taught the traditional academic curriculum: English, Latin, algebra, geometry, physiology (or anatomy), earth sciences, physics, and history. Almost NO students were in vocational education, in high school, YET. (go to table, to see contrast by 1920). Even in 1910 almost no students received these subjects in high school.

 

By 1922,

13.7% of high school students were in "industrial subjects (21% by 1934, 26% by 1949)

 12.6% were learning book-keeping

 
13.1% were learning typewriting (16.7% by 1934, 22.5% by 1949)

8.9% were learning shorthand 

14.3% were learning home economics (16.7% by 1934, 24% by 1949)

 
Observers remarked that "For a long time all boys were trained to be President. Then for a while we trained them all to be professional men. Now we train boys to get jobs." President of the school board, Muncie, Indiana (1929) Tozer, Violas, Senese.

 

As high school education was made mandatory for the masses, the curriculum changed from a college preparatory program for the elite few to a more differentiated curriculum for the industrial masses who were "destined" to become blue-collar factory workers (for men) or clerical workers (secretaries, receptionists, stenographers) or retail workers (sales) for women.

 

Parents might have some influence on how youngsters were assigned to a track (academic, vocational, business); but more likely principals made these decisions by observing family background; the occupation of the parents; grades; performance on tests (see below); or teacher recommendations.

 

Tracking (assigning students to a track) raised questions about what the phrase "equal educational opportunity" meant. Were schools, as Horace Mann had hoped, "the great equalizer?" Did equal educational opportunity mean that all students would receive one kind of education, or the same kind of education.

 

The answer became that "Students would have an equal opportunity to receive the education that was appropriate to them, or for them.

 

In 1908, the Boston superintendent of schools said "Society would provide an opportunity to receive the kind of education that would fit students equally for their particular life work."

 

This was like saying that all plumbers would have an equal chance to receive the kind of education that would prepare them to be plumbers (or carpenters, or electricians, or secretaries).

 

Eliot himself said "there is no such thing as equality of gifts, powers, or faculties, either among children or adults." The best thing is to identify what the child does best, "what the line is in which the child can do best," and then educate him or her for that.

 

Thus, between 1890 and 1920, there was a transition to a focus on employable skills, social stability, and this version of "equal educational opportunity."

 
And there was an extension of schooling:

From the few to the many
From voluntary to compulsory
From the unified curriculum to the differentiated curriculum
From an academic only curriculum to extra-curricular activities (control juvenile delinquency)

From completely local control to more centralized administrative control.

 

INTELLIGENCE TESTING

 

Native born Americans (especially of British, Protestant background) were alarmed and disconcerted by the rise of the cities, the "alien" immigrants, and their utter difference (of dress, language, religion). Americans such as Edward Ross feared that the "immigrants" had a birthrate that was too high, and they would overrun America as the British Americans (the Anglo-Saxons) committed "race suicide" (the Anglo's practiced birth control and had fewer births). World War I added an element of panic and hysteria to this sense of fear. Against this background, interest in "intelligence tests" intensified.

 

In 1905 Alfred Binet and Theodore Simon (both French) devised a metric intelligence test (a numeric scale, where a given level of cognitive function corresponded to a number).
 

In 1912 William Stein suggested that one could divide the "mental age" by "chronological age' to arrive at an "intelligence quotient" or IQ.

 In 1916 Lewis Terman, at Stanford University, "improved' Binet's test.

 

With the entry of the US into World War I in 1917, the advocates of intelligence testing induced a reluctant Army to experiment with IQ tests. The Army preferred to base promotions on seniority, but at the urging of the American Psychological Association tests were given as part of the process to select candidates for officer training. Some 1.7 million men were tested. One must bear in mind that one-fourth of the draft age men in 1918 could not read or write. One third were deemed physically unfit.

 

The IQ tests suggested that:

 47% of white draftees had a mental age of 12 yrs or less

89% of black draftees had a mental age of 12 yrs of under.

All of these people, supposedly, were "feebleminded"

 

Native white stock and northern Europeans (British Isles) scored superior

The "new immigrants" from southern and eastern Europe scored inferior. Among Russian, Polish and Italian draftees, more than half were classified as "inferior;

Eighty percent of African Americans were categorized as being of "inferior" intelligence

 

Critics asked if questions about the writings of Edgar Allen Poe or European paintings really were tests of "intelligence."

 

The Army thought the tests were a pile of manure, and immediately discontinued them as soon as the war ended.

 
But business, government and the universities lapped up these tests. In 1926 the College Entrance Examination Board (CEEB) administered the first Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT, or now SATI).

 

Questions about the Sistine Chapel, Michelangelo, Chaucer, Tolstoy, Huck Finn).

 

But performance on tests was one possible way to assign students to a "track" in school.

 

ULTIMATELY, a series about the purpose of education are raised:

 

Education for social stability

          Does this not risk degenrating into education for conformity

          What then happens to the capacity for critical or independent thinking?

Education for employable skills

 

Education for social reform (or social engineering

 

Education according to group differences

Runs the risk of providing the most valuable education to those who are already the most privileged

 

Education for whose interests? Cui bono?