Outside In:
Minorities and the Transformation of American Education
Paula S. Fass
Part One -
FROM OTHER SHORES: EUROPEAN IMMIGRANTS AND AMERICAN EDUCATION
--Introduction--
Though a marginal factor in American Social life, schools were being lauded
as the cure all by the early twentieth century.
It has been a huge part of our national dialogue and each of our private
lives. Her contention is that the shape
of public schools reflects our encounters with diversity and outsiders. It was hoping to make them industrious
Americans, but they too in the process transformed the institutions and what
being American could mean.
-- Chapter One –
The Progressive, the Immigrant and the School
P. 13 Carl Kaestle has written
about the ways in which schooling in nineteenth century
By the late nineteenth she
thinks the fate of the republic was no longer an issue. Economic success, loyalty to the state and
the incorporation of a heterogeneous population presented new goals. And while we have satisfactory accounts of
the common schools, we do not have the same for progressive education. It is characterized by different groups
(labor unions, socialists, city managers, middle class reformers, journalists
etc) each push their special interest.
Dewey and Cremin’s coherent accounts are being challenged.
She will focus here on the
professional reformers and how they understood social problems and older
concerns about republican citizenship informed their idea of cultural
investments in school. They addressed
the paradox that American expansion required the infusion of outsiders, but the
outsiders threatened to dissolve the culture and its links to the past by their
presence.
They had two unqualified
solutions: 1) Education was a transparent social good and 2) that all should be
educated and were capable of it.
They had to deal with the
industrial changes afoot. The moral
order and social meaning were lost. This
perception augments their social problem viewpoint. Between 1860 and 1890 thirteen and one-half
million and three quarters of many cities’ populations entered the us. In many
industries one
Citizenship had been
inseparable from autonomy. Work was the
basis of this autonomy, self-identification and self-worth. Early 19th century reformers were
Whigs.
Reformers increased their
attention to the leisure, family life, health, and housing of the poor (their
private lives). Work had lost its moral
force in the factory. It did, however, make you aware that life was fast paced and
that you were a part of a larger concern.
But the work is not educational.
Felix Adler founded the Ethical Culture Society. He pushed the non-religious sense of “calling”
as an intense identification with work. But he knew industrial work could not
be a calling.
P. 19 Reformers called
upon the government to intervene and compensate. Jacob Riis’s first sentence in his The Children of the Poor is “The problem
of the children is the problem of the state.”
Americans had invested the family with great purpose and importance
throughout the nineteenth century. Along
with the church ad school they had a moral mission. Now it was seen as another place of
work.
The family divested of
work and work of meaning they sought to reform school because they could not
reform work or societies’ direction at large.
P. 21 society shook all,
but schools remained intact. Support for
them was very broad based
Unions, socialists, families and populists loved em. Education has long been a part of our
cultural faith. Without compulsory
attendance laws, many had attended, but it was not universal. Elementary education was all most could
expect. Expanding the length and mission
of schools was at the heart of education reform efforts. Most high schools were public. In 1870, only 2.7 percent of all students
eligible for four-year high schools were in public schools. By 1890 it was 4.2 percent. The private schools did latin
to prepare for college, public schools were to be more preparatory for
life.
Riis noted that the poor
were nearly all foreign.
P. 23 The evangelical
nature of early 19th century Protestantism was being called into
question by secularization and science. Furthermore, new theories of child rearing,
Catholics and foreign language groups and socialists challenged the simple
mission. Reformer’s emphasis on the
tenacious characteristics of immigrants also complicated the definition of
Americanism. In light of their implicit
discoveries about culture, education became a much subtler matter for reformers
than common schools had been. They found
neighborhood ethnic organizations and garnered that education was the process
of total socialization.
The schools were to become
an integral part of these neighborhoods.
Schools were not to be didactic instruments of morality and
citizenship. Instead, schools were to be
democratic and participatory. They would
recreate the communities that cities had replaced. Vocational ed was
kept as a moral instrument. It was very
craft oriented. They were not unaware of
the danger of education becoming class education. Handling the forces of nature was to help him
rise up. They found the widely pushed purely
academic curriculum inappropriate for a boy who would drop out at 14. Work was to be the center of common
socialization, not highbrow academics.
Pg. 30 The reformers found
the relationship between the family and neighborhood problematic and so
inserted the schools into the community. Immigrant kids were hampered by language
problems, siblings needing care at home and parents that undercut the school’s
authority. Whereas administrators were
worried about efficiency and order, progressives wanted to work around the realities
of the kids. The schools also had to be
sensitive to the fact of diversity and that all kids could not be treated
uniformly. But this meant industrial
training for those cultures suitable for it.
The progressives
appreciated diversity, but also found it disturbing. They thought it provided energy, and yet
needed to be unified. With the “flavor
of mind” of each group, you did not want to educate folks beyond their station,
but fit them into it. They wanted
change and growth built upon the strength the communities provided. Without alienating them from their folks,
they wanted progress. These are not
contradictions, but the essence of progressive school ideology. They were all interested in reconstructing
the society.
