On pages 60-61, Hartman describes the progressive’s view of educational relevancy and reality.

Module 2: From Hot War to Cold War: The Adjustment Phase in American Education

Module Description:

As we read in module one, progressive educators had a plan. The idea of a child-centered classroom with daily skills taught was a bold vision for the time. Towards the end of the 1930s, the ‘new car smell’ of progressive ‘Frontier Thinkers’ had worn critical American society figures. Just as the winds changed, so did the liberal ideology after WWII. In a sense, liberal education’s view of society and teaching application was ‘all over the place’ regarding educational trends. This module outlines critical trends found in Hartman’s chapter three.

Module Goals and Objectives: Given the opportunity, students will be able to:

1. Define the progressive evolution after World War II

2. Identify characteristics of Life Adjustment education.

3. Explain how education evolved with the needs of society.

Module Notes – Ideology and Education

Post-War Issues: The State of Education

For Americans, the end of World War II was a momentous occasion. It marked the successful conclusion of a long and bloody war and promised the beginning of a new age. The American people were faced with crucial choices. Educational leaders were convinced that the public school system would prepare young Americans to help make thoughtful decisions. For many of these leaders, the results of the war gave a sense of redirection to their efforts – postwar education would have to prepare youth to become responsible citizens of a new international community in democratic classrooms. The times, they firmly believed, called for the aims and methods of progressive education.

Nevertheless, while education would be crucial in the postwar period, after fifteen years of depression and war, American schools faced tremendous problems. It is difficult to draw a comprehensive picture of American schools in this period, but one thing is clear: the essential facts could be expressed in overwhelming numbers. Americans who had lived through the depression and became accustomed to declining birthrates and teacher surpluses were astounded at what they now saw. More and more children were coming to school every year, but despite desperate efforts by school boards, there were never enough classrooms or enough teachers. American communities would need to build half a million new classrooms at the cost of ten to fourteen billion dollars. The leading edge of the population boom hit in 1953 when schools faced a thirty-four percent increase in the number of first-grade students in 1947. The surge of enrollment in the 1950s would prove unprecedented, accounting for more than half of the total growth in American schools in the fifty years between 1910 and 1960.

The war itself had a profound effect on education. Aside from postponing needed school construction, war industries had provided many inducements for teachers to leave the profession. Moreover, while the war reduced resources, it also led to new demands on public education. Anticipating a wave of delinquent behavior as war disrupted the family, Americans looked to schools to provide supervised recreation after regular school hours. The exodus of women into the workforce fostered a new interest in day nurseries and early childhood education. At the same time, the draft revealed that many American youth were neither physically nor psychologically fit; educational leaders recognized that they would have to pay more attention to health education, physical fitness, and mental health.

Two years after the war, the respected New York Times education writer Benjamin Fine set out to assess American schools. He painted a grim picture in a comprehensive series of articles (based on six months of the survey). He found some disastrous conditions and little that was good, much that was not good. Schools lacked textbooks, paper, pencils, and maps. Books were often outdated; children were learning history from books that did not include World War I. Others confirmed Fine’s pessimistic views. A 1951 national survey of school facilities found that nearly one-quarter of the nation’s elementary students attended inadequate schools. In nine states, one-third of all schoolchildren were enrolled in unsatisfactory schools. A large number of these were one-room schools, many without running water.

His visits to the nation’s schools convinced Fine that the crucial problem was the most acute teacher shortage in the history of American education. In desperate efforts to ensure a teacher for every class, schools hired taxi-cab drivers, mechanics, telephone operators, or retired janitors to become teachers. The average teacher now had less training than in 1939 – Fine estimated that over half of American teachers had one year of college training or less. Fine estimated that incompetent teachers taught at least half the children attending rural schools.

Moreover, the situation was getting worse. Teachers were leaving education at seventy-five thousand per year – a twenty percent turnover rate. Low pay, lack of prestige, and archaic rules still circumscribed teachers’ lives. They were told which church to attend, how to spend their evenings, and what to wear. In many places, teachers were fired if they chose to get married. Teachers were not only unhappy about the restrictions on how they lived, but they were also increasingly dissatisfied with salaries that failed to keep pace with inflation.

