Historical Events (its alot of reading)

See the  attached example s below. Please list five significant historical events/leaders from this era (Chapters Five and Six) and choose two to compare and contrast. Your Discussion Forum response will satisfy the following requirements:

a. Five events and the date each event occurred is listed

b. Two events are chosen and a Venn Diagram is completed showing (at least three in each category) the similarities and differences of each chosen event.

c. Three of the following five questions have been answered

· These events are still significant today because____.

· If I could change the outcome of one of my listed events I would change___ because____. 

· If only one of these events/individuals could have taken place; I would chose ___ because____.

· If I could change the outcome of one of my chosen events I would choose___ because____. 

· What would you say is the most important result of each of your chosen events? 

Recommended Resource:  A Hypertext Timeline of American Educational History  

CHAPTER 5

5.1 The Secondary School Movement

The secondary school movement that emerged after the Civil War provided opportunities for young people to stay in school longer. Although the high school had been introduced onto the American education scene as early as 1821, the high school movement had grown slowly in the years before the Civil War. The first American comprehensive (and coeducational) high school, offering both English and classical courses of study, opened in Lowell, Massachusetts, in 1831. High schools soon appeared in several other larger cities.

However, by 1860 there were only 300 high schools in the nation compared to more than 6,000 academies. Of these, more than 100 were located in Massachusetts, the only state that had enacted legislation requiring communities to provide secondary-level education.

Unlike the common school, the high school had not yet been overwhelmingly demanded by the masses. Rather, it appeared to be more a reformer's response to urbanization and industrialization. Middle- and upper-class reformers, adopting the philosophy and rhetoric of the common school advocates, viewed their efforts as democratizing secondary education and providing a means of maintaining social values, addressing the social problems in urban centers, and promoting economic progress. As a result, prior to the Civil War, most high schools were located in urban areas, where a sufficient number of students and sufficient tax support were most often found.

In the years after the Civil War, however, a number of factors similar to those that fueled the common school movement came together to create a greater demand for secondary education: population growth caused in large part by increased immigration, rapid growth in industry, and technological change that intensified the demand for skilled workers. A high school education was increasingly seen as necessary to the full realization of one's social and economic goals. This was as true for artisans and small entrepreneurs in the cities as it was for businessmen and professionals in rural communities (Herbst, 1996). Economic growth also created a larger tax base that could be used to support an expanded education system.

The convergence of these factors brought a dramatic increase in the number of public high schools—from about 500 in 1870 to 6,000 in 1900. During the 1880s the number of free public high schools surpassed the number of fee-charging academies, and by the end of the century, high schools had pushed out the majority of academies altogether. Although fewer than 10% of the high school age population attended high school, in 1900 over half a million students enrolled and 62,000 graduated.

The Kalamazoo Case and Increased Tax Support

The public secondary school movement gained momentum from the decision of the Michigan Supreme Court in the famous Kalamazoo case (1874), which originated when the school board of Kalamazoo, Michigan, moved to establish a publicly supported high school and hire a nonteaching superintendent. Three taxpayers brought suit to prevent the board from levying a tax to support the high school. They charged that because the instruction in the schools was not practical, and therefore not necessary or beneficial to the majority of people, those few who did benefit should be the ones to pay for it (Stuart et al. v. School District No. 1 of the Village of Kalamazoo, 1874).

The taxpayers referenced the Michigan constitution, which authorized the establishment of common schools and a university but did not mention secondary or high schools, and which specified that English, not Latin, was to be the language of instruction (the curriculum of the high school was primarily college prep and thus emphasized Latin).

The court ruled in favor of the school board, arguing that it would be inconsistent with the intent of the constitution's framers to set up elementary schools and a state university and then expect citizens to obtain a private secondary education. The court also held that it was within the power of the school board to hire a superintendent and that when the voters of the district had voted to support a high school, it was within the authority of the school board to decide the curriculum.

By ruling that the legislature could impose taxes for the support of secondary schools, the Michigan Supreme Court provided the precedent for public support of secondary education. As a result of the growth in secondary education, in the decade between school years 1879–1880 and 1889–1890, total expenditures for the public schools increased 81%, from $78 million to $141 million (Snyder & Dillow, 2013).

Compulsory Attendance and Increased Literacy

Compulsory attendance laws soon followed in the wake of the Kalamazoo decision. Although Massachusetts had passed the first compulsory attendance law in 1852 (requiring all children between ages 8 and 14 to attend school 12 weeks a year, 6 of them consecutively), the widespread push for compulsory attendance laws did not take place until after the Civil War, when they emerged as a complement to child labor laws.

Although not directed at school attendance, child labor laws had the effect of regulating school attendance. For example, laws enacted in Massachusetts in 1836 and Connecticut in 1842 said that no child under 15 could be employed in any business or industry without proof of having attended school 3 out of the past 12 months. The passage of similar laws in other states drove the adoption of compulsory attendance laws. Simultaneously, technological advances in industry decreased the need for child labor.

By 1918 all states had enacted laws requiring full-time school attendance until the child reached a certain age or completed a certain grade. Compliance with these laws was not full or immediate, but the laws combined with other factors to raise attendance rates from 50% in 1865 to 72% in 1900. By 1900 children attended school an average of 99 days per year, twice as many as they had a century earlier (Snyder & Dillow, 2013).

One result of the increase in school attendance was a declining illiteracy rate: from 20% of all persons over 10 years of age in 1870 to 7.7% in 1910 (Snyder, 1993). However, illiteracy rates varied by segment of the population and region. As a result of the pre–Civil War prohibitions on teaching African Americans and the inadequate provision of education after the war, African Americans had the highest illiteracy rate: 30.5% in 1910. The illiteracy rate was also high among the older population, which had not benefited from universal, compulsory education. Native-born Whites had the lowest illiteracy rate in 1910: 3.0%. Regionally, the South, which not only had the most African Americans but also had been the slowest in developing systems of common schools, had the highest illiteracy rate.

The Standardization of the Curriculum

In its origins the high school had been viewed as providing a more practical curriculum than the academy. However, at the end of the 19th century, it was still oriented toward preparing students for college, despite the fact that the majority of students did not go there. As high school enrollment increased, there was growing concern among educators that the needs of the terminal student were not being met and that, as a consequence, many dropped out.

Many questions also arose regarding the proper relationship between the elementary school and the high school, and the high school and higher education, as well as what should be taught at each level. Then, as now, institutions of higher education complained about the preparation provided by the high schools, and the high schools complained about the varied and conflicting entrance requirements of colleges and universities.

The Committee of Ten

In an attempt to address some of these issues, and in an effort to standardize the high school curriculum and college entrance requirements, the National Education Association (NEA) established the Committee of Ten in 1892. Charles Eliot, the much-respected president of Harvard University, chaired the committee, which was largely composed of representatives of higher education. Its report, The Report of the Committee on Secondary School Studies (NEA, 1894), recommended four curricula: classical, Latin-scientific, modern language, and English.

However, while maintaining that the purpose of secondary schools was not only to prepare students for college, and while acknowledging that few secondary students in fact went on to college, the committee

embraced the position common to both mental disciplinarians and those who embraced a classical curriculum, that education is primarily concerned with fostering a set of skills that are valuable for every human being and not with developing a set of skills particular to one's specific occupation. (Diener, 2008, p. 68)

Vocational training, they believed, should come after high school.

Although the recommendations of the Committee of Ten came under immediate attack from many educators for failing to recognize that many students were terminal and could benefit from a vocational education, they determined the standardized curricular patterns for several decades. They also laid the groundwork for recurring proposals for a core curriculum that were to be made throughout the 20th century. Finally, the report had a major influence on the work of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, which established the Carnegie Unit as the standard unit to measure contact hours with the instructor for a yearlong high school course. The Carnegie Unit made it possible for institutions to standardize output and faculty workloads.

Seven Cardinal Principles of Secondary Education

The opposition that greeted the recommendations of the Committee of Ten did not diminish with time, and within 25 years little support for them could be found. The demands of an increasingly industrialized economy "created an atmosphere in which specific technical skills and not general intellectual skill were valued" (Diener, 2008, p. 66). Concerns also remained that high schools were not able to attract and retain students, who were then left to roam the streets.

In 1913 the NEA responded by appointing another committee, the Commission on the Reorganization of Secondary Education (CRSE), to review the curriculum and organization of secondary education in light of the many changes that had taken place in society and the workplace, as well as in the secondary school population and educational learning theories. Unlike the Committee of Ten, which was made up almost exclusively of university representatives, the CRSE included high school teachers and principals, school district administrators, normal school teachers and administrators, representatives of state departments of education, the U.S. commissioner of education, and other representatives of the U.S. Bureau of Education. After 5 years of work, the CRSE issued its report, the Cardinal Principles of Secondary Education (NEA, 1918).

The Cardinal Principles has been described by the curriculum historian Herbert Kliebard (2004) as a "convenient counterpoint" to the report of the Committee of Ten. The underlying philosophy of the CRSE was that education in a democracy should "develop in each individual the knowledge, interests, ideals, habits, and powers whereby he will find his place and use that place to shape both himself and society toward ever nobler ends" (NEA, 1918, p. 9).

A second major theme of the Principles was the concept of social efficiency. A "cult of efficiency" had gained favor in the business community after the Civil War, and it found life in the schools in the form of the curriculum theory of social efficiency, which is discussed in more detail in Chapter 6. Advocates of social efficiency argued that in order for society to function efficiently, students to use their time efficiently, and schools to operate efficiently, education should help students understand their function in society and should offer them only those subjects that would prepare them most directly for what their lives had in store (Kliebard, 2004).

The report identified seven objectives that it said should guide the curriculum: (1) health; (2) command of fundamental processes (reading, writing, and oral expression); (3) worthy home membership; (4) vocation; (5) citizenship; (6) worthy use of leisure; and (7) ethical character. Only one of the objectives, "command of fundamental processes," was concerned with academics, and, unlike the Committee of Ten report, which focused on the four curricula, the Principles focused on goals or objectives outside the curriculum; the curriculum was instead seen as the instrument through which students would achieve the goals.

The Cardinal Principles were widely accepted by educators and the public and represented two significant reforms: "First, they directly facilitated the assimilation of all students into a common culture, and second, this was the first time that the school curriculum became the means through which nonacademic goals were to be attained" (Horn, 2002, p. 35). After a decade of debate over whether secondary education in the United States should follow the European model of dual systems (academic and vocational/industrial) or a unitary, "democratic" system, the Principles provided the blueprint for the American comprehensive high school and its distinguishing feature— academic and vocational studies under the same roof (Wraga, 2000).

The comprehensive high school would serve two complementary functions: a specialized function that would address the variegated needs of a heterogeneous student body and a unifying function that would promote the social interaction of students from different backgrounds (Wraga, 2000). Social interaction was facilitated by extracurricular activities and the intermingling of students in those parts of the curriculum that would be common to all of them (such as health, citizenship, and ethics). The "devotion to utility" reflected in the Cardinal Principles represented not only a rejection of traditional liberal education but also an articulation of progressive educational philosophy, which is discussed in detail in Chapter 6 (Graves, 2010).

The Manual Training Movement

Concurrent with the high school movement, and anticipating the more functional emphasis of the Cardinal Principles, was the manual training movement, which prepared the way for vocational education. It began in the 1870s with the training of engineers, but soon spread to public education and was promoted by John Runkle, president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Manual training was intended to develop perception, dexterity, hand–eye coordination, and visual accuracy, and was not specific to any trade or vocation or the manufacture of any product (Herbst, 1996).

Many who did not welcome the involvement of business and industry in the curriculum of the school welcomed manual training at the secondary level. Separating instruction from production provided manual and mental training for future draftsmen, engineers, and craftsmen, while also providing all students the opportunity to discover and pursue their mechanical interests and talents and encouraging them to remain in school. These arguments, most persuasively and forcefully made by Calvin Woodward, dean of the O'Fallon Polytechnic Institute of Washington University (a manual training high school), appealed to educators, parents, and others who were critical of the narrow academic focus of the traditional high school (Herbst, 1996).

The movement to integrate manual training into the public schools did not go unchallenged. Some educators agreed with the Committee of Ten's contention that the public schools should not be in the business of preparing workers for business or the crafts. Others, coming from the opposite perspective, saw little relationship between the skills gained in manual training and those needed by industry.

Still others objected to manual training because of its association with reform schools, where it was considered the appropriate program for students who were unprepared or unable to benefit from academic instruction. Manual training had also traditionally been associated with the schooling of Native Americans and African Americans, and a number of the critics of these programs, most notably W. E. B. DuBois, questioned the limits manual training placed on the occupational and economic advancement of these minorities.

Despite these and other objections, manual training was introduced in numerous schools, typically in the form of drafting, art education, or mechanics. However, manual training never really gained the support of a critical mass of educators, many of whom held it in low esteem, and as a result, it never gained a lasting place in the curriculum. It did, however, play a major role in setting the stage for another movement—the vocational education movement.