Progressive education set
the terms of the educational debate throughout the twentieth century. It defined the issues for school
administrators long after those pressing issues were less urgent.
-- Chapter Two –
Education, Democracy, and the Science of Individual
Differences
Thomas took a cultural
view of differences. But others took the
inborn view. IQ testing extended
powerfully into schools as a result. Whether to educate all or only those who can absorb it became a
tension. The inborn was
emphasized. Why?
Pg. 37 First, by
emphasizing schooling as socialization, knowing the particular child became
important. Hence the reliance on IQ tests. Secondly, progressive school reform was a
part of progressive managerial reform.
Social reform was generous, but managerial reform was efficient.
Between 1890 and 1940 the
proportion of all children from five to seventeen attending school went from 44
percent to 74 percent. During the same
period the expenditure per child went from 17 to 105 dollars and attendance
days went from 60 to 130. Amidst this
growth, IQ helped deal with heterogeneity.
In the 19th century
most only got the rudiments of literacy.
Before 1880 no state even had an effective compulsory education
law. Mobility usually depended on
connections, marriage, capital, skills gotten through work, strong work habits,
sobriety and ingenuity. As this system
of advance eroded, school took over.
They thus socialized humans and advanced them where the community had
previously done both.
Not so much the college
bound academics, but the physical, mental, emotional growth, interests aptitudes,
present and future relationships became foci.
Schooling for life. Complicating this mission was that in 1908
71.5% of students had foreign-born fathers in NY. 57.8 in other 37
other cities was found. 40.4 percent
were retarded (behind in their work) the Dillingham Commission found. They were overage, not performing, not
progressing and not learning.
P. 43 Keeping
them in longer was facilitated by fights against child labor and stronger
school attendance laws. By 1920 they had
been successful on both fronts. By 1930,
90.0 percent of all fourteen and fifteen year old children of native white
parents were in school, while 91.3 percent of mixed and 92.6 of immigrant parentage
were in school. But this brought in
those who were most often failures.
Retardation showed that something was wrong with the schools and the
kids.
P. 46 A
brief history of Binet’s test and Louis Terman and WW I IQ testing
follows. Continuing, results were
correlated with differences in region, education, race and country of origin of
WW I draftees. The public was riveted by
lower scores for blacks and recent Italian and Slav immigrants on tests
administered in English and native languages.
Thus the army made racist arguments, not conclusively, but
publicly. This intensified awareness of
individual and group differences.
Binet wasn’t concerned
with how much of your intelligence was from the environment and how much from
nature. But we took to its promise of
measuring innate and unchanging potential like a fish to water, a bird to the
sky and a building to the city. Perhaps
that is because it offered the promise of being able to deal with all these
different sorts of peoples in an efficient and easy to conceptualize way. It seemed to stand apart from culture and
captured our concern with race and education.
Progressives were confused
by the intersection of race and culture.
The use of IQ had an influence on the immigration exclusion acts of the
1920s. But it was a mixture of racism
and culturism.
IQ allowed the educators
to shift the blame of inadequate school to the inadequacy of the pupils.
Pg 51Education reformers,
such as Mr. Dewey, shifted emphasis from the acquisition of the accumulated
wisdom of the past, to the unfolding of your inner potential.
Edward Cubberly wrote the
introduction to Lewis Terman’s The Measurement
of Intelligence. He said that choice
of study, juvenile delinquency and separation into tracks could be done via
IQ. It was convenient that schools, hit
with a huge task, could limit aspirations via IQ. For all this to work, the thing measured by
IQ had to be reified. Again, separation
into tracks for the better fitting of individuals was a big implication of
IQ.
The reliance on IQ
narrowed Dewey’s “whole-child” approach.
One facet of the individual was to be emphasized. It would be mean spirited and wrong to say
that educators used IQ to exclude newer immigrants. The switch from the idea of acquiring
information to the process of learning facilitated this trend.
Pg. 56 Schools were also
urged to provide other social services.
The schools never became the vital centers of community life envisioned
by educators. They became more than just
learning centers though. Free lunches, nurses guidance clinics, speech therapy, summer recreation,
and other services joined in the mission.
Though ad hoc in the 1920s, these services came to be seen as integral
to equal educational opportunity by the late 30s.
Leonard Covello got
Italian introduced as a language option in high schools. His vision of a
community school is one that respects and affects the community of the district
everyday. But this was respecting the
immigrant culture, on the one hand, and an attempt to tame it on the
other. The visiting teacher was an
example of this. They were to remediate
the family and if necessary report misconduct to SPC officials.
Reaching out to the
community was also expressed in having courses for al levels of folks. Black people at
By 1930, when 60 percent of
all high-school age youth were in school, the motives for attendance were more
varied. But once schools limited you via
vocational training, what they could offer you –in terms of a better life – was
cheapened. Businessmen preferred folks
with general, rather than specific, skills.
Skills taught were often outdated as they were being taught.
P. 67 With
child labor laws, kids were not at work.
