The American School -II
Walzer, Michael
This article forms the second part of an extended study of American education. The first part, as well as a related article by Melvin Tumin, appeared in our previous (Spring 1959) issue;...
...An education for social opportunity is surely conceivable which is not also a subtle training in invidious distinction...
...The admission of the cold war into the classroom, whether in the form of actual military preparation or political propaganda, is paralleled by the admission of commercial culture in the form of the Hollywood movie, the best-seller, the corner-store magazine...
...This suggests a significant argument, repeated below, against overly rigid sectioning or the siphoning off of talent...
...6. To understand the influence of science on human life...
...He will shortly become a familiar in a different world...
...In such schools educational problems are somewhat different from those discussed above...
...The bright child is recog nized as a national resource...
...A more realistic argument, not so much for a training in televisionwatching, as for the use of material from the mass media, is offered by those who would seek to make contact with students "on their own level," and to knit together their school-learning with what they learn on their own...
...In relationship to this heritage all vocational training—however necessary and beneficial—is extra-curricular...
...The immediate difficulty is that it is an ostensibly democratic spirit...
...We may assume that retention through high school, being 100 per cent among upper class children, and probably not too far from that among the middle classes, must drop radically among the children of unskilled workers, slum dwellers, agricultural laborers, new immigrants, etc.—for otherwise a national retention rate of 55 per cent is hardly explicable...
...The common learning is often one form of this ruse...
...This was the demand of the NEA in a special preface to the revised edition of Education for ALL American Youth...
...In a book on "life adjustment" education published in 1952, just one year after the US Office of Education gave the new ideology semiofficial status, an educator already quoted above described the new technique:° What holds a family together...
...Training children of 14 and 15 for skilled labor is hardly necessary...
...The major arguments against the segregation of the talented have been presented with great persuasiveness by Bruno Bettelheim in a recent issue of Commentary...
...some are political: "How can we keep fascism and corn munism out of this country...
...81-3...
...For the masses this may mean the substitution of a sickly pap for the in congruities of Mother Goose and the wickedness of Aesop's Fables...
...The true goal of educational equality is to make available to all students who are in any way capable or learning a single heritage of knowledge in art and science...
...One of America's most influential writers on education, James B. Conant, has suggested that the schools should seek to reduce the "visibility" of social and economic (and intellectual) differences...
...Secondly, a genuinely democratic education is ultimately a matter of what is taught...
...The schools, therefore, must help answer the needs of society...
...Our next issue, being a special number dt voted to problems of American trade unionism, will not be available for this discussion...
...IN A TEXTBOOK on secondary education published seven years ago by the head of the College of Education at a large mid-western university there appears a list of problems which the school curriculum, so the text implies, should be designed to solve...
...There is something of ruse here also, for the noun and adjective are wedded too hastily...
...Prolonged and often smug discussions as to the "limited" capacities of the children involved are really irrelevant...
...This is already apparent in the approach to literature recommended by the NEA: "some of the best things ever said on the solution of students' personal problems were written by poets, novelists and dramatists...
...THIS EDUCATIONAL DEFEATISM 1S related to the secret opinion many educators seem to have of democracy: they believe that it is not possible but that it can be counterfeited by a kind of ruse...
...The dangers of segregation are best viewed in the vocational high school...
...These presumed "needs" of the child, which are also the anticipated requirements of society, received classical expression in an extremely important book published by the National Educational Association in 1944 (revised edition, 1952) entitled Education for ALL American Youth...
...He has argued that all education is essentially vocational, that history, foreign languages and physics serve career purposes no less than do workshop and commercial English...
...Political and social adjustment, they would probably insist, is only the means to personal happiness...
...What would happen to an individual cut off from a family unit throughout life...
...To SOME EXTENT, such problems—and the attendant forms of social conflict—are not avoidable, though there is never any excuse for requiring that they be wrestled with amid generally depressing surroundings and a pervasive sense of hopelessness...
...The school is more and more able to assume that the buying of goods and services is the most universal human experience...
...secondly, of those who toughmindedly look out for the best interests of the Pentagon...
...The happiness to which such a training points is the contentment of the bland, a kind of friendly mindlessness...