Vocational Education

By the turn of the 20th century, business leaders had become increasingly concerned that the United States was losing ground in world markets, particularly to Germany. The success of the German technical schools in preparing highly skilled workers was seen as a major factor in that country's economic success. Industry's interest in vocational education coincided with progressive reformers' criticism of the public schools for their inattention to the interests and needs of the child. By 1910 business leaders, public officials, unions, and progressive educators had come together to create the vocational education movement (Cuban, 2001). They pressured the schools to offer a separate vocational curriculum.

The initial response of school districts, especially those in the larger cities, was to open trade, technical, and industrial high schools. The next major step came with the introduction of day and evening continuation schools for youth already at work, and cooperative education programs jointly sponsored by the schools and industry. The latter arrangements freed the public schools from investing in shops, kitchens, and other specialized workspaces. Equally important, artisans, master craftsmen, and other experienced tradespersons served as instructors, leaving the high school teachers to concentrate on academic and citizenship education (Herbst, 1996).

Vocational education programs tended to be concentrated in the cities, where they were seen as addressing both the need for a trained workforce and a curriculum for immigrant children "whose difficulties with the traditional college prep curriculum were believed to be most acute" (Graham, 2005, p. 41). The children of immigrants responded enthusiastically to the programs.

In the South, vocational education was initially geared toward African Americans. According to one historian's interpretation, both immigrants and African Americans occupied a somewhat analogous position—numerically large and politically weak. Both groups were also accustomed to the dominant group, native-born Whites, making educational policy decisions for them. In this instance the dominant group had decided that vocational training would be good for "others" (Graham, 1974).

Labor leaders originally opposed the concept of a differentiated vocational curriculum; they saw it as exacerbating class differences. However, they came to accept the argument that the benefits vocational education offered by keeping students in school and providing them the skills necessary for higher paying jobs outweighed this negative. They also believed, or at least hoped, that as long as vocational education was part of the comprehensive high school, students from different social classes would have the opportunity to interact.

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Vocational education was already established in the high school curriculum when a business-led coalition succeeded in securing federal support for it through the Smith-Hughes Act of 1917, the first federal legislation to provide direct federal funds to the public schools. The act provided federal money to help pay for the preparation and salaries of teachers in the agriculture, trade and industrial, and home economics fields. It was important not only because of the funding precedent it established but also because it, in effect, rejected a common curriculum for all high school students (Graham, 2005).

Vocational education was one of the most lasting reform initiatives of the 20th century (Horn, 2002) and was key to attracting larger numbers and a wider range of students to the high school. Not only was a new curricular option created, but many existing subjects were also infused with criteria taken from vocational education; for example, courses such as business mathematics and business English were accepted as legitimate substitutes for the traditional forms of these subjects (Kliebard, 2004). By the late 1920s separate vocational tracks and vocational guidance counselors were in place in most urban comprehensive high schools. Vocational education had become a fundamental part of the public school system.

The Comprehensive High School

By the mid-1920s, the work of the CRSE and the introduction of vocational education had given shape to the American comprehensive high school. It had become an institution based on the concept of democracy that offered a range of curricula to students of differing abilities and interests.

Four basic curricula were offered: (1) the college preparatory program, which included courses in English language and literature, foreign languages, mathematics, the natural and physical sciences, and history and social sciences; (2) the commercial or business program, which offered courses in bookkeeping, shorthand, and typing; (3) the industrial, vocational, home economics, and agricultural programs; and (4) a modified academic program for students who planned to terminate their formal education upon high school completion.

Students self-selected different educational tracks based on their abilities, goals, interests, and prospects for further education. As guidance counselors became more common, standardized tests were used to sort students into the different curricular tracks.

Despite the opportunity for alternative curricula, the college prep curriculum remained the dominant track in most comprehensive high schools. In his study of the high school curriculum during the 1920s, Counts (1926) attributed this to the social prestige associated with the traditional curriculum. Additionally, in many schools, especially small high schools, enrollments and resources typically could not support all four curricula, and despite efforts to break the stranglehold of the college preparatory curriculum and the inroads made by vocational education, often the only program offered was the academic one.

The domination of the traditional academic curriculum, as well as a structure that anticipated students moving through graded classrooms, studying the same subjects in the same ways, and taking exams for promotion, resulted in many students being left behind. For instance, developmentally challenged students aged 10 to 15, many from poor and immigrant families, crowded the upper elementary grades, "shamed and bored as individuals and collectively producing what educators called 'waste'—a social sin in an age that glorified the concept of social efficiency" (Tyack & Cuban, 1995, p. 186).

Emergence of the Junior High School

The junior high school, which appeared in the first decade of the 20th century, offered grades 6 and 7, or 6, 7, and 8, and was designed, in part, to address the problems of the high school noted above. It was also a response to the Committee of Ten's recommendation that academic work begin earlier and that elementary schooling be reduced from 8 to 6 years and secondary education be extended down 2 years. The concept appealed to several types of reformers.

One group was concerned about attrition and preparing students for the world of work. They felt the junior high school would prevent students from dropping out and would provide them the opportunity to explore their vocational interests or even receive vocational training before high school. Another group was encouraged by the work of developmental psychologists such as G. Stanley Hall that emphasized the developmental differences between childhood and preadolescence, and between preadolescence and postadolescence, and suggested that, for educational purposes, children at these stages were better kept separate.

According to these reformers, the junior high school period was one in which "differences of abilities or extra-school conditions and of prospects will acutely manifest themselves, forcing us to differentiate curricula" (Snedden, cited in Kliebard, 2004, p. 95).

A third group of reformers was concerned with transforming the curriculum of the entire school system. As discussed in the following chapter, these progressive reformers wanted to break the rigidity of the traditional classroom and introduce new subjects and new ways of teaching. They believed that reorganizing the intermediate grades would provide the impetus for reorganizing the entire public school system (Tyack & Cuban, 1995).

Although the concept of the junior high school did receive widespread support, its adoption and incorporation into school systems was slow. The first junior high school was established in Columbus, Ohio, in 1909 and was followed by a second the next year in Berkeley, California. Ten years later 94% of the secondary schools in the country still followed the traditional pattern of 8 years of elementary school and 4 years of high school. Two decades later this pattern still characterized about two thirds of the secondary schools (Tyack & Cuban, 1995).

It was not until after World War II that a rapid growth in enrollments and new school construction drove efforts to end the dominance of the 8–4 pattern and cemented the junior high school as a rung on the U.S. education system ladder.

5.2 Growth of Parochial Schools

As discussed in Chapter 4, in the mid-19th-century Catholics became increasingly concerned with the heavily Protestant sectarian practices in the public schools and the fact that Catholic students were not excused from these practices.

In 1853 the First Plenary Council of Bishops urged every parish to establish and support a Catholic school in the parish. In 1866 the Second Plenary Council repeated the call and admonished bishops to see to it that schools were established in connection with every church in their dioceses. The Third Plenary Council in 1884 went from pleading to admonishing parishes to establish a Catholic school within 2 years. If possible, schools were to be free. Parents were to send their children to these schools unless given permission by the bishop to attend elsewhere.

With the urging of the Catholic Church and the increasing number of Catholic immigrants from Ireland, Italy, Germany, and Eastern Europe, the number of Catholic schools increased at a rapid rate. "By 1895, . . . an overwhelming working-class Catholic population had built some four thousand Catholic schools [nationwide], which enrolled 755,038 children, an increase of 50 percent in a decade" (McGreevy, 2003, p. 114). In some large cities such as New York and Chicago, Catholic schools accounted for as much as 20% of the total enrollment, and in Detroit the figure was up to 40% (Vinyard, 2008).

The proliferation of parish schools, including boys' prep schools and convent boarding schools,

took form according to local circumstances, quality of sister-teachers, and parents' preferences; Irish nuns for Irish children, German nuns for Germans. Catholic publishers printed textbooks for religious education and conscientious nuns insisted upon additional books and lessons equal to the best of the public schools. (Vinyard, 2008, p. 1)

The growth of the Catholic schools met with concern from many Protestants. An attempt was made to amend the U.S. Constitution to prohibit any level of government from providing financial aid to religious schools. While the proposed amendment (the Blaine Amendment) failed, the majority of states did enact such prohibitions.

Other efforts were made to force all children to attend public schools. In 1922 an Oregon law was amended to prohibit children from attending private schools until after the eighth grade. The law's stated goal was to ensure that children, especially the children of immigrants, were "Americanized." A private military school and the Society of the Sisters of the Holy Name challenged the law, set to go into effect in 1926. In 1925 the U.S. Supreme Court overturned it, upholding the right of parents and guardians to send their child to the school of their choice (Pierce v. Society of the Sisters of the Holy Name, 1925).

Catholics were not the only denomination that established their own schools in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. A number of Protestant groups, including the Lutherans, Dutch Calvinists, Seventh-Day Adventists, Presbyterians, and Baptists also established private schools. Overall the sum of these schools did not equal that of the Catholic schools, but each was important to the denomination and to the provision of education in the United States.

5.3 Expansion of Higher Education

As discussed in Chapter 3, throughout the first half of the 19th century, as the population grew and expanded westward, the number of colleges grew rapidly. By the outbreak of the Civil War, 20 states had established 21 public colleges supported largely from public lands. Additional incentive for the establishment of public institutions was provided by the Morrill Acts of 1862 and 1890, the second of which was important in the establishment of colleges for African Americans.

The period after the Civil War also saw expanded opportunities for higher education for women. Within 15 years after the war, one half of the colleges and universities in the United States admitted women, and almost one third of the students were female.

The period after the Civil War saw not only phenomenal growth in the number of new colleges but also in their roles. Many institutions developed into large, multipurpose research universities as we know them today. At the other end of the higher education spectrum, a new entry, the junior college, was introduced to provide courses parallel to the first 2 years of the university.

The Morrill Acts and the Land Grant College Movement

A growing recognition among farmers and laborers that education could improve their economic conditions, and that the classical curriculum offered by most existing colleges was irrelevant to their needs, led them to urge the establishment of new institutions that would provide more practical programs. In response, with the backing of industrial interests but over the objections of many private colleges, the first Land Grant College Act, also known as the Morrill Act after its sponsor, Representative Justin Morrill of Vermont, was passed by Congress and signed by President Lincoln in 1862.

The act granted 30,000 acres of public land in the form of land scrip to each state for each senator and representative it had in Congress in 1860. The income from the land was to be used to support at least one college that would teach subjects related to "agriculture and mechanical arts." The money could be used to establish agricultural and mechanical schools at existing colleges, to add support to existing programs, or to open new colleges.

Despite the fact that some states squandered the revenue from these endowments (U.S. National Archives and Records Administration, 2013) and "shady land deals made the future of some colleges less secure than it might to have been," (Loss, 2012), within a decade 24 land grant colleges enrolled 2,600 students, 13% of the total U.S. collegiate population (Williams, 2003). Among the first of the new institutions were the universities of Maine (1865); West Virginia and Illinois (1867); the University of California (1868); the University of Nebraska and Purdue University (1869); The Ohio State University (1870); and the University of Arkansas and Texas A&M University (1871).

The quarter century after the Civil War was not positive for land grant colleges, though. Their faculties were inadequate, and they attracted far more engineering than agricultural students (Williams, 2003). However, the passage of the Hatch Act in 1887, which established and funded agricultural experimental stations at land grant colleges, and the Morrill Act of 1890, which provided for direct annual grants to each state to support educational programs at land grant colleges, gave strength to the movement.

The second Morrill Act also mandated that no grant be given to any state that denied admission to its land grant colleges on the basis of color or race without providing a separate landgrant institution for "colored students." Soon after, 17 states, mostly in the South, also established separate land grant colleges for African Americans. These land grant schools account for approximately 75% of the Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) in the United States, institutions established before 1964 with the principal mission of educating African Americans. In 1994 the Tribal Land-Grant Colleges and Universities Program added over three dozen more land grant institutions.

The two Morrill Acts provided the incentive for a shift from the classical to a more applied curriculum and for greatly expanded state systems of higher education. The acts provided the financial stability land grant colleges needed and at the same time promoted state support (Williams, 2003). They also marked a major shift in the federal government's involvement in the provision of education. For the first time the federal government sought to influence the direction of curriculum, and for the first time it made a significant and direct financial contribution to the effort.

Higher Education for Women

Another group for whom opportunities for higher education expanded in the period after the Civil War was women. As previously noted, a number of women's seminaries and a few women's colleges had opened prior to the Civil War. Although most were not equal to the best men's colleges in terms of admission standards or degree requirements, they probably compared favorably with the majority of male institutions of the period that claimed collegiate status (Newcomer, 1959).

After the Civil War, women increasingly sought higher education.

Some, such as Mary Sharp College, which was founded in 1850 and required both Latin and Greek for graduation, were comparable to the finest men's colleges (Woody, 1929). Prior to the Civil War, Georgia Female College (1836), Oxford Female College (1852), Illinois Conference Female College (1854), Ingram University (1857), and Vassar College (1861) were among the women's colleges offering a 4-year course leading to an A.B. (artium baccalaureus, or Bachelor of Arts) degree (Newcomer, 1959). In addition, several formerly all-male institutions (such as Oberlin in 1833; Antioch in 1853; and the State University of Iowa in 1858) began admitting women prior to the Civil War.

