The Smart Society. Peter D. Salins

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      In one of the most striking educational developments of the young United States, district schools throughout the new states were determined to stifle at an early age the kind of speech-related class distinctions that then and now have plagued the people of England. Strongly influenced by Noah Webster, they consciously and universally propagated a uniform way of writing (including spelling) and speaking that we today recognize as Standard American English.²

      Beginning in the 1830s, spurred on by the enormously influential educational reformer from Massachusetts, Horace Mann, and responsive to the growing educational requirements of a rapidly industrializing country, a powerful national education reform movement strove to substantially upgrade the curricular content, teaching effectiveness, and time span of America’s public schools.³ In Mann’s own words,

      After the State shall have secured to all its children, that basis of knowledge and morality, which is indispensable to its own security; after it shall have supplied them with the instruments of that individual prosperity, whose aggregate will constitute its own social prosperity; then they may be emancipated from its tutelage, each one to go whithersoever his well-instructed mind shall determine.⁴

      This effort, referred to by education scholars as “the common school movement,” took on great momentum and spread like wildfire across the new nation. Illinois imposed universal schooling along these lines in 1825, followed by New York in 1830, Massachusetts in 1837, and by the 1860s, so had all northern, Midwest, and frontier states. Only in the South was the movement thwarted before the Civil War, where affluent whites sent their children to private schools, and poor whites and blacks (then enslaved) received a meager district school education at best. In the Reconstruction period after the Civil War, unsegregated common schools open to both white and black schoolchildren were established in all southern states, but with the collapse of Reconstruction after 1875 and the adoption of Jim Crow laws throughout the South, these became segregated and remained so until the passage of civil rights legislation in the 1960s.

      Many of the characteristic aspects of American schools today, most particularly elementary schools, were set in stone by the common schools of the nineteenth century. Among the most distinctive at the time—and the most enduring—was the belief that teachers should receive specialized training, which resulted in the establishment of “normal schools” to prepare them with supposedly scientific methods of teaching (i.e., “pedagogy”). America’s first normal school was launched in Boston in 1838, and by the end of the century the lion’s share of the national teaching force was trained in such places.⁵ The professionalization of teacher training got a huge boost in prestige and public acceptance with the founding in 1887 of the national citadel of teacher training, Columbia University Teachers College. By the early twentieth century, most normal schools had mutated into state teachers colleges, and, after World War II, into comprehensive public liberal arts colleges dominated by their teacher education programs. To this day, a majority of American elementary schoolteachers as well as a large share of high school teachers are graduates of such teacher education programs, the descendants of the normal schools of the common school era.

      The common school movement introduced many other familiar features of public schools. While originally dedicated only to making access to elementary school universally mandatory and free, by the end of the nineteenth century the movement had extended its reach to encompass universal secondary education. The common school template fostered the strict assignment of students to classrooms by age (something quite novel in the nineteenth century) and by academic ability. In the wake of the movement’s influence, many other American public school characteristics also came to be nationally consistent. Despite being under the jurisdiction of state education departments, with almost no federal government input until recently, the curricular content of schools, subject for subject, became relatively uniform across the country. This was most likely due to the influence of national (but nongovernmental) accreditation organizations that first arose at the end of the nineteenth century; the standardized doctrines of the teachers colleges; and the sales policies of textbook publishers that profit from nationwide adoption of their offerings. Even the physical specifications of American schools quickly became homogenized, with consistent class and classroom sizes, and a familiar repertoire of ancillary facilities: gymnasiums, auditoriums, cafeterias, and so on.

      By the early twentieth century, the common school movement had succeeded in making its vision of access to a professionally delivered, practical education for all Americans a reality in every state. But it took a while for the education establishment to agree on the precise format and academic content of a typical school system’s elementary (and later, secondary) schools. In the case of elementary education, there was always general agreement (even internationally) on the educational foundations to be taught. However, in the early decades of the twentieth century, John Dewey and other “progressive” educators challenged the rigidly structured rote learning and focus on academic content practiced in most American elementary schools at the time—and still pervasive in the rest of the world—charging that it was pedagogically ineffective and, worse, stifled child development and creativity.⁶ By the middle of the twentieth century, the progressives had won this argument, first in the training of teachers in state colleges, and then in the classrooms of most districts. In a strong backlash, there arose a powerful countermovement in the 1950s against progressivism led by such national figures as Harvard President James Bryant Conant, University of Chicago President Robert Maynard Hutchins, and Admiral Hyman Rickover, all of them calling for higher academic standards and more rigorous instruction.⁷ This debate continues to the present day, with the teacher training establishment and the National Education Association still promoting progressivism, and a host of prominent critics opposing it, including luminaries such as the late Boston University President John Silber, former Assistant Secretary of Education Chester Finn, and several notable public school chancellors in Chicago, New York, and Washington.

      The spread of American secondary schools at the turn of the last century raised other questions. First, at what age should elementary education end? The study of early adolescent psychological development that surfaced at the time, and the high dropout rates of children who went to four-year high schools right after eight years of elementary school, persuaded educators that there had to be a transitional, intermediate institution. Thus, beginning in 1909 in Columbus, Ohio, and 1910 in Berkeley, California, secondary education came to be articulated into two segments: a transitional school for early adolescents (called junior high or middle school) and high school for older teens. But the precise age at which to set cutoffs to begin the transition (ten, eleven, or twelve) or to end it (fourteen or fifteen) has yet to be settled. Given the uncertainty of the subjects to be taught—and how they are to be taught—in the transition years, and the painfulness of teaching anything to early adolescents, few districts have been happy with any of the many variations they have tried out over the years.

      More seriously, educators needed to agree on what should be taught—and to whom—in high school. From their widespread introduction in the early twentieth century until the 1960s, the national consensus was that high schools should sort students by academic ability, as measured by standardized aptitude or IQ tests (administered in elementary or middle school), and tailor each student’s coursework to reflect his or her intellectual and occupational capacities. This sorting led inexorably to channeling students of different abilities—and, to a lesser extent, boys and girls—into different academic and, ultimately, career paths. The cognitively gifted were to be prepared for college; the less gifted taught enough to function competently in lower- and mid-level white-collar jobs (such as girls being groomed for secretarial work); and the least academically oriented (mainly boys) trained for vocational or technical trades, either in comprehensive high school vocational tracks or in specialized vocational schools.⁸

      There were certain undeniable benefits to having academically stratified high schools. They could require rigorous courses for college preparatory students, assuring a very high degree of academic readiness for the college-bound, and they supplied the middle and lower tiers of the labor market with an army of competent СКАЧАТЬ