March/April 2001
Diane Ravitch on Left Back: A Century of Failed School Reforms
Every month, the Harvard Graduate School of Education invites educators, researchers, community activists, and policymakers from across the country to talk about key issues in schools and school reform. We are pleased to be able to provide you with an edited transcript of some of these forums. Below is an edited transcript of a talk that took place at the Harvard Graduate School of Education on October 11, 2000.
For easier reading, we have divided the transcript into the following sections:
Welcome by Jerome Murphy, Dean of HGSE
Introduction by Patricia Albjerg Graham
Remarks by Diane Ravitch
Question and Answer Session
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WELCOME BY JEROME MURPHY Good evening. My name is Jerry Murphy, and I'm the Dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Education. It's a pleasure to see you all here. A special word of welcome to our honored guest, Diane Ravitch, who has written the wonderfully provocative book that we will be discussing tonight. I had the good fortune earlier in the day to go to a faculty seminar where we spent an hour and a half having a very lively conversation. So I think we're in for an exciting evening.
Welcome to all of you. I bring you greetings from the current president of Harvard University, Neil Rudenstine. And I should say that if I could, I would probably bring you greetings from two former Harvard presidents who are prominently featured in Diane's book, Charles William Eliot and James Bryant Conant. And given Diane's critique, I suspect that they may be rolling over a bit in the grave at the moment.
I'm delighted that Diane has a much more positive appraisal of several members of our faculty, from Howard Gardner to Ted Sizer, and I think Ted is here this evening as well as Deborah Meier, who recently has been an adjunct member of the faculty.
Tonight's program is brought to you under the banner of the Askwith Education Forum, which is a series of events designed to provoke debate about education, the arts, and society. It is now my pleasure to introduce Patricia Albjerg Graham, who will introduce our guest. Pat is the former dean of the Graduate School of Education, the recently retired president of the Spencer Foundation, and currently the Charles Warren Professor of History of American Education here at HGSE. So please welcome Pat Graham.
INTRODUCTION BY PATRICIA ALBJERG GRAHAM Thank you, Jerry. You know, for me it is just a wonderful treat to be able to introduce Diane Ravitch. Diane and I met more than 25 years ago in the dining room of her apartment-I guess we probably met in the living room-but we first had a conversation in the dining room, when she had two little boys about whose education she was very properly concerned, as any mother would be.
This was in New York City. She had just decided to begin work on a book about disputes in New York City schools. As most of you know, this book became The Great School Wars. As the conversation of the dinner went on, she said she was thinking of taking a graduate course or two, but her professor was talking to her about the need to write a thesis.
As the conversation went on, my husband suggested to her, "You know, at Columbia, Daniel Bell published his first book and it became his Ph.D. thesis. Why don't you do the same?" And she did. It launched a magnificent career as a writer and thinker about educational issues, which has led her occasionally to full-time paid employment: as an assistant secretary in the Bush administration for educational research and improvement and affiliations with a number of distinguished institutions such as Brookings and Columbia University Teachers College, and now New York University.
But I think one of the many things that Diane exemplifies so well for us is that one can make a big difference in education in many ways. And Diane's contribution is as a thinker, as a writer, as a person who engages educational issues passionately, and with a great concern for data and for accuracy. So more of us might want to follow that example.
It's a great privilege for me to welcome Diane back to the Harvard Graduate School of Education. She came here when her last big book-she's published some little books since then-but her last big book, The Troubled Crusade, came out, and she filled Longfellow Hall that night just as she is filling it tonight. So, Diane, welcome back.
REMARKS BY DIANE RAVITCH Well, first of all, I want to thank Jerry Murphy and Pat Graham for so graciously inviting me here, and thank Dottie Engler for having made all the arrangements, which often seemed complicated but probably weren't as complicated as they seemed. And Pat truly was responsible. In fact, her husband, Lorne, was responsible for my getting my doctorate for a book that I had already written. It was the only time I ever went against the advice of my mentor, Lawrence Cremin, who said, "This has never been done at Teachers College, and it won't be done on my watch." But it was. So I thank Pat for having given me the encouragement.