Although the door to higher education for women was thus opening, it had not yet opened very wide. Prior to the Civil War only 3,000 women in the entire nation attended colleges or universities that offered A.B. degrees (Newcomer, 1959). After the war, however, women's higher education began to flourish, as several private women's colleges (for example, Wellesley, 1875; Smith, 1875; Radcliff, 1879; and Bryn Mawr, 1880) were established and offered programs comparable to those found in the men's colleges. In 1884 Mississippi chartered the first public-supported state women's college, Mississippi State College for Women. In addition, an increasing number of state universities began admitting women, albeit selectively.

Women had an increased presence in higher education for a number of reasons. The growth of public secondary education was no doubt a major factor. The Civil War itself was another, in that it brought a decline in male college enrollments that women were eager to fill. The opening of several professions to women also increased their interest in higher education. Although overall the numbers were small, more and more women were becoming physicians and ministers, and, to a lesser extent, lawyers. Yet another major factor contributing to the push was the women's rights movement. Many women turned the energies that they had been giving to the emancipation of slaves to securing equal political and economic rights for themselves and their sisters.

Whatever the combination of factors, and despite the prejudices against them, the number of women attending colleges and universities increased markedly after the Civil War. As depicted in Table 5.2, only 5 years after the war ended, more than one in five college students was female, and in 10 years this had increased to one in three. A majority of these were attending normal schools, as teaching remained the most accessible and socially acceptable profession for women.

Emergence of the Modern University

Some historians have called the period between the end of the Civil War and the beginning of the 20th century the Age of the University. During this period over 200 new colleges were established in the United States. Feeding this growth in higher education was the rapid growth in industry, technology, and commerce.

As the number of institutions of higher education grew, so did their roles. Many of the new institutions, as well as many of the older ones, bore the name university. However, it was difficult to tell an American college from a university. The first major step in creating institutional differences in patterns as well as practice was made by Johns Hopkins University. From its inception in 1876, Johns Hopkins had patterned itself after the German universities, placing heavy emphasis on graduate studies and research. In 1885 the University of Pennsylvania and Bryn Mawr followed Johns Hopkins's lead and also began admitting students to newly created graduate departments.

Following the lead of these innovators, other colleges and universities began to examine their programs. A number of more established private institutions (for example, Harvard, Columbia, and Yale) and the larger state institutions (such as Michigan, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin) began moving in the direction of establishing graduate programs and emphasizing research. In most of these institutions graduate study was open to women, a number of whom took advantage of the opportunity to study what had previously been possible only by "special arrangements" (Woody, 1929).

Another major curricular innovation in higher education was the introduction of the elective system championed by Harvard's president, Charles Eliot, which broke with the practice of dictating the courses to be taken in each year of college. While Eliot did not reject the proposition that the purpose of education was to train the faculties of the mind, he believed that any subject had the potential to foster mental discipline, not just the traditional subjects (Diener, 2008).

Eliot demanded that new subjects like history and political science be included in the group of studies deemed essential for a liberal education, and he removed the requirement that all freshmen study the classical languages (Diener, 2008). Although the elective concept met stiff resistance on some campuses, many leading colleges and universities adopted it. By the end of the 19th century, the American university had come to look much as we know it today, with an undergraduate college of liberal arts and sciences, a graduate college, and various professional colleges.

Founding of Junior Colleges

While some university presidents moved to add a graduate level, others attempted to become less involved in undergraduate education by introducing what eventually became the freestanding junior college. Some university presidents and deans viewed the first 2 years of higher education as more appropriate to secondary education and wanted to free their faculties from what they considered secondary education responsibilities so that they could devote themselves to research and graduate education.

Others, such as the University of Chicago's president, William Rainey Harper, felt that separating the first 2 years from the second would meet the needs of those who could not afford to attend for 4 years, as well as those who were not interested in research or were not academically qualified for it. In 1892, under Harper's leadership, the University of Chicago initiated a reorganization whereby the freshman and sophomore years were designated the "academic college" and the junior and senior years the "university college." Four years later they were renamed the junior and senior colleges, and students were awarded an associate in arts degree upon completion of the junior college (Butts & Cremin, 1953).

The first freestanding junior college, the Joliet (Illinois) Junior College, was established in 1901, and Harper was instrumental in its development. Although initially established to offer courses that would transfer to 4-year institutions, it soon began to offer terminal and vocational programs as well (Gutek, 1986). Other junior colleges, some of them former academies or small liberal arts colleges, opened in several other parts of the country. The junior college was a popular choice for women, who were still denied admission at many 4-year institutions.

A major impetus for the junior college movement came in California, which passed a law in 1907 permitting school boards to "prescribe a post graduate course of study for the graduates of such high school or other schools, which courses of study shall approximate the studies prescribed in the first two years of university courses." By the early 1920s the concept of the junior college was well established. During the late 1920s, encouraged by the Smith-Hughes Act, junior colleges developed more extensive vocational and technical education programs. By the end of the decade, over 400 junior colleges were in operation, enrolling more than 50,000 students.

5.4 Improved Teacher Training and Professionalism

Teacher training benefited from a strengthening of the curriculum and standards at the normal schools. Additionally, at the same time that the number of colleges and universities was increasing, and the role of the university evolving, many universities also established departments of pedagogy or teacher education. The entry of the universities into teacher training brought a movement to develop a science of education and a scientific approach to the learning process. The work of Johann Herbart was a major contribution to this movement.

Strengthening of the Normal School Curriculum and Standards

Between the end of the Civil War and 1900, the number of normal schools exploded from 50 to nearly 350. Unfortunately, in many of these institutions the academic background of both the faculty and students precluded them from teaching or studying at a collegiate level: High school completion was seldom required for admission, and the majority of instructors did not hold a college degree themselves (Diener, 2008). The majority of these institutions focused on the technical training of teachers rather than providing a broad liberal education.

However, as the new century advanced, improvements in the quality of faculties, students, and facilities were matched by an expansion of the curriculum. A burgeoning population had created an increased demand for elementary and common school teachers, while the secondary school movement created a concomitant demand for secondary teachers. Normal schools began to broaden their curricula to include the training of secondary school teachers, and they began to require high school completion for admission and college degrees for faculty.

During the second and third decades of the 20th century, normal schools, responding in part to competition from colleges and universities entering teacher training (described in the next section), expanded their programs from 2, to 3, and eventually to 4 years. By this time many of them were beginning to call themselves state teachers' colleges and offering B.A. degrees.

The passage of teacher certification statutes that specified the amount and type of training required of teachers contributed to this move, as did the requirement by accrediting agencies that secondary school teachers have bachelor's degrees. Between 1911 and 1930, there were 88 such conversions (Tyack, 1967). In time, with the broadening of the curriculum to embrace many of the liberal arts, the "teacher" designation was dropped and most became simply "state colleges." Some of these former normal schools have become among the largest and most respected universities in the United States.

Universities Enter Teacher Training

Paralleling the development and growth of teachers' colleges was the establishment of departments or chairs of pedagogy in colleges and universities. Teacher training at the college or university level, typically consisting of one or two courses in the "science and art" of teaching, had been offered at a limited number of institutions as early as the 1830s, and the universities had always been institutions for the education of those who taught in the Latin grammar schools, academies, and high schools. However, they did not prepare these students as teachers per se, but as individuals who had advanced knowledge of certain subject matter.

Universities did not become involved in teacher preparation to any significant extent until after the Civil War. Their involvement stemmed from the increased demand for secondary school teachers, the entrance of the normal schools into the training of secondary school teachers (to which the universities objected), and the growing recognition that the professionalization of teaching demanded study of its theory and practice.

The University of Iowa established the first permanent chair of pedagogy (education) in 1873. Other Midwestern universities followed, and in 1892 the New York College for the Training of Teachers became a part of Columbia University. By the turn of the century, teacher training departments had become commonplace in the major colleges and universities. By 1894–1895 there were more than 200 colleges offering teacher education courses, and 27 had organized departments or schools of pedagogy (Lagemann, 2000).

Herbartianism

An important outgrowth of the involvement of universities in teacher education was the movement to develop a science of education and the scientific investigation of educational problems. One of the earliest contributors to this movement was the German philosopher and educator, Johann Friedrich Herbart (1776–1841).

Herbart believed that the development of character was the primary goal of education, and that this could best be achieved by a scientific approach to the learning process that placed greater emphasis on the development of ideas and less on emotion and feeling.

Herbart proposed, much along the lines of current thinking in brain research, that learning takes place through the process of apperception, by which the child interprets new information in light of past experiences. By this process two or more ideas become related and will relate to future ideas or experiences. Thus, teaching must ensure the association of ideas by making sure the student understands how new material is related to previous material. Because instruction is most successful if it stimulates interest, the curriculum should be directed at arousing student enthusiasm. Such an approach, with its emphasis on the relationship of concepts and information, was designed to break down the isolation of disciplines found in the traditional curriculum.

Although Herbartianism was short-lived, its ideas and pedagogy had a profound influence on teaching methods and the curriculum, particularly at the elementary level, long after the movement itself faded (Kliebard, 2004). Herbart demonstrated not only the significance of methodology in instruction, but also, equally important, that education could become a science. The National Herbartian Society was founded in 1892 and 8 years later became the National Society of the Scientific Study of Education. Most books on teaching methods published between 1895 and World War I were pervaded by Herbartian ideas, and as late as the 1950s the Herbartian steps could be found in teacher education tests (Connell, 1980).

The Herbartians provided a well-articulated and methodical approach to education at a time when teachers and teacher education were seeking just such a systematic and comprehensive view (Connell, 1980). Before the end of the 19th century, teachers across the country began organizing lessons around the five steps. Although many of them may have done so rather mechanically, the process did force attention to methodology.

Teacher Certification

The growing public school system demanded not just more teachers but more qualified teachers trained in the most recent educational pedagogy and psychology. The traditional method of assessing teacher quality had been certification following a written examination and often an oral examination by a lay committee. However, the ability and objectivity of these panels was always suspect. In a Baptist area Congregationalist teachers might not be hired, and vice versa. In the South, prospective teachers might be hired only if they said that states' rights had caused the Civil War, and in the North only if they blamed slavery (Tyack, 1967). The written exams in most states, although free of bias, tested only what might be expected of a common school graduate and contained no questions on pedagogy.

This began to change by the mid-19th century, as state departments of education became involved in teacher certification. In 1843 New York authorized the state superintendent to set examinations and issue certificates that would be valid statewide. Indiana followed in 1852, Pennsylvania in 1854, and by the end of the century the superintendents of most other states were given the same authority (Angus, 2001). By 1921, 26 states issued all certificates, 7 states developed the regulations and examinations but the county issued the certificate, and 12 states developed regulations and questions but the county administered the examination and issued the certificate (Butts & Cremin, 1953).

At the same time that certification was being centralized at the state level, certification requirements were being upgraded. In 1900 no state required high school graduation for certification. In the first decade of the 20th century, this changed as a few states began to require high school graduation for an elementary school teaching certificate and in others the number of years of secondary school completion required for certification was increased to 2, 3, or 4.

By 1921, 4 states required high school graduation plus some professional training of their teachers, and 14 states required high school graduation but no professional training. Thirty states did not yet specify any academic requirement for certification (Butts & Cremin, 1953). Nonetheless, the trend toward increasing certification requirements had clearly begun. In the years to come, certification requirements would increasingly define who was qualified to teach and what knowledge teachers should possess.

5.6 New Directions in the Education of Native Americans and African Americans

While educational opportunities at all levels expanded for White Americans in the post–Civil War era, two minority racial groups, Native Americans and African Americans, were also finally gaining access to public schooling.

The education of Native Americans had historically been provided, with government support, by various religious groups. After the Civil War, the federal government came to play a more direct role by operating controversial boarding schools as well as a growing number of onreservation day schools through the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA). However, as documented in the 1928 Meriam Report, conducted for the government by independent investigators, the quality of these schools and the education they offered was inferior. Significant reform would not come for several decades.

For African Americans, the emancipation from slavery brought not only freedom from bonds but also the freedom to be educated. During the period of Reconstruction immediately after the Civil War, great strides were made in establishing schools for African Americans. However, the gains of Reconstruction were short-lived, and its end brought not only an end to these efforts, but also a reversal of many of the gains. By the end of the century, debate within the African American community centered on what kind of education African Americans should have and the best way to achieve social and civil rights. Meanwhile, the separate and unequal education system already in place would characterize American education for more than half a century.

Mission Schools

In the period between the Revolution and the Civil War, the policy of the federal government toward Native Americas was one of pushing them ever farther westward. The federal government negotiated treaties in which the tribes ceded land in exchange for money, promises of land ownership, and the provision of various protections and services, including education.

The primary way the federal government met its treaty obligations to provide education was through financial support of mission schools operated on the reservations by various religious groups. The objective of this education was to assimilate Native students into American society.

