"GETTING TOUGH" IN THE SCHOOLS
Meier, Deborah
The release of a half-dozen prestigious reports on schooling in America has initiated, according to Secretary of Education T. H. Bell, "the greatest, most promising development since the turn of...
...Like the National Commission, Ravitch sees the American public schools as a remarkable triumph...
...When the time was that "mediocrity" was not predominant remains, as always in this field, a mystery Ravitch can't solve for us...
...The teacher is the boss...
...The appropriate "limited" goal is variously described by Ravitch as "cognitive," "academic," and "intellectual...
...Yes, of course, there are "limits," but Ravitch's approach is more likely to lead to different limits for different kids...
...The trouble is that while Ravitch sees the liberal arts as a bulwark of democracy, and progressivism as its enemy, something entirely different has really been going on, and it was neither "liberal" nor "progressive...
...13 Moreover, the focus of normative testing has played a major role in the trend toward defining all those in the bottom portion of any particular curve as "deviant," in need of "special education," thus justifying the systematic removal of ever larger groups of children who are not "making it" on normative scales...
...What she wants is "structured learning...
...Although modest in tone, it builds a case for Bell's agenda and provides background for other official reports...
...We've all known courses on ancient Greece that were easy and used audiovisuals...
...He suggests, furthermore, that a liberal-arts curriculum focused on "formal culture" need not be posed as an "alternative" to all other curricula...
...Nor is Ravitch interested in exploring the third possibility: that the challenge to produce equal in-school results might require a redefinition of achievement and new ways of measuring it (see my article in Dissent, Fall 1981, on reading tests...
...To understand its impact, let us see how it fits into the current educational hoopla, and then examine it on its own merits...
...Two of the critics of progressive education whom Ravitch invokes on behalf of these limited goals are Robert Hutchins and historian Arthur Bestor...
...2 pencil in order to fill in precoded answer sheets...
...q 70...
...To Ravitch it seems self-evident why ignorance about ancient civilizations or algebra is more dangerous to the future of democracy than ignorance about how to repair your automobile or ignorance about sex (two particular targets of her essays...
...Kohl, in fact, describes an effort to build a rigorous sixth-grade curriculum around mythology, which included having children do a great deal of writing...
...A "trade union mentality" is blamed for the promulgation of endless bureaucratic paperwork, and unions are held responsible for transforming "what had once been a noble though poorly compensated profession" into a craft concerned with bread and butter issues—money and job security...
...True, all children now had to go to school for a longer time, and hard-pressed teachers had to invent new ways to manage, 62 amuse and, if they could, educate at least the most "promising...
...It wasn't, to paraphrase Herndon, "the way it was supposed to be...
...66 Are the classrooms in which four-year-olds fill in workbooks more "cognitive" than those in which children work with sand, soil, animals, and blocks...
...It is in the struggle to make a particular subject matter "belong" to the student that pedagogy becomes important...
...Despite his efforts, neither the progressive movement he helped start, the "pedagogical revolution" of the late '50s, nor the "romantics and rebels" of the '60s altered the inner workings of most schools that poor and working-class children attended...
...John Holt's How Children Fail did not describe schools "that crush the joy of learning...
...We'd also seen students like some of those described...
...Even if we ignore the impact of poor nutrition and health, or the unequal financial resources available to families to supplement public expenditures on education, children still do not enter the race as equals...
...The university specialists who designed "new math" in the late '50s learned this the hard way...
...Unless they're prepared to see the school as an agent for social change, they know that the "real world of work" their children must face is not exactly a model of democratic citizenship...
...Ravitch's treatment of the preschool program Head Start is an important case in point...
...Bestor's attack on the mushyminded establishment progressives appeared in the mid-'50s...
...The three terms have separate histories of use and meaning that are themselves revealing...
...3) that we can transform schools in some other substantial and meaningful way...
...Ravitch is not alone in questioning whether we are best served by letting children "choose what they want . . . if they want...
...The standardized tests given in the pre-1960 epoch were substantially shorter and easier than any in use today...
...Some progressive ideas—more experiential learning, recognition of individual differences, etc.—were introduced, but they never replaced the traditions described above...
...3) the claim that schools work best when they limit themselves to cognitive and/or academic goals...
...7, pp...
...Would she have middle-class nurseries also abandon their traditional priorities...
...The nature of that defense will help us understand both why and how they should be taught...
...James Herndon did not write about his "triumphs over his principals, the other teachers, and the system...
