create a quiz and 2 essays

Chapter 8

documents the emergence of the modern American secondary school—the comprehensive high school—in the post–World War II period. The analysis is grounded in the political–economic and ideological context of the cold war, but the components of modern liberalism remain explicit. Thus, the fundamental objectives of school reform that emerged in the progressive era—employable skills, social stability, meritocracy, and equal educational opportunity—remained central to the thinking of cold war era reformers. Chief among these was Professor James B. Conant, president of Harvard University and later U.S. high commissioner to Germany. Conant provides a lens through which the nationalism of the social and educational thinking of his day is examined. In contrast to Conant, the chapter presents a Primary Source Reading by Mark Van Doren, who provides students with a different way to think about the central role of education in a modern democratic society. This contrast suggests parallels with similar contrasts articulated elsewhere in the book: Dewey versus Eliot, Washington versus Du Bois, and Mann versus Brownson, among others. Read more at location 239

Top of Form

   • Delete this highlight   • Undo deletion

Bottom of Form

B012Y5IPA0 15663287 Note: Add a note

Chapter Objectives Among the objectives that Chapter 8 seeks to achieve are these: 1. This chapter should deepen and extend students’ ability to think critically about the presuppositions underlying the structure and content of modern schooling, particularly at the secondary level. 2. Another objective is to critically examine how modern liberal commitments to such values as expert knowledge, meritocracy, and nationalism influenced schooling in the latter half of the 20th century. 3. Students should also think critically about the school as an instrument of national political policy in the political–economic context of the United States after World War II. 4. This chapter asks students to question the notion of a nationalist agenda for schooling within the context of democratic ideals so that the idea of “national interest” itself becomes problematic. 5. Students should consider a relatively recent historical instance of how an expressed commitment to democracy and equality can, in modern liberal schooling policy, serve students inequitably. 6. Students should also consider Van Doren’s alternative approach to democratic education in contemporary society, one that is committed not to social or political outcomes but to an ideal of human development applicable to all students. 7. This chapter can help examine our tendency to believe that the dominant way of thinking about school and society in a particular era was the only “sensible” approach or that it was a necessary “product of the times” and therefore Read more at location 240

Top of Form

   • Delete this highlight   • Undo deletion

Bottom of Form

B012Y5IPA0 15728874 Note: Add a note

Introduction: The Best and Brightest . . . By the turn of the 20th century most American children attended school, public or private. But only a minority proceeded beyond the eighth grade. Very few young people went on to high school, and even fewer graduated. The public high school did not become a mass institution until the 1930s. Even after World War II, educators continued to tinker with the high school’s structure and curriculum as new populations of students sought to enter its doors and as policymakers increasingly looked to the high school for answers to society’s problems. This period of American educational history, extending from the 1930s to the 1960s, not only witnessed the institutionalization of the public high school but led policymakers to link educational quality to national security. Fervently committed to the notion that the schools could be used effectively to fight the cold war, James B. Conant became one of the chief architects of the public high school during this era. As educational philosopher James E. McClellan wrote in 1968, “If a foreign visitor to these benighted shores were required to take his views about the policies governing American education from one, and only one man . . . there could be only one sensible choice. . . . If any man spoke for and to American educational policy (granted that in a most important sense no man does or can)—that man would be James Bryant Conant.”1 As the president of Harvard University from 1933 to 1953 and later as a public school investigator and reformer, Conant took advantage of an unprecedented opportunity to influence educational policy. For over 30 years Conant promoted his meritocratic vision, stressing the selective function of schooling and the advancement of the talented youngster. Through Conant’s judicious use Read more at location 241

Top of Form

   • Delete this highlight   • Undo deletion

Bottom of Form

B012Y5IPA0 15794548 Note: Add a note

of powerful contacts and skillful appeal to public opinion, his ideas appeared frequently in the popular press, often setting the agenda for educational debate. Conant’s initial interest in public schools grew out of efforts to attract to Harvard highly able students from all social classes. Within 10 years, he had become one of America’s most notable advocates of school reform by arguing that a reconstructed educational system could lead to a better society. Put simply, Conant favored an educational system from kindergarten through college that would sort students according to their ability, challenge the academically able, and specifically prepare all others for useful places in society. Only then, he maintained, would the best and the brightest secure society’s most responsible and powerful positions, with the less able pledging their political and moral support. Furthermore, Conant’s ideal educational system would effectively combat what he regarded as threats to the social order—whether those threats were fascism in the 1930s, communism in the 1940s and 1950s, or domestic unrest in the 1960s. Political Economy and Ideology of the Early Cold War Era By the 1920s, the American economy had become the envy of the world. Americans appeared to have more food to eat, better clothes to wear, and more ways to amuse themselves than any other people on earth. Big business raked in huge profits, corporate offices scoured the globe for new markets to exploit, and American stockholders were consumed in a prolonged frenzy of stock speculation and get-rich-quick schemes. But abundance for some overshadowed the hardships of others. In the 1920s agriculture reached a new low from which it did not recover for two decades. Poverty increased in urban areas, and starvation prevailed in many pockets in the South. The New Deal legislation that would later empower labor unions had not yet been passed, and many members of the working classes toiled for long hours with little hope of advancement or job security. With racism continuing unabated, Black people suffered severely in the middle of this economic boom. Almost universally denied a decent standard of living, most Black people eked out an existence as tenant farmers in the southern countryside or held the most menial and lowest-paid jobs northern cities had to offer.2 With the collapse of the stock market in 1929 and the onset of the worst depression in American history, these disparities of wealth and poverty became even more glaring. Industrial output fell precipitously, and over one-fourth of the adult population lost their jobs. While the working classes and oppressed minorities fared poorly, the great depression also victimized many others who were unaccustomed to hard times. Even those who held on to their jobs saw their wages slashed and their standard of living drastically reduced. The stock market crash also impoverished a few wealthy Americans who had invested their fortunes in high-priced securities, but others benefited by taking advantage of the depression’s greatly deflated prices. Although Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal temporarily reduced unemployment and raised some hopes, in general government failed to blunt significantly the depression’s devastating impact.3 In Europe, economic ruin increased acceptance of radical ideas from both right- and left-wing sources. In Italy, Germany, and Spain fascist dictators flourished, while other countries established communist parties. In the United States, these ideologies had vocal supporters, though none became dominant. Some prophesied capitalism’s demise, while others counted on institutions such as the public school to help rescue free enterprise. In general, ideological extremes were readily tolerated until post–World War II “red baiting” brought dire consequences to Americans who had supported radical causes in the 1930s.4 Most observers agree that U.S. mobilization for World War II ended the great depression. The war forced the application of Keynesian principles of deficit spending that... Read more at location 242