Most of the schools followed a program of studies known as the 50/50 curriculum: Half of the time was spent in the traditional common school academic subjects, as well as the religion of the sponsoring denomination, and the other half of the time in vocational and agricultural training for boys and domestic arts for girls. Native language and culture were excluded from the curriculum (Hale, 2002), and the use of Native language and cultural practices outside the curriculum was discouraged if not forbidden.

While European Americans attempted forced assimilation of Native Americans, most Native Americans resisted their efforts and sought to preserve their languages and cultures. They also sought to adapt their traditions to the demands and opportunities of the modern world.

For example, in 1821 a Cherokee named Sequoyah (1770–1843) completed an 85-character phonetic Cherokee alphabet, the first Native American script in North America, as well as the only known instance of one individual creating an entirely new system of writing (Wilford, 2009). Because each character represented a sound in the Cherokee language, it was easy for the Cherokees to master and to learn to read and write using it. By 1828 a printing press using the characters was turning out pamphlets, hymns, the Bible, and a newspaper.

Despite the efforts of the Cherokees and others, however, the federal government refused to recognize their right to coexist with Whites on the East Coast. The Indian Removal Act of 1830 resulted in the forced removal of the so-called Five Civilized Tribes (Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek, and Seminole) from the Southeast to the Indian Territory of present-day Oklahoma, and temporarily interrupted missionary efforts.

However, the missionaries soon resumed their work with increased federal aid and remained the primary providers of education to Native Americans into the 20th century (Coleman, 1993). In fact, it was not until 1917 that this arrangement, which in effect constituted government support of sectarian education, ended, and educational programs became institutionalized in the Bureau of Indian Affairs.

The mission school experience was not a positive one for most Native Americans or, for that matter, for their missionary teachers. The missionaries failed to recognize that most Native Americans were intensely religious and were invested in preserving their religions and cultures at all costs (DeJong, 1993). The federal government provided a little money but no standards. The net result of 100 years of effort and hundreds of thousands of dollars was thus "a small number of poorly attended mission schools, a suspicious and disillusioned Indian population, and a few hundred alumni who for the most part were considered outcasts by whites and Indians alike" (DeJong, 1993, p. 59).

After the Civil War a new assimilation approach to Native education became popular. This approach advocated the incorporation of Native Americans into the predominant White culture and, like the praying towns of colonial times, was based on the belief that the most lasting and efficient way this assimilation could take place was to remove children from their tribal setting and subject them, in a strict disciplinary setting, to an infusion of American language and customs.

Beginning with President Grant's "Peace Policy" of 1869, thousands of Native American children as young as 5 years of age were forced into federal or religious boarding schools away from their families. The "Peace Policy" was seen as a more economical solution to the "Indian Problem" than costly military campaigns against the tribes to gain control of their lands (Pember, 2007).

The first major boarding school was established in 1879 at Carlisle, Pennsylvania, by Captain Richard Henry Pratt, a veteran of the Indian Wars that had broken out on the western plains after the Civil War. His motto at the Carlisle school was "kill the Indian, save the man." The school was operated with military precision and harsh discipline. Students were given new names and forbidden to speak in their native tongue, and those caught breaking this rule faced harsh punishment. Students were required to wear uniforms and boys to keep their hair short and follow a strict regimen.

Manual labor performed by students was required to keep the schools self-supporting. The boarding schools provided only the rudiments of a common school education, along with basic vocational and industrial training, and in the crowded conditions and with inadequate medical care, disease and death were common. By the turn of the century, 25 off-reservation boarding schools had been established, enrolling 6,000 students annually, along with 81 on-reservation boarding schools with over 8,000 students in attendance (Coleman, 1993).

The boarding schools were subject to much criticism. The physical and living conditions were often unhealthy and substandard. Dropout rates were high. Students often returned to the reservation rather than enter White society and upon their return often found reentering life there difficult. They also found either that they were unable to apply the training they had received, or that it was irrelevant. In the end, then, the boarding schools failed to produce the assimilated and educated Native American that had been envisioned at their inception. As former commissioner of Indian affairs Francis Leupp wrote in 1910, "[T]he Indians did not fail in their quest for an education, but the educational system failed the Indians" (Dejong, 1993, p. 129).

By the 1920s, "responding to complaints that the schools were too expensive and encouraged dependency more than self-sufficiency," (Marr, 2008, p. 13), the federal government closed most of the off-reservation boarding schools.

Reservation Day Schools and Public Schools

In the last quarter of the 19th century, in part as a response to the criticisms of the boarding schools, and in part as a result of President Grant's efforts to institutionalize education programs under the BIA, government schooling expanded rapidly in the form of BIA-operated day schools on the reservations. The on-reservation day schools offered a couple of important advantages over the off-reservation boarding schools: They were less expensive to operate, and they were more acceptable to parents. As a consequence, the number of day schools increased from 150 in 1877 to 301 in 1900 (Coleman, 1993).

Also increasing in numbers were Native Americans attending public schools. Native Americans in the eastern United States who were not under the jurisdiction of the federal government had attended off-reservation public schools for years, but increasingly public schools were placed on the reservations. These schools were initially built to accommodate Whites who rented land on some reservations. But early in the 20th century, Native American children began to attend them, and by 1923 over half of the Native American children nationwide attended public schools either on or off the reservation (Marr, 2008).

But despite the progress made in providing access and the attempts by Congress to compel and coerce attendance, as late as the 1920s, large numbers of Native children did not attend school. Moreover, the goal of Native American education providers remained what it had been from colonial times: assimilation of the Native American into White culture and society. The education offered was typically low on academics and high on practical, vocational training. It was not until after the very critical 1928 Meriam Report (discussed in Chapter 7) that significant changes were initiated in Native American education.

Education of Free and Freed African Americans

As discussed earlier, during the colonial period and the early republic, various missionary and denominational groups provided limited and sporadic schooling to African Americans, both free and slave. However, by the third decade of the 19th century, the rise of militant abolitionism and the fear of slave revolts had led several Southern states to enact the so-called Slave Codes, which, among other things, prohibited the education of slaves.

In the North, although most states had abolished slavery, little public support was given to educating free African Americans, and most grew up without any formal education. Those who did attend more often than not found themselves in segregated schools. An important legal support for this segregation (and also for segregation for the remainder of the century) was provided by the Massachusetts Supreme Court decision in Roberts v. City of Boston (1850), which said that separate schools did not violate the rights of the African American child.

Despite these obstacles, some free African Americans did obtain an education. The outbreak of the Civil War in 1861 found about 4,000 African Americans in schools in the slave states and 23,000 in the free states (West, 1972). A few African Americans even obtained a higher education in England or Scotland or attended the limited number of American colleges that admitted African Americans, notably Oberlin in Ohio and Berea in Kentucky. Still others attended the three African Americans colleges (known today as Historically Black Colleges and Universities, or HBCU) established before 1860: Cheyney State College (1839) and Lincoln University (1854) in Pennsylvania and Wilberforce University (1856) in Ohio.

Many who gained a higher education prior to 1860 did so under the auspices of the American Colonization Society, which was established in 1817 to send free African Americans to the colony of Liberia in Africa, founded by the society in 1822. Their education was undertaken to provide the doctors, lawyers, teachers, clergy, and civil servants needed by the new colony. Although not all those educated by the society went to the colony, and some who went did not remain, enough did to provide the colony and the Republic of Liberia, which it became in 1847, with its leadership elite (Pifer, 1973).

Reconstruction

During the post–Civil War period known as Reconstruction (1865–1877), hundreds of teachers supported by various northern churches, missionary societies, and educational foundations moved to the South to educate newly liberated African Americans. The first of the educational foundations, established in 1867, was the Peabody Fund for the Advancement of Negro Education in the South. It later merged with the Slater Fund to support industrial education and teacher preparation. Among the other groups involved in the education of southern African Americans, the largest was the General Education Board set up by John D. Rockefeller in 1902 (Pifer, 1973; West, 1972).

Another major force in African American education in the South during Reconstruction was the Freedmen's Bureau, established by President Lincoln as part of the Department of War. Aided by various missionary and aid societies, the bureau established some 3,000 schools, and by 1869 some 114,000 students attended bureau schools.

These schools followed the New England common school model in terms of their curriculum (reading, writing, grammar, geography, arithmetic, and music) and moral outlook (the importance of certain values and the responsibility of citizenship), but added a new dimension—industrial training. Consistent with the rationale for the education of immigrants and Native Americans, vocational and industrial training was considered the best education to prepare African Americans for the occupations they were most suited to perform (Gutek, 1986).

Other providers of education for former slaves were freed people themselves. Some former slaves had gained literacy before the war or while serving in the military. Once the war was over and the Slave Codes nullified, they taught other freed people. And, despite limited financial resources, the freed people often purchased or rented land on which to locate facilities, contributed the materials and sweat equity to build schoolhouses, and sacrificed so that their children might attend classes during the day, while the adults often made time after work to attend night school. (Krowl, 2011, p. 2)

This "grass roots movement" was an important force in moving Southern states to a system of universal schooling in the immediate post–Civil War period (Anderson, 1988).

Segregation of the Public Schools

Another factor changing the face of education in the South during Reconstruction was legislation leading to the establishment of tax-supported public school systems. Many freedmen recently elected to state legislatures were a force in this movement. Many of these African American legislators, as well as some their White colleagues, advocated integration in the newly established schools. In fact, many of the state statutes or constitutional provisions established the schools without making reference to either integration or segregation.

However, none of the Southern states actually instituted an integrated system, and what began as the custom of racial segregation became law in all the Southern states. Still, the efforts of the various groups and agencies did result in a dramatic reversal of the educational status of African Americans, who moved from a literacy rate estimated at 5%–10% at the outbreak of the Civil War to one of 70% by 1910.

As impressive as these figures are, they hide the poor condition of African American (and White) education in the South. While the rest of the country became increasingly urbanized, the South remained predominantly poor and rural well into the 20th century. As described by the historian Patricia Graham (2005), in the South,

public funds were scarce, and needs were great, thus reducing the amount available for public education. Schools floundered in rural areas where the population concentrations were small, where publicly subsidized transportation was not available, and where the jobs were predominantly agricultural and did not seem to require much formal study. Furthermore, white immigration to the South was very low, thereby eliminating one stimulus to schooling, preparing non-English speakers for citizenship. Finally, and most importantly, when schooling was seen as primarily serving the needs of the society to prepare citizens, few whites wished to spend much of their limited funds on schooling for their black neighbors, who, despite the post–Civil War amendments to the Constitution, still did not enjoy full rights as citizens. (pp. 19–20)

After the 1870s the federal government effectively withdrew from the promotion of the civil and educational rights of African Americans, and the education of African Americans quickly deteriorated. Following Reconstruction the pay of African American teachers in the South fell to less than half that of White teachers, as did expenditures for African American schools.

These differences translated into shorter school terms, inadequate textbooks and materials, and dilapidated facilities (Anderson, 1988). The Primary Source Readings at the end of this chapter describes one such school in rural Tennessee taught by W. E. B. DuBois. Perhaps not surprisingly, in 1900 the enrollment rate for African American school-age children was 31%, compared to 54% for Whites, and the illiteracy rate for African Americans was over 40%, compared to 6% for Whites (Snyder, 1993).

By 1900 White southerners had regained control of their legal and political systems. With the passage of laws mandating separation of the races, known as Jim Crow laws, and the 1896 Supreme Court decision in Plessy v. Ferguson, which, in saying that separate railroad cars did not violate the Constitution, established the "separate but equal" legal doctrine, a system of racial segregation was established in the South that remained in effect until the desegregation movement of the 1950s and 1960s.

In the period after Reconstruction, ever-increasing numbers of White children from lower socioeconomic families entered the public school system; between 1880 and 1895, White enrollment in the public schools increased 106%, compared to 59% for African American enrollment (Frazier, cited in Hare & Swift, 1976). The "rise of the poor Whites" placed increased financial demands on public revenues and often resulted in funds being diverted from African American schools to improve White ones (Gutek, 1986).

To this was added the disenfranchisement of African Americans by many Southern states and the delegation of authority to local school boards to divide state education funds as they saw fit. The disproportionate distribution of funds was justified, according to the state superintendent of Alabama, because most "colored" children are "only capable of receiving and profiting by an elementary education which costs comparably much less than that suitable for the white race in its more advanced stages of civilization" (Graham, 2005, p. 21).

From the court approval of segregation, African Americans' loss of political power, and decreased financial support for African American education emerged the "separate and inferior" system that marked so much of the South until the Supreme Court reversal of Plessy v. Ferguson in 1954 and the subsequent civil rights movement (discussed in Chapter 8).

The Higher Education Debate: Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. DuBois

One of the first and most important institutions of higher education for African Americans in the immediate post–Civil War period was the Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute, founded in 1868 by General Samuel Chapman Armstrong, a representative of the Freedmen's Bureau who had commanded an African American brigade during the Civil War. The Hampton Institute, which featured industrial education as its basic mission, was founded for the education of African Americans, but beginning in 1878 it also admitted Native Americans.