How to keep them in the school and off the streets? John Dewey saw mental and manual work as
intimately related. The commercial
tracks were to keep the less desirable’s kids accounted for. So the new democratic schools were less about
adapting the kids to what they needed, in some respects, than confirming preconceived
notions about them. And IQ testing,
vocational education, age grouping, systematic tracking became what were what
educators of the time came to think of when the word “progressive was used.” It was not Dewey’s vision of releasing
potentials for social progress, rather it was the need
for efficiency. Every person was pegged
to go where they were best suited from top to bottom came to be what was meant
by democratic education. Intellect had
notin’ to do wit it. This was in part
based on the ‘realization’ that not all the eggs in the basket are sharp.
Our unity was not to be
taught explicitly as to derive from our having been individually and
efficiently sorted.
-- Chapter Three –
“Americanizing” the High Schools:
P.
73 Children of immigrants, in the 1930s, were moving into high schools and even
colleges. High school used to be a major
unattainable achievement for most. Some
used them on the way to college. Most
never saw them. We now link them up with
elementary schools as much as we do with colleges. Age, not level of academic achievement, came
to make you a high school student. These
became, in the thirties, signs that your ethnic enclave had arrived as he
schools, like the neighborhoods, were ethnic enclaves.
Making Americans was to be
done based on the adolescent’s proclivity for clannishness. They would learn to be decent citizens by
self-directing their own social, civic, athletic and academic affairs. Extra curricular affairs took off.
Training for leadership
and school spirit became goals and the extracurricular activities became the
repository for the old common school ideal.
Having fun exploring who you potentially are became important. And these after school activities became a
messier fit for the science of education.
In the 30s and 40s 4/5th participated in some club. P. 80
She did an ethnic analysis of the clubs.
Jews and native whites were always over represented in the clubs. Jews were more active than native
whites. Italians and Germans didn’t join
as much. Blacks and Irish were between
the Italians and Germans and the whites and Jews.
Irish men never joined
science, orchestra or dramatics. Jews
and Blacks didn’t do much religious stuff.
No black was a student body president or head editor. 3/4ths of blacks were in groups, but the
range they were in was narrow. They did
tons of track team activity. They did a
little basketball, but not many other sports.
Jews did basketball, natives did football. Perhaps track being individual and
non-contact was more comfortable for blacks.
Women did not differentiate so much in sports.
Women were less ethnically
oriented overall. But Jewish women did
literary activities. When a woman was an
editor it was a Jew. Italians, blacks
and Irish did not do newspapers. The
exception was yearbook. Whites and Irish
headed them. Irish men, natives and even
Germans were overrepresented as class presidents, but especially native whites
were. Jews, Italians and blacks were
underrepresented. Jews were president in
overwhelmingly Jewish schools. In lower
offices, Irish were still overrepresented.
Celebrity status went to
whites (whatever “celebrity status” is).
Males for achievements and females for their beauty
and grace. Jewish men achieved
this more than Jewish women.
Jewish men dominated
academic clubs such as science. Native
men also participated. Italians, Germans
and Irish were only weakly involved and blacks not at all. Jewish women did not do academic clubs. Italian women were the strongest in academic
clubs in sharp contrast to Italian men.
Jews and Irish began to send women to school much earlier and keep them
there longer. Only the most academically
ambitious Italian women were encouraged to stay. After blacks, Italians were the poorest and
most likely to need to drop out for monetary reasons. If anyone was going to graduate, from an
Italian family, they would push the boy as a future breadwinner.
P. 89-90 Ethnic
stereotypes are often not across both genders.
In social activities we see the strongest correlation between ethnicity
and participation patterns. Jews did
more extracurricular generally than others and more in service too. Blacks made a good showing here. This might confirm their desire to
participate being channeled into less high profile activities. Little teamwork was needed here so the risk
of exclusion was less.
Jews and Irish went
separate ways on politics, sports and politics v literary activities, science
and academic clubs. Native men were
least restricted in their choices but high profile in social ones.
P. 92 There are three routs to assimilation: schools where native
patterns dominated, schools where one ethnic group dominated or schools where
no one was in control.
George Washington high
school was rich,
Jews participated less
vigorously at SP than at other schools.
As the majority, they didn’t need to strive as hard, they could assume
social acceptability. The one area where
they totally dominated was politics.
The GW Jewish experience
was very different. Jews were active
strivers at GW but they didn’t capture positions with power and prestige. Native men took these (presidencies,
yearbook, football, celebrities). Jewish
women were less affected and were all over.
The folks at GW had
arrived economically and Italians were, thus, uncharacteristically active. They for once ignored football and did social
stuff. They avoided the Jewish dominated
academic clubs. Academics, formal and informal, at GW were
even more than elsewhere a Jewish arena for achievement.
Native men were one-fifth
the population at GW and held one-half of the celebrity positions. They represented the archetypal ideal of
assimilation.
P. 96 Evander Childs and
New Ultrecht were suburban, largely white and lower-middle to middle
class. At EC Jews (44%) and Italians
(17%) met a large contingent of natives (19%) who had previously
dominated. NU was more Jewish.
At NU Italians were
underrepresented in the social world (Jews controlled these). Italian men tended to cluster in the glee
club, religious clubs and football and showed an unusual interest in
academics. Italian and Jewish separation
suggests both marked distinctions in choices and the probable exclusion of
Italians from the most sensitive political and social areas.