Top of Form

   • Delete this highlight   • Undo deletion

Bottom of Form

B012Y5IPA0 15860460 Note: Add a note

binge that appeared to know few bounds. A boom in low-cost single-family housing fueled further demand for family cars and the latest household appliances. Despitea brief period of inflation, the demand for consumer goods continued without letup. Although unemployment mounted, it never exceeded 7 percent in the 1950s, and Americans showed little sympathy for the poor or the dispossessed. Neither the popular press nor the federal government paid much attention to the least well off during this period. Yet the health of the war-fueled economy depended on a continued buildup of the military arsenal that the U.S. government had amassed to wage a two-front war during World War II. Only the challenge of a powerful new military foe would provide the United States with a justification for further augmenting its already massive store of armaments. The Soviet Union turned out to be the perfect adversary. Although in 1945 they were four years away from developing the atomic bomb, the fully mobilized Soviets were intent on using their military might to occupy eastern Europe as a buffer against foreign attack. The U.S. government feared that unless the Soviet Union’s relentless march into Europe and Asia was halted, communism would spread around the globe. The threat of Soviet expansion and the accompanying instability it would bring particularly disturbed American multinational companies that had extended their operations to dozens of countries abroad. They argued that Soviet insurgents would create a political climate antithetical to economic growth and that this would threaten American well-being. Fearing the political and economic consequences of communist expansion, American government officials devised two key policies to slow the Soviet juggernaut.6 Under containment, the first of the two policies, the United States declared its intention of taking whatever economic and military means were necessary to stop the spread of communism. When President Harry S Truman declared in 1947, “I believe that it must be the policy of the United States to support free people who are resisting attempted subjugations by armed minorities or by outside pressures,” he was opening the door to U.S. involvement in other nations’ affairs throughout the world.7 Massive humanitarian aid to Greece and Turkey in 1947 under the Truman Doctrine was one manifestation of the policy of containment. Marshaling United Nations support for U.S. intervention in Korea in 1950 served as another. In that year, U.S. support for French aid to the South Vietnamese in their civil war with North Vietnam set in motion a series of events that ultimately led to the U.S. war with Vietnam. With the second policy, known simply as the doctrine of first use, the United States declared its prerogative to initiate nuclear bombing whenever enemy forces, whether nuclear or conventional, threatened American military installations. These policies required the United States to stockpile thousands of nuclear weapons at great cost to taxpayers, but they also permitted the country to continue reaping the benefits of a wartime economy without the added burden of waging a major war. The enormous growth of what President Eisenhower later called the “military-industrial complex” served as another tangible result of America’s first-use and containment policies.8 Fear of Soviet communism reached nearly hysterical levels in the late 1940s and early 1950s. The House Committee on Un-American Activities, Senator Joseph McCarthy, and such organizations as the John Birch Society all accused government agencies of harboring communists. Hearings were held and blacklists were compiled to rid the United States of “reds” and “pinkos.” A cloud of fear and dread overshadowed almost every institution in American life. Schools were no exception; teachers were increasingly required to take loyalty oaths and forswear any involvement in the Communist party.9 Although fears of communist infiltration lessened considerably after the mid-1950s, for the next two decades The Brandenburg Gate of... Read more at location 243

Top of Form

   • Delete this highlight   • Undo deletion

Bottom of Form

B012Y5IPA0 15925897 Note: Add a note

capitalist West Germany throughout the cold war. Read more at location 243

Top of Form

   • Delete this highlight   • Undo deletion

Bottom of Form

B012Y5IPA0 15925904 Note: Add a note

American foreign policy continued to be based on the ideological split between the two superpowers and the premise that the Soviets were intent on spreading communism around the globe. It should not be ignored that the U.S. leaders had their own expansionist plans. Truman had declared in 1947, “The whole world should adopt the American system. . . . The American system can survive in America only if it becomes a world system.” Believing that “at the present moment in world history every nation must choose between alternative ways of life,” Truman assumed that any leftist insurrection was the work of Soviet expansionism and that the “American way of life” of representative democracy and corporate capitalism was therefore threatened by revolutions in small nations around the globe.10 Protests against the Vietnam War in the late 1960s and early 1970s would later question the foundation of these assumptions, and for a few years during and after Vietnam few educators or policy analysts stressed the link between national security and educational quality. But as will be discussed in Chapter 10, the Nation at Risk report in 1983 employed language that again stirred the emotions of erstwhile cold warriors, warning Americans everywhere that our failure to teach math and science adequately was tantamount to unilateral disarmament. In addition to the Soviet threat, the issue of race discrimination confronted Americans in the post–World War II era. Since emancipation, African Americans had been systematically deprived of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. After the war slow steps were taken toward the elimination of segregation. President Truman desegregated the armed forces, and the Supreme Court declared segregated schools inherently unequal in the Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954. Also, the increasing number of novelists, playwrights, and filmmakers who focused on the theme of racial prejudice brought new attention to this most central of American problems. The aftermath of the Civil War had produced, among other legal enactments, the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution for the protection of African Americans newly released from slavery. This clause required that no state shall “deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” As with all legislation, it remained for the courts to interpret its meaning and application to a variety of circumstances. U.S. Supreme Court precedent was established in Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896 (see Chapter 6), in which the Court held that the requirements of equal protection were met by “separate-but-equal” treatment of the races by government in support of “public peace and good order.” Ignoring the lone dissent by Justice Harlan that “the Constitution is color blind,” this decision set the pattern for race segregation throughout the South. It took half a century for the Plessy precedent to be reversed. This was done in the landmark case of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas of 1954. The Court reversed Plessy by noting that understanding of the effects of race segregation in education had grown since Plessy. The Court now accepted that the enforced segregation of Black children “generates a feeling of inferiority . . . that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone.” Therefore, the Court concluded that “in the field of public education the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.” Still, resistance to these changes in both the South and the North affirmed the deep and historical roots of racial discrimination. In some cases, parents of children from predominantly White schools literally battled Black people and government authorities to forestall the integration of their schools. Zoning ordinances were devised to keep African Americans out of White neighborhoods, and major banks ordered the redlining of Black business districts, which set down burdensome guidelines for... Read more at location 244

