No one feature in a system of intellectual education is of greater moment than such an arrangement of duties and motives, as will most effectually throw the student upon the resources of his own mind.
-The Yale Report, 1828
Historical Overview of the American Curriculum
There has been a marked decline in educational curricula throughout the course of America’s history. At the center of this folly, especially since the turn of the 20th century, is the tendency to blindly conform to the latest trend, without regard to the reasons why education was the way it came to be. This is not to say that education should always stay the same. Good changes are welcome. Arbitrary, politically driven, or misanthropic changes are not. This tendency to reform education according to the tides of university research—or, worse, popular opinion—draws out the image of that great astronomer at the Academy of Lagado, whom Gulliver had seen “place a sundial upon the great weathercock on the town-house, by adjusting the annual and diurnal motions of the earth and sun, so as to answer and coincide with all accidental turnings of the wind” (Swift, 1726/1985, pp. 225-6).
Every subject has been the victim of the described pattern. I will begin by describing those ill-treatments suffered by the languages, as they typify the downfall of the other subjects. Latin and Greek were part of any standard curriculum until their significance began to be challenged in the mid-19th century. Four-year colleges not only required those languages for entrance, but taught history and other subjects in those languages (Willis et al., 1993, p. 26). The 1828 Yale Report strongly defends Greek and Latin, arguing that they provide students the elementary ideas with which to pursue higher education (p. 36). This respect for classical languages continued throughout the 18th century and into the 19th. The Chicago high school curriculum in 1862 required German or Latin during the first two years, and German, Latin, or French the final two years. For juniors and seniors there was also the option of deferring to the “classical course,” where history and philosophy were studied in Greek and Latin (Chicago Board of Education, pp. 71-2). The NEA’s report in 1893 by the Committee of Ten also indicates a classically oriented education. Even Los Angeles High School, in 1909, offered a track that included Greek and Latin. It was at this time, though, that the widespread obsession with pragmatism crept into the schools and made classical languages all but extinct today.
Other subjects suffered the same fate. History went from an in-depth “universal history” (Chicago, 1862) to the dry and heartless textbooks of today. Nine year olds were reading Robinson Crusoe in 1895 (NEA, p. 95), whereas today I would be remiss in finding a senior who could do the same. As late as 1914, bedrock subjects like chorus in Boston, music in St. Louis, and astronomy in Chicago, were required for high school students (Davis, pp. 147-148). The average high school curriculum of today is a farce compared to that of a hundred years ago, and all but dead when compared the expectations of our initial settlers in Plymouth and subsequent founders. As triumphantly declared by Whitehead (who ironically was himself classically trained) regarding the classics: “All is gone, and gone forever. Humpty Dumpty was a good egg so long as he was on top of the wall, but you can never set him up again” (1929/1967, p. 61). We have seen, briefly, how the egg has fallen, and now we shall explore why.
The Puritan settlers of the Massachusetts Bay Colony brought with them a great intellectual tradition, and a profound respect for education. The amount of educated men, per capita, was much greater in Winthrop’s colony than all of England, or any of its parts, at the time (Morison, 1930, p. 184). The rigor and exceptional level of their education system (begun with Harvard, as well as local community schools for younger students) affected the tenor of American education up to and through the Revolution, well into the 19th century. With the advent of the Common School movement, however, an increasing focus was made on accessibility and vocation. While the Yale College faculty made it clear that vocation should not be the purpose of education,[1] Horace Mann and his associate Henry Barnard were advocating that schools be made more accessible to the common child. Rather than attempting to formulate the best possible education standards based on the ideas I presented in the previous section, Barnard and Mann went around the country surveying thousands of schools in order to find what was common to all of them (Barnard, 1839/1993, 1841/1993, pp. 41-2). What America got was, on the one hand, a remarkable public education system that served as a model to other nations, and, on the other hand, a school system that increasingly catered toward the lowest common denominator. Mann clearly had great intentions for his country. He was, after all, a Whig who took part in increasing the nation’s productive capacity by personally working on canals and railroads (Mondale & Patton, 2001, pp. 25-7). It can only be concluded that the light of his overall vision for public education was so great that it blinded him from seeing the effects of some of the particulars.
Toward the end of the 19th century the emphasis on vocation was joined by an emphasis on practicality, an emphasis which was brought into full force by John Dewey in the first quarter of the 20th century. A comparison between an NEA report in 1876 and 1918 is indicative of the change. The earlier report frowns upon vocation-oriented studies, which might seem the most useful to students, but “[h]is cultural studies . . . are useful at more points in his life and for a greater period of time” (p. 76). The latter report states the opposite: “[O]nly so much theory should be taught at any one time as will show results in practice” (p. 159).