At EC Italians ruled
social activities. Blacks were absent
from most activities other than service where 75 percent of all black men were
involved and in track which had ½ of the black men. Native men were in every part of EC’s
extracurricular world. As was true at
GW, Jews were bested by natives for the most prestigious posts, the
presidencies and editorships.
P. 98 The
differences in the experiences of Jews and Italians at EC and NU seems to have
had less to do with the economics than with the demographics of the schools and
their surrounding neighborhoods. Between
1933 and 1945 the Italian population went from 10 to 23 percent as the native
population shrunk from 26 to 14. They
were rising where as in NU they were a constant minority by a slim margin. At EC Italians were not an
outgroup but one of several minorities.
At Theodore Roosevelt High
School (TR) in the
P. 99 But
elections to the presidency, a source of evidence for her shows, six male
presidents – three native, one Irish and Jewish and one Italian. Sure, Natives are overrepresented, but this
is far from exclusionary (except for blacks).
Still she points out that Irish and Natives controlled 2/3rds of the
presidencies while only being 1/5th of the population.
Italian men made an
unusually strong showing in academics there.
One woman was elected president, Irish, other
political offices were dominated by Irish women too. The marked preference of Jewish women for
literary activities is nowhere better illustrated than at TR. Jewish men apparently, far more than Jewish
women, felt the brunt of power.
Bay Ridge was and is an
all female school. It was thus
considered safe and so a lot of Italian women (highly protected by their
culture) went. Italian women participated much more widely here and so show the
above. It was also largely non-Jewish
(6%) but
regardless of environment Jewish women were into literary interests. Italian women dominating social clubs may
reflect the lack of religious clubs. The
four black women were highly active. Women
tended in all schools to demonstrate fewer sharply defined ethnic
patterns.
P. 102 High School of
Commerce was uni-sex and vocational. It
had a lot of Irish and blacks. Irish who
couldn’t get into Catholic schools often went vocational. Blacks went from 3 percent in 1933 to 15
percent in 1947. Jews went from 31 to 15
percent in the same times. Jews led in
student activities. All
editors, two of nine presidents, but no science. Irish were heavy in politics and other
political offices and sports. They also
eschewed science.
Germans, here, and at
other schools clustered heavily. They
were prominent among presidents glee club and
drama.
Perhaps the prominence of
Jews in extracurricular reflects that it looks good on college apps and they were
going. But choices
clustering also reflects ethnic preference even among those who viewed
their parents old world affiliations with disdain or pain.
Ethnic groups had
different experiences at different schools.
Woman often made different choices than their ethnic brothers. And ethnicity seems to not have been as
consistently expressed by women as men. Economics
had an effect Italians and blacks did more at schools where their escape from
poverty allowed them to. People did mix a lot.
Natives had prestige, Jews had academic ambition and blacks had
exclusion generally. Irish and Italians dominated religious clubs. These were features of the larger world that
they were introduced to in public school.
Ethnicity was a strong source of guidance and a continuing source of
identification within the mass culture and the impersonality of the school. The schools not only did not succeed in
destroying the ethnic affiliations of the students, it encouraged and supported
and therefore, strengthened them.
P. 109 Here she walks a
fine line between blame for the schools creating this situation and failure to
appreciate the strength of cultures. “A
Jew, in most places, found a richer set of contexts for personal development
and more social approval than an Italian.”
Found or made?
P. 110 “In education, we
are all more or less progressive, since we assume that doing well academically
is a positive objective, and therefore anything that inhibits this – race, sex,
class, ethnicity – is an impediment to progress.” Not all associations that reduce academic
achievement are bad. These reflect
different expressions of and strategies of assimilation. Schools blunted the edges of cultures,
allowing some characteristics and stopping others. It identified strengths of groups and helped
them in a socially approving manner.
P. 111 “Separating culture
from society may be useful heuristically, but it has neither the feel of
reality nor the sense of history.” The
immigrant child was not just like his parents.
The ethnic groups experienced each other in a space and shaped that
space.
Part Two -
OTHER PEOPLE, OTHER SCHOOLS: RACE, SEX, RELIGION, AND AMERICAN EDUCATION
-- Chapter Four –
New Day Coming: The Federal Government and Black Education
in the 1930’s and ‘40s
P. 116 Intro quote says it
is unjust to have healthy illiterates (re: black) unaffected at home while
others (re: white) go fight.
Blacks were small in NYC
where progressives were and were treated as if they did not exist by most
education policy makers. In the 30s and
40s blacks rarely saw high schools. They
were largely illiterate. FDR’s putting
the Federal government into education changed this. The opening of schools to immigrants had
never resulted in a federal policy or significantly disturbed politics. Most progressives saw themselves as above
politics and Federal involvement was seen as unconstitutional. The Federal government came in when optimism
was hurting in the 1930s and during the war.
As such it saw black education not as a pedagogical issue, but a social
issue.