They were expanding the public schools to meet the crunch of the baby boom while modernizing and rebuilding American schools was an unprecedented challenge. One crucial asset was a new sense of professionalism that contributed to a new flair among teachers and administrators. Although the teacher shortage meant that many people hired as teachers did not meet professional standards, standards did exist and were increasingly recognized. While local school boards still controlled educational policies, teachers and administrators were increasingly sensitive to national professional standards and ideologies. Well-developed national organizations of teachers and administrators supported these standards and the ideologies that reinforced them. As recognized experts, school administrators applied national standards to local schools and asked their communities to provide funds needed to enable local schools to meet these standards.

Teachers’ colleges and the education departments of the universities were influential in developing a new sense of professional identity. A significant number of faculty and universities have become important institutions for the development of new professionalism. Closely tied to the new professionalism was a common ideology. By now, educational leaders and most teachers share a view of education that defines their aims and gives them a sense of mission and importance. This ideology provided a unique vocabulary that differentiated teachers from non-teachers who filled teaching roles. In considerable measure, this ideology was a form of progressivism. Dewey’s ideas formed the basis of the most professional discussion of educational philosophy and such progressive platitudes as teaching the whole child peppered educational writings. For many leaders of the profession, this form of progressivism had become the conventional wisdom.

Although American educators had adopted many of the tenets of progressive education, the prevailing ideology was not a consistent philosophy. It was a mélange of incompatible principles; progressive ideas resided uneasily in combination with others that could easily undermine them. For example, many educators who saw themselves as progressives also believed in applying the principles of a ‘science’ of education by using standardized tests to place students in classes appropriate for their abilities. This kind of ‘scientific’ classification was popular in the context of the high prestige of science in the postwar period. However, the precise classification of students made possible by standardized testing drew its inspiration from Thorndike rather than Dewey. As Dewey pointed out, the emphasis on tests, measurement, and efficiency was contrary to the egalitarian spirit of progressivism. Testing too often led to classification and labeling for the convenience of administrators rather than for the individualization progressives promoted.

The emphasis on centralization and school consolidation strains within the postwar period also reveals the contradictory strains within the prevailing ideology. Replacing the one-room schools with more significant buildings was a way of promoting the progressive goal of an enriched curriculum for children in small rural communities. At the same time, however, centralization was an essential way of promoting efficiency and standardization that often worked against a central doctrine of Dewey’s progressivism – spontaneity and flexibility in the classroom.

Despite its inherent contradictions, however, this ideology served essential purposes. It united the profession and provided teachers and administrators with a specialized methodology and language. More importantly, it gave them a sense of common purpose. The prevailing creed pictured schools as crucial institutions for the communities they served, working to promote prosperity, peace, and democratic harmony. At the same time, it allowed teachers to see themselves as performing a significant role in the lives of the students they taught, going far beyond simply imparting information.

Progressive education itself changed in the postwar period. Following the lead of William Kilpatrick, progressives began to concentrate on the psychological ‘adjustment’ needs of students while, at the same time, changing the emphasis of their efforts from elementary to secondary school. As enrollment in high school became the norm for students, educators worried about serving the needs of the large group of students, who, they thought, had neither the talents nor the inclination to benefit from the traditional college preparatory curriculum. The result was the development of a new secondary school curriculum – education for ‘life adjustment.’ The life adjustment movement was the most important of the post-war refinements of progressive education. An important reason for this claim was the failure of too many schools or teachers to provide high-school instruction having sufficient meaning, value, and appeal to the pupils and their parents. The curriculum would have to be adapted to the needs of students. A revised curriculum would also have to meet the needs of an increasingly complex society. Proponents of life adjustment education argued that adult citizenship’s vast and complicated responsibilities in the postwar world would require comprehensive civic, vocational, and cultural education.

Life Adjustment after the War

Though most of the ‘progressive’ educational practices had made their way into the schools since right-wing critics denounced the 1930s, more often, the specific target of the attack was life-adjustment education, a program of more recent origin. The life-adjustment curriculum synthesized many child-centered ideas that served as the intellectual foundation for professional educators and the new psychological theories of social adjustment deployed by psychological experts during the war. Its goal was to provide classroom experiences to meet all students’ daily personal and social needs, particularly those not served by the secondary level’s existing academic and vocational curricula.

The perceived need for a more practical curriculum stemmed from the shifting demographics of the student population. Public school enrollments had grown continuously over the twentieth century, and an increasing proportion of these students attended high school. As attendance through the twelfth grade became the norm, educational leaders increasingly viewed the traditional academic curriculum as inappropriate for this new group of students. When war enlistment and the lure of jobs in the industry later produced a precipitous decline in enrollment in the 1940s, educators, seeing their ideal of universal secondary education undermined, sought to reorder the curriculum even further, the holding power of the high schools. Developing a more personally relevant educational program for secondary students appeared to be the best way to accomplish that task.