I see it as no coincidence that the most robust period of industrial development on the planet occurred in the United States in the last third of the 19th century, before the shift to pragmatism occurred in education. After this, the obsession with relevance, utility, and efficiency—all euphemistically wrapped up in a “democratic” Progressivism—ate away at everything good about American education. The research allegedly proving the superiority of the Progressive movement was run by proponents of the Progressive movement itself. The first such major study conducted was spawned in 1918 by an article written by Dewey’s acolyte, W. H. Kilpatrick, entitled, “The Project Method.” Ellsworth Collings, under the tutelage of Kilpatrick, conducted a four-year study[2] in which he implemented the method, the results showing the veritable success of the program. A decade later the Progressive Education Association, seeing the advantage in running such studies, sponsored a similar “successful” experiment on a grand scale, called the “Eight Year Study” (Willis et al., 1993, pp. 171-2). Intervening and subsequent studies all showed similar results: Progressivism was the savior of education.
With the advent of Progressivism came a severe Positivist outlook which demanded that education and its results be quantified and measured for efficiency. The 1918 article, “Scientific Method in Curriculum-Making,” for example, demands that the effectiveness of curricula be measured by student error rates, amount of experiential relevance, and the extent to which they offset “social deficiency” (Bobbitt, pp. 165-170). By 1924, this trend officially bordered on the absurd. William Wirt, an apostle and former student of Dewey, implemented the Gary Plan in Indiana, the locus of which was “the platoon system” (Willis et al., p. 205). The organizational plan for this system, designed by Wirt, is full of lists, charts, and mathematical formulas. Everything from space distribution, teacher labor, instructional time, and enrollment are calculated so as to be utilized to their maximum capacities. Even the gymnasium and auditorium are in full use at all hours of the day (Spain, 1924). American education received its mortal strike when this trend turned its sights toward intelligence testing after WWI. Initially, the tests were conducted to track students into appropriate courses of study based on their intelligence. Those deemed less intelligent were given a vocational curriculum, while the smarter students were tracked into a slightly less odious course (Mondale & Patton, 2001, pp. 97-103). Eventually, standardized testing came to saturate all of education: entrance (intelligence) tests, assessment tests, exit tests. Like the materiel of an army, students, teachers, curricula, and teaching methods have become discrete products in the factory of education. Ellwood Cubberly, chair of the Education department at Stanford from 1917-1933, in a rare moment of truth for Progressivists, articulated the widespread belief that,
We should give up the exceedingly democratic idea that all are equal and that our society is devoid of classes. The employee tends to remain an employee; the wage earner tends to remain a wage earner. . . . One bright child may easily be worth more to the National Life than thousands of those of low mentality (Mondale & Patton, 2001, p. 98).
While standardized tests have their place in very particular circumstances, their very nature goes against the nonlinear Gestaltqualität of the human mind. Education’s fascination with units and measurement betrays an attempt to smuggle the mechanical theory of Laplace into the realm of pedagogy. Skinner’s behaviorism, also tacitly accepted in education, is the counterpart to this. In the end, the result is, effectively, “reducing [man] either to an insentient automaton or to a bundle of appetites” (Polanyi & Prosch, 1975, p. 25). Wolfgang Köhler’s critique (1947) of quantitative cognitive tests in psychology applies, in this context, to standardized testing in education. Köhler compares reliance on such tests to an incompetent physicist who wishes to compare different motors. For each motor, the physicist measures volume, surface temperature, ion emission, revolutions per minute, and weight. With this data, the scientist claims to determine the power produced by each motor, all the while ignoring the physical processes that actually produce work. Psychologists, Köhler claimed, commit the same fallacy: “People who suffer from this ailment will soon fail to recognize problems which do not lend themselves at once to quantitative investigation” (p. 31). His opprobrium is even more scathing for animal psychologists: “Being in love with figures and curves, they will keep away from the true source of new ideas and new problems in a youthful science: a broad outlook upon its subject matter” (p. 32). Very recently, in our nation’s desire to “Race to the Top,” quantitative testing has gained an even more prominent role, being hailed as the main source in determining student performance and instructional efficiency. This threatens to mechanize education to a greater degree than that already suffered. We can imagine Köhler smiling benignedly in his grave, hoping that we will soon see the great blunder in following such a course.
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[1] “As our course of instruction is not intended to complete an education, in theological, medical, or legal science; neither does it include all the minute details of mercantile, mechanical, or agricultural concerns. These can never be effectually learned except in the very circumstances in which they are to be practised. The young merchant must be trained in the counting room, the mechanic, in the workshop, the farmer, in the field. . . . For what purpose, then, it will be asked, are young men who are destined to these occupations, ever sent to a college? They should not be sent, as we think, with an expectation of finishing their education at the college; but with a view of laying a thorough foundation in the principles of science, preparatory to the study of the practical arts” (1829, p. 31).
[2] Results were published by him in An experiment with a project curriculum (1923).