On the eve of the Great
Depression Hoover appointed a National Advisory Committee on Education. Issued in 1931 it suggested that some of the
increasingly expensive schooling be paid for by the Federal government. This was partially urged due to the
recognition of how uneven school expenditures were in the country. This was acceptable as long as it “does not
delegate to the Federal Government any control of the social purpose and
specific purposes of education.” At the
end of the report the presidents of Negro institutions of higher learning asked
for some state proportionality in spending on blacks. The report overall thought that black
education would develop as the needs of the black people developed. Schooling was not a force for social reform,
and equal schooling could not produce social equality.
P. 120 Throughout
the 1930s the NEA would stand behind the
FDR had no education
agenda. Caliver was a frustrated
surveyor and meeting organizer. The
Office of Education only thought in terms of general monies. The New Deal entered education parallel to public
state education.
Hopkins and Ickes
administered the Alphabet soup to provide relief. They did school construction and repair,
teacher employment, courses in literacy and naturalization, vocational training
and rehabilitation, nursery schools, correspondence courses, educational radio
programs. They did no education policy
at all. The CCC originally thought the
participants would pick up what they needed to learn on the job. It became clear that they needed direct
instruction, especially in literacy. They
also created academic programs just to occupy folks. By 1938 – 39 more than 90 percent of the
members of the corps were enrolled in some instruction, averaging four hours
per week.
In 1937 Congress formally organized their educational programs by giving
each camp a school building.
p. 124 the NYA was even
more administratively fragmented. Established
as an autonomous part of the WPA in 35, it was to allow students in secondary
school and colleges to continue their education. They helped 500,000 a year, but had no
contact with the Office of Education until 1940.
There were also
educational programs run by the WPA. It
also professed no education policy. But
all New Deal programs spoke to the nature and role of education in
P. 126 Aubrey Williams
told a Harvard audience that the division between academic and vocational
education had been overdone. It was a
hold over of the difference between the gentleman and the laborer. He said that such a division was dangerous to
our democracy. He then did the standard,
and largely true, denial that the federal government had interfered in the
local control of education. They had
worked outside of the classroom, but touched those previously ignored and
raised the specter of social reform. It
showed the Feds could have a role in economics and education.
Finally the New Deal
program’s attention to the problem of blacks was wholly unprecedented. Of course, Mary McLeod
Bethune, president of the National Council of Negro Women (appointed to serve
as head of the Negro Affairs Office in the NYA, was behind much of this
attention. 100,000 black adults
were reported to have learned to read and write because of the WPA
program. Williams also saw black
progress as a top priority. 300,000
black youth participated in the NYA. A
special fund only applied to blacks and helped 4000 college and graduate
students.
CCC camps were
segregated. In response to any slight
pressure CCC camps for Negroes were cancelled or moved. The CCC was run by the War Department, the
NYA run by Williams and Ickes was able to do more. Its ad hoc nature allowed Bethune to have
much influence that shielded FDR from political implications. The program was especially strong in
P. 133 These programs also
created professional black leadership dedicated to black advances. It propelled them towards demands for
justice.
P. 134 The
NEA largely thought the Federal Education programs a threat to their power and
democracy. But the New Deal did not lay
foundations for post-depression programs.
So the New Deal, in part, raised expectations it could not fulfill. Also, the New Deal programs did nothing to
break down the separate but equal situation.
In
The reports
recommendations were not adopted as WW II interrupted all and gave power back
to the NEA.
P. 139 The
War did not stop federal education, but switched it to the Department of
War. They were not interested in justice
but an immediate payoff in manpower. It
also put the Army in the glare of nervous publicity concerning inequality.
From the beginning of the
war blacks were about twice as often to be categorized as 4-F and be rejected
for service. The situation was worse in the
South. 80 percent of the blacks were in
classes IV and V on the Army General Classification Test (AGCT), as against
30-40% of whites. 41% of whites and 17%
of blacks had graduated high school between 1941-5, but this statistic does not
address the shorter years and lower teacher standards at black high schools. Three of four black registrants came from the
South.
P. 142 Induction standards
were first at 4th grade level and John Hershey, selective service
director, thought everyone in
P. 145 Mental capacity,
rather than literacy, was made the criteria for induction of all
personnel. In June, 1943 all limits on
the induction of illiterates were lifted.
Between this time and
The STUs were
segregated. 1,271 of the 5,291 teachers
were black. The goals were a modest
fourth grade level and understanding of war aims. The maximum stay was 12 weeks with some 16
week exceptions. Failures left with an
honorable discharge. The Army was never
satisfied but Ginzberg and Bray noted that only 10 percent were failures in
school and their military performance was adequate, as good as that of
comparable soldiers who had not required instruction in literacy. Schooling helped 348,000 illiterates during
the war and another 35,000 in the Navy 45 % of whom were black.
Ginzberg and Bray found
that one-half of the graduates of STUs sought further instruction after the war
under the GI Bill. Blacks were equal to
whites in their postwar pursuit of education.
And more than whites, they sought non-agricultural learning.
The implications went
beyond the particular attainments of the participants. The army realized that the AGCT was partially
an achievement test. Whereas inferiority
was the bombshell of the WW I induction procedure, illiteracy was of the WW II
one. By the end of the war the army had
pub itself on record as supporting the teachability of blacks. They used the better than whites graduation
rate of blacks from the STUs to prove it.
