The Troubled Crusade: American Education 1945-1980
Turner, John R.
THE TROUBLED CRUSADE: AMERICAN EDUCATION 1945-1980 Diane Ravitch/Basic Books/S19.95 John R. Turner Dealing with a subject as diverse as American schooling over a 35-year period requires...
...In her analysis of upheavals at the University of California, Columbia, San Francisco State, Cornell, and Yale, she has little good to say about the student radicals, quoting with approval Eugene Genovese's designation of them as "pseudo-revolutionary middle class totalitarians...
...If Americans ever get up enough gumption to take back control of educational policy, and reintroduce the diversity that ought to characterize the schools of a free nation, it will be in part because they have understood the process by which the educational professoriate projected itself into power...
...One can find pretty much what he looks for...
...The problem with legends in their own time is that they are sometimes hard reading, and none was harder than Bernard M. Baruch...
...Ravitch's approach to educational history is that it seldom pushes through to results that count...
...In treading on religious ground she has to expect to draw the lightning...
...Her chapter entitled "From Berkeley to Kent State," for example, which recounts the campus uprisings of the sixties and seventies, is one of the more engaging sections of the book because it deals with specific acts, and because it allows the author to lay aside the mantle of historical objectivity, rise out of the mushy conclusions dictated by educational data, and say what she thinks...
...But much of him was and remains hidden, like those old-fashioned high top Sears Roebuck shoes that a photc r chanced to see Baruch Edwin M. Yo , Jr...
...A great deal of money had been spent and ambitious claims had been made...
...Everyone of a certain age remembers him, this adviser to Presidents, very rich (though not, it turns out, as rich as people often thought), a man who preferred a sunny bench in Lafayette Park to the corridors of power...
...by 1977 the number had grown to almost a thousand...
...Theflaw in Mrs...
...A history of schooling that says virtually nothing about what actually took place in the minds of students leaves something to be desired...
...She exhibits no inclination toward individual perception and so makes scarcely any use of anecdotal evidbnce...
...John R. Turner is Director of Continuing Education at St...
...wearing one day while sitting crosslegged in the park...
...She knows also that the government's weakness in the face of pressure groups means that political initiatives can be ruinous to genuine learning...
...The problem with any assumption about a subject as vast as the schools of an entire nation is that it is inevitably more a product of political and historiographical stance than it is of evidence...
...Between 1956 and 1975, the National Science Foundation funded 53 projects designed to spruce up the teaching of mathematics and science by weaning teachers from their dependence on textbooks and memorization exercises...
...Mary's College of Maryland and author of the column "'An Idea of Freedom...
...James Grant, a lively financial journalist, had the excellent idea of using Baruch's Wall Street adventures as a sort of aperture to the inner man...
...By the midseventies these efforts were generally seen as failures by the educational community...
...is a columnist f o r the Washin~,.vn Post and other newspapers...
...THE TROUBLED CRUSADE: AMERICAN EDUCATION 1945-1980 Diane Ravitch/Basic Books/S19.95 John R. Turner Dealing with a subject as diverse as American schooling over a 35-year period requires thematic discipline...
...Bernard Baruch came out of Reconstruction South Carolina, the...
...Consequently, not only does her book seldom penetrate to the heart of her subject, it also makes for fairly dry THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1984 35 reading except in those sections where she has a political story to tell...
...Particularly in the natural sciences, the NSF curricula had found wide acceptance, and were being used in 60 percent of the nation's school districts...
...Baruch knew this...
...Though she clearly regrets the bureaucratic invasion, and the consequent loss of coherence, she is also strongly impressed by the sheer physical growth of education...
...Ravitch, that all this represents learning, there can be no question that the schools now are better than they were at the end of the Second World War...
...It's hard to know what "significant" means in this case...
...And certainly, it doesn't tell us what the effect was...
...Yet her special scorn is reserved for weakkneed faculty members and bumbling administrators who gave the agitators the ammunition they needed to win temporary support from student majorities who did not really agree with the radical aims...