...And this difference is largely determined by social class...
...One criterion in looking at choices, from a democratic viewpoint, is whether their mastery helps us not only in the exercise of power but also in the capacity to criticize power effectively...
...Ravitch perceptively notes, in another connection, that "those who see the school as the leading edge of social change believe they can shape the values of children in ways that are broader, more humane, and more liberated than those of their parents...
...Based on an assumption that children varied only in the rate at which they could handle the identical material, he proposed a highly complex reorganization of schools into different tracks, moving through the same body of knowledge at different speeds (not unlike some current notions of "mastery learning...
...The reports of the National Commission, the 20th Century Fund, and the Education Commission of the States are primarily focused on how schools can better serve a flagging economy...
...Ravitch rejects a consideration of this whole question since "Americans had long ago decided, without much discussion . . . that education would be the best vehicle through which to change society...
...But Ravitch would exclude not only a child's health, nutrition, and improved family life, but also "free play and permissive adultchild relations" typical of middle-class nursery schools...
...children do not need schools to learn how to blow their noses and button their pants...
...It's Jefferson's call for a "crusade against ignorance," not the needs of the economy that, she says, she's concerned with...
...This progressive ideology was defeated after the war, or fell of its own flabby weight, to be replaced briefly in the late '50s by what Ravitch enthusiastically calls "a pedagogical revolution...
...Democracy and Education RAVITCH TREATS as a received truth the idea that democracy rests upon formal education, that ignorance breeds tyranny, and that without literacy representative government will falter...
...For the good of the economy, and a happier work force...
...We'd been similarly confused, outfoxed, and embarrassed...
...either you renounce your native identity and world views or you cannot have access to our special resources...
...That book was about both his favorite school and his favorite teacher...
...Herndon's books are models, in fact, of collegial compassion...
...Gabriel Chanan, "Culture and Equality in Education," Educational Research, vol...
...We knew that even if we shared the classic ideals of Robert Hutchins, we were unable to translate them into practice because of the conditions of our job, the situation of our students, the nature of the school, or our own inadequate knowledge about teaching and learning...
...Schools, Chanan proposes, can offer a "unified" approach without leading to a uniform one...
...Granted, young people are probably interested in and need to know about the "world of work" and how to deal with it...
...David Hargreaves, The Challenge of the Comprehensive School (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982...
...The release of a half-dozen prestigious reports on schooling in America has initiated, according to Secretary of Education T. H. Bell, "the greatest, most promising development since the turn of the century...
...Tests like these are now given to kindergarteners, and first-graders are held back based on tests formerly given to older children—requiring complex phonetic information, the reading of substantially longer paragraphs, more complex questions, and no pictures...
...They rejected reliance on textbooks, as well as the domination of the classroom by teachers in terms either of curriculum planning or discipline...
...Nor, in courses designed to introduce students to work, are intellectual and cognitive issues raised about the "real world" that might demystify the workings of our economy or suggest to students the possibility that human beings might alter current work relationships or employment patterns...
...For those who were teaching in schools in which poor and working-class children spent their time, or for those millions of Americans whose children attended such schools, there was no such conflict...
...Texas is not alone...
...The extraordinary expectation that schools can produce equal results logically requires one of the following three assumptions: (1) that the educational and cultural background of the family is irrelevant to a child's school success (being advantaged is of no advantage to our offspring...
...It's not universal, but it's common...
...To talk nobly of schooling and democracy while ignoring the issue of work is an intellectual evasion...
...Thus we're left with the noble goal of "equal results" minus a practical strategy...
...that parents and children who felt humiliated or disrespected (for reasons that often baffled us) 65 could make our lives miserable...
...Lowerclass schools are often devoid of books (except perhaps workbooks, readers, and the textbook...
...They saw the school as a major shaping force, the first public domain children confronted...
...When teachers lose control over their subject matter, they turn in desperation to method courses...
...In fact, to call for a solely "academic" focus is far from traditional and may only be a way of side-stepping critical questions...
...Unlike many writers who described schools, Kohl, Holt, and Herndon understood that real children needed breakfast and lunch, even if that seemed downright nonintellectual...
...Furthermore, she is not willing to accept either of the "escapes" frequently offered...
...They each bring with them their own "culture," an individual way of seeing reality...
...6 More troubling, however, are the implications of Ravitch's critique of Head Start's intellectual/cognitive curriculum...