Booker T. Washington (1856–1915) was one of the hundreds of young African Americans who flocked to Hampton and the few other normal schools or colleges that would admit them. At Hampton, Washington developed the ideas about education that led to his establishment of the famous Tuskegee Institute in Alabama in 1881. At this school for African Americans, Washington emphasized the dignity of labor and, rather than an academic education, advocated a practical education that would provide African Americans marketable skills that would allow them to be self-sufficient.

Washington and the "Tuskegee Doctrine" were much favored by philanthropic foundations and politicians. Washington's "Atlanta Compromise" address at the Cotton States Exposition in 1895 assured his audience that African Americans did not seek social and political equality, but only to earn economic independence and the respect of Whites by taking their places as industrious laborers and skilled tradesmen. Washington (1900/1976) declared:

Our greatest danger is that in the great leap from slavery to freedom we may overlook the fact that the masses of us are to live by the productions of our hands, and fail to keep in mind that we shall prosper in proportion as we learn to dignify and glorify common labour and put brains and skill into the common occupations of life. . . . No race can prosper till it learns that there is as much dignity in tilling a field as in writing a poem. (p. 343)

Washington believed that when African Americans had shown their loyalty, established themselves as valued workers, been successful in their trades or businesses, and owned property, they would deserve and be given their civil and political rights. Man may discriminate, he said, but the laws of commerce and trade do not.

Others, such as W. E. B. DuBois (1868–1963) the first African American to earn a Ph.D. from Harvard, disagreed with Washington and with what they considered a position of accommodation or compromise. They argued that giving African Americans only one educational direction (industrial) and Whites several undermined the achievement of civil and political equality. DuBois criticized what he called Washington's "gospel of work and money" as depriving the "Talented Tenth" of the African American population of the education they needed to become the leaders of their race. This group, he believed, should receive the classical education provided to prospective leaders of White society (DuBois, 1903).

DuBois understood that not all African Americans would go to college or enter the professions, but he believed that a liberal arts education in elementary, secondary, college, and vocational schools was nonetheless necessary to prepare them to participate in or become enlightened leaders of African American racial progress and American civilization as a whole (Alridge, 2007). "The purpose of education, DuBois stated, is 'not to make men carpenters, but to make carpenters men'" (Alridge, 2007, p. 437).

DuBois encouraged political activism and in 1909 joined a multiracial group of social activists in founding the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Whereas Washington was criticized for being too politically accommodating, DuBois was criticized for being too confrontational: Whereas Washington avoided the issue of racism and even forbade his faculty and students from talking about it, DuBois chronicled the racist practices and abuses in the United States in his many publications.

Whether Washington's accommodationist approach or DuBois' militant one hindered the civil rights movement, or whether any other approach would have done any better is open to conjecture. What is known is that by the time Washington began his work at Tuskegee, not only had Reconstruction ended, but also a backlash against African Americans in the South had begun. The education he advanced was perhaps the only one that would have been permitted and supported in the openly racist political and social climate that pervaded the South at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century (Tozer, Violas, & Senese, 2002).

Booker T. Washington

Booker T. Washington was born as a slave on a plantation in Virginia in 1856. His mother was a cook on the plantation and his father an unidentified White man. Even at an early age he was expected to do manual labor. After the Civil War and emancipation, his family moved to Malden, West Virginia, where he went to work with his stepfather (whose first name he took as his last) in the local salt furnaces and coal mines. He later got a job as a houseboy for the wife of an owner of a coal mine who allowed him to attend school for a couple of hours a day during the winter.

Determined to obtain an education, in 1872, at age 16, Washington walked much of the 500 miles to the Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute in Hampton, Virginia, taking odd jobs along the way. At Hampton, Washington worked to support his education while excelling at his studies. He soon became a mentee of General Samuel C. Armstrong, the school's founder and headmaster.

Following his graduation from Hampton in 1875, Washington returned to Malden and taught school. In 1878 he enrolled in the Wayland Seminary in Washington, DC, but did not complete the program. In 1879 General Armstrong offered him a job teaching at Hampton, where he also served as the housefather for Native American students. Two years later Armstrong was asked to recommend a White man to become the founding principal of a school for "colored teachers" in Alabama. Without hesitation Armstrong recommended Washington.

In 1881 Washington traveled to Tuskegee, Alabama, and on July 4, 1881, he began, in an old dilapidated church with 30 students, what became the Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute. He soon began traveling around the country to solicit funds and promote the school, giving assurances to prospective donors that nothing in the Tuskegee program challenged White supremacy or represented any economic competition with Whites. A year after opening Tuskegee, Washington bought a nearby former plantation that became the institute's permanent location. Tuskegee students and faculty then built all the buildings.

The program at Tuskegee reflected Washington's philosophy on the most realistic social, political, and economic roles of African Americans in post–Civil War America. He believed that the best way for African Americans to gain equal rights was to demonstrate "industry, thrift, intelligence, and prosperity." The program at Tuskegee became a model for industrial education. In addition to their academic studies, students were trained in industrial and agricultural professions and trades, not just so they could learn a living upon leaving Tuskegee, but also so they could teach these skills in African American schools throughout the South. Students practiced teaching at an elementary school on the campus operated for the children of faculty and townspeople.

In 1895 Washington came to national attention with a speech at the Cotton States and International Exposition in Atlanta that came to be known as the "Atlanta Compromise." In the speech, Washington accepted racial subordination, segregation, and disfranchisement as long as African Americans were afforded educational opportunity, equal opportunity for economic entrepreneurship, and legal justice. He emphasized economic self-help and "pulling oneself up by the bootstraps."

Washington believed that when African Americans proved themselves economically, civil rights would naturally follow (National Park Service, 2013). He initially enjoyed widespread African American support, but Washington was later criticized by more militant African American leaders, including W. E. B. DuBois, for his accommodationist position. However, at the same time he was being criticized, Washington secretly supported court cases challenging segregation.

In addition to his work at Tuskegee, Washington was active in gaining financial support for African American public schools throughout the South, as well as a number of institutions of higher education that trained teachers. Washington worked with Julius Rosenwald, president of Sears, Roebuck, and Company, to establish the Rosenwald Fund. Working with model designs created by Tuskegee faculty, over the next 2 decades the fund built almost 5,000 community schools in rural areas throughout the South.

Between 1895 and 1915, Washington was the most influential African American in the United States (National Park Service, 2013). In 1901 he became the first African American to be invited to the White House. He was also the first African American to be depicted on a stamp and on a U.S. coin. He was awarded honorary degrees from numerous universities, including Harvard and Dartmouth.

Washington remained the head of the Tuskegee Institute until his death at Tuskegee in 1915 at the age of 59. His legacy is an unfailing belief in the power of education

that education could provide many poor African Americans with the opportunity for advancement and racial equality. For those who didn't have the money or educational background to attend college, he offered an important alternative to the more elite liberal arts degree. He contributed to the vital tradition of higher learning in this country and the democratic belief that a college education should be available to all, despite their race or class. Perhaps his most lasting legacy is his vision of education as the key to true individual freedom and achievement. (National Park Service, 2013, p. 1)

Today, Tuskegee University is one the most respected institutions of higher education in the South, offering the bachelors, masters, and doctoral degrees. From 30 students in an old church, it has grown to a campus of over 3,000 students and 70 buildings on over 5,000 acres.

Educationally, Washington's efforts were successful: Tuskegee was transformed from a couple of dilapidated buildings to a thriving institution. Ten years after its founding, the school had a faculty of 88 and a student body of 1,200, making it one of the largest institutions of higher education in the South.

The traditional attention given to Tuskegee and Hampton as agricultural and industrial schools has obscured the fact that they were founded and maintained primarily to train African American teachers for the South. Indeed, between 1872 and 1890, 604 of Hampton's 723 graduates became teachers (Anderson, 1988). Many of them, along with Tuskegee's alumni, were instrumental not only in establishing and teaching in the public schools, but also in establishing normal schools in rural areas throughout the South.

In addition to Hampton and Tuskegee, a number of other African American colleges and universities, 25 in all, emerged in the immediate post–Civil War years, many with the support of the Freedmen's Bureau and various missionary societies. These include Atlanta University, founded in 1865 by the American Baptist Mission Society; Howard University, chartered in 1868 by the Congregationalists; Fisk University, established in 1866 by the American Missionary Association; and Mehary Medical College, originally Walton College, founded in 1865 by the Methodist Episcopal Church. Somewhat later, as a result of the Second Morrill Act of 1890, African American land grant colleges were established in each of the Southern states.

CHAPTER 6

6.1 National Growth and Reform

The 20th century brought marked changes to American social, economic, political, and educational life. Population growth continued at a staggering rate: from 76 million in 1900 to 106 million in 1920 and 123 million in 1930. Although birthrates declined, improvements in medicine and sanitation led to lower infant mortality, a lower overall death rate, and a longer life expectancy for all segments of the population. By World War I most infectious diseases had been brought under control, and medical education was greatly improved (Bonner, 1963).

Meanwhile, the nation's economic output grew even more rapidly than its population, as it solidified its place as the largest industrial power in the world. Corruption and abuses accompanied growth, however, leading ultimately to a broad-based national reform movement known as progressivism.

Immigration and Population

As in the last decades of the 19th century, a significant portion of the nation's population growth was the result of immigration. In the first 2 decades of the 20th century, the average number of immigrants doubled from the previous 2 decades, from an average of 450,000 immigrants per year to an average of almost 800,000 per year (see Table 6.1). Continuing the trend that had begun in the last century, the majority of these were "new" immigrants from southern and eastern Europe—Italy, Poland, Russia, Austria-Hungary—and were primarily Catholic or Jewish. Many were peasants or refugees from the ghettos of Poland or Russia.

Concerns that the new immigrants were of an undesirable "racial stock" and tended to be illiterate, criminal, and "ill-fitted to the demands of a Teutonic civilization" led to demands in the popular media that immigration be restricted (Ravitch, 2001, p. 65). Additionally, the sheer numbers of the children of these immigrants, as well as the fact that many spoke a language other than English or were undereducated, presented a variety of challenges to the schools.

At the same time that the population was experiencing rapid growth, it was also becoming increasingly urban. The population of the nation's cities rose 39% between 1900 and 1910 and, in 1920, for the first time, the number of those living in towns of at least 2,500 (54.3 million) exceeded the number of those living in rural areas (51.8 million) (see Figure 6.1). As a result, towns and cities grew. Much of the urban growth came from the new immigrants. Additionally, between 1910 and 1930, over a million African Americans left the rural South for the urban North in hopes of greater employment opportunities, to escape racial violence and segregation, and in search of better schools and better housing.

The new immigrants tended to congregate in crowded, segregated neighborhoods. Living conditions in the slums and tenements of these ethnic neighborhoods in many major American cities equaled or exceeded the squalor, poverty, and unsanitary conditions of the European slums the immigrants had left behind. The increased urbanization also resulted in concentrations of children who needed schooling, and growing numbers of children swelled already overcrowded urban schools.

Source: U.S. Department of the Census. (2004). Retrieved August 8, 2013 from http://www.census.gov/population/censusdata/table-4.pdf

American territory also expanded in these decades. In the last years of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th, the United States acquired Guam, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, the Hawaiian Islands, the Virgin Islands, and the Panama Canal Zone. The nation also engaged in a war with Spain; landed troops in Mexico, Nicaragua, and Haiti; helped put down a revolt in China; and, in 1917, entered World War I and the fight, as President Woodrow Wilson characterized it, "to make the world safe for democracy."

Politics and Economic Growth: The Bright and Dark Sides

The economic growth of the United States during this period was even more profound. Whereas the population increased less than fourfold in the post–Civil War to pre–World War I period, production increased tenfold (Gray & Peterson, 1974). Americans also witnessed rapid growth in railroads and other transportation and communication industries. The expansion of the railroads helped bring an end to the frontier, which by 1890 was declared officially closed by the Bureau of Census (that is, they could not draw a line of demarcation beyond which the population was less than two persons per square mile).

Railroads now linked all parts of the nation, as did an ever-expanding network of telegraph and, later, telephone lines. At the same time, a transatlantic cable allowed instant communication with Europe and global shipping linked the nation with others. The expansion in the transportation industry opened up new markets for the growing agricultural and industrial sectors, and by 1920 the United States had become the largest manufacturing nation in the world.

This period of stellar economic growth was accompanied by abuses in industry and politics. Business leaders who contributed to the abuses have often been referred to as "robber barons" for placing greed and their personal and business fortunes ahead of the welfare of their workers and those who consumed their products.

Investigative journalists, often called "muckrakers," filled the tabloids with descriptions of the plight of workers, including children, in factories; unsafe and unsanitary working conditions; and the horrors of industrial accidents. At the beginning of the 20th century, one million injuries and 25,000–30,000 deaths per year occurred in industrial jobs (Hanson, n.d.). Other journalists (for example, Upton Sinclair in his novel The Jungle), exposed the filth and disease of the meat packing industry and life in the poverty-ridden slums.

Excesses in industry were facilitated by corruption in politics, and disregard for the welfare of workers and consumers was matched by disregard for the welfare of taxpayers. Corruption was evident at all levels of government, including the local school district. School boards and school systems were exposed as cesspools of patronage and corruption: Politically appointed school board members put unqualified friends and relatives into teaching and administrative positions and took bribes to award construction contracts or to purchase textbooks and supplies. Politicians not only stole from the public trust, but they also sold the public trust.