Top of Form

   • Delete this highlight   • Undo deletion

Bottom of Form

B012Y5IPA0 15991557 Note: Add a note

new liberalism. Although domestic and international conditions had changed, those changes had not challenged the fundamental commitments of corporate liberalism (explained in Chapter 4). The progressive era had replaced classical liberal faith in human reason with faith in scientific methods, for example, and in the post–World War II era the triumphs and perils of scientific advancement dominated the thinking of American policy analysts. With the advent of nuclear weapons, the potential costs of war had never been so great. The growing complexities of modern science and modern statecraft therefore further enhanced the position of the highly trained expert while appearing to dwarf the role of the ordinary citizen. The exigencies of modern life, with its emphasis on specialized knowledge, interdependence, and conformity more than ever seemed to overwhelm the individual. Progress continued to be central to 20th-century liberal ideology and was considered achievable primarily through science and technology. It was technological superiority, in the form of the atomic bomb, that had defeated the Japanese in war. Technology seemed also to contribute to a rapidly rising standard of living as new uses for plastics, home appliances, and various medical breakthroughs (such as immunizations from childhood illnesses) won a great deal of public approval. As progress itself seemed to be the product of various kinds of expertis e, the ideological linkage between expert, centralized decision making and public well-being grew stronger. Similarly, the assembly lines and increasingly sophisticated technology of American industry further concentrated workplace decision making among a few elite managers and engineers. The emergence of large labor unions ushered in an age of increased job security and better wages and benefits, but the centralized decision making established during the progressive era was intensified. Another trend begun in the 19th century contributed to such centralized management: farm work became increasingly scarce. Whereas in 1920, 27 percent of the working population worked on the farm, by 1960 only 6 percent of the working population worked there. Although only a hundred years earlier Abraham Lincoln had extolled the value of self-employment, that ideal was effectively eliminated as an option for some 90 percent of all workers. Nearly everyone was managed by someone else. These developments were reflected in the conduct of political affairs and in attitudes toward the common person. Democracy had come to be regarded as a form of government that was properly administered by experts with only the perfunctory consent of the governed. The so-called common man was characterized as too selfish and uninformed to cope with the rigors of governing in Read more at location 245

Top of Form

   • Delete this highlight   • Undo deletion

Bottom of Form

B012Y5IPA0 16056782 Note: Add a note

a complex age. Following the theory of the bell-shaped curve, leaders assumed that the welfare of the United States depended on identifying the select few with superior minds and placing them in positions of authority. The prevailing view of liberty was in a sense what George Santayana had called “provisional freedom,” one that somehow always led back to an orthodoxy that embraced the virtues of American military and economic dominance, meritocracy, and social stability.12 the greatest threats to the freedom of the American citizen were not from within but abroad—first fascism and later Soviet communism. Freedom became increasingly identified with “our” way of life, while “theirs” was unfree. Socialism, which had enjoyed a period of popularity in the United States earlier in the century, was increasingly characterized as a “foreign” system of thought, totalitarian and anti-America n. “Free market capitalism” was opposed to “state-controlled economies” in public discourse even though capitalism in the United States had long since ceased to be a free market system. However, the identification of the United States with freedom itself politically and economically, stifled critical debate about the flaws in its social system. The enemy to freedom was not the military-industrial complex despite the warnings of President Eisenhower in 1961. Rather, the enemy to freedom was the Soviet threat, a threat which was kept alive in the public mind through persistent cold war rhetoric punctuated by a series of international military interventions to “halt the Communist menace.” It was extremely difficult for the common citizen to question the actions of the U.S. military-industrial complex in the cold war era. A massive increase in U.S. intelligence operations after World War II gave increased credibility to the notion that the government knew what it was doing, even if the people did not and (“for security reasons”) could not know. Thus, to enjoy Did the concept of meritocracy play a role in your schooling experience. If so, how? Thinking Critically about the Issues #1 Classical Liberal New Liberal 1. Negative freedom: freedom from government restraint. 1. Positive freedom: government responsibility to act in public interest. 2. Government must stay out of individuals’ lives except 2. Government may intervene in individuals’ lives to promote when safety of society is at stake. their happiness and well-being. 3. The individual is free to pursue own interests. 3. Individuals’ activities are always interconnected with those of others. 4. Faith in individual to act with rational self-interest. 4. Faith in decisions of experts to decide the interests of society and individuals. Examples Examples a. State may provide schools but not require attendance. a. Compulsory attendance is considered to be in the public interest. b. Education for individual freedom. b. Education for social responsibility. c. The state should not mandate personal behavior unless c. The state may require the individual to wear seat belts or that behavior threatens others or public safety. motorcycle helmets both to protect the individual and to protect public interests. Exhibit 8.1 Classical versus New Liberal Conceptions of Freedom This provisional freedom that emerged from the postwar period was increasingly tied to nationalism. For classical liberals, a strong central government was feared as a potential enemy to individual freedom. Conversely, in the progressive era, modern liberals posited a strong central government as the only real route to freedom, for only “big government” was strong enough to regulate monopolies, big banking, labor organizers, poverty, and other internal threats to the freedom of the common person (see Exhibit 8.1). The two world wars, however, seemed to establish that Read more at location 246