...And that, after all, is the major problem...
...It is possible first of all to attract better and happier teachers (there is, however, a frightening "attraction" in slum schools as well, for some teachers enjoy the comparative freedom from parental supervision and aspiration, and the opportunity to maintain an overt, stern, and sometimes para-military discipline...
...The problems are classified under various heads: some are personal: "How can I become more attractive...
...These children too must be formed into citizens and consumers, though hardly by a process which will help them to make intelligent and rational choices...
...And insofar as this particular skill is family-taught, the educational system serves as "a mechanism which helps perpetuate our class order...
...And surely in an America which has tended of late to dissipate its vulgar energy, the spectacle of young men "on the make" is not entirely disheartening...
...It was devoted to an examination of the "neglected sixty per cent" of American students...
...In general, the survivals result from the lack of perspicacity, energy and system so characteristic of liberal reformers facing a class society, as well as from the eternal resourcefulness of privilege...
...In the Evanston program "consideration is given to real life situations which pupils now face and which will continue to confront them...
...The child ought to be "wasting" these interim years with an inventive and imaginative education in history, literature and science...
...and then comprehension becomes little more than formal co-existence...
...The novelties are more likely the result of an apprehension of the needs of a mass society and its bureaucratic elite...
...Since World War II, the trend in education has been steadily away from the "inner-directed" school...
...this he described as the "conservation of intellectual resources...
...In socially integrated schools participation in carefully differentiated programs leading toward fairly explicit careers has tended to follow class lines...
...The ever-present need for some sort of cultural unity has been filled by men who stood to gain by pitching its level low enough to maximize the immediate sale of cultural commodities...
...5 Ibid., p. 76-7...
...But the training of the talented is likely to be narrowed in no less significant ways: first, because the national investment will probably require specialization at an early age so that a return can be shown as rapidly as possible...
...And this resource must be exploited: thevein of talent in the masses—often enough overlooked in the past—will have to be mined...
...The attack upon importance and the critique of value mask themselves in the language of equalitarianism...
...translated it means: "We shall be depriving children of the right to go to school unless we can find some way of not educating them once they are there...
...The elitists, for all their attacks upon mass education and its advocates often manifest a similar impulse toward educational segregation...
...family expectations, class manners and mores guide the student toward a kind of manifest destiny...
...4 Warner, et...
...But it must be said that these are possibilities only rarely realized...
...The commitment to discover talent wherever it can be found is genuine enough...
...I1 Probably most American high schools are socially integrated, though this may mean no more than that they include a fairly wide middle class range, losing the children of both social extremes...
...For the purposes of our examination, American schools can be roughly divided into those which are, in class terms, integrated and those which are socially "pure...
...permanent disagreement is never tolerated...
...copies can still be had...
...On his own, he will be far more efficiently prepared for his future: tested, selected and guided...
...under the heading "Social Adjustment" appears the following: "Learning to make common decisions concerning common problems, not by compromise, but by consensus, the democratic process...
...Now it is obvious that the fulfillment of most of these "needs" is the normal outcome of an education in history, literature, and science —supplemented as it must be by subsequent vocational or professional training...
...The secondary school must accept its responsibility to help youth prepare for the armed services just as its gives help in preparation for other careers...
...It is only in the lower-middle classes—to use Lloyd Warner's terms (and his figures)— that approximately equal numbers of students opt for, or are guided into, the commercial-vocational program and the academic curriculum...
...the pseudo-ethic of cooperation and consensus is another...
...Am I normal...
...1 U.S...
...Thirdly, if the commitment to a common learning is genuine, then it must be accompanied by radical experiment with the methods of education...
...Neither of these courses are really possible for the "neglected sixty": "reading to comprehend newspapers and magazines reasonably well" is considered a worthy aim for them...
...Surely no one who has recently spent any time in an average sch-ool can fail to be aware that the vocational and commercial programs on the one hand and the academic on the other are simply the names behind which different social classes receive their education and discover their divergent destinies...
...Educators have moved—despite an inevitable, and one would think a fortunate, inertia in the system—to fit the schools to the needs of the increasingly socialized child, and through him to the needs of society...