They got to the fourth-grade level faster than whites did.
At
Caliver, who headed the
Office of Education for three decades and was always an outsider in policy
pushed for Adult Education. But remedial
education seemed less important in the 1950s than cutting edge science to the
Feds.
P. 154 On the eve of the
Brown decision, Ginzberg and Bray wrote of how weird it was that the poor
inequitable distribution of education in
-- Chapter Five –
The Female Paradox: Higher Education for Women,
1945 -63
Women entered education
concern differently than blacks or minorities.
They had always done well in school and did not figure in the IQ
debates. Apart from the special
vocational offerings for them, the curriculum for women and others was
equal. Women had politely taken their high
school degrees and retreated to homes.
P. 157 However, women in
the middle of the 19th century began to vocally demand and receive
places in institutions of higher learning.
It was in the area of voluntary higher education that women began to
create a ruckus. By 1920 they
represented almost one-half of all college enrollments. During the war they were more than half. The female paradox was that women were receiving
more education than they needed and this became a big issue in post-WW II
times. By 1950 the proportion of women
in institutions had plummeted to 30 percent, lower than at any point in the
twentieth century.
P. 158-9 White thought
that women’s arts, cooking, should be honored with a place in the college
curriculum. This was taken seriously as
a progressive and democratic use of education.
In the late twentieth century women’s education had been thought of as
equal. That was when Latin and classical
studies dominated. In the early
twentieth it went to broad based liberal arts – a broadly non-utilitarian
education whose stated goal is a lively familiarity with the full range of
civilized thought and activity in the sciences, arts, humanities and social
sciences. Liberal Arts came to be the
touchstone of women’s ed. In the 1920s and 1930s a
more mother prep curriculum was advocated.
A course on Euthenics, or
race development, at Vassar emphasized the responsibility of women for human
survival via child development. This was
again progressive as it was a scientific sorting proper to the age. It involved hands on teaching methods. Late forties and early fifty’s were all about
the family and colleges prepared women in droves for this. Liberal arts would not fit them and/or make
them discontent.
Between 1920 and 1940 the
percentage of folks getting degrees went from 3.5 to 9.7. During the same time it went from 1.7 to 6.6
for women. Many went without attaining
a degree. Time magazine and the country
were generally upset that women were wasting their time with liberal arts when
they could get a practical women’s education.
White was seeking to ennoble women’s education as university worthy.
P. 165 WW II sent women to
work and into laboratories. After the War women employment steadily increased. By 1957 they were 22 million strong and
accounted for one-third of the total work force. ¼ were divorced or widowed. The college educated were
more likely to be working and stayed longer.
47% were employed outside of the home.
Only 30% of those with less education. This especially was women over 30. Educators started to see that women had to be
educated for dual careers. The
Technical and Junior
colleges took the lead in creating appropriate curriculum beyond the regular
shift back to Liberal Arts. Medical
records, stenography, dental hygiene and business arts were offered. These did not challenge traditional schools cause they were work oriented. Some were worried that women were being
shuttled into dead-end programs. They
used the vision of shifting women’s lives to shore up the utility of a general
liberal arts education. These debates,
on the whole, backed up the pro-liberal arts position.
P. 171 The
American Association of University Women said the triple goal of career, happy
home and service to her fellow man was best attained via Liberal Ed. Homemaking was seen as a career as much as
any other so the home versus career dichotomy is false. Liberal Arts was an
investment in family intelligence. It
was ironic that liberal arts curriculum was the banner of woman’s equal
attainment in the beginning of the twentieth century later became a broad
banner to wrap around her matrimonial girdle.
White started the 1950s, by the 1960s women’s
needs were seen as so broad that nothing but a new version of liberal arts
would do.
Mueller was forward
thinking in that she wanted full professional education for women. She was willing to do what few other
participants in the discussion of the fifties were willing to do, to dismiss
the issue of woman’s family role as irrelevant to her schooling. Studies found women did want marriage and
children before twenty five and three kids.
Not being engaged as a college senior was a stigma for most women. Lack of role models and fears about
demonstrating “masculine” characteristics, feelings of female inadequacy and
the general cultural assumptions created this, Heist’s report said. No women thought that they would never
marry. Some saw this as a result of the
education of youth and others as inborn in women.
P. 180 Komarovsky defended
liberal education against, manual work for women. She saw the problem not in the college, but
in society not allowing women to flower in any direction they could. This was not the college’s fault.
Women were walking around
with a matrimonial dream in front of them and so did not take their studies
seriously enough. Still the liberal
curriculum created conflicts concerning roles and self-conceptions. It also hurt them in the schools as they
thought being outstanding academically hurt their chances of getting a
date. And their college careers were not
designed to create professional momentum.
They were aimed at a job after
children, not a career. Being in school
took away from their early childbearing and pretty years and so set them
back. And they thought they’d pick up
how to run a house on the job. They were
not being served by the liberal arts curriculum in either way. It was not until later in their suburbs that
they thought about the wasted resources of the college days.