...And if, by some nearmiracle, they did improve their rank, causing a relative decline in the status advantage of some other more powerful constituency, might not the rules be changed...
...According to Ravitch, progressive educators rejected the teaching of such traditional subjects as English, math, history, and science...
...Chanan wants to defend, not just impose, "the educational value placed upon abstraction and writtenness . . . even though it also has a fetishistic element...
...In her preoccupation with the critics on the "left," Ravitch has not noticed these far more powerful and widely practiced challenges to Arthur Bestor's belief that "serious intellectual training is not beyond the reach of the masses...
...The liberal arts might thus even become a source of pleasure, not merely an unpleasant duty...
...At a time when employment possibilities for young people are rather bleak, Dewey's central question becomes even more pressing...
...They have been endangered, however, by well-intentioned but ultimately corrupting defects that she generally lumps together under the label of "permissive progressivism...
...But the difficulty is that there is more than one other choice...
...There is an inevitable "hidden agenda" of "life needs" implicit in any choice of courses and manner of delivery...
...However, the 20th Century Fund Report, in which Ravitch participated, is fairly explicit in its attack on unions...
...If corporations are deeply involved in setting our educational priorities, we might consider how well armed we are for the day when they might conclude, as does conservative economist Warren Robinson, that Americans are dangerously overeducated, and that this is a major factor in the decline of U.S...
...In fact, she defines these kinds of reforms as the problem...
...She also scorns related reforms aimed at altering the curriculum, pedagogy, or the ways schools relate to the children's culture and community...
...In the process, more than one solution may be adopted in different places...
...Facile platitudes about democracy also obscure a related phenomenon...
...For these more affluent and more privileged families, the ideals of good citizenship and appropriate job habits are not so clearly in conflict...
...Head Start's failure is blamed on an unwillingness to establish limited "cognitive" goals...
...One reason, after all, that poor and workingclass parents are often ambivalent, if not downright hostile, to schools that seek to "empower" children is precisely this concern...
...Even Bestor, after all, might not reject helping infants "blow their noses and button their pants...
...The drive by successive waves of new immigrants to seek emancipation through formal schooling is enlightening...
...Is the traditional high-status curriculum valued by society only for social/historical reasons," asks English author and critic Gabriel Chanan in an attempt to defend the liberal arts, "or does it have intrinsic qualities connected with the mastery of reality...
...Even with additional resources, the disadvantaged will always be, on the average, behind...
...We had seen these students in our classes...
...Despite major achievements, made possible by an enormously expanded federal presence in education, American schools witnessed a dangerous decline in quality...
...The content of education has also been severely affected by this narrowing of curriculum to what can be quantitatively measured on a multiple-choice test, and then fit into a normal curve...
...Ravitch's dismissal of such concerns leads one to wonder if it is really Hutchins's and Bestor's call for renewed intellectual content that she is championing when she calls for "limits...
...He thought it would be pretty simple, given his enormous faith in the efficacy of IQ tests and his limited knowledge about young children...
...The proliferation of "special education" enrollments is partly a triumph...
...2) that we can design a curriculum that bypasses any family advantages...
...The impact of modern technology—a rallying slogan for much of the current debate on education—is not quite what the National Commission on Excellence glibly and optimistically suggests...
...When John Dewey wrote his famous 1916 manifesto, Education and Democracy, he was challenging this traditional view...
...The recent revival in several states of the 19thcentury notion of "payment by result"—by which schools would get financially rewarded for producing higher student test scores—offers a glimpse of where we might be headed...
...But both Chanan and Hargreaves are asking the kind of questions that Ravitch fails even to recognize...
...Nor does she accept the position— put forth by such critics as Christopher Jencks and Lester Thurow—that schools were never a sensible vehicle for achieving equality, if we define equality in terms of an eventual fairer distribution of income...
...That's at least in part the rub, and one Ravitch avoids...
...The second idea—building a "culture-fair" curriculum that does not favor middle-class children—has become popular lately among urban educators responding to the demand for equal test results...
...In the words of President Johnson, whom she quotes approvingly, the schools must provide not merely "equality of opportunity" but "equality as a fact, as a result...
...As they are removed from the rolls of "regular" schools we have an illusory feeling that standards have gone up (it's a bit like neighborhood "gentrification...
...More vocational preparation to enhance their children's job prospects tops the list of recommendations...
...While there is a notable distance between theory and practice in all schools, it is greater in some than in others...
...but that requires teachers who "own" their own subject matter, rather than ladling out a prescribed program...