I want to say a couple of words about myself, if I may. I was born in Houston. My grandparents did not speak English. My grandfather was a tailor; my grandmother never learned to speak English and she stayed home, and as far as I could tell, she scrubbed floors all the time. Neither of my parents had a college education. My father was a high school dropout in Savannah, Georgia, and my mother, who was an immigrant from Bessarabia [Eastern Europe], learned English in the Houston public schools and did graduate high school. She was very proud of that.
I was one of eight children, number three. And people sometimes say to me, "Well, you know, you write very clearly. I don't understand this. You're not supposed to do this in the academic world." I'm always getting in trouble that I do write so clearly that people know exactly what I mean. And I think that's because I'm third of eight. And when you're one of eight children, you have to really be able to address all of the other seven and speak their language, and I did. And I try to write in a way so that people who are not scholars can understand what I'm writing about.
I went to the public schools in Houston. I attended there from kindergarten through 12th grade. My parents told me the story that when I was five or six years old, they wanted to enroll me in the school across the street. If any of you grew up in Houston or know Houston, you know there's a very fine private school there called the Kinkaid Academy. My parents thought that I should go to the Kinkaid Academy; I'm not quite sure why.
And Mrs. Kinkaid met them and told them that they didn't accept Jews. So that was very simple. Well, they do now, but at that time, it made me a very strong, passionate defender of public education. And I still treasure a letter that my father wrote to the Houston newspapers talking about the superiority of the public schools over the private schools, with me as his number one example.
The great change in my life-the life of the mind-was leaving Houston and going to Wellesley College. Coming home to this area is always wonderful for me, because four of the most wonderful years of my life were spent at Wellesley. I graduated in 1960; I was married two weeks later.
Eighteen months later, I had my first child. I spent twelve years after college raising children. I had a child who died of leukemia. I have two sons. I was writing all the time that I was raising my children. And I began graduate school in 1972. I debated whether to go to Teachers College or to study history at Columbia University. And I met a man who was at that time a rather famous radical historian on the Columbia faculty. He said that the Columbia history department would not accept me because I had three strikes against me. He said, "First of all, you're 32; you're too old. Second of all, you're a woman, and we don't want women in our department." He said it. And he said, "Third, you're interested in education, and we don't do education in the Columbia history department."
So, I did enroll to earn my Ph.D. at Teachers College, and Lawrence Cremin was my mentor, a wonderful scholar. I met young professors such as Pat Graham and Donna Shalala, and I had the great privilege of encountering Lawrence Cremin's exacting standards of scholarship.
I've written several books. The book that I'm talking about tonight I began in the late 1980s with Larry Cremin's encouragement. He died, I believe, in 1990 or '91, and I did something that I would not have done if he had been alive: I went to work in the government. Every time some offer would come along to work in state, local, or federal government, he would say, "Don't do it." He died, so I did it. And as Pat said, I became assistant secretary [of education]. And I had started this book; I had about 350 pages written. I was writing a book that was going to be a history of the teaching of the humanities. I had this chunky manuscript.
I went to work for the government. I spent two years there, a year working at Brookings. I wrote a book on national standards and the issues and problems with them. And then I came back to this book and I looked at the 350 pages and said, "I don't remember what my train of thought was." I forget what questions I was asking and what I was doing. So I knew that I had learned a lot in writing this, but I set it aside and couldn't work on it anymore. I started fresh.
And what I wrote is a summation of what I've studied and learned in my life in this field over the last 30 years. My book, Left Back, and let me say that I'm not the happiest person in the world with the title. I wanted to call it Anti-Intellectualism in American Education following on Richard Hofstadter's great work. The publisher said, "That title will be remaindered on the second day that it's published." So we had many discussions of titles and this was the title that we finally agreed upon.
But it is a story, a narrative history of what I describe as a battle of ideas across the 20th century about what to teach and who should learn, with the major sub-theme being something like a steady drumbeat against the academic curriculum and against having too many kids study the academic curriculum.
David Tyack once talked about historians finding a pattern in the rug. So this was my finding a pattern in the rug. Others might not discern it, but I tried to unmask the evidence and say that this is the pattern I discerned.
I framed this, first of all, with a discussion of two men of ideas of the late 19th century. Lester Frank Ward was a great believer in equal access to knowledge and the widest possible distribution of knowledge across the population. He believed that anyone given the opportunity could become smart, but that this opportunity and knowledge were not available. Then there was Herbert Spencer, the English philosopher who was a great proponent of utility as the measure of all things. I then moved on to a discussion of Charles Elliot and William Torrey Harris and the famous Committee of Ten whose report was issued in 1893. Ted Sizer wrote a book about the Committee of Ten, which is invaluable to anyone who wants to read this report.