Top of Form

   • Delete this highlight   • Undo deletion

Bottom of Form

B012Y5IPA0 16122447 Note: Add a note

the freedoms of the United States, it seemed necessary to leave the decision making to others and to trust blindly in their goodwill. Some, such as James B. Conant, argued that this was entirely consistent with Jefferson’s democratic ideal, in which the talented would rise to the top and the people could be counted on to defer to this carefully selected intellectual elite. Nicholas Lemann develops this point extensively.13 James Bryant Conant James B. Conant’s modest origins hardly suggested a future as one of America’s most respected educators. Born in 1893, Conant was reared in a middle-class home in Dorchester, Massachusetts. He struggled through his first few years in school, blossoming as a scholar only after responding to the challenges of the prestigious Roxbury Latin School. After distinguishing himself at Roxbury in the physical sciences, he went on to Harvard, where he completed the requirements for an A.B. degree in three years. He stayed on at Harvard to take a Ph.D. in organic and physical chemistry in 1916. After completing his doctorate at the age of 23, Conant eagerly accepted a post as instructor of organic chemistry in Harvard’s chemistry department. Despite a successful first year, the nation’s entry into World War I stalled Conant’s plans for advancement. Thinking he could best serve his country in the Chemical Warfare Service, Conant quickly rose to become the head of a division that would develop an improved method for producing mustard gas. Although he regarded the poison gas research as a highly unattractive task, he considered it essential to the war effort. He also expressed no misgivings about the morality of this work, saying years later that he did not see “why tearing a man’s guts out by a high-explosive shell is to be preferred to maiming by attacking his lungs or skin.”14 At the war’s end Conant enthusiastically resumed his academic career, plunging into a series of significant research projects. Within a decade he had gained a national reputation for his chemical research and had achieved the rank of full professor. Fellow chemists from around the world hailed Conant’s investigations into the structure of chlorophyll, and Harvard rewarded him with an endowed chair in chemistry in 1929. For his distinguished scholarly achievements, Conant also received Columbia University’s Charles F. Chandler Medal and the William H. Nichols Medal of the American James Bryant Conant’s far-reaching influence on the American high school is plainly apparent today—for better and for worse. Chemical Society. In 1931 Harvard named him the head of its chemistry division. Conant’s meteoric rise reached its zenith two years later, in the depths of the great depression, when he agreed to assume Harvard’s presidency. A vocal critic of the presidency of Abbot Lawrence Lowell, his immediate predecessor, Conant attributed the perceived decline in the quality of the Harvard faculty to Lowell’s preference for scholars with broad liberal arts backgrounds but little specialized knowledge. Conant agreed that breadth was desirable but also affirmed that great universities must recruit researchers of the first rank who are acknowledged experts in their fields of specialization. Conant also regretted Lowell’s marked aversion to students from racial and ethnic minorities, stressing what he regarded as Harvard’s mission to educate the best and the brightest students, regardless of their social or economic backgrounds. Leading periodicals lauded Harvard’s decision to pass the presidential mantle from Lowell to Conant. They acclaimed Conant’s scholarly accomplishments and expressed particular satisfaction with the fact that Conant did not belong to the elite circle of Boston Brahmins. The editors of The Nation dissented, however, noting that Conant’s record lacked evidence of a broad social Read more at location 247

Top of Form

   • Delete this highlight   • Undo deletion

Bottom of Form

B012Y5IPA0 16187999 Note: Add a note

consciousness. His affiliations with large corporations such as DuPont indicated to The Nation that Conant might be “of that category of technicians for whom the captains of industry loom as great men, wisely entrusted with the destinies of our social order.”15 The early years of Conant’s presidency were marked by his decision to upgrade the faculty and bring a broader range of students to Harvard. He sought first to clear the faculty ranks of what he regarded as dead weight, while hiring and promoting professors who had made important scholarly contributions to their fields. Some praised this new “up or out” policy, as it came to be called, but others attacked it as unfairly subordinating good teaching to the promotion of research. Conant maintained that the university gave equal consideration to both teaching and research in making faculty promotions and that up or out was a painful but effective way to enhance faculty quality. Standardized Testing and Student Selection Seeking to tear down some of the geographic and financial barriers that had traditionally limited Harvard’s enrollment to students from the elite public and private schools of the Northeast, Conant proposed a National Scholarship Program. This program would identify able young scholars and make it feasible for them to attend Harvard. But Conant believed the program was doomed to fail unless a reliable and valid measure of academic aptitude could be found to ensure objectivity in determining scholarship eligibility. After much deliberation and consultation with his assistant deans, Henry Chauncey and Wilbur Bender, Conant settled on the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT). Assistant deans Bender and Chauncey favored the SAT for the efficiency with which the multiple-choice test could be administered and evaluated. Perhaps they were also impressed with the test develope r’s description of the exam as a series of progressively more difficult questions, each with its own unambiguous solution and increasingly tempting “traps.” By the mid-1930s Harvard had adopted the SAT, finding it a very satisfactory device for selecting promising scholars. Owing to this success, Harvard eventually employed the SAT as a standard by which all undergraduate applicants would be measured. As Conant said: “The record seems to show that Harvard’s interest in the use of objective tests for selecting national scholars was an important factor in promoting the use of the tests for general admission purposes. My own interest in the new type of examinations certainly was aroused by the report of Bender and Chauncey and its outcome. Eventually it would lead to my playing a part in the establishment of the Educational Testing Service.”16 Indeed, as Conant recalled it, his enthusiasm for the SAT represented an “almost naive faith” in standardized tests. He came to believe that exams such as the SAT offered a nearly foolproof method for ascertaining academic promise. He also thought that the testing movement provided a solution to some of the problems of public school instruction. With the help of testing, he maintained, a child’s inherent abilities could be determined as early as age 12, and appropriate instruction then could be prescribed. Despite minor shifts in his point of view, for three decades Conant remained one of the most vigorous supporters of testing, vocational guidance, and the selective function of schooling. Throughout the 1930s Conant traveled extensively to convince Harvard alumni and the general public of the need for national scholarships and standardized testing. Frequently, he referred to himself as an “educational Calvinist.” By this Conant meant that most students were “predestined” to exhibit certain set capacities early in their school careers which were “highly resistant to change by external agencies.” Moreover, as Conant saw it, a “strict educational Calvinist” was primarily concerned with sorting and classifying students according to their aptitude as measured by tests.17 Conant did not worry that standardized tests... Read more at location 248