...And is all this not affected by the kind of problems that children will encounter when they enter the adult world...
...Parents who already speak in the vocabulary of the school cannot avoid providing their children with a continuous competitive edge in a system built upon rank order...
...Older tests consisted of alphabetrecognition items, initial consonants, and twoand three-line phrases and "stories" accompanied by pictures...
...To understand why, it's necessary to consider what working-class parents see as the relationship between schools and their real lives...
...She contends that it was made difficult to attain during the 1960s largely by the understandable but unfortunate oversensitivity of black militants to looking at their own family structure, and the poor judgment of well-meaning romantics and ideological rebels.' Ravitch acknowledges the existence of a persistent, age-old "democratic dilemma...
...The culture of schools, with its specific norms, can also make intelligent middle-class children seem inadequate misfits...
...Isn't there a point where she must tell us...
...Ravitch's response is rhetoric, devoid of precisely the contextual detail that might help us see the connections between contemporary education and democracy...
...The most famous contemporary observer of children's efforts to learn, Jean Piaget, makes it into her book just once, to score a point against a popularizer of open education...
...In accordance with the current demand for "rigor," many infant programs have abandoned both a concern for the family and all subject matter, replacing it—in the name of "cognition"— with isolated verbal skills taught in a vacuum of intellectual content...
...There has been a consensus in the popular media since the early 1970s that educational standards have "declined" and that a "return to basics" is needed...
...In fact, the economy does not need an enormously expanded, intellectually more sophisticated labor force...
...Robinson, in an article in Education Week, October 5, 1983, p. 24, argues that it's time to return to the old days when all but the very gifted among the needy paid the full cost of their higher education...
...Why doesn't Ravitch take on these powerful institutions in the way she takes on the "life needs" progressives...
...Such a failure is of more than passing interest in light of the fact that it was the main concern of those misguided "reformers and romantics," as well as a key to the mandate Ravitch accepts: to teach all with more or less equal success, in a manner that meets elite standards...
...For Chanan, the heart of the "democratic dilemma" is how to make the "formal culture" accessible to all without requiring a renunciation of a student's own culture...
...Two interesting examples are the Perry Preschool Project carried out by the High Scope Educational Research Foundation—an 18-year study of 123 Head Start students in Ypsilanti—and the Lazar Study sponsored by the Department of Health, Education and Welfare...
...By 1965 schools were explicitly ordered to break this "correlation between social class and educational achievement...
...This was and is the rhetoric of 63 the powerful "accountability movement" and the "more effective schools" strategies in vogue today...
...The standardized testing rage has even seriously undermined some foolish elite schools: why practice writing if examinations only require a No...
...Equally enlightening are the persistent failure of democratic countries to close the gap between the educational achievement of lowerand upper-class students...
...She chides Head Start for accepting an earlychildhood approach in which "cognitive goals were no more important and often less important than social, medical, and psychological services, nutrition, adult career development, and parent involvement...
...The best conceived curriculum cannot be tested in the abstract...
...The latter, entitled Lasting Effects After Preschool, pools 12 investigations of long-term effects and is reported fully in the New York Teacher, December 16, 1979...
...On Chicago's South Side, for example, many schools in low-income areas still had bolted-down desks well into the '60s...
...A school that develops ways to communicate greater respect for "deviants" will be doing a service to more than the poor or racial minorities...
...On Cognitive Goals and School Limits IF EDUCATION is to serve democracy, says Ravitch, schools must accept a more limited function...
...It doesn't rest on which is "harder," which is "required," or whether the subject is presented "verbally...
...Ravitch, like Bestor, forgets that "socialization" and "life needs" were not invented by progressives...
...But the losers do not disappear, except from our immediate view...
...The removal of parents, and now teachers, from important decision-making roles has serious political consequences for a democratic society...
...Penmanship, weekly spelling tests, a board full of computation tasks requiring a lot of copying, and good manners—these were the staples in such schools.' Anyone today who visits elementary schools that are attended mainly by low-income children notes the prevalence of programmed scripts based on behavior-mod techniques, reading "kits" consisting of hundreds of unrelated paragraphs followed by multiple-choice questions, and reams of ditto sheets...
...The traditionalists with whom she most sympathizes— Robert Hutchins, Arthur Bestor, Paul Woodring—had trouble translating their ideals into forms applicable to mass education...
...Ravitch spends time on race, sex, and other "handicapping" conditions, but class, like the needs of the labor market, she renders invisible...