An outline of an action plan for implementing the new program emerged from the various life-adjustment commissions. Education professionals identified several critical areas of life that they felt the strong curriculum should address, including ‘citizenship, home economics, physical and mental health, vocational activities, enjoyment of life, and the development of personal powers.’ Within each area, real-life problems – problems that would naturally generate student interest – focused on instruction. Suggestions for these included everything from ‘getting along with others to ‘understanding parents’ to ‘learning how to drive a car.’ The intent was to develop a functional curriculum that would apply universally to the secondary school student population. The life-adjustment curriculum was primarily an extension of the vocational education model to general education. By making preparation for life rather than preparation for work (or college, which some viewed as preparation for professional work), the objective of schooling, the proponents of the new curricular program seized the common ground shared by all secondary students despite the diversity of their ultimate vocational goals and, in doing so, sought to extend the authority over the entire school program.

For parents and business and educational leaders looking for schools to provide a more significant opportunity to students in the postwar years, the life-adjustment curriculum seemed an enlightened means to educate students of all abilities and social standings to work cooperatively for the advancement of society. Opportunities to invoke these ideas were rarely overlooked by the curriculum’s proponents, who sought to match their arguments for the life-adjustment program with the solid democratic rhetoric that characterized the post-war debates contrasting the political and economic systems of the United States with those of the Soviet Union. For these educators, to be democratic meant to be anti-elitist. Thus, they separated the curriculum from the historically well-established academic disciplines associated with the college-preparatory track. These disciplines were entrenched in the secondary school program despite educators’ earlier efforts to free themselves from their influence.

Subversion in the Classroom

Though not felt directly on the American continent, the threat to peace and prosperity from the Soviet Union was nevertheless perceived as growing. During the Cold War, American foreign policy operated on the assumption that the Soviet leadership was driven by a communist ideology that was inherently expansionistic, with world conquest as the only acceptable historical outcome. Many saw communism as a monstrous and monolithic global conspiracy centered in Moscow and bent upon absolute world domination. The ‘Red Scare’ provided a point of focus for public anxiety, particularly concerning schools. Communist subversion seemed to give the explanation many were looking for. With the war going on in Korea and the media’s attention on enemy techniques of brainwashing, propaganda, and political indoctrination (psychological tools to which children were viewed as particularly susceptible), it is not surprising that the school’s tenor criticism turned towards its subversive potential.

Members of reactionary citizen groups spent little time worrying about intellectual justifications for their attacks on communism in schools. For most, communism was un-American (though what that meant was not clear) and was more than enough reason to rid the schools of its influence. However, some individuals in the academic community did begin articulating an intellectual stand against communism. Among intellectuals, this became a consensus view of the Communist Party that became the basis for mainstream efforts to purge communism from all levels of the American political system and the nation’s schools and universities.

The specific argument against communism in schools was pressed by liberal intellectuals seeking to preserve their privileged place in academics. With the Red Scare resurgence, these individuals (often viewed with suspicion in society) sought political cover by giving up their communist colleagues in the name of academic freedom. Their argument for doing so depended on two points. First was the definition of the Communist Party as a conspiratorial organization that employed unethical means to meet its political objectives. Second, they argued that membership in the party entailed a strict adherence to a political party line. According to this view, by joining the party, one necessarily accepted the ideological system on which it was based and indicated his or her willingness to follow the party line in all matters, including the indoctrination of students. In the eyes of liberal academics, Communist Party members had given up their commitment to free thought due to their voluntary association.

In a series of articles, Sidney Hook, chair of the philosophy department at New York University, stridently explained this fundamental incompatibility between party membership and honest scholarship. Hook argued that membership in the party makes a teacher intellectually dishonest by default. In joining the party, ‘he has signified his willingness to teach according to directives received and not by objective methods of searching for the truth.’ Even when the teacher disagrees with the party line on some points, he defers to the greater good of the party. It is precisely this ‘evaluation of what is important or unimportant in the light of a political objective,’ Hook went on, ‘that makes it impossible for him to exercise the free criticism he would engage in where he is loyal to the principles of scientific inquiry.’ In contrast, the true scholar ‘is prepared to learn from anyone. Doctrines are only valid or invalid in the light of objective evidence and logical inference.