6.2 Changes in Education

Significant changes in the educational arena accompanied those in the social, economic, and political ones. The increased urbanization of the population and the popularity of the automobile made possible the building of larger schools and contributed to the consolidation of many rural school districts. The number of school districts in the United States decreased gradually from over 130,000 at the turn of the century to approximately 119,000 in 1937 and 40,000 by 1960 (Snyder, 1993).

However, the differences between urban and rural districts remained. Students in rural schools (67% of all students in 1910) attended school for fewer weeks than urban students and received only 57% of the per pupil expenditure ($26.13 versus $45.74) (Cuban, 1984).

Instruction at the turn of the 20th century remained very teacher centered. Likewise, the curriculum was very subject centered and, consistent with the recommendations of the Committee of Ten, geared toward college preparation. Cuban (1984) describes it as follows:

Generally, classes were taught as a group. Teacher talk dominated verbal expression during class time. Student movement during instruction occurred only with the teacher's permission. Classroom activities clustered around teacher questions and explanations, student recitation, and the class working on textbook assignments. Except for laboratory work done in science classrooms, uniformity in behavior was sought and reflected in classroom after classroom with rows of bolted-down desks facing the blackboard and the teacher's desk. (p. 30)

As the nation entered the new century, the school population increased more rapidly than the overall population, more than doubling between 1890 and 1930. Moreover, students stayed in school longer, and high school enrollment rose dramatically, from 519,000 in 1900 to 4.4 million in 1930.

To accommodate this growth, new schools opened at the rate of one per day (Cuban, 1984). The growth in the student population and school facilities was accompanied by almost a doubling in the number of teachers and other nonsupervisory personnel between 1900 and 1930 (see Table 5.1). During the same period the average length of the school term increased by 27 days. More teachers and longer terms translated into a tenfold increase in expenditures between 1900 and 1930 (see Table 6.2).

Table 6.2: Revenue and expenditures, 1889–1890 to 1929–1930 (in unadjusted dollars)

School year ending 1890 1900 1910 1920 1930

Total revenues, in millions 143 220 433 970 2,089

Federal government – – – 2 7

State government 26 38 65 160 354

Local sources 97 149 312 808 1,728

Total expenditures, in millions 141 215 426 1,036 2,317

Expenditures per pupil in average daily attendance 17 20 33 64 108

Source: U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics. (1993). 120 years of American education: A statistical portrait. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office.

A significant portion of the increase in school enrollment, especially in the larger cities, came from the new immigrants and their children. As had been true for generations before them, these immigrants saw education as the best route to improve their lives in their new homeland. "So powerful was the lure of education that on the day after a steamship arrived, as many as 125 children would apply to one New York school" (Bernard & Mondale, 2001c, p. 73).

Urban schools, already overcrowded and often in disrepair, faced the task of teaching these children, many of whom lived in conditions of abject poverty. Overcrowding meant that many children could only attend school part time.

As discussed in the previous chapter, the response of some education reformers to the burgeoning immigrant enrollment was to push to expand the industrial and vocational offerings of the public schools. Many school districts introduced multiple vocational tracks to prepare "hand-minded" immigrant children to become industrial and commercial workers, domestic workers, or housewives (Ravitch, 2001c).

Many others saw the school as the means to Americanize the immigrant. Schools added classes in civics and American history, and, as the nation moved toward war, many schools adopted an English-only curriculum. After the Allied victory in 1918, the movement accelerated, and soon 35 states mandated that instruction be in English only. American heroes and anthems were emphasized, the Bible was read, the Lord's Prayer was recited, and Christian holidays were celebrated, even in cities such as New York where a large part of the student population was Jewish (Bernard & Mondale, 2001).

6.3 Progressive Reformers

The response to the era's negative business and political practices was a reform movement that came to be known as the progressive movement. Progressives, largely urban, middle class, and college educated, decried the excesses of big business and political corruption. They urged the government to become a tool for change, and to protect consumers against unfair monopolistic practices, workers (particularly women and children) against exploitation, and the less fortunate against any form of social injustice.

Through labor legislation they sought to regulate the labor of women, limit child labor and bar children from hazardous occupations, regulate wages and hours, and improve health and safety conditions in factories. On the local, state, and national levels, progressives sought to wrest control of government from the business community and use it to bring about social change. They also sought to limit big business through the passage of antitrust legislation that controlled monopolies and their unfair business practices.

In addressing the excesses in government and politics, the progressives effected political reform through the adoption of an initiative system that allowed citizens to initiate laws themselves, a referendum to review actions of the legislature, and a recall that allowed for the removal of ineffective or corrupt elected officials. Other reforms bringing increased democracy came with the passage of the 17th Amendment, which provided for the direct election of senators by voters rather than their election by the state legislatures, and the 19th Amendment, which gave women the right to vote.

Some progressive reformers founded settlement houses in poor neighborhoods, such as Jane Addams' Hull House in Chicago, where they lived among those they sought to help. Settlement workers joined other social reformers in crusades to improve the conditions in urban slums.

The majority of those affected by the deleterious conditions in the unsanitary, filthy, and overcrowded tenements were immigrants and their children. In addition to attempting to improve these immigrants' working and living conditions, social reformers sought to provide them with language training, vocational skills, and citizenship training. Many of the educational progressives, including John Dewey, aligned themselves with and contributed to the work of these social reformers.

Laborers also sought to improve their plight through labor unions and strikes. Increased union activity met with harsh resistance and persecution from industrial corporations and government; violence and loss of life were not uncommon. Yet by 1920 one fifth of all nonagricultural workers in the nation were organized; in view of employer hostility, this was a considerable achievement (Kirkland, 1969).

6.4 Progressivism in Education

The progressive reform movement, which had such a widespread impact on political, social, and economic life, also found expression in education. The word expression has been carefully chosen because defining exactly what should be considered part of the progressive education movement has been the subject of some debate.

Some historians have viewed the progressive education movement as the educational phase of the larger progressive movement that swept American political and social life (Cremin, 1959). Others have challenged this analysis for failing to include those social and political reformers who envisioned a corporate society that replaced individualism with a socialized and cooperative man with an occupational specialization—a vision that led them to advocate training for both social cooperation and specialized skills (Spring, 1970).

Still others have taken the position of this text: namely, that in its first stage, before World War I, progressive education was an expression of the same middle-class drive that gave form and energy to the progressive movement, but that in the years following the war, progressive education reflected a very different set of social values and took a very different direction, no longer directing its attention to schools serving the urban poor but to private or suburban schools serving the middle and upper classes.

In the prewar period, paralleling the call of the social and political reformers, education reformers, particularly those in the cities, called for making the schools more sanitary, more open to air and sunlight, and more conducive to creative activity. They also called for lowering pupil–teacher ratios and for adding the provision of basic health care and food services to the responsibilities of the school. In some areas schools were kept open in the evening to provide classes for adults, primarily immigrants, or evening study hours for children living in crowded tenement houses. In other areas attempts were made to have the schools serve as community centers.

The impact of progressivism in education was most evident in the areas of administration and pedagogy. Progressivism in administration was manifest in the efficiency movement, or what Callahan (1962) dubbed the cult of efficiency. In pedagogy, progressivism was evidenced in a variety of efforts to make the child the center of the educational process and to use scientific research to improve educational practice.

Administrative Progressivism: The Efficiency Movement

The efficiency movement, which played a central role in the progressive era in the United States, addressed the perceived waste and inefficiency in all areas of the economy, government, and society. The movement embraced scientific management, which grew out of the work of Frederick W. Taylor, an engineer at Bethlehem Steel, and was aimed at increasing production at lower cost while at the same time instilling order, standardization, and discipline.

Scientific management as a technique involved a scientific analysis of the task to be performed, a detailing of the timing of the actions and materials used in performing the task, and a determination of the order of the quickest and best steps to accomplish the task while eliminating any unnecessary steps. In education, reformers associated with the movement applied the principles of scientific management to the operation of the schools.

Many of the leaders of the progressive movement, as well as many members of boards of education, were also members of the business community. At a time when the schools received criticism for ineffectiveness and inefficiency, these individuals increasingly urged that the principles and practices of business be applied to their operation. Beginning in the second decade of the century, school boards and superintendents stepped up their efforts to apply the "science" of management to the educational enterprise and adopted the language and ideology of corporate America.

The influence of the efficiency movement was evidenced by the attention given to job analysis and specialization, supervision, standardization of tasks, teacher evaluation, accountability, cost accounting, and the introduction of incentive pay plans. Another very visible manifestation was the reduction in the size of school boards, which in the bigger cities were often very large. At one time the Philadelphia School Board had 42 members and New York City's had 46. In some cases the size of the board reflected the political division of the city into wards, each one demanding a representative on the board. In many cases board members were politically appointed, not elected.

Administrative progressives, as these reformers have been called, believed that reducing the size of the boards would increase their efficiency, and that moving to nonpartisan elections would reduce the influence of patronage and bribery. At the same time that school boards were becoming smaller, their membership moved from domination by upper-class and professional men to increased representation from the middle and upper middle classes.

Reformers were also convinced that schools would be more efficient if decisions were made or informed by experts. This led to the vesting of greater decision-making power in the most widely acknowledged expert, the superintendent, as well as to the introduction of a more hierarchical and bureaucratic educational structure. It also led to the establishment of efficiency departments patterned after Taylor's "planning departments" and staffed by so-called educational efficiency experts. These departments and experts conducted surveys appraising every aspect of the school operation and making recommendations for improvement.

The administrative progressives in education were the first generation of professional educators trained in graduate schools of education (Tyack & Cuban, 1995). They took on roles like urban superintendents, professors of education, state and federal officials, and leaders of the professional education organizations. By 1930, through the efforts of administrative progressives within and outside of education, most school boards had been transformed into smaller, more businesslike operations divorced from partisan politics (Cuban, 2001). The administrative progressives were also instrumental in increasing state funding and certification requirements for teachers and in bringing greater standardization to textbooks and the curriculum.

Social Efficiency

The desire to maximize the efficient operation of the schools also contributed to the social efficiency movement mentioned in Chapter 5. According to the educators involved in this movement, schools would be more efficient if they did not "waste" specific instruction on students who would never need or use it. Accordingly, they believed that the "efficient" curriculum should be differentiated into an array of academic and vocational tracks, and students should be tracked into the particular curriculum that would contribute most directly to their vocational or educational goals.

The social efficiency movement, in its belief that assessment could provide a scientific basis for the placement of students, was clearly influenced by the mental measurement movement and Thorndike's work in human intelligence, both of which are discussed later in this chapter.

According to Kliebard (2004), no one epitomized the efficiency-minded curriculum planners more than John Franklin Bobbitt (1876–1956). Bobbitt developed an approach to curriculum development adapted from Taylor's concepts of job and task analysis and based on the belief that the curriculum should be developed on the basis of an analysis of adult vocational, occupational, social, and political roles. In his 1912 article, "The Elimination of Waste in Education," Bobbitt used the factory metaphor to articulate how such a curriculum could be used for the production of "the finished product for which it is best adapted" (p. 269)—that is, the provision of an education based on the predicted social and vocational role of the child.

Bobbitt was very impressed with the school system established by Superintendent William Wirt in Gary, Indiana, a city that had basically been founded by the U.S. Steel Corporation in 1906. Wirt studied with John Dewey (discussed in the next section) at the University of Chicago, and the system he established in Gary reflected Dewey's concern for the interdependence between the school and the community. The Gary plan involved the integration of industrial education into the regular curriculum at both the elementary and secondary levels. Workshops were distributed throughout the schools, allowing younger children to observe and, in keeping with Dewey's "learning by doing" philosophy, be assisted by older students, who would in turn learn by serving as their instructors (Volk, 2005).

The Gary plan, also known as the platoon or work-study-play plan, involved organizing the student body into two platoons. While one platoon was involved in academic subjects in the morning, the second platoon was involved in physical activities, manual or vocational training, or the arts or music pursuits. In the afternoon the pattern was reversed. Such a program was intended to maximize the intellectual, social, cultural, and physical abilities of the child. The Gary plan also aimed at making the most efficient use of school facilities, leading Wirt to open the schools at night, on weekends, and during the summers.

By 1929 the platoon system had been adopted by over 200 school districts. However, it had also become the subject of considerable controversy. Many of the efficiency reformers' contemporaries, as well as many parents, objected to the presumption of predicting children's future roles. Others saw the platoon system and similar efforts as nothing more than attempts at social control and ways to ensure industry a supply of trained workers.

In New York City the plan was abandoned after protest both from immigrant and workingclass parents concerned that their children were being overwhelmingly tracked into the vocational curricula. Trade unions also protested the plan, saying it was designed to stifle social mobility and to train "wage slaves for American capitalism" (Cohen & Mohl, cited in Volk, 2005, p. 42).