...If you want to discuss the relationship of schools to democracy, you cannot skip over the school's historic connection to employment...
...But maybe a little discussion would be healthy...
...New York: Basic Books, 1983...
...Deborah Meier has written on public elementary education and testing and, since 1964, taught public elementary school in Chicago, Philadelphia, and New York...
...To redress this problem, we must limit our scope and build a more rigorous program based on the ideals of a liberal education for all...
...Granted, no one would argue that all the reforms offered were serious or sensible...
...And we could certainly devise an automotive course meeting her three criteria—tough, verbal, and required...
...Enlightening too is the compatability of high levels of literacy and intellectual talent—even lots of high culture— with some of the world's cruelest tyrannies...
...In fact, she admits, they "failed to confront the question at all...
...Even if equally tough on all, it is not equally "liberal...
...The real issue is how and which "life needs" are implemented...
...When we fail to acknowledge the dual function of schools we paper over an important reality...
...Is a classroom organized around well-planned social and individual activity less structured than a room in which a teacher directs children on how to fill in their ditto sheets...
...Is this the kind of elite academy Ravitch is offering the masses...
...Hutchins asked for even more...
...Consider the stated goals of 19thand 20th-century schools aimed (as historian Ravitch is well aware) at lower-class and immigrant pupils whose manners and behavior needed "Americanizing...
...ThirtySix Children, by Herbert Kohl, is not a description of how he replaced the "prescribed curriculum" (tough...
...The casual repetition of the cliche that the "racial revolution" diverted a promising "pedagogical revolution" and that "the pursuit of excellence" was soon "overshadowed by concern about the needs of the disadvantaged" contains an unexamined assumption: it depends, doesn't it, upon one's vantage point...
...Even the most conservative prep school emphasizes a version of "life needs"—only there it's called "characterbuilding...
...Does it not matter how we define both education and democracy...
...To make this point, Ravitch ignores the plethora of studies that indicate Head Start succeeded in precisely those long-range academic goals that she favors...
...Not Ravitch...
...But more serious, it's invidious...
...Every child is to be exposed to the same unambiguous, explicit, and sequentially ordered curriculum, albeit some may have to do it more than once till they get it "right...
...It enables her to assume that we can safely rely in the '80s on a corporate interpretation of priorities...
...Schools and Equality Since 1960 RAVITCH ACCEPTS the notion that schools in the postwar period should have sought and did seek to maximize "equality...
...Diane Ravitch, a serious neoconservative historian and educational writer, provides an intellectually respectable description of the circumstances that have, presumably, necessitated these "promising developments...
...Easy and nonverbal electives" may make a handy target (they're apparently bad even for preschoolers...
...Is instruction on verbal "concepts" such as over/under, the alphabet, and the names of the basic colors what Bestor meant by teaching "the power to think...
...The new litany of "toughness" will produce neither excellence nor equality—and surely not both...
...61 (2) the unintended negative effects of the reforms of the 1960s that were aimed at eliminating the educational gap between classes and races...
...And surely the new holy trinity, "verbal, tough, and required," provides an insufficient if not downright intellectually dishonest criterion for measuring what's worthy of inclusion...
...Or, Chanan suggests, it may be essential also to the exercise of the social and political power needed to change the world...
...He comes up with a somewhat different solution...
...To separate the issue of classroom "management" from the content of the course is to turn pedagogy into a set of gimmicks...
...To presume that schools are unaffected by the condition of the labor market is either naive or deceptive...
...Ravitch can't decide whether the '60s reforms were a success or not...
...The stakes were raised, and thus the ranking has remained the same...
...Does she imagine that Hutchins, Bestor, et al...
...The popularity of these books lay in their capacity to evoke scenes teachers recognized, while also provoking them to think more deeply about their meaning...
...Ravitch's book, in its own way, comes to the same conclusion...
...THOSE OF us who want to perpetuate the liberal arts can rest our case on the power to impose and intimidate—or we can develop a reasoned argument aimed not merely against certain anti-intellectual critics of the left but at persuading the broader public of the liberal arts' value...
...If we fail to provide a defense, we are implicitly abandoning Jefferson's "crusade...
...Despite all of this, Ravitch doesn't raise an eyebrow at the demand that schools create equal results...
...A serious writer whose task is to report on the status of Jefferson's "crusade" cannot, however, afford to rest on such attractive platitudes...
...They rejected a daily schedule with time allotted for specific subjects...