...A kind of selfsalesmanship and a perennial patriotism round out what may well pass for an education...
...But it is not entirely—or necessarily—a democratic achievement...
...More important, however, is another kind of limitation: a more or less intentional restriction in the scope of the student's social and cultural acquaintance...
...At least self-aggrandizement, whatever else it requires, involves activity, work and study and these probably necessitate a temporary break in continual consumer titillation...
...IV There has been in recent years a significant effort to develop a common learning (a "core" curriculum) which might serve as a balance to an education whose weight was slowly shifting toward the vocational or the merely casual...
...But this would be obfuscation and not equality...
...Assiduously followed up, it has resulted in the creation of a new, more or less homogeneous teen-age culture in America...
...An intelligent man might, after all, choose not to use the mass media, and intelligence at any rate precedes use and does not merely modify it...
...Given this intellectual (or rather anti-intellectual) orientation, it is inevitable that the same processes of fragmentation, trivialization and false equalization which had affected the peripheral areas of learning should now be introduced into the center...
...among upper-lower class students the figures were 72 per cent and 28 per cent respectively.4 There is no evidence available to indicate any significant change in these divisions since Warner's work...
...The judgment of ability," write Havighurst and his asso ciates, "is primarily a social class judgment and those children who conform to middle-class standards [are said to] have ability...
...The product of this training was the man David Riesman called "innerdirected," a man whose experience of authority and love in the family had fitted him, once he had left the home, to face the world as an individual...
...Still, if opportunity is to be offered to the children of working class and new immigrant communities, it is inevitable that radical differences be confronted, that the children come to know an unaccustomed world...
...But this distinction, at least, is no longer based on social class...
...A communist ?"7 This is the occasional humor of moral confusion...
...For the subtle tenacity of class is manifest even in our better high schools with their two-highway system, and even (or especially) in the new, extravagantly modern and luxurious vocational schools...
...With the conservatives of the first group (Hutchins, Bestor, Arendt) radicals are likely to discover certain limited areas of agreement, at least agreement as to criticism of the status quo...
...it is rather from a host of external influences, among which the mass media are increasingly important...
...As reported in a bouncy and enthusiastic book, New Schools for a New Culture (revised edition, 1953), describing the reputedly excellent core program of Evanston Township High School, this new common learning requires a "greater emphasis on people and less on...
...V Against the trend in educational thinking sketched above must be set the recent, largely post-Sputnik demands for renewed rigor in the training of the talented student...
...Among upper-middle class students the figures in a Yankee City high school were 12 per cent for the first and 88 per cent for the second...
...2. To maintain good health and physical fitness...
...Despite the progress of consolidation and the possibility of federal loans, a large number of Americans attend schools understaffed by underpaid teachers, housed in buildings partially condemned or ugly, dirty and (often) unsafe...
...The new teen-age culture no longer supports the work of the school as did the older middle-class training in work and aspiration...
...Already there is a tendency in educational writing to pay more attention to the gifted individual, even if he is a non-conforming individual...
...it is the natural adjustment of salesman and customer...
...If education can somehow be made a communal rather than a purely individual enterprise, then it will be possible to build upon an existing cultural base and not merely to uproot the bright and the aggressive and send them upon their American way...
...we devoutly abstain, however, from planning the practice of equality...
...al., p. 61...
...They probably demonstrate certain general truths about American high schools...
...despite the plethora of tests, talent remains chiefly an attribute of performance, and the judgment of performance, as well as performance itself, is a matter of manners and mores...
...The essential purpose of the new education, a group of its apostles have argued, is "to build common cultural backgrounds that many homes no longer supply...
...Thus the author of one of the better texts on building the high school curriculum suggests such "instructional units" as Managing Money, Family Living, Prejudice, Learning to Enjoy and Appreciate Literature, How to Apply for a Job, Physics in the Kitchen.10 Another text describes a "new" English program oriented towards: 1) letterwriting, 2) oral discussion, 3) daily speech needs, 4) interviewing, 5) group discussion, 6) conversation...
...The "school retention rate" offers significant evidence of educa tional inequality in America today...
...To grow in the ability to think rationally...
...Instead, the talented student is to be guided into his new social position (which will be no less a niche for being a higher niche than that to which he is accustomed...