Top of Form

   • Delete this highlight   • Undo deletion

Bottom of Form

B012Y5IPA0 16253729 Note: Add a note

such as DuPont indicated to The Nation that Conant might be “of that category of technicians for whom the captains of industry loom as great men, wisely entrusted with the destinies of our social order.”15 The early years of Conant’s presidency were marked by his decision to upgrade the faculty and bring a broader range of students to Harvard. He sought first to clear the faculty ranks of what he regarded as dead weight, while hiring and promoting professors who had made important scholarly contributions to their fields. Some praised this new “up or out” policy, as it came to be called, but others attacked it as unfairly subordinating good teaching to the promotion of research. Conant maintained that the university gave equal consideration to both teaching and research in making faculty promotions and that up or out was a painful but effective way to enhance faculty quality. Standardized Testing and Student Selection Seeking to tear down some of the geographic and financial barriers that had traditionally limited Harvard’s enrollment to students from the elite public and private schools of the Northeast, Conant proposed a National Scholarship Program. This program would identify able young scholars and make it feasible for them to attend Harvard. But Conant believed the program was doomed to fail unless a reliable and valid measure of academic aptitude could be found to ensure objectivity in determining scholarship eligibility. After much deliberation and consultation with his assistant deans, Henry Chauncey and Wilbur Bender, Conant settled on the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT). Assistant deans Bender and Chauncey favored the SAT for the efficiency with which the multiple-choice test could be administered and evaluated. Perhaps they were also impressed with the test develope r’s description of the exam as a series of progressively more difficult questions, each with its own unambiguous solution and increasingly tempting “traps.” By the mid-1930s Harvard had adopted the SAT, finding it a very satisfactory device for selecting promising scholars. Owing to this success, Harvard eventually employed the SAT as a standard by which all undergraduate applicants would be measured. As Conant said: “The record seems to show that Harvard’s interest in the use of objective tests for selecting national scholars was an important factor in promoting the use of the tests for general admission purposes. My own interest in the new type of examinations certainly was aroused by the report of Bender and Chauncey and its outcome. Eventually it would lead to my playing a part in the establishment of the Educational Testing Service.”16 Indeed, as Conant recalled it, his enthusiasm for the SAT represented an “almost naive faith” in standardized tests. He came to believe that exams such as the SAT offered a nearly foolproof method for ascertaining academic promise. He also thought that the testing movement provided a solution to some of the problems of public school instruction. With the help of testing, he maintained, a child’s inherent abilities could be determined as early as age 12, and appropriate instruction then could be prescribed. Despite minor shifts in his point of view, for three decades Conant remained one of the most vigorous supporters of testing, vocational guidance, and the selective function of schooling. Throughout the 1930s Conant traveled extensively to convince Harvard alumni and the general public of the need for national scholarships and standardized testing. Frequently, he referred to himself as an “educational Calvinist.” By this Conant meant that most students were “predestined” to exhibit certain set capacities early in their school careers which were “highly resistant to change by external agencies.” Moreover, as Conant saw it, a “strict educational Calvinist” was primarily concerned with sorting and classifying students according to their aptitude as measured by tests.17 Conant did not worry that standardized tests might penalize late bloomers, because he doubted that... Read more at location 248

Top of Form

   • Delete this highlight   • Undo deletion

Bottom of Form

B012Y5IPA0 16253729 Note: Add a note

criterion. After many years of debate, the three divisions merged in 1947 to form the Educational Testing Service (ETS). As a member of its first board of trustees, Conant played a crucial role in the formation of ETS, stating in his memoirs, “The establishment of ETS was part of an educational revolution in which I am proud to have played a part.” With the appointment of Henry Chauncey, Conant’s former assistant dean, to the presidency of ETS, Conant boasted that he set Chauncey up in business. He also could have boasted that with the establishment of the ETS, America had moved one step closer to Conant’s vision of the meritocratic society.19 retreat from Conant’s ideal of social mobility. Echoing Charles Eliot’s fears and hopes, Conant wrote in 1940, “In short, a horde of heterogeneous students has descended on our secondary schools, and on our ability to handle all types intelligently depends in large measure the future of this country.”20 Are excellence and equality compatible ideals? Explain . Thinking Critically about the Issues #3 To what degree did standardized testing affect your education or your life plans? Thinking Critically about the Issues #2 Who Merits a College Education? Like many other Americans, Conant feared the long-term consequences of the great depression. The hard times dampened the traditional optimism of Americans, engendering skepticism about the value of free enterprise and democracy. Some found fascism and communism appealing, while others wanted to expand significantly the role of government in economic planning. Many Americans looked to Germany, Italy, and Japan for alternative roads back to prosperity. Developments abroad intensified Conant’s sensitivity to the fragility of democracy and led to a redoubling of his commitment to capitalism and free enterprise. He concluded that the depression and totalitarianism jeopardized what he regarded as the very backbone of democracy—social mobility. Redistributing wealth or achieving equality of condition would not resolve this crisis. But school reform could help forestall permanent class stratification. Scholarships and accelerated classes would encourage the intellectually gifted, while vocational education would meet the needs of the less academically able. Conant counted on Harvard and other elite institutions to awaken rank-and-file teachers to the new demands of modern society and to work with him to foster a new sense of community in the schools. Separate schools for the gifted and dull, although advantageous in some ways, would in the long run only contribute to further divisiveness and a continued In the dark days before World War II, Conant advanced the view that by giving recognition to the best students and helping the rest of the students find their educational niche, the schools would be promoting social stability and thus greatly enhancing national security. He feared, however, that in practice schools were not doing enough to discourage “marginal” high school students from pursuing a college education. In 1940, with 11 percent of high school students going on to college, Conant called them the wrong 11 percent and far more than American colleges could effectively teach without lowering standards. In addition to the problem of standards, Conant was concerned that an excessively large population of college students might cause disruptions in the social order. With social stability, not the intellectual fulfillment of each student, as his first priority, Conant warned: “I doubt if society can make a graver mistake than to provide advanced higher education of a specialized nature for men and women who are unable subsequently to use this training. Quite apart from economic considerations the existence of any large number of highly educated individuals whose ambitions have been frustrated is unhealthy for any nation.”21 Near the end of World War II, the GI Bill of Rights provided full college scholarships to all veterans regardless of their academic “aptitudes.” As a group, veterans had worse academic... Read more at location 249