P. 185 We have now settled into an aggressive pattern of equal rights
for professional preparation. We can
easily dismiss the questions of the past.
But we can see that the educating of women who would not be entering the
work force was not a chimera for society then.
Limited family and social resources exist. Schools exist within a specific cultural
context that defines the problems they are asked to address and usually sets the
limits of their effective action.
White’s vision lost, in
part, because the universities as research institutions could not just retool
so quickly. Thus liberal arts came to be
central to the curriculum instead of function or utility. It was a preparation for graduate studies. But students were not satisfied with this
reasoning. No wonder women panicked in
their senior years. If they did not get
married, liberal arts didn’t prepare them for much professionally. Liberal arts as a focus shows that a
university bent on educating the masses cannot be all things to all folks.
-- Chapter Six –
Imitation and Autonomy: Catholic Education in
the Twentieth Century
Catholic schools were a
reaction to the public schools taking up more and more of socialization. This is a countercurrent, from one perspective,
to the death of social life currently decried.
From the 1860s or so, shortly after public schools really took off,
Catholic schools have been a reaction, to them.
Hap the public schools not expanded aggressively in the twentieth century, it is safe to say that the Catholic schools would
have stayed a small expression of community autonomy. Instead, by mid 20th they educated
14 percent of school kids and in 1962 included five and a half million
children.
Not all Catholic children
have been able to find a space in them.
Only 50% of Catholics got in.
P. 191 Catholic schools
are in the Thomist rationalist psychology tradition. They heavily emphasize character formation,
discipline, the unity of learning and high levels of
academic proficiency. This was true long
after public schools redirected their interest from the subject to the
child. They also resisted the adjustment
model. They have seen the difference
between their schools and the secular as the difference between ideal and
material. They are first and foremost defined
by being religious.
But these schools have had
to deal with ethnicity, language, academic evaluation, and competition with
public schools. They have the same
universe of problems that other schools have.
Not until the 1930s did
much Catholic education go beyond the 6th grade. Based on the parish, these were small local
homogeneous communities without funds for high school. They could not provide the wide curriculum of
a high school.
The push for these schools came from child labor laws and compulsory
education laws.
By
1949 nearly 500,000 students went to Catholic high schools. Over a million by 1960. But 1/3rd were run by private
religious orders.
Many
Catholics did not attend them, due to lack of facilities and selective admission
and promotion policies. They selected
their students academically and let the public schools take the rest.
After
World War Two increased enrollment meant they had to widen the curriculum to
include non-college prep stuff. But it
was still an extension to Latin teaching.
James Coleman in the 1980s found that seniors in Catholic schools had
taken more math, science, English and foreign language. They were about
discipline and academics more than the child centered,
utilitarian values of public schools.
Pg.
198 the Reverend John F. Dwyer, in 1936, said “Culture, or the building up of
individual character, is best accomplished by means of general and not specific
training. No better way of imparting
these skills [mental discipline] has yet been found than the old classical
course.” Certainly it is not in those
schools and systems where a false theory of democracy dictates the curriculum,
and makes the slowest boy of the slowest class the norm of the group’s
achievement; and where the curriculum is solicitously fitted to take in the
lazy dullard who belongs in school only by the fiat of American education law.”
Wide
offerings were considered synonymous with academic watering down. Plus these schools did not have money to
expand beyond the core. 50% of the
schools excluded those of below normal I.Q.
Many also had academic standards for admission and more than half an
entrance exam. The median IQ for 12th
graders was in the 74th percentile.
They also preferred native born Irish and German Catholics to immigrants, poles and
others. Only 10% were immigrants from
non-English speaking countries. At a time when the large majority of Catholic parents were
immigrants. The Pastors did not
encourage newer immigrant children to continue to college.
This
made them extremely effect agents of a specifically Catholic form of
Americanization, since German and Irish natives were the status groups. Ethnic hierarchy within Catholic education is
usually not talked about. But this has
paid off in success. More Catholics who
go to Catholic high school go to college than public schoolers.
The
traditionalism of Catholic schools did not go unchallenged. Progressive forces touting the unique
potential of each child exerted influence.
But most never spoke John Dewey’s name without venom. They thought they taught the whole child,
spiritually. The fundamental unity of
the human personality, values, purposes, and relationship to God were one.
One
Catholic did not like the exclusion or the humiliation those who could not
handle abstract curriculum were subjected to.
They were teaching children, not subjects as the cant goes.
P.
207 By late 1940s and 1950s IQ was a huge part of Catholic administration. Even a religious institution had to use “scientific”
techniques for pedagogical efficiency. They had to deal with the pressure to adopt
public school trends and defend their conservative ways. Extracurricular activities
for example. The public schools
had created popular ways to get youth buy in, Catholics mostly got parental
buy-in. Low teacher prep and finances
meant that they had to rely on pride to defend their schools.
J.
O’Connell in Are Catholic Schools
Progressive? Tore into John Dewey. His naturalism
was most hated. Also his denial of sin
and depravity the denial of the duality of man’s nature, the denial to the
teacher of an effective role in shaping the child’s mind and will, the denial
of real ends and purpose to education.