...But the various kinds of knowledge required and used by one and the other man are not equal, nor should the school pretend that they are...
...Department of Health, Education and Welfare, Statistical Summary of Education, 1953-54, p. 10...
...They appear to move in frenzied circles attempting to teach everything, responding with unreflecting enthusiasm to each new "need": the reaction to Sputnik is only a more newsworthy example...
...and it can be a relationship of deep mutual respect...
...In part this is even a vocational limitation, for the more exotic programs in fields like aviation or beauty culture hardly make for a very broad range of employment possibilities...
...In the past the American school has supplied some such direction to those of its students, at least, who were preparing for college...
...Somewhat in this fashion (the educational "functionalism" of the book on Evanston is slightly more sophisticated) does the unprincipled appropriation of material lead to a radical devaluation of that same material...
...The general effort of the new education to shape students into adjustable citizens is made real in the school by joining the student to an interdependent, cooperating group...
...As a start: confrontation must be made with the child as the member of a social group...
...They seek to repeat a lesson which has recently been written into many elementary school primers: that policeman and milkman, doctor and lawyer, factory worker and business administrator all are equally "helpful" members of society...
...This is true enough so far as the men themselves are concerned, though it is a trivial basis for human brotherhood...
...The possibilities for individual mobility are probably the major virtues of a class-integrated school today...
...This attitude in our schools, re-enforced a hundred times from the outside, is perhaps the greatest existing threat to that other—that genuine—equalitarianism for which socialists yearn...
...Perhaps this is the true test of a democracy: that a way be found to confront all its children with cultural excellence and to win from all of them an intelligent and active response...
...Early testing, guidance programs, the national defense scholarships—these are so many shafts for the mining of talent...
...The school's adjustment to the mass media themselves is probably more rapid, however, than to the programs of these educated middle-men of cultural levelling...
...3 Roper, Factors Affecting the Admission of High School Seniors to College, 1949, p. 17, 1943...
...94-96...
...Talent tells on the field more immediately, pos sibly more decisively, than in the classroom...
...But neither this man nor any of his colleagues would acknowledge conformity alone as a goal of education...
...First, the most immediate and most important educational task remains the attack upon class barriers...
...Some modern sociologists suggest that the discovery of such individuals is virtually the only task , of the school: a push for the first-born, a smiling and presumably socializing glance at the stolid unmoving mass...
...And the result of this devaluation is once again to leave the school helpless in its confrontation with the world of politics and commerce...
...This is probably true because a common set of cultural tastes and aspirations stands behind American athletics, while learning is still culturally divisive...
...We hope to return to this theme in forthcoming numbers...
...It is quite possible that the current "crisis" will increase the possibilities of upward mobility through the educational system...
...In some genuinely progressive schools, it should be said, the core curriculum represents an extremely valuable experiment in teaching method and involves very little tampering with content...
...In the order in which they there appear—their expression is shortened but not caricatured—these are the ten "needs of youth" which the school is to meet: 1. To develop salable skills...
...But today this danger is a very real one...
...Individuals will never climb freely out of the group (or freely choose to remain) until the group as a whole has been raised to a new level of intellectual consciousness...
...among the sons of men in professional or executive positions the figure was 73.4 per cent...
...subject matter as such . . . on appreciation rather than analysis, on the contemporary as an increasingly important area of study, on the psychology of learning rather than the logic of subject matter...
...of the other forty per cent, presumably, half are prepared for college and half are provided with technical skills...
...It has sometimes been suggested, not always tongue-in-cheek, that high school athletic programs are the most democratic features of American secondary education: football has even carried racial integration into the south...
...This proliferation is perhaps not a necessary evil, even if it does absorb, as some critics have alleged, a considerable portion of a narrowly limited amount of educational time...
...but after that our pages will be open to contributions which extend or challenge the material presented thus far.—EnrroRs...
...They would—to be blunt—not know enough, and while knowledge may not yet be the equivalent of power, it has never been so necessary to the powerful...
...8 The schools, " however, can do more than this...