Top of Form

   • Delete this highlight   • Undo deletion

Bottom of Form

B012Y5IPA0 16319185 Note: Add a note

GI Bill provided millions of “academically promising” students the opportunity to prove themselves as “late bloomers.” Undeterred, Conant never wavered from his belief that the “late bloomer” was a myth perpetuated by an American public unwilling to accept fully what he regarded as one of education’s chief functions—to sort and to classify students by their cognitive ability.23 School Reform Reports and Social Stratification In 1945, with World War II coming to a close and concerns about the postwar era becoming increasingly acute, a spate of reports appeared on the future needs of American education. Three of the most widely read and discussed of these documents were Harvard University’s General Education in a Free Society, the Educational Policy Commission’s Education for All American Youth, and a sociological study, Who Shall Be Educated? The Harvard report set forth lucidly and eloquently the theory and philosophy of general education. In searching for an overall logic or unity to secondary school instruction, the authors emphasized the goals of effective thinking and clear communication of thought. Moreover, the authors of this report affirmed that the great majority of high school students would benefit from a challenging course of study largely derived from the liberal arts. The goals of the Harvard report stood in stark contrast to the objectives of the Educational Policy Commission’s (EPC) Education for All American Youth and Lloyd Warner, Robert Havighurst, and Martin Loeb’s Who Shall Be Educated? The EPC, with its life-adjustment orientation, asserted that only the 15 or 20 percent of students going on to college should be encouraged to take a full complement of academic subjects. Less able students, the EPC explained, would focus on three practical goals during their four years of high school: vocational efficiency, civic competence, and personal development. Largely agreeing with the EPC, Warner, Havighurst, and Loeb argued that schools should be used to increase the degree of social mobility only moderately. To try to do more than this, the authors maintained, would be to encourage more students to rise to the top of the social pyramid than could be accommodated by the status system. The authors thus called for a secondary school that would differentiate students according to measured ability and use an experienced staff of guidance counselors to carry out a sorting function closely corresponding to society’s vocational needs. would lead to a lowering of academic standards. Years later he complained that the passage of the GI Bill of Rights indicated America’s unwillingness to accept the selective principle of education, which he regarded as essential in a free and fluid society. Conant did not address the fact that his and Hutchins’s fears of lowered standards had proved unwarranted. The GI Bill became one of the greatest academic successes in American history. Over two million veterans took advantage of the opportunity to attend college during the seven years the program was offered, and almost one-fourth of them probably would have never attended college without the bill’s subsidies. Most impressive of all, more veterans than nonveterans distinguished themselves in academically rigorous courses. Veterans earned better grades than nonveterans, and contrary to Hutchins’s predictions, they enrolled in liberal arts courses in far greater numbers than nonveterans. Although Congress passed the GI Bill partly to forestall massive postwar unemployment, the results of the bill showed that mature students, even from nonacademic backgrounds, could flourish in an academic atmosphere.22 What may have eluded Conant, or at least what he chose never to comment on, was the striking fact that the Read more at location 250

Top of Form

   • Delete this highlight   • Undo deletion

Bottom of Form

B012Y5IPA0 16384587 Note: Add a note

As the initiator of the Harvard report, a member of the commission that had produced All American Youth, and an admirer of Who Shall Be Educated? Conant sought to offer a picture of American education that would draw liberally on all three documents. He got his chance when Columbia University invited him to deliver the prestigious Julius and Rose Sachs Lectures in November 1945. In the three lectures, which he collectively titled Public Education and the Structure of American Society, Conant focused on what he regarded as the necessary relation between education and equality of opportunity. Although education had the potential to foster a high degree of social fluidity and reduce the emphasis on class distinctions and hereditary privilege, he lamented that in the first decades of the 20th century education had tended to increase stratification in the United States. Without progress toward greater social mobility, Conant feared that more discontented Americans would endeavor to foment social change through violent action. He thus concluded that “the chances of a nonrevolutionary development of our nation in the next fifty years seem to me to be determined largely by our educational system.” As Conant saw it, if Americans would accept his vision of the ideal democracy, the potential violence and disruption of the postwar years could be averted. In his history of the Scholastic Aptitude Test, Nicholas Lemann has said that the big question for Conant was this: “How can you build a classless society through the mechanism of relentlessly classifying the entire population?”24 First, Conant answered, Americans must acknowledge the important place of the well-trained, meritorious expert in every important field. Second, they must reject advancement through hereditary privilege and embrace a fluid social structure that would allow talented people from any social class to rise to positions of importance and responsibility. Third, all types of labor must be regarded as equal, with no position being accorded more social status than any other. Once these values were accepted, Conant observed, students would no longer feel compelled to attend college to reap the rewards of high status. Higher education, then, would be attractive only to those who genuinely merited it and required it in their eventual occupations. Public schools would play a crucial role in this process by sorting students according to their ability, and guidance counselors would assume the important job of selecting students for college preparatory courses. In response to those who feared that guidance counselors might use their positions of authority to coerce students, Conant stated that school personnel could be counted on to employ “the democratic method of enlightenment and persuasion.”25 To make all of this work, Conant asserted, “there should be no hierarchy of educational discipline, no one channel should have a social standing above the other.” But as an exasperated Nicholas Lemann has exclaimed: “Was this touchingly naïve, or willfully naïve, or just unpardonably naïve?”26 What hope was there really of creating such an academic culture, Lemann wondered, or was Conant merely attempting to mollify those who stood to benefit the least from his meritocratic vision? Critically analyze the degree to which Conant’s educational recommendations might be characterized as elitist in nature. Thinking Critically about the Issues #4 Education in a Divided World Three years later, with tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union steadily increasing, Conant expanded the Sachs Lectures into a book titled Education in a Divided World. In this book, Conant argued that by promoting greater cultural and social unity, the American public schools could serve as the first bulwark of defense against the Soviets. As Conant saw it, the United States would prevail in the protracted struggle between the two superpowers if American students learned to recognize and condemn the defects of the Soviet system while absorbing “the historic goals of our... Read more at location 251