...Science and mathematics were taught pretty much as they had been before...
...The corresponding weakness is an absence of information about what actually went on in the classroom...
...Years after leaving the stock exchange, he would shrewdly say that the best book on the psychology of the market was an obscure historical tome, Mackay's Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness o f Crowds...
...BERNARD BARUCH: THE ADVENTURES OF A WALL STREET LEGEND James Grant/Simon and Schuster/S19.95 Edwin M. Yoder, Jr...
...Diane Ravitch is what I would call a conservative liberal--as contrasted with the progressive liberal to one side of her and the liberal conservative tothe other...
...Yet, according to the common view, not much had happened...
...Though the schools had not been transformed, some changes had occurred...
...The Bart~ch legend is grounded in the tribute Americans usually pay to men of, or reputed to have, financial genius...
...The author's attitude toward these developments is not as decided as the foregoing statement might suggest...
...Through eight dense chapters Mrs...
...Her summary of this much reported segment of American educational history is the most sensible short account I have seen...
...Not so, says Mrs...
...And historians like Mrs...
...As Mrs...
...Ravitch concludes: "Lost in the new order of things was any conception of the common interest, the idea that made common schooling possible...
...Therefore, the author asserts, the NSF "can be judged to have achieved a significant influence through its relatively small investment...
...The progressives claimed to have made a science of pedagogy, and they were successful in selling that idea to the nation...
...The cost of assuring educational access to everyone--aside from billions of dollars--has been intense confusion about what education is supposed to be...
...The number of buildings built, the number of teachers trained, the number of graduates certified, and the number of dollars spent since 1945 are astounding...
...Just about as good is her chapter on the rise and fall of progressive education, which I suspect will receive more attention than all other parts of the book put together...
...Though Mrs...
...And if one adheres to her view of valid evidence, she's right...
...She is a social scientific historian and places her faith in data, statistics, and "studies" based on them...
...Ravitch gives the early progressive thinkers, and especially John Dewey, credit for urging a needed liberalization of teaching methods, she sees that the major role of progressive thought was to serve as the intellectual vehicle for the bureaucratization of the schools...
...Her heart is with government reform, but her head tells her that the government often fouls up what it touches, and that it is particularly inept in dealing with the subtleties of education...
...Not that fame was the only source of his fame...
...Baruch had it...
...Grant's approach is sound, so far as it goes...
...Consequently, long after their specific prescriptions had been set aside, the organizations they created continued to dominate the schools...
...Ravitch who lifted the veil from the educational sanctum sanctorum will have made an important contribution...
...The number of people graduating from college and going on to advanced education now exceeds the wildest predictions of 35 years ago...
...Nor does she have much patience with those who argue that piecemeal reform is little more than patching holes in a rotten educational fabric...
...For these reasons, she is suspicious of sweeping governmental programs, preferring instead processes with limited and specific goals...
...She might well respond that it's impossible to know what happened in students' minds...
...Her account of the curriculum revision movement, which rose up in the anxiety following Sputnik, provides a clear example of how she thinks educational change occurs...
...If one assumes, with Mrs...
...A single fact alone, offered in her final pages, could well serve as a symbol for her entire story: In 1965 there were 92 federal regulations affecting education...
...Well, maybe...
...Ravitch amply documents the governmental ingestion of the schools...
...But his reach is a bit limited since a genius for making money, like artier forms of genius, is often a matter not of systematic calculation but of the exercise of elusive gifts of intuition...
...In that case she can be an interesting writer...
...The strength of Diane Ravitch's new book, The Troubled Crusade, is its close adherence to the argument that public demands for equality brought state action to bear on the schools in a way never before experienced in our history...
...Nearly twenty years after his death at 95 in 1965, Baruch continues to exhibit the strange opacity of those who are, as someone has wickedly put it, "famous for being famous...
...That a school district used one of the curricula doesn't tell us how many students were affected...
Vol. 17 • March 1984 • No. 3