This rationalization provided the semblance of legitimacy necessary to continue the expulsion of communist teachers that had already begun. The target, however, soon shifted. The power to indoctrinate politicians profitably was not limited to communist individuals. As they became scarce, a more accessible target was found in the books and materials used in schools, about which almost anything could be said without fear of rebuttal. In 1949, the House of Un-American Activities Committee requested 71 colleges’ and universities’ lists of textbooks used in all their courses. Many ignored the request; a few complied. All objected to Congress extending itself beyond its natural jurisdiction in this way, and in the face of strong opposition, the committee abandoned the investigation. Red hunters were to find tremendous success in the lower schools.

Concerns with Academia

Amid all the political attacks directed at the public schools in the early 1950s, the academic traditionalists headed by Illinois professor Arthur Bestor let loose with their denunciation of the current educational trends. The postwar boom and the infrastructure crisis it spawned directed the public’s attention to the schools’ material and personnel needs. The Red Scare had effectively refocused some of that attention on the curriculum’s intellectual substance, inviting debate over its adequacy. In the turmoil of the time, the academicians, perhaps sensing a window of opportunity, developed the most sustained and searching criticism of the public schools of that decade and the most telling concerning the eventual reform of education in the United States.

Although public education was reeling from charges of subversion, Bestor and his colleagues focused their attacks on the modern school curriculum’s inherent anti-intellectualism – reserving contempt for life-adjustment education. This public debate between traditional academics and professional educators over the proper aims and purposes of schooling brought to the fore the importance of academic training in society. At the same time, it highlighted the status anxiety of intellectuals in the United States. The debate also helped bring into bold relief the strong ideological climate that had come to grip the nation in all matters related to the mind. America’s stereotype as the land of inventive genius, technical mastery, and practicality worked against establishing any lofty place for individuals who traded in the most abstract knowledge – save when that knowledge had some direct application for the betterment of society or personal profit.

The threat to the established academic curriculum by the social science-wielding professional educators appears to have been personally felt by some university scholars in the early 1950s, particularly in the form of education school requirements that served to bypass courses in liberal arts. They argued that first-year college students’ insufficient intellectual preparation demonstrated the need to reestablish academic standards. The education establishment’s desire to spread the ill-conceived, life-adjustment practices that had devastated secondary education to the university level promised only to exacerbate the situation.

Bestor’s Critique

To check the spread of this anti-intellectualism and safeguard the liberal arts in higher education required a well-thought-out offensive by Bestor and his like-minded colleagues. After all, developing a credible attack on public education was a dicey business, especially in the early 1950s. The public school was the prototypical American institution. With the dramatic increases in student enrollment came a vocal parental constituency that was most satisfied with the schools their children attended. Many parents, characteristically distrustful of intellectual elitism, favored the functional curriculum that schools adopted as it was.

Following the startling convictions of Alger Hiss and the repeated smears of intellectuals as communist sympathizers by the radical right, members of the academic community had the added obstacle of maintaining an acceptable ideological stance in controversial matters – a point of which Bestor was aware. Bestor’s first attempt to act came in a proposal submitted to the Council of American Historical Association in December 1952 that called for establishing a scientific and scholarly commission to help ensure the adequate representation of academic subjects in the school curriculum. Within his discipline, Colleagues, fearful of the threat red hunters like Senator McCarthy posed to academic freedom and their careers, urged Bestor to proceed cautiously. There seemed to be too much criticism of the schools already. For Bestor to make a compelling case for a return to the traditional academic curriculum in the social and political climate of the 1950s, it was clear that he had to thread his argument carefully between images and ideas that would likely draw charges of either communist sympathizing or antidemocratic elitism.

In Educational Wastelands, Bestor’s most complete and well-publicized diatribe regarding public education’s inadequacies, he turned the charges that the academic curriculum was antidemocratic back on the professional educators, working to place them outside the current ideological mainstream. Bestor firmly believed that schools were institutions primarily responsible for the intellect’s training and that the disciplined-centered curriculum was the most effective means to accomplish that. He was especially disturbed by the fundamental assumption inherent in life-adjustment education: mental training, as traditionally conceived, was inappropriate for all but a small minority population. The functional curriculum pushed by the educational establishment to fit students for their projected roles in life, Bestor argued, sold short their potential for intellectual development and greater democratic participation. The result would be a greater dependency on elite groups of professional experts. Bestor and other academics offered the alternative firmly grounded in the liberal arts tradition. History, literature, foreign languages, mathematics, and the sciences were valuable subjects. They should be taught, they argued, not for any immediate functional reasons in the most practical sense, but rather for their ability to communicate to students’ cultural values of a nation.’