They said the techniques could be incorporated without accepting the
philosophy that gave birth to them.
But
they accepted some of these techniques and thus Catholic schools were
Americanized by the 1950s.
There
have always been more female students in Catholic schools than male. The parents, being conservative, were
probably drawn to the segregation by gender.
This allowed the Church to talk frankly about the women’s matrimonial
role. This may explain why college was
less attractive to Catholic females than males.
Those
who went to college were to know that the perfection of love is service. Female catholic colleges did not have to
leave the fold to adopt the liberal arts curriculum others touted for
females. They also became very
professionally oriented after WW II. But
liberal arts as prep for parenting was a focus. It allowed moms to avoid emotional decisions
and rather be led by reason and faith.
Pg.
217 Catholic schools segregated out black students. This was well into the seventies. Blacks never taught whites. Catholics have shunned vocational education,
but used it in predominantly black schools.
As late as 1957 they established all black schools. In 1960 they were still doing it in
practice. They have historically had
segregated churches and congregations.
Black nuns could not find colleges to train them in the South.
Well
into the twenties and thirties Catholics were being taught religion in their
parent’s language. Blacks were taught
black history and black pride. But there was no linguistic rational for black schools. They were there to keep them away from
whites.
While
every Catholic child belongs to Christ’s Mystical Body, immigrant children also
belong to distinct communities. Ethnic
conflict within the church and resentments about Irish control of the hierarchy
forced the American church to a de facto fragmentation of parishes by
ethnicity. They used native tongue
instruction to keep loyalty of new immigrant groups.
Polish
sisters, staffed at a Lithuanian school were accused of teaching Polish
ways. The protection of first-born pride
schools meant the schooling received was uneven.
The
parish schools were a great transition institution for immigrants. They bridged language and cultural gaps. NOTE THAT this was a need. The cultural adjustment is not
automatic. Poles were very devoted to
Catholic schools. Italians preferred
public school. The ethnic identities of
Catholic schools started to subside by the interwar years. Still Irish were the most enthusiastic,
Italians and Hispanics less so.
By the sixties people went because they did not
like public schools, ethnic and linguistic considerations were gone.
In
1955 sociologists Peter and Alice Rossi found Catholic school attendees to be
more ambitious and less family oriented than Catholics in public school. Ethnicity had been replaced by the triple
melting pot of Protestant, Catholic and Jewish.
James
Coleman found blacks in Catholic schools were nearly as ambitious as whites. Catholic schools by the late 1970s were
integrating institutions for advancement, not ethnic schools for the poor.
The
Catholic school has always been a blend of ideals and expediency, but always
thought to be more than a tool for adaptation.
Catholic
schools advantages were the ability to select, but also like-mindedness. The parents were all motivated. They could also ignore problems by shipping
them to the public school. They had all
the advantages of local control without most of the disadvantages. The parents submitted to the higher ups as
they had intimacy with them. If you didn’t
like it you could leave to public school.
The
academic emphasis became attractive to the ambitious. Their traditionalism went from being a source
of defensiveness to a source of pride. They
did selective adoption of the progressive precepts.
P.
228 James Coleman showed Catholic students out achieve
public school kids regardless of class and ethnic background. Their students divisions of
class, race and ethnicity while public schools echo them. It has done so by homogenizing their backgrounds
in a way that public schools were supposed to but failed to do. Ironically the less democratic Catholic
schools have registered more democratic gains.
Coleman
said the difference is in the specific form of Catholic instruction. Coleman has suggested more choice to increase
the homogeneity of the parental backgrounds also.
------CONCLUSION-----
Pg.
229 Citizenship, morality, mobility, assimilation and now justice and equality
have been the goals of schools. They
have taken the place of church in our unity and offered paths to
salvation. The evangelical tone of
reformers makes the religion of education analogy truer.
It
has also embodied liberal values: Individual self realization and freely
available opportunities. It aims
squarely at this world and so gets caught in its quagmires.
The
outsider has forced the hand of the schools out into the open.
In
the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the social problem of
immigration was the preeminent issue for schools. They gave control and the language of
opportunity to the situation. By the
second and third decades the magnitude of immigration and diversity meant they
had to refine their methods and thus adopted IQ. This unnecessarily reified group differences,
yet was an attempt at meritocracy.
The
tension between control and diversity was complicated by the children’s
reluctance to give up their ethnicity.
Schools created the ability of ethnic groups to have somewhat different,
while, similar experiences.
The
belief that all had their particular place at the table was a bad bargain for
blacks. Blacks have also, however,
embraced the gospel of education. The
New Deal and WW II allowed them to enter the education church. They entered into what Mary Bethune called “the
American program.” The Army showed blacks could learn.
WW
II also had a huge impact on women.
Women’s role in schools had been solid, but their role in society was
not.
It
is ironic that American education liberalism has permitted the development of
Catholic schools which are in no small way opposed to liberalism. Public schools have recently started to learn
from their example. This is in some ways
too bad as the public schools have embraced the progressive education
agenda. They have thus been able to keep
their doors wide open to all levels of ability and commitment and stressed that
the goals of individuals are as important as those of society.