...These are the kinds of questions important in everyday life that imaginative literature like Cheaper By the Dozen, Anna Karen ma, and Mama's Bank Account can raise in pupils' minds and they give the background for practical courses...
...This is a reaction of the men of the right: first, of those who nostalgically defend tradition and authority in education...
...FINALLY, A THREEFOLD set of suggestions...
...Also previous editions of the Summary...
...The authors of the NEA book, however, seek to wring from such subjects a more immediate gain than genuine learning is able to offer...
...they campaign against invidious comparisons between vocational and academic programs, against the snobbery so frequently learned along with Latin or physics or higher mathematics...
...The grossest inequality is obviously manifest in the latter, in the exclusiveness often enjoyed or endured by both upper and lower class children...
...American school districts are organized geographically and in largest part financed locally...
...School does not long detain such children, and they have usually fled in spirit years before they escape in fact...
...That at least is only a matter of money, and any serious program for dealing with our educational problems must make that money available...
...The state, then, must reach into the masses to recruit its military and administrative bureaucracies...
...It has done so, however, in such an unimaginative and crotchety fashion, and with such an extraordinary absence of enthusiasm or concern, as to endanger the very idea of direction in learning...
...School retention figures, it should be noted, have been showing a steady improvement for over half a century...
...Precisely how it is distributed is more difficult to discover...
...Major work must still be done, and not only in slums and the poorer agricultural districts where such work should inevitably begin...
...The student reacts, as does the school: his is a passive nature, oriented mainly to the consumption of pleasure...
...One of the results of this enthusiasm has been a proliferation of courses in the high school, a phenomenon especially noticeable in those new schools which have been able to plan for the needs of all their students...
...Shafts are sunk so that talent can be discovered and brought to the surface...
...the rate of this improvement appears, however, to have slowed down in recent years...
...The young child, recognized as a consumer, is appealed to through the mass media—and with this appeal the family often cannot compete...
...The school thus self-consciously assumes many of the educational tasks of the family, in effect short-circuiting an older learning process in which the student's cultural and moral directions were most often supplied by his parents...
...It is the essential characteristic of spurious equalitarianism that it does not recognize respect, tolerance or conflict as possible relationships of equal men, but only agreement and resemblance...
...The danger to education is only significant when any of these activities achieves intellectual parity with traditional academic subjects...
...Such suggestions from educators are frightening enough...
...Such a result would have to be judged in terms of its effects upon the unselected, as well as in terms of the definition and uses of talent...
...We shall be denying educational opportunity to many people," wrote the President's Committee on Higher Education, "as long as we maintain the present orientation of higher education toward verbal skills and intellectual interests...
...That so much of the current debate centers upon the problems of schools already integrated reveals a surprising disinclination to face the most immediate educational problems...
...Although the number of high school students will continue to rise—automatically with the birth rate—the social range of the school may already have been extended to its "natural" limits, that is, to limits set by the comparative political and economic powerlessness of the groups still beyond the pale...
...The school must seek contacts, and it must establish them (surely) in the language of the child and of his peers—even while insisting upon its own standards and values...
...6 Douglas, Secondary Education for Life Adjustment of American Youth, 1952, p. 58...
...learning is still a part of class culture, its pursuit dependent upon family encouragement and pressure...
...Perhaps New York's experiment with the "all-day neighborhood school" suggests a beginning...
...The essence of the democratic ruse is the equality of subject matter (stooping, then, is really as good as conquering...
...Instead of approaching problems in taste, personal choice and political duty through an established, authoritative body of knowledge, they tend to fragmentize the old curriculum and to present instead a series of problem-solving lessons...
...A complex industrial and military establishment could hardly be maintained with the personnel produced by the new learning...
...Such sociological surveys as are available confirm this, indicating, for example, that in families whose income is below the national average some 30 per cent of those students whose indicated capacity is sufficient for college work, fail to finish high school...
...most working class students who go to college at all move on to state teachers' colleges, junior colleges, or the smaller technical institutes...
...Consumption, appreciation and use: here are a new trio of human "needs" which the school, in its more modern moments, seeks to fulfill...
...Insofar as the student is still trained for productive activity, for "opportunity" in the old sense of that word, invidious distinctions prevail...