...He made a passionate appeal for a system of mass education aimed at teaching "the power to think...
...The implication that we did something for "those" children, at the expense of excellence, is untrue...
...hadn't the wit to think of these cures also?' Writers about schools get away with such pitifully superficial palliatives—worthy of TV talk shows—so long as they operate on a level of rhetoric and abstraction that removes them from confronting the classroom day by day...
...A look at the changes over the years in reading tests given to first-graders suggests that this may be just what has occurred...
...What is new is that these major reports are the product of a combination of forces—political, educational and, above all, corporate...
...She is now the director of a public school in East Harlem...
...I See the Annual Gallup Poll, in the September 1983 Phi Delta Kappan, on public attitudes toward schools...
...In this respect she echoes the contradictions rampant in all the major reports that also argue both sides of the case—glowing triumphs of American schools and dire emergency straits facing us...
...It is one of the rationales offered for city and state efforts to centralize curriculum and standards, with a concomitant loss in influence by the local community as well as the individual teacher...
...Avoiding the issue enables Ravitch, for example, to accept the dubious popular notion that school priorities in the '60s and '70s were set by disadvantaged minorities...
...instead of libraries they have remedial reading and audiovisual "labs...
...They tried to do too much and did most of it badly...
...with one that "encouraged children to express themselves through creative writing" (easy...
...An intellectually more rigorous education will not put America's youth back to work...
...Or shall we slip the liberal arts in under misleading arguments for "toughness" and hope "they" won't notice...
...They rejected tests, and all other forms of competition for grades or rewards...
...To assess Ravitch's contribution it might help to examine how she deals with three recurring themes: (1) the interdependence of democracy and education...
...that's the way life is, and they may as well learn it young...
...Since 1945 there has been a virtual revolution in the use of tests, test-oriented pedagogies, and test-related technologies...
...But a familiar story, well-told, can add new insights...
...Initiated by alarm over Russia's launching of Sputnik, the new reforms were, however, soon thwarted by concern for equality rather than excellence...
...They are not blind to the fact that the employment opportunities available to their children signify certain priorities...
...Regardless of Ravitch's intentions, it sets the stage for once again abandoning the disadvantaged in the name of "excellence...
...What is left out is everything Hutchins was championing, and what remains is precisely what he derided as "miscellaneous dead facts...
...Ravitch generally equates social class with race...
...Throwing clichés at old problems is even more popular these days than throwing money 69 was once supposed to be, and it is even less successful at solving them...
...There is a conservative tradition, accepted also by many latter-day progressives, that some children, perhaps most, are frustrated and embittered by undue complexity—either the complexity of having to make choices or of having to deal with subtler subject matter...
...Ravitch offers an interesting departure...
...Underlying many of the apparent contradictions between Ravitch's professed goals and her analysis are unexamined class biases that run throughout this book as well as through many of the recent reports...
...Somewhere, sometime, one must investigate what happens as teachers and children pursue an actual curriculum...
...Modern, more self-confident, and better organized parents may not, in fact, always take the boss's side against their children...
...Shall we be elitists and "impose" our values...
...Is it the traditional "academy," previously offered only to the elite, that she has in mind for the masses...
...If it was to be supportive of democratic values, then its citizens (the students) needed to develop the kind of "constructive intelligence" that would enable them to rethink answers to social problems, including issues of work, in a systematic manner...
...As a consequence there has been a shift in decision-making from the classroom to the program experts who design the new teaching/ testing programs and also determine what are acceptable measures of success...
...But it has also become a way of trying to look more successful by merely redefining our population...
...an increasing number of the jobs that will become available will require low levels of skill and at most an elementary education...
...They don't even set obvious "limits," since many of the practices Ravitch proceeds to criticize were justified on strictly "cognitive" grounds...
...It is a familiar argument, with its neoconservative stress on the virtues of "limiting our vision...
...In 1945 "one's educational chances were limited by the accident of birth and by the color of one's skin...
...Neither "the power to think" nor the knowledge and skill needed "to change our environment" is synonymous with such criteria...
...She chides them for failing to recognize that parents and community might be "appalled by the arrogance of educational theorists who presume to impose their values on other people's children...
...So do proponents of "high" culture and a more rigorous liberal-arts curriculum, whether they are progressives or traditionalists, Dewey or Hutchins—or Ravitch...
...108-16...
...But not only progressives "impose" their values on other people's children...
...9 If the function of the traditional curricula is to provide a "mastery of reality," various choices could, after all, exist...