Pedagogical Progressivism

Pedagogical progressives traced their intellectual roots to Froebel and Pestalozzi. The emphasis those thinkers placed on educating the whole child and on the importance of the needs and interests of the child were clearly reflected in this strain of progressive reform, as was their advocacy for an activity curriculum.

Also reflected in pedagogical progressivism was the child study movement, which began with the pioneering work of G. Stanley Hall (1849–1924). Hall received a doctorate in psychology from Harvard in 1878, the first in the United States. He later became the first professor of psychology and pedagogy at Johns Hopkins University, where he established a center for applied psychology in 1884, the year Dewey graduated from the same institution. In an 1883 article, "Educational Needs," Hall advanced what became the formative principle for child study: "[W]e must study and follow the child's nature as it naturally is" (Goodchild, 2012, p. 75).

Black and white photograph of G. Stanley Hall.

©Bettmann/Corbis

Hall believed that understanding the natural development of children was the key to developing curriculum to meet their needs.

Child study, practiced through the observation of children at school or at play, was considered a scientific approach to determining individual differences among children upon which curricular decisions could be made. Hall recognized that emotional growth and personality development were just as important as cognitive and physical development in understanding the child and the educational process. Influenced by Charles Darwin's theory of evolution, Hall advanced the recapitulation theory of child development, which saw the child as an evolving organism who developed through a series of recognizable and successively related stages that paralleled the development or evolution of civilization.

Hall believed that once educators understood how the child developed, they would be better able to foster that development by tailoring learning activities appropriate to the child's age, sex, ability, and vocational expectations (Hall, 1904). In effect, Hall advocated individualized instruction. These early efforts at child study were important in laying the foundations for educational psychology and developmental psychology. Hall's focus on the nature of the child and its role in advancing learning became one of the major conceptual streams in the early science of American education that developed into the progressive education movement (Goodchild, 2012).

Pedagogical progressivism thus had many influences, but it can be directly traced to Francis W. Parker, superintendent of schools in Quincy and Boston, Massachusetts. Parker had a major influence on John Dewey, who became the leading spokesperson for the progressive education movement, and Ella Flagg Young, superintendent of schools of Chicago. Dewey's philosophy of pragmatism, in turn, influenced William H. Kilpatrick in his attempt to make education both child centered and practical.

Francis W. Parker

Francis W. Parker (1837–1902) studied in Europe, where he became familiar with the work of Pestalozzi and Froebel. In addition to adopting their child-centered and activity-based approach to curriculum, he shared their belief in the importance of loving and respecting the child. In all things, Parker's aim was to make the child the center of the educational process.

Parker left the superintendency in Boston in 1880 to become principal of the Cook County Normal School in Chicago. There he was able not only to influence the training of teachers but also to test his ideas at the associated practice (lab) school. Parker considered the school environment to be the most important part of the progressive movement (Schmitt, 2010), and he organized the lab school as a model democratic community.

Social activities formed an integral part of the curriculum, as did nature studies, field trips, and art. Rather than deal with multiple, discrete subject matter, the curriculum integrated subjects in ways that made them more meaningful to the learner. For example, reading was taught in conjunction with history and literature, while mathematics was taught in relationship with other activities. The concept of integration became one of the tenets of progressive education.

Flora Cooke (1938–2005), a colleague of Parker's and the first principal of the Francis W. Parker school in Chicago, identified the five central concepts of Parker's philosophy of education: (1) a passionate belief in democracy; (2) all machinery in the school must be directed at building character; (3) the common school is the only effective instrument for education in a democracy; (4) education should be concerned with the cultivation of altruistic and social rather than selfish motives, and (5) every effort must be made to meet the individual needs of the child and to condition each child for his best growth and contribution.

Parker's educational ideas were spread through his many publications and speeches. Numerous educators and other interested persons came to observe his theories in practice at the lab school. Later, when he joined the faculty at the University of Chicago, his influence extended to his colleagues John Dewey and Ella Flagg Young. In fact, Dewey considered Parker to be the "father of progressive education" (Dewey, 1930).

John Dewey

Photo of John Dewey.

©Bettmann/Corbis/Associated Press

John Dewey pioneered progressive education, or what he called "learning by doing."

John Dewey, professor of philosophy and pedagogy at the University of Chicago and professor of philosophy at Columbia University, first came into contact with Parker as a parent of children at Parker's practice school. Dewey was impressed with the philosophy and methods of the school and in 1896 established his own laboratory school at the University of Chicago. Unlike other similar schools associated with colleges or universities, Dewey did not intend that his school be a practice school for training teachers, but a laboratory where ideas could be tested. Implicit in this was the belief that education was a legitimate area for scientific investigation and that a science of education did indeed exist.

Dewey's progressive educational theories reflected his philosophy of pragmatism, which holds that there are no absolutes: Truth results from the application of scientific thinking to experience. He rejected the old, rigid, subject-centered curriculum in favor of a child-centered curriculum in which learning came through experience, not rote memorization of facts and figures. "Learning by doing" was the motto of his lab school. He established its classroom as a miniature of society and integrated learning into real-life experiences. The school emphasized the problem-solving method and placed motivation at the center of the learning process. Motivation was stimulated by focusing on children's needs, interests, and natural inquisitiveness.

However, although Dewey proposed that children be given the opportunity for creative selfexpression, and that their interests be considered in the learning process, he also believed that order was important and in later life became critical of some of the more extreme versions of child-centeredness, which he considered anti-intellectual. For Dewey, the child's experience with the environment "must be mediated by reflective thinking and problem solving," and the learning experience must maintain a "pragmatic balance between the consequences of education for the student and for society" (Horn, 2002, p. 38).

The goal of education for Dewey was to promote individual growth and to prepare the child for full participation in a democratic society. The relationships between education and democracy and school and society were central to his vision. However, Dewey did not favor using the school to prepare children for a predetermined vocation or place in life. Rather, he argued, the importance of occupations was their social feature: They were to serve as focal points of school learning, providing channels for creative expression of children's instincts, free communication, and interchange of ideas, as well fostering social discipline (Waks, 2013).

Dewey believed the school, functioning as an "embryonic society" and as a miniature democratic institution, should be the place where the child develops a spirit of social cooperation and community life. Only by enabling the child to develop to his or her maximum potential would the community realize its own. In one of his most widely read books, The School and Society (1899), Dewey argued that what the best and wisest parents want for their children, the community should want for all children.

Dewey maintained that the child should be viewed as a total organism and that education is most effective when it considers not only the intellectual but also the social, emotional, and physical needs of the child. He thought that education was a lifelong process and that the school should be an integral part of community life, a concept that supported the development of the community school that integrates the child into the life of the community and serves as a community center, providing health, social, and human services on or near the school campus.

Dewey wrote some 500 articles and 40 books. His classic Democracy and Education (1916) provided perhaps the strongest statement of his educational theories and provided the rationale for a generation of progressive educators. His influence was felt not only in philosophy and education, but also in law, political theory, and social reform. Dewey provided the intellectual foundation for progressive education, and has been said to be "the real spokesman for intellectual America in the Progressive Era" (Bonner, 1963, p. 44).

Ella Flagg Young

One of Dewey's colleagues and collaborators at the University of Chicago, Ella Flagg Young (1845–1917), became another important figure in the progressive education movement, serving as the first woman superintendent of a large city school system (Chicago, 1907–1915) and the first woman president of the National Education Association (1910).

Young served as supervisor of instruction at Dewey's lab school. Like him, she proposed that teaching methods should give fullest expression to the individual interests of the child, that education should recognize the total experiences the child brings to the school, and that the curriculum should provide the child with experiences that build on his or her natural interests and dispositions (Webb & McCarthy, 1998).

Young also shared Dewey's belief that the school should mirror the democratic society it served. In her public voice as well as in her administrative practices, she encouraged the extension of the principles of democracy throughout the educational system, the individual school, and into the classroom. She decentralized many administrative responsibilities and encouraged the development of principals as instructional leaders.

Although she was one of the most respected and well-known administrators of her day, Young was one of a handful of superintendents who did not subscribe to the cult of efficiency. She rejected attempts to mechanize the work of the teacher. In fact, her approach was just the opposite. She gave teachers a voice in decision making, sought to raise their salaries and increase the professionalism of their occupation, and, as evidenced in the Primary Source Readings for this chapter, supported their right to unionize. As a principal she started clubs in which teachers could meet to discuss various issues facing the schools and the profession. In a short time, Ella Flagg Young Clubs could be found in elementary schools throughout Chicago.

From her professional positions, as well as through her numerous presentations and publications, Young played a visible and important role in promoting progressive education in the years leading up to World War I.

Pioneers in Education: Ella Flagg Young

Pioneer School Administrator

Illustration of Ella Flagg Young.

Steve Campbell

Ella Flagg Young

Ella Flagg Young served as a teacher, principal, and assistant superintendent of schools in Chicago before studying with John Dewey at the University of Chicago, where she received her Ph.D. in 1900. From 1899 to 1904 she was a professor of pedagogy at the University of Chicago. She also served as supervisor of instruction at Dewey's laboratory school at the University and collaborated with Dewey on several published works.

Dewey regarded Young as the "wisest person on school matters" with whom he had ever come in contact and admitted that

[M]ore times than I could say I didn't see the meaning or force of some favorite conception of mine until Mrs. Young had given it back to me . . . it was from her that I learned that freedom and respect for freedom means regard for the inquiring and reflective process of individuals. (McManis, 1916, p, 121)

In 1905 Young left the University of Chicago to become principal of the Chicago Normal School (later Chicago Teachers College). In 1909 she returned to the Chicago schools as superintendent of schools, the first woman to head a large city school system. Young was a supporter of the Chicago Teachers Federation (CTF), and the board of education hoped her appointment would bring a better relationship with the increasingly powerful and militant union. In 1910, with the support of Margaret Haley, the president of the CTF, she was elected president of the National Education Association, the first woman to hold this office.

Throughout her career Dr. Young sought to improve the training and condition of teachers. She espoused democratic administration and organized teachers' councils to provide teachers with a greater voice in decision making. She also fought hard for higher teachers' salaries.

Young was a strong supporter of teachers and of improving and strengthening the teaching profession, a position which often brought her into conflict with the board of education. In 1915, tired of the continued strife, she resigned as superintendent of schools. At the outbreak of World War I she became chairman of the Women's Liberty Loan Committee, and although over 70 years old, traveled throughout the country on its behalf. While on one trip she became a victim of the flu epidemic sweeping the country.

William H. Kilpatrick

William H. Kilpatrick was the most prominent advocate of progressive education in the period between World War I and World War II (Graham, 1967). A former mathematics teacher and principal in Georgia and then professor at Columbia University's Teachers College, he translated Dewey's philosophy into a practical educational methodology, the project method. In doing so, he aimed to make education as child centered and "practical" as possible by engaging the child in purposeful projects consistent with the child's own goals and interests.

For Kilpatrick, "wholehearted purposeful activity" should be at the heart of the educative process. Conduct of projects should proceed through four steps: purposing, planning, executing, and judging. Rejecting the scientific, efficiency curriculum planning of Bobbitt, he argued that the curriculum should be built around the child's own purposes, not specific subject matter. He believed that education should stress the development of character and personality, not just the acquisition of bookish information (Loundsbury, 2005). Kilpatrick and his followers argued that:

selection of content was a matter of secondary importance at best . . . [rather] the child's own purposes should provide the basis for the development of the curriculum with subject matter employed instrumentally as it bore on the accomplishment of those purposes. . . . Kilpatrick proposed a curriculum that deemphasized the acquisition of knowledge in favor of a curriculum that was synonymous with purposeful activity. . . . Kilpatrick was, in effect, reconstructing what we mean by a curriculum, and an interesting side effect of that redefinition was that the project method had become a curriculum. (Kliebard, 2004, p. 141)

The project method gained widespread favor as a curriculum development methodology and as an alternative to social efficiency. Despite concerns that the project method failed to ensure the acquisition of the knowledge needed by future citizens, and that standardization of the process came to overshadow its child-centered goal, the movement continued to expand. By the 1930s the movement outgrew its identification with the project per se and was reinvented as the activity or experience curriculum (Kliebard, 2004).

Kilpatrick played a major role in advancing the progressive education movement through not only his many presentations and publications (perhaps the most widely distributed being his 1918 article, "The Project Method: The Use of the Purposeful Act in the Educational Process"), but also through the over 35,000 students he taught in his quarter century at Teachers College.

6.5 The Kindergarten Movement

As was previously noted, progressive education can trace its intellectual roots, in part, to Friedrich Froebel (1782–1852), who established the first kindergarten in Germany in 1837. Froebel studied at Pestalozzi's institute in Switzerland and accepted many of his ideas associated with sense realism and child-centeredness. According to Froebel, the primary aim of the school should be the development of the native endowments of the individual child through self-expression, which was encouraged by an active curriculum that included games, singing, or any number of creative and spontaneous activities. He believed that the education process should begin with the child as early as 3 or 4 years of age. Froebel's system of education emphasized play as perhaps the best environment for instruction because it was the traditional avenue of growth and learning for children.