...expansion has been hardly less rapid in undemocratic countries...
...later, perhaps, tested again, watched and advised...
...What is most important, however, is the simple fact of social confrontation in the school...
...College acceptance rates showed a similar bias, though it was far less extreme . 3 The children of different classes, of course, apply to different colleges...
...it is grabbed with an eye for the useful, the comforting and the exciting...
...They believe that children learn best in limited worlds, whether these limits are defined by the child's own experience or by his tested aptitudes...
...2 School retention through college similarly follows class lines: a study by Elmo Roper among high school graduates found that only 20.5 per cent of the sons of factory workers applied for admission to college...
...5. To learn how to buy goods and services...
...3. To understand the rights and duties of citizenship...
...Unimpressed with the history of social change, very much impressed with the contemporary mechanics of socialization, they seek quite consciously to break down any lingering, recalcitrant "inner direction" in order to develop the student's "adaptive flexibility" and to expand his "frustration tolerance...
...The most serious educational suggestion of the elitists is the early selection and segregation of the gifted student...
...This article forms the second part of an extended study of American education...
...Differences of opinion, the authors continue, are never real...
...Between such teachers, usually recruited from the middle classes, and the children they must teach there arise the most fundamental and difficult problems of communication...
...it has now become a source of moral confusion in the curriculum, a confusion only occasionally funny...
...7 Ibid., pp...
...The amazingly rapid expansion of American education in the past fifty years is indeed an occasion for pride: it is better that children be in school...
...In the world of culture, however, one might well wish at least to supplement this with the relationship of teacher and student...
...that can come later, perhaps on the job...
...One of the critics of the new learning has rightly pointed out that in this world of consensus the individual who holds a minority view "is treated like a backward child who must be brought to see the light...
...What causes conflict with those we sincerely love...
...A false equalitarianism of ideas and purposes leaves the school utterly unable to choose among the myriad demands made upon it...
...In the absence of such a man, it becomes imperative that the school itself be capable of "inner-direction," that it discover value in its curriculum and confront its students with this value...
...its possibilities may well include hostility and mutual avoidance as well as tolerance and friendship, but either of these seems better than isolation: in this case a similar principle should govern the social treatment of class and racial differences...
...Elitism ought not to be confused with a simple re-enforcement of the surviving class distinctions...
...Perhaps that is why their proposals would tend to make American education look more like Russian...
...Finding such a way is often a task which absorbs all the ingenuity of writers on education...
...To a degree, the family is no longer able to send into the school a child already conscious of his social position, already filled with a particular set of attitudes and aspirations...
...What causes pimples...
...10 Romine, Building the High School Curriculum, 1954, passim...
...The process is not conspiratorial...
...9. To develop respect for other persons...
...Surrounded by his equals, he will presumably be able to move more quickly and to study more difficult subjects...
...The greatest happiness of the greatest number remains the goal of educators calling themselves liberals and progressives...
...For the discovery of the child as a consumer has proven one of Madison Avenue's major inspirations...
...This is sheer ruse...
...this means that insofar as the geography of our cities and countryside is a class geography, the schools—especially on the elementary level—will be socially unintegrated...
...Why do two persons who marry so often fail to understand one another...
...Many educators are quite frank about discouraging expectations in students who in their opinion are likely to be frustrated later on...
...Whether or not the atmosphere is that of the Blackboard Jungle —most often it is not—these schools provide what can only be called a training in limitation...
...The problem-solving approach, which breaks down subject matter into particles of useful advice and bits of "skill," is the key agent of this erosion of learning...
...the school's role tends increasingly to become passive, aimed at a training in the pleasures of consumption...
...This common learning has centered upon English and the social studies...
...It is always worthwhile to experiment with those capacities...
...This is something like stooping to conquer and is justifiable if one does not stoop too low—and if one remembers to conquer...
...These are the possibilities—long explored in this country—of what the English call a "comprehensive" school...
...many more drop out during junior high school years.' But these figures by themselves tell only a small part of the story: for school retention is not at all evenly distributed among social classes...
...Even as we survey the gains, we need to note the cunning survival of old, and the unlooked-for development of new, forms of inequality...