...But a whole program designed around vocational skills is, needless to say, not often offered to those who can handle the academic/intellectual curriculum...
...And none of them leads inexorably to any particular set of curricula or pedagogical practices...
...This is the kind of question that cannot be examined critically if we do not recognize the problem itself...
...But while their opposite—tough, verbal, and required— may sound inspiring, it hides a sleight of hand...
...Children do differ enormously, regardless of social class and/or race...
...What we are not required to do in order to prove our devotion to the liberal arts is reflexively mimic a particular 19th-century curriculum and the pedagogic style that went with it...
...This litany is not new...
...They don't need all that fancy stuff," they complain, "just make them obedient and do their work...
...In the name of "getting tough," Texas is now considering dividing children in the sixth grade into vocational, general, and elite tracks...
...The first casualties are generally the "liberal arts," both because they are harder to tailor to such specifications and because they are considered a luxury anyway...
...cope with the requirements concerning attendance and punctuality," understand "personal economics" and "our basic economic system—profits, revenues, basic laws of supply and demand...
...The current recipe for reform is clear: more tests, more homework, longer school hours, mandated state requirements, stiffer standards for promotion, stricter discipline codes, merit pay and, sometimes, tuition tax credits...
...This is what gives her new book, The Troubled Crusade,' its importance today and explains its extensive and positive reception...
...Just lack of knowledge...
...If teachers and children are to be held accountable, then, this idea assumes, schools should only teach what can be measured objectively...
...8, no...
...Yet she also claims that we've witnessed declining achievement and severely lowered standards...
...It also affects the meaning of teaching...
...The liberal arts require a coherent defense...
...Actually, Arthur Bestor did try to confront the problem...
...IN HER 320 PAGES ON SCHOOLS since World War II Ravitch offers not a word about the massive introduction of standardized tests and standardized curriculum programs tailored to them...
...As for the platitudes—we knew them only too well...
...And there is considerable evidence that, at least for those previously denied access, a lessening of the wage gap was a major goal of their support for educational equality...
...The particulars that go into creating the ideal "welleducated" citizen are not sacred nor historically frozen: they too are subject to democratic debate...
...But learning what, and structured how...
...It was not joy but children's strategies to avoid learning that concerned him and that he carefully described...
...Yet neither Chanan nor Hargreaves has solved this dilemma...
...The importance of "abstraction, writtenness, and so on"—features common to traditional liberal-arts programs—may be attributable to "the particular history associated with dominant social groups, or it may be attributable to nothing more mysterious than that many middleclass jobs have an administrative, centralizing element...
...68 The debate is not between "permissive progressives" and the advocates of a liberal-arts education, nor between "life needs" and "cognition...
...For such children, the teacher is not a "boss" but a guide and model...
...In fact, the National and State Commission reports are blunt about the appropriate ideology of career education.' That Ravitch ignores this development, often welcomed by hard-pressed parents desperate for some kind of job future for their children, is an inexcusable instance of her careless 67 bias...
...The Task Force on Education for Economic Growth of the Commission of the States advocates the teaching of "basic employment and economic competencies" such as "the ability to engage in interpersonal relationships...
...Together they have agreed on one solution: "get tough...
...The school may be mildly repressive, but it is trying to educate on the basis of a model that matches children's own ideals of "adulthood...
...For the first time they saw the possibility that their schools might emerge from out of the shadows, might be exposed to some "excellence...
...Many of the same corporations offering us their renewed commitment to schools are also advocating an earlier focus on career education, with an avowed interest in inculcating better "work habits and attitudes...
...It won't alter the connection between social class and school achievement, beat the Russians and Japanese, nor eliminate unemployment...
...She willingly confronts the dilemma: it just turns out not to be so complex...
...David Hargreaves, another English critic, in grappling with the same set of problems on a more empirical level, recognizes the centrality of the issue of "honor" and "dignity" as it relates to social class and school failure...
...The new common wisdom on behalf of "tough, verbal, and required" masks widely divergent agendas...
...Based on her list, it seems hard to think of any place in America where such "progressivism" dominated educational practice...
...The young people who seek vocational schools—some of them find there the first meaningful contact with both subject matter and teachers—are vulnerable to the "life needs" rhetoric of the corporations...
...And it certainly won't help beleaguered children or their teachers in their daily struggle with classroom realities...