One of Froebel's pupils, Margaretha Schurz, opened the first kindergarten in the United States in Watertown, Wisconsin, in 1856. Other Germanspeaking communities soon followed. Four years later the first Englishspeaking kindergarten was established in Boston by Elizabeth Peabody (a sister-in-law of Horace Mann), who also studied with Froebel. Peabody's school served as an educational stepping-stone to the elementary school for students from well-to-do families.

However, the first large-scale adoption of the kindergarten, in St. Louis in the 1870s, was targeted to the children of the urban poor. Begun as charity kindergartens by a young socialite, Susan Blow, who had observed the kindergarten firsthand in Germany, their success in enrolling children from the city's slums led the school board to adopt them.

With the encouragement of Superintendent William T. Harris, the kindergarten was expanded, and Miss Blow opened a school to train fellow teachers in Froebel's methods. Other, mostly urban, districts followed St. Louis's lead. The kindergarten movement also expanded in the private arena with assistance from philanthropic individuals and societies who saw the schools as a way to combat the ills of urban poverty, taking the children off the streets, teaching them positive personal habits, and giving them an introduction to learning.

The success of the "charity kindergartens" and the support given the movement by the National Education Association which in 1884 established a department of kindergarten instruction, helped expand the kindergarten in public school systems. Starting in the early 1900s, as progressive educators gained greater influence in institutions of higher education, schools for educating kindergarten teachers opened as extensions of the curriculum in the normal schools, as part of university teacher training departments, and as separate programs in teacher colleges. By 1918, although not universally established (only 10.5% of the 4.5 million children between 4 and 6 years of age were enrolled in a kindergarten [Butts & Cremin, 1953]), the kindergarten had undoubtedly been accepted as the first rung of the American education ladder.

Tools of the Trade: Froebel's Gifts and Occupations

The gifts and occupations were educational materials developed by Friedrich Froebel for use in the kindergarten. "The gifts and occupations were a series of twenty devices and activities, essentially a hands-on curricular system, intended to introduce children to the physical forms and relationships found in nature" (Provenzo, 2009, p. 87). The first 10 of the devices are referred to as the gifts and the second 10 as the occupations.

The gifts were so termed because they were given to the child to be respected as a gift and were to be used in play in the child's self-directed activities. They were often considered the first educational toys and were intended to lead to discovery and give insight into the common patterns and forms found in nature.

The gifts were assigned a number and ranged from the simple, intended for the very young child (#1), to the more complex. The first gift was a set of six colored woolen balls (three primary and three secondary colors), each attached to a string. The second gift was a set of four wooden objects (ball, cylinder, two cubes) with a wooden hanging apparatus. The third gift was a set of eight 1-inch cubes. The fourth, fifth, sixth, and seventh gifts were blocks and cubes of various dimensions, with the seventh also including an equilateral triangle. The eighth gift was straights of varying lengths, the ninth gift included full circles, half circles, and quadrants. The tenth gift could be peas, pebbles, pieces of torn paper, leaves, beads, or almost any "points" that could be used to create forms that could change their form at any point.

Froebel's occupations were the materials the child was to use to practice skills. According to Froebel, the occupations led to invention and gave the child power. The occupations included those using materials based on the points (stringing beads or buttons, perforating paper, etc); surface materials (painting, paper cutting, paper folding, parquetry, etc.); materials based on lines (drawing, weaving, braiding, knitting, thread games, etc.); and solid materials (clay, beeswax, mud, wood carving, etc).

The major conceptual differences between the gifts and the occupations were:

The gifts were analytic, the occupations synthetic.

In the gifts there was combination, investigation, rearrangement of certain definite material, but no change in its form; in the occupations the material was modified, reshaped, and transformed.

The results obtained in gift work were transitory, in occupations permanent.

The gifts ascended from solid through divided solid, plane, divided plane and line, to the point; the occupations began at the point and travelled the same road in the opposite direction, until they reach the solid. (Wiggen & Smith, 1896, p. 5)

Froebel's gifts and occupations in various modifications have been used worldwide for almost two centuries and have impacted the development of generations of children.

6.6 The Measurement Movement

One expression of the progressive influence on education was a growing interest in the science of education. If education were to be studied using the principles of scientific inquiry, and greater efficiency were to be obtained, then things must be measured. As Edward L. Thorndike (1918), one of the leaders in the development of the science of education, explained:

Whatever exists at all exists in some amount. To know it thoroughly involves knowing its quantity as well as its quality. Education is concerned with changes in human beings; a change is a difference between two conditions; each of these conditions is known to us only by the products produced by it—things made, words spoken, acts performed and the like. To measure any of these products means to define its amount in some way so that competent persons will know how large it is, better than they would without measurement. (p. 7)

Although intelligence and aptitude measures had been in use for some time, the real breakthrough came when French psychologists Alfred Binet and Theodore Simon developed an instrument based on an intelligence scale that allowed comparison of individual intelligence to a norm. The goal of the test was to enable French schools to identify mentally challenged students for appropriate placement.

Of the many adaptations of the Binet-Simon scale, the most important for education was the so-called Stanford revision by Lewis Terman. The Stanford-Binet Intelligence Test extended the Binet test to the average and gifted student and is still the most widely used individually administered intelligence test in America today. Terman also included the intelligence quotient (IQ), a number indicating the ratio between mental age and chronological age.

One of the major American figures in the measurement movement was the educational psychologist Edward L. Thorndike (1874–1949), who taught the first university course in educational measurement and wrote the first textbook on the use of social measurements, An Introduction to the Theory of Mental and Social Measurements (1904).

Thorndike was also a major contributor to efforts to develop standardized intelligence and achievement tests. He wrote and taught about test construction, and he and his students at Columbia developed achievement tests in several areas. As a member of the U.S. Army's Committee on Classification of Personnel, Thorndike supervised the development of the Beta form of the Stanford-Binet test used with illiterate World War I recruits.

In fact, the massive mobilization of manpower needed during World War I was a major factor in the growth of the measurement movement. The military needed a way to determine which men were suited for service and for what type of service. Out of this need a number of group intelligence tests were developed and ultimately were administered to 1.75 million recruits during the war.

A military recruit attempts to complete a intelligence test while a supervisor looks on.

© Bettmann/CORBIS

The testing of World War I recruits was a major step in the development of intelligence tests.

One unexpected result of this massive testing was the discovery of a large number of young men with educational (as well as physical) deficiencies: Approximately one quarter of all recruits were judged illiterate. Deficiencies were particularly high among rural youth, which confirmed the inadequacies of many rural school systems.

The success of the wartime use of the tests led to what seemed their next logical use—to identify and sort students for alternative educational placements. According to Heffernan (1968), the "apparent objectivity of the test results had a fascination for school administrators and teachers. Certainty seemed somehow to attach to these mathematically expressed comparisons of pupil achievement" (p. 229). Throughout the country students were classified, assigned, and compared on the basis of tests.

Criticism of the testing, however, came from a number of fronts. Progressives such as Dewey voiced their concerns that the tests were used to indiscriminately label students and to make subjective judgments about their potential, thereby undermining the democratic purpose of schooling. Essentialists such as William C. Bagley, also of Teachers College, criticized the tests when they were used under the umbrella of social efficiency to unnecessarily limit the educational opportunities afforded children.

Because the children whose opportunities were most likely to be limited were minorities and immigrants, members of the lower class also challenged the tests. Yet, despite these objections the measurement movement moved forward; by the end of the 1920s several million schoolchildren had taken intelligence tests, and measurement had become a permanent part of American education.

6.7 Progressive Education After World War I

The 1920s brought a rise in the stock market, telephone poles, and women's skirts. The car replaced the horse and buggy as the primary means of transportation, and sound came to the big screen. With a rising economy and the country riding a wave of patriotism after having "made the world safe for democracy," social and political progressivism declined. Educational progressivism, meanwhile, took a different turn. In fact, the progressive reform movement after the war bore little similarity to the reform movement before it (Graham, 1967).

Before the war, reform in education had been directed toward the public schools serving the urban poor. The goal of the reforms had not been to alter the school's primary role as a place of instruction, but to expand public school facilities and curricular offerings. Progressive reformers sought to add to the school's primary role various measures designed to improve the lot of the children of the working poor and to equip them to more easily and fully participate in American life; "hence the vocational schools, the health and nutrition programs, the hot meal schedules, and the rest" (Graham, 1967, p. 8).

After the war, progressive education was primarily an affair of so-called progressive private schools or public schools in suburbs serving middle- or upper-class families. These parents were not interested in the social services provided by the school or the vocational training it offered; they were impressed by the "new psychology" and the references to child-centeredness and creativity and wanted to see these ideas expanded for their children (Graham, 1967).

Location was not the only difference between the prewar and postwar "progressive schools." They also differed in their curricula and the very source of the reforms:

While Gary (Indiana) had gone in for efficiency of school operation, individualized instruction stamped the Winnetka (a Chicago suburb) plan. Gary achieved an expanded curriculum including vocational courses; Winnetka featured a revised curriculum stressing social studies and a newly integrated subject matter. Impetus for reform at Gary had come from old-line civic progressives and local community planners. . . . Initiative for school revision in Winnetka, on the other hand, had come from the residents and parents of the modish suburb who wanted to improve local educational opportunities for their children. (Graham, 1967, p. 10)

The founding of the Progressive Education Association (PEA) in 1919 gave postwar progressives a formal organizational voice. The association adopted seven guiding principles: (1) the child's freedom to develop naturally; (2) interest as the motivation for all work; (3) the teacher as guide in the learning process; (4) the scientific study of pupil development; (5) greater attention to everything that affects the child's physical development; (6) cooperation between the school and home in meeting the natural interests and activities of the child; and (7) the progressive school should be a leader in educational movements (Progressive Education, 1924).

In the years after its founding, the PEA was considered the official expression of the progressive education movement, and at its height it attracted over 10,000 members. The association published a journal, Progressive Education, from 1924 to 1955, as well as a large number of books and reports, perhaps the best known being the report of the Eight-Year Study (discussed in Chapter 7), which showed that students from experimental high schools performed as well as students from traditional schools. The study became the Progressive Education Association's "abiding contribution to American education" (Watras, 2006, p. 2).

In its early years the PEA was dominated by headmasters from "progressive" private schools. Later, leadership shifted to public school administrators and professors of education, many of whom were affiliated with Teachers College. Many of its leaders considered themselves disciples of Parker and Dewey, but Dewey was often critical of the activities of the PEA, which he did not believe were based on a fully developed and articulated philosophy. However, he did share with its members a concern that in a somewhat desperate attempt to be "scientific," education had overlooked the fact that the child should be the most important consideration (Hissong & Hissong, 1930).

Despite its prominence, the PEA did not reflect the concerns of the majority of the pre–World War I leaders of the progressive movement. In the end, the innovations of the prewar progressives found their way into the mainstream of American education, whereas many of those urged by the PEA's leaders and contemporaries, although popular for a decade or two, soon passed from vogue (Graham, 1967).

6.8 Influence of the Progressive Education Movement on Higher Education

The influence of the progressive education movement was also felt in higher education. At a number of universities, faculty collaborated with state and local reformers to provide the research needed to support reform initiatives. The most notable expression of progressive higher education was the University of Wisconsin.

The Wisconsin model was based on the idea that "the obligation of the university was to undertake leadership in the application of science to the improvement of the life of the citizenry in every domain" (Cremin, 1988, p. 246). This was to be accomplished through research and service, the training of experts, and extended education. Faculty collaborated with state officials to draft civil service legislation, public utilities legislation, and the first workmen's compensation program in the United States (Cole, 2009).

The movement to establish a science of education also affected colleges and universities. New departments of pedagogy and education offered graduate degrees in educational administration, elementary and secondary teaching, and educational psychology. Faculty in these departments conducted research and published their findings in scholarly journals.

The teachers' colleges and normal schools, like the universities, adopted the progressive service orientation: "They presumed to prepare scientifically trained experts; they extended their learning to all comers; and they prided themselves on their sensitivity to popular need" (Cremin, 1988, p. 248). By 1940 there were over 200 teachers' colleges and normal schools located in 42 of the 48 states. As previously noted, many had become state colleges. Almost all granted the bachelor's degree, many the master's degree, and a few the doctoral degree (President's Commission on Higher Education, 1948).

College and university enrollment rose steadily during the pre–World War I years and then surged after the war, partly as a result of those who had come to higher education as part of the Student's Army Training Corps and then stayed after the war ended. Higher education enrollment rose from almost 600,000 in 1919–1920 to 1.1 million in 1929–1930.

Most of these students sought a professional or technical education, primarily in education, business, and engineering, and enrolled not in the universities but in the growing number of junior colleges and teacher education institutions. The number of junior colleges increased from 52 in 1920 to 277 in 1930 and 456 in 1940 (U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1975).

Webb. L. D. (2014).  History of American education: Voices and perspectives . San Diego, CA: Bridgepoint Education, Inc.

· Chapter 5: Education in the Post-Civil War Era

· Chapter 6: The Progressive Era in Education

Sass, E. (n.d.). American educational history: A hypertext timeline. Retrieved from http://www.eds-resources.com/educationhistorytimeline.html