...May or may not: the leading body of American teachers was not sure whether or not military training had a place in the high school program...
...9 Douglas, p. 345...
...It is possible, secondly, to offer a wider range of subjects, academic as well as commercial and vocational, and to provide some semblance of a liberal education...
...High school principals often acknowledge that such is their mission...
...To be beyond the pale does not mean that one does not get an education, but rather that one's education is incomplete, is experienced as something to be resisted and avoided, and is provided at the hands of teachers who often imagine themselves—whether in the spirit of idealism or of cynicism—to be in exile...
...Our post-war school building program has been predictably spotty, hardly beginning work precisely in those areas where it is most needed...
...The vocational high school fails to cultivate a wide-open sense of the possible...
...In surroundings such as these they quickly learn what one might think was the single intended lesson: that such as they need not dwell very long on the business of educa tion...
...In thus confronting real life, knowledge is appropriated before it is learned...
...The outcome of the current crisis in education may well be to alter the last half of this discouraging proposition: to make at least scientific achievement a common cultural aspiration and to increase the degree of talent selection and reward...
...In the curriculum itself many educators now insist upon the equal significance of all subjects...
...What is a fascist...
...As for the first of these, it might be worthwhile to point out that the social effect of democratic selection on the basis of extraordinary athletic talent has been the slow erosion of activity and participation among the untalented...
...We require a major rethinking of our curriculum, and eventually a (tentative, latitudinarian) redefinition of that body of knowledge which we value so highly that we would impose it upon every child...
...The 28 per cent of Warner's upper-lower class sample who chose an academic program and perhaps went on to a college of some sort were socially mobile, aspiring upwards...
...it has been designed to meet not the specific needs for vocational skills and techniques, but the more general needs of citizenship and consumption...
...Their democratic right to an education is transformed into the inescapable duty of society to provide them with the appearance of knowledge...
...From fifth grade to high school approximately 55 per cent of the student population is retained: of every 1,000 students in fifth grade in 1946-47 only 553 graduated high school in 1954...
...Such a training, they suggest, would enable men to become "intelligent users" of the mass media...
...Hunt called for better selection of talented students...
...for it is not only the talented who must serve...
...and thirdly, because the snobbery which elitism can hardly fail to sanction is itself a human limitation...
...5 " III In the years before the launching of Sputnik our schools were in the process of shaping their curriculums to fit the needs of a mass society...
...But this is supplemented by a spurious equality of persons, achieved through an odd and disturbing sort of group harmony...
...It is possible that the "revolution" in American secondary education is nearing its close (in the colleges, perhaps, it is only beginning...
...The shift from one to another is perfectly illustrated by the facile rhetoric of Herold C. Hunt, Under-secretary of Health, Education and Welfare, speaking to a conference on education in 1955: "It is a root belief in a democracy that the school must help fit the individual for his place in society...
...7. To develop an appreciation of literature, art, music and nature...
...The incongruous series has long been a device of satire...
...The least that can be said is that educators today have not had faith enough in the possibility of success...
...but this will involve careful thought and communal planning...
...It responds instead to the greatest pressure, and it is not the needs of individuals but the requirements of society which prevail...
...This process parallels, complicates and to a limited degree undercuts the effort to maintain class distinctions which has just been described...
...But it is likely that these problems would be more satisfactorily dealt with in a class-integrated school...
...Although the number of students leaving school is highest in the two years directly before graduation, it is actually rather evenly distributed over all the years after sixth-grade: thus a considerable number of children never get beyond grade school...
...Indeed, father and mother, instead of themselves supplying the cultural images and values of their children, will often succumb to the child's more "educated," more contemporary, sense of the appropriate and fashionable...
...Elitism is the natural, perhaps the inevitable, concomitant of mass education...
...4. To understand the significance of the family for the individual and for society...
...they nudge students into a suitable place in the school program and this is a foretaste of the process by which they will someday be adjusted to their position in society at large...
...It follows that they will be dilapidated or luxurious according to the state of the local economy...
...11 Everyday problems indeed...
...Since the class system is, at its socially most significant level, a system of family relationships, the newer educational processes tend to soften any very precise sense of class distinction...
...I The rhetoric of equality is a staple of American speech...