...POLLSTERS REGULARLY REMIND US that most parents, while deploring "current standards," have always been and remain remarkably satisfied with the curriculum.' When dissatisfaction is expressed, few favor more liberal arts...
...productivity...
...Not perhaps out of lack of sympathy (she tells us she sympathizes...
...and we've been there before...
...Our world status, no less, is at stake...
...America, said Bestor, does not need a program that "substitutes 'life needs' " for the disciplines of science, math, history, and foreign languages...
...We all are in the position of the "deviant" in some subjects, having difficulty making sense of material in the way "the teacher" expects...
...But what would a "cognitively oriented" program for three- and four-year-olds be like...
...The job prospects for most Americans are bleak...
...She refers to the "unqualified success of the social revolution initiated by the Brown decision," a "rising level of educational attainment for the population as a whole," the "continued pre-eminence of research and scholarship" on the university level...
...Lurking behind this apparently clear classification system of what's "cognitive" and what isn't, there are several unexamined assumptions that may have nothing in common with the broad love of culture and the study of human achievements that Bestor and Hutchins were defending...
...However misguided their answers, these were the issues that the giants of progressive education grappled with, both theoretically and experimentally...
...More homework, tougher grading, fewer electives, and more tests: "toughness" and "rigor" will apparently do the trick...
...Such elitist views have long been openly held in European countries, although in the United States they generally take the form of disputes over IQ scores...
...Schools failed, she claims, whenever "their leaders and their public alike had forgotten their real limitations as well as their real strengths...
...that real children got restless and bored even when we thought we were being clear and inspiring, felt intimidated even when we thought we were being understanding...
...If Bestor wanted the masses "furnished with the strengths that had made the old ruling classes great and powerful," perhaps these nonacademic concerns needed to be duplicated too...
...What is required is experimentation in the real schools, and the time and patience to observe and modify...
...Schools are, again, big news...
...It does not, therefore, seem an option for Ravitch...
...Shouldn't we ask what kind of knowledge, gained under what kind of circumstances...
...And many schools were never exposed to these innovations...
...And "seeing that each and every one . . . receives a liberal education" is by no means the unanimous choice of those who are backing "rigor...
...Ravitch has left the whole area of classroom experience and children's learning almost untouched...
...Well-to-do children, in contrast, are expected to enter occupations with a far wider latitude for independence and autonomy...
...We know what she thinks Head Start should not have been...
...Whatever the merits of these perennial favorites, they hardly seem responsive to an age-old "democratic dilemma...
...Equally enlightening is the history of schools at the service of elites: making some people feel superior and others inferior, some self-confident and others powerless...
...If the connection 64 between schools and society is more complex than the public has acknowledged and conventional rhetoric encourages, then schools will continue to bear the brunt of unexamined, perhaps mistaken, expectations...
...She does not defend a two-tier system, in which some children are expected to engage in higher-level thinking and others are given an explicitly watered-down curriculum or pushed out altogether...
...Learning to be a good sport, a team member, a leader, and a "gentleman" has always occupied a prominent place in schools to which elites send their young...
...Some kids do need to be provided with special services...
...Where were the schools that meet this description...
...To advance the claims for a liberal education one must risk looking at its history, risk acknowledging that there may be various paths to "cognition" and "intelligence," and that knowledge can never be entirely separated from the setting in which we learn it or the way in which it is taught...
...To do so "is to present an ultimatum...
...12 Ravitch says nothing about tuition tax credits—a curious omission—and startlingly little about teachers' unions...
...Our mission . . . is to change our environment, not to adjust ourselves to it," he declared in an attack on the conservatism of the '50s school establishment...
...She's for it...
...In the only section in which she tries to look at classrooms, she manages to thoroughly distort some important potential sources...
...When the educational progressives raised the question of schools and democracy, they saw them as critically interdependent...
...Notes ' The Troubled Crusade: American Education, 19451980, by Diane Ravitch...
...Shall we tell them these are "noncognitive" and thus taboo...
...They are, furthermore, expected to use their leisure time to promote culture and participate in democratic political life...
...The school is a society in its own right, said Dewey, not simply preparation for life...
...By leaving such complexities virtually untouched, Diane Ravitch contributes to muddled thinking about the relationship of schools to society, particularly the connection of schools to powerful political and corporate institutions...
...He reports with sensitivity and some amusement how his often ornery pupils dealt with his innovations, and he acknowledges having had minimal success in changing anything...
...The two were assumed to go together...
Vol. 31 • January 1984 • No. 1