Top of Form

   • Delete this highlight   • Undo deletion

Bottom of Form

B012Y5IPA0 16450289 Note: Add a note

theme in Darkness at Noon is that even more important than making a choice of values or demonstrating the superiority of one ideology over another is the necessity of keeping responsible discourse and inquiry going. Conant, however, appeared willing to sacrifice the pursuit of knowledge and mutual understanding to the pursuit of American dominance.27 Conant’s contribution to a 1951 pamphlet called Education and National Security extended the theme of how educators could help the United States compete more effectively with the Soviet Union. While the school must impart certain moral and spiritual values, its overriding purposes involved supplying the armed forces with adequate personnel and training people to meet the nation’s critical needs. Whereas they condoned the study of history and critical thought, the authors also praised instructors for teaching their charges to accept and support American foreign-policy engagements such as the “police action” that then raged in Korea. The authors also wrote approvingly that teachers determine “how readily the young recruit adapts himself to military life, how the industrial employee learns his assigned operation, and with what speed and accuracy the new stenographer transcribes her notes.”28 In his last year before leaving Harvard in 1953 to become the U.S. high commissioner to Germany, Conant published Education and Liberty. Based on a series of lectures delivered at the University of Virginia, this book again affirmed Conant’s faith in American public schools. It also showed his growing mastery of the complexities of educational systems in Australia, New Zealand, Scotland, and England. Conant’s recent investigations of Australian and New Zealand schools (made possible by a grant from the Carnegie Corporation) and increasingly broad knowledge of British educational history considerably sharpened his ability to draw parallels between those school systems and public education in the United States. Although he noted the effectiveness of those nations in educating talented youngsters, Conant’s comparative study amounted to a celebration of both the diversity and the democratic unity of American public education. For the first time in his major writings, Conant stressed the unique function of the American comprehensive high school. By mixing students of vastly different backgrounds and abilities in the same school, he observed, the comprehensive high school minimized class distinctions and avoided many of the social cleavages that characterized the other societies he had investigated. Whereas schools in most other countries were highly centralized and run by the state, local communities administered American schools, greatly increasing educational diversity and the opportunity for experimentation. Conant conceded that inferior schools tended to emerge under America’s decentralized system and that some of those schools were poorly equipped to prepare the academically talented for college. In general, however, he acclaimed the American comprehensive high school for its role in nourishing democratic unity. Did the comprehensive high school form a part of your school experience? If so, how did it affect the education of your fellow students? Thinking Critically about the Issues #5 Although Soviet communism largely remained a tacit backdrop to Education and Liberty, at one point Conant articulated the chief assumption of his educational proposals. “If the field of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton, it may well be that the ideological struggle with Communism in the next fifty years will be won on playing fields of the public high schools of the United States. That this may be so is the fervent hope of all of us who are working to support and improve these characteristic American institutions.”29 As Conant left Harvard, he continued to reflect on the role of the American comprehensive high school. In Education and Liberty he had accumulated and presented more firsthand knowledge of Australian and New Zealand schools than he had of American schools.... Read more at location 252

Top of Form

   • Delete this highlight   • Undo deletion

Bottom of Form

B012Y5IPA0 16515805 Note: Add a note

which taught “children what kind of behavior was socially acceptable and how to adjust to group expectations.”31 Beginning in 1949 and continuing for about a decade, a torrent of articles and books appeared that censured the public schools for lowering standards and in general miseducating American youth. Almost all these observers of the educational scene agreed that progressive reforms and especially life adjustment had sadly diminished the importance of academic achievement. By stressing personality development and meeting each student’s individual needs, the critics argued, the schools were neglecting the traditional intellectual subjects and were thus failing to impart mental and moral discipline. Of all the critics, perhaps the most interesting and perceptive were former urban school board member Mortimer Smith and noted professional historian Arthur Bestor. Both adamantly maintained that the primary purpose of schooling should be intellectual training, and both tenaciously clung to the belief that even the most ordinary student could profit from a rigorously intellectual course of study. While conceding the importance of serving a student’s needs, interests, and abilities, Smith insisted that to Read more at location 253

Top of Form

   • Delete this highlight   • Undo deletion

Bottom of Form

B012Y5IPA0 16580792 Note: Add a note

the demands of modern life. Claiming that most students had spurned the traditional academic curriculum or had rejected vocational education, Prosser argued that those students needed instruction in the practical arts of home and family life and civic competence. Although the life-adjustment curriculum would not omit science, math, and the humanities, those courses would stress hands-on experience and focus on contemporary problems. As one life-adjustment document put it, “citizenship training must concentrate on understanding the present, not studying the past.”30 Although life-adjustment educators intended to make schooling more relevant and “functional,” many of the courses that appeared in school districts around the country in the half decade after the war appeared to reflect a powerful anti-intellectual bias. In some school districts, entire instructional units were devoted to the etiquette of dating, including discussion of such questions as “Do girls want to ‘pet’?” and “Should you go in with a girl after a date (to raid the ice box)?” As educational historian Diane Ravitch has pointed out, time and again one could find evidence of school instruction during this period Read more at location 253