...The purpose of this is indicated in a list of aims set forth by the writers on Evanston High School...
...8. To be able to use leisure time well and to budget it wisely...
...personality adjustment, group relations and the personal factors of success and progress...
...Nor is this seen as any cause for sorrow: it is "in fact fortunate," says an article in the Bulletin of the National Association of Secondary School Principals, "for a society having a large number of jobs to be done requiring no unusual aptitudes or interests" that so many children exist who have neither "aroused interests or pronounced aptitudes...
...Its author is, let us hope, an educator with but few faithful pupils...
...His fellow-citizens being in fact only the masses he will someday govern—or whose governors he will advise—there is, it follows, no reason for him to associate with them...
...The new equality is thus an equality of books and ideas without value...
...In undertaking to solve personal problems and to train the student in the practices of citizenship, educators are all too likely to forget their primary duties...
...Similarly, history is no longer to be studied "for its own sake," but rather "for the sake of becoming a good practicing citizen...
...It is not, however, in the school that the child attains his education in the appropriate...
...2 Warner, Havighurst, Loeb, Who Shall be Educated: The Challenge of Unequal Opportunities, 1944, p. 52...
...Or it may mean a commitment to study history only insofar as it can be put to practical use in solving community problems...
...Learn ing to be middle-class and not merely learning mathematics or history is obviously an important element in upward mobility...
...Many educational textbooks today advocate a teaching program in listening and watching (just as many more urge an education in buying...
...The second group, which advocates an elitist training in technical and scientific skills, must be resolutely opposed...
...The first part, as well as a related article by Melvin Tumin, appeared in our previous (Spring 1959) issue...
...If this view were widely accepted, the prestige of the liberal arts and sciences would be effectively reduced...
...Consumption in America today tends to be more homogeneous: expectations and taste are not governed by the family but created outside it...
...if Life had its way, he would shortly speak a different language...
...If that relationship is more authoritative, it is at the same time less manipulative...
...the school should "discourage controversy, encourage fact-finding...
...10...
...They share a firm sense of the virtues of homogeneity...
...The secondary school may or may not assume responsibility for any actual military training...
...This construction of a "common culture" is enhanced by that broader trend which is slowly transforming a society oriented to production into a society absorbed in consumption...
...Both young children and teen-agers have, in fact, a great deal of time—time enough to learn to dance, to drive a car, to play football, to train for a vocation...
...yet his spirit is very much abroad...
...IT WOULD SEEM not to require proof that education at any time and in any society should in its character and purposes conform to the dominant ideals as to form of organization held by that society...
...There is a tendency, however, not to leave self-aggrandizement to chance...
...Both their resistance and their acceptance, it should be noted, will then be salutary...
...8 Selection and Guidance of Gifted Students for National Survival, Report of the 20th Educational Conference, New York City, October, 1955...
...even—hopefully—time enough for unorganized play and unplanned idleness...
...Is God a person...
...11 Carlsen, "Life Adjustment Through English," in Douglas, ed., Education for Life Adjustment, 1950, pp...
...Such a selection as the high schools claim to make, however, can rare ly be made on the basis of talent alone...
...22, 1951) first made clear the nature of the trick...
...Athletics, to put it crudely, has become a part of mass culture, and motivation toward athletic achievement a matter of massive indoctrination...
...The recognition of difference, though not always or even often its abolition, must be made a basic goal of democratic education...
...Only a single point will be emphasized here...
...To this end every secondary school which has not already done so should conduct a realistic study of young men's special military needs .. . The curriculum should include appropriate knowledge and skills of value in preparing for military service...
...Its members are, in fact, not conservatives at all, but the most advanced de fenders of the interests of an increasingly well-established power elite...
...Frustration is recognized not only as a personal problem, but also as a social danger...
...This measurement indicates the holding power of the schools, or, conversely, the ability (or the willing ness) of children to continue their education...
...A bulletin of the US Office of Education (No...
...it is somewhat comforting to know that schools are usually "reactionary" about implementing them...
...secondly, because the confrontation with difference should be an important part of education...
...s Thus wrote the director of an American college of education in 1952...
Vol. 6 • July 1959 • No. 3