The Fall of Life-Adjustment

For all its initial appeal, the life-adjustment education program eventually fell from public favor, whether the results of the growing criticism or its excesses. Its emphasis on teaching daily life’s trivialities had reached extremes that few were willing to defend publicly. For example, one senior high school psychology textbook included ‘how to make a joke’ among the ‘important things each must learn in school. However, the profound shift in the ideological climate in the postwar United States was more significant in the downfall of life-adjustment education. Rising national paranoia threw cold water on any public policies that smacked collectivism. In this light, critics viewed the life-adjustment program as an extension of the already suspect progressive education practices. Besides, the program’s emphasis on adjusting the individual society reflected its reliance on intrusive social science that had overreached its base and suggested the manipulative techniques of mass persuasion and brainwashing closely identified with the totalitarian nations in the enemy camp. In harmony with the conservative political resurgence, the emerging spirit of the country was one of laissez-faire individualism.

Readings and Guiding Questions:

Please read the following material in the order provided. To help one better reflect on each reading, questions will accompany each article/book chapter. These questions are to help one better understand the material. They are not required to be submitted for review unless marked otherwise.

Hartman Chapter 3

(Please use the following brief notes as a reference as you read Hartman, Chapter 3)

The Evolution of Progressive Education

· 1947 the U.S. Office of Education created a Commission on Life Adjustment. This would become the new vision for progressive education. Progressive denounced radical elements of the ‘frontier thinkers’ in the 1930s who wanted their political agenda in public schools.

· The ‘educational adjustment’ reversed many of Dewey’s ideas. Instead of adjusting society to the child to create a socialist child, the child was mentally adapted to living in an un-socialist society.

· The progressive force changed from a radical stance in education to a stabilizing force in wartime culture. One area of concern for progressives was the increasing rate of juvenile delinquency, where high numbers of students were unsupervised throughout the day.

· The idea and concept of ‘schools in danger’ focused on two societal developments: 1) increased attendance in the years following the war, left fewer schools, and lagging construction. Student attendance outpaced building construction, and 2) Increased American foreign interest abroad pulled needed monies from education to combat communist ideology in Europe.

· Truman’s administration’s choice to provide increased revenues to foreign interventions and heightened fears of communist teachers in the classroom created anxiety among Americans.

· The ideology of ‘maturity’ emerged from the Cold War scare immediately following WWII. Many believed ignorant, irresponsible, and young Americans would crumble under the pressure of Communist Russia. As a result, the nation needed strong students with moral character. The nation’s survival rested in the arms of secondary schools to inculcate maturity.

· The progressive response was in the form of ‘Life Adjustment.’ This philosophy followed Dr. Benjamin Spock’s approach to raising children to resist easy manipulation by leaders. He believed children should be gently coerced into maturity.

· Life adjusters were at odds with ‘the traditional curriculum’ or ‘traditional subjects such as math, history, English, etc. They wished to add courses emphasizing ethics, moral living, health and safety, and leisure. They believe education should be a ‘real-life problem.’

· It was believed that educators should evolve to the needs of society. As society’s economic needs changed and grew, their primary duty was to tailor students to fit the economic order – reinforcing the term’ workforce.’

· Life adjusters believed schools acted as ‘sorting machines’ and channeled teens according to class. The idea gathered from the research suggested an influential taxonomy of psychological descriptive correlated with a stratified class’s demand. Adolescents considered middle-class tended to be self-directed and displayed intelligence levels, while lower-income families had more submissive and academic failure traits.

· The ideology of maturity entailed vastly different responsibilities for working-class children. Children from the wealthy or upper-middle-class became ‘mature’ when they learned how to be individuals and leaders, compared to working-class children’s matriculation via passive and social and economic acceptance.

When reading Chapter Three, please reflect on the following questions.

1. What societal factors aided in the progressive/liberal view of education?

2. How did societal factors cause the progressive/liberal stance to modify and change?

3. Why did progressives disagree with ‘traditional education?’

4. How did life adjusters view gender differentiation?

Required Assignment

1. Online Web Discussion – Read each of the questions below.  After doing so, select all questions to focus your discussion.  Please make one thoughtful, original posting (a direct response to your chosen question) and at least one thoughtful response to a classmate’s posting.  <

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