Top of Form

   • Delete this highlight   • Undo deletion

Bottom of Form

B012Y5IPA0 16580993 Note: Add a note

develop well-roundedness, all students should be required to work at things for which they might not have talent. Bestor affirmed the importance of giving all students a solid liberal arts education regardless of how deficient their family or cultural background might appear. As Bestor saw it, the school could have no more important function than to overcome educational handicaps, thereby achieving its true democratic mission of meeting the fundamental need of all people for intellectual enrichment. In 1956, Smith, Bestor, and colleagues of theirs formed the Council for Basic Education (CBE). The CBE’s commitment to making intellectual training the highest priority of the public schools was as strong as its opposition to the differentiation of students by ability. The CBE’s original statement of purpose declared “that only by the maintenance of high academic standards can the ideal of democratic education be realized—the ideal of offering to all the children of all the people of the United States not merely an opportunity to attend school, but the privilege of receiving there the soundest education that is offered any place in the world.”32 Another critic of life-adjustment education, Admiral Hyman Rickover, took a different view. For Rickover, a naval engineer and nuclear submarine designer, technical and scientific education for a small, talented elite took precedence over all other kinds of schooling. As a naval admiral and stalwart cold warrior, Rickover asserted that “education is America’s first line of defense” in competing with the Soviet Union. Although Rickover spoke of educating all children well, he focused attention on the 15 or 20 percent he regarded as academically talented. The future mathematicians, physicists, and linguists, he believed, must be trained in homogeneous, Europeanstyle secondary schools where academic standards would be maintained and sentimental attachments to the slow child would not impede the main task at hand. Rickover not only rejected mixed-ability classes but also regarded the comprehensive high school as an unfortunate vestige of a less complicated era. Rickover envisioned a school system that would identify talented students at an early age and enroll them in accelerated educational programs. In the long run, he argued, this highly selective process would enhance American freedom by helping the United States keep pace with the Soviets. Rickover’s envisioned school system might slight the majority of students, but as Rickover reminded his readers, “The future belongs to the best educated nation. Let it be ours.”33 After the Soviets launched Sputnik in 1957, alarming the American public and making them think that their schools had failed to teach science and math to an entire generation of students, Rickover’s elitist perspective sparked new interest. In response to spreading fears that the United States was losing the cold war because of its intellectually feeble school system, Congress passed the National Defense Education Act of 1958. With strong endorsement from President Eisenhower, this legislation allocated millions of dollars for upgrading the teaching of science and math and improving procedures for identifying and educating gifted students. The hearings that led up to this legislation and the general concern regarding Russian technological superiority launched a new round of attacks against the public schools. In the middle of this continuing debate, in the late winter of 1959, James B. Conant released his first study of secondary schools, The American High School Today. Conant asserted that the comprehensive high school, by educating academic and vocational students under the same roof, contributed to democratic unity while also doing an adequate job of preparing both populations for their respective post–high school destinations. Most important to school people, who had grown tired of defending themselves against an unremitting barrage of educational criticism, Conant appeared to accept the educational status quo with only minor... Read more at location 254

Top of Form

   • Delete this highlight   • Undo deletion

Bottom of Form

B012Y5IPA0 16646953 Note: Add a note

talented youth. In his first annual report for the Carnegie Corporation, Gardner showed that he put great faith in IQ tests. He stated that a student with an IQ score between 108 and 115 would barely qualify for admission to a four-year college and that an IQ below 108 just about eliminated a student’s chance to compete effectively in college. Increasingly, Conant frequently referred to an IQ of 115 as an appropriate cutoff for identifying the academically talented. literature and language, and several years of history? If this important task could be accomplished in a school also attended by less able students, the comprehensive high school would be realizing its crucial mission: the identification and development of the most academically talented and the social integration of both collegebound and non-college-bound students. On May 16, 1957, the board of trustees of the Carnegie Corporation announced that it was approving the appropriation of $350,000 to the ETS for the administration of the study of the American high school by James B. Conant. By that time the objectives of the study had been clarified, the staff had been hired, the schools to be studied had been identified and contacted, and a tentative schedule of school visits had been worked out. Between September 1957 and July 1958 Conant conducted the first phase of his study. During that period Conant and an associate visited over 50 comprehensive high schools in 18 states, filing a detailed report after each visit. According to Conant, those schools all had a “high degree of comprehensiveness”—that is, with more than half the students enrolled in vocational programs and with a significant minority taking college preparatory classes. Conant and his staff deemed a comprehensive high school satisfactory if it gave “a good general education for all the pupils as future citizens of a democracy, provide[d] elective programs for the majority to develop useful skills, and educate[d] adequately those with a talent for handling advanced academic subjects —particularly foreign languages and advanced mathematics.”36 At the conclusion of his investigations Conant reported that eight schools were successfully fulfilling his objectives for the comprehensive high school. Although reluctant to make sweeping generalizations about the condition of public secondary education in the United States, Conant admitted that “no radical alteration in the basic pattern of American education is necessary in order to improve public high schools.” By so uncritically accepting the educational status quo, Conant ensured a favorable reception for his report. While Conant did offer 21 recommendations for improving public high schools, as historian Raymond Callahan has said, “Any superintendent who could say he was adopting Conant’s recommendations, or better yet, that his school system had already been following them for years, was almost impregnable.” Consequently, shortly after the publication of The American High School Today, Conant Explain the role that concern about national security played in at least five of James B. Conant’s educational proposals. Thinking Critically about the Issues #6 In 1956 Gardner titled his second annual report “The Great Talent Hunt.” He described at length the important new role that the gifted must play in American society and the special obligation of educators to challenge those students and develop their talents. In subsequent reports Gardner continued to stress the education of the talented but also tried to make a case for counseling students away from college who he believed were not suited for it. In his book Excellence, which appeared shortly after the first Conant report, Gardner wrote that the educational system must work effectively as a “sorting-out process.” As Gardner put it, “The Schools are the golden avenue of opportunity for able youngsters; but by the same token they are the arena in which less able youngsters discover their limitations.” Thus, in the late 1950s Gardner was advancing the same themes..

a1EEB1FP6N521

a3KWI5KR3L4AV

a2WFHGF4Z0DL

aBR9V01MUAM02

a28S3VC706UBX

a3DSWOLSTJEJ

a14F3WBDUBU3

a379E4S5GDFD8

aQ5DICDDCRC4Q

191a2c1c09eea6

a33J3M8RFYC63

a21TKAO7THS6T

a3ARK0WNQC8B

a1JH2Y8L13WPK

B012Y5IPA0

a32I4RZ08IS1M0

a1BY3TS9S19HH

a1AU7C8NN8LXZ

a14W2Z5YJCC3T

a32H73B4L6MEU

a3DNBRR6VH07Q