The framework of this narrative is the ideal at the end of the 19th century that students should be treated the same in high school regardless of whether they planned to go to college or to work. And there would be different courses, but not different curricula. All students would have the same opportunity to study a foreign language, history, literature, mathematics, and science, even though they would have different destinations in life. This was the ideal that was often referred to as the educational ladder stretching from kindergarten through high school and then to college, which would remain open for as long as students stayed in school.
Now, not many kids were in high school. The common school education at the beginning of the 20th century was an eight-year education. Most students left school at the end of eight years. Only about five to six percent or so stayed on to go to high school. But the idea was that as high school education expanded, as enrollment expanded, there would be this educational ladder open to all.
Now what I began to discern early on was a series of movements, many of which call themselves progressive. I know I've often taken a critical view of progressivism, but what I always emphasize is that the definition of progressivism itself is constantly shifting. And there were a series of progressive movements that were, first of all, a revolt against tradition, a revolt against what was seen as the stultifying curriculum, an emphasis on rote learning.
What began to come through in many of these movements was a revolt against, first, the classical curriculum, which virtually didn't exist in American high schools at the beginning of the 20th century. Then there was a revolt against the academic curriculum and an effort to restrict the academic curriculum only to those who were going to college, not to encourage everyone to have this experience.
Among the movements-and I have about 20-some-odd movements that I write about in the book-a very important one at the end of the 19th century was the child study movement. The great champion of the child study movement was G. Stanley Hall, who was the president of Clark University in Worcester. Hall was a very influential psychologist in his day. And he wrote again and again in many works and speeches that the interest of the child trumps everything else. And he documented that when children enter school, they actually know very little. They don't know very many things at all. But he always would say that teachers should learn from their students, not that students should learn from their teachers. Now since the students actually didn't know very much, it was hard to know what the teachers were supposed to learn from them. But nonetheless, his main contribution was to say, "Fit the school to the child and not the child to the school."
Now in very elaborate detail, I describe some of Hall's ideas. He was very critical of the academic curriculum, and he believed that, among other things, reading was not all that important. He would say, "Charlemagne couldn't read, and he was quite a brainy man. He did quite a lot. And neither could the blessed mother Mary; she couldn't read, and we all revere her." And he said, "In fact, some people are better off never learning to read, because illiterates escape certain temptations such as vacuous and vicious reading." This super pedant said, "In fact, ignorance may be a wholesome poultice for weakly souls." Now it's hard to imagine someone actually saying that there's something good to be said for ignorance and illiteracy. But Hall did that, and he was a leader of one of the first major movements.
Then one of the next movements to come along was the social efficiency movement. This was a movement that sought to redefine the meaning of democracy and education, to say that equal opportunity meant providing everyone a different kind of curriculum, not providing everyone the opportunity to experience the same kind of curriculum. The social efficiency experts suggested that it was anti-democratic and elitist and aristocratic to expect all students to be able to participate in the academic curriculum, and they argued that because immigrants are different and that their skills were manual skills, not intellectual skills, immigrant children needed a different kind of education from native children.
James Earl Russell, who was the Dean of Teachers College, wrote in 1906, "How can a nation endure that deliberately seeks to rouse ambitions and aspirations in the coming generations which in the nature of events cannot possibly be fulfilled? If the chief object of government be to promote civic order and social stability, how can we justify our practice in schooling the masses in precisely the same manner as we do those who are to be our leaders?"
This was considered very democratic, to suggest that the masses needed a different kind of education. Well, what kind of education did the masses need? They needed-the children of immigrants, black children, in many cases girls, needed a special kind of education: agricultural education, handicrafts education, manual trades like blacksmithing, learning how to can things, and learning how to be domestic servants.
One of the great exemplars of the social efficiency and industrial education movement was a very famous report called the Jones report. It was written by a man named Thomas Jesse Jones, who was the president of a major foundation. He also was the federal government's specialist basically on black education. He was not black; he was a Welshman. He wrote a report in 1916 which consisted of two volumes. The first volume said black education is in terrible condition; so is the education of white children. And he described southern education as being in need of better funding. But he went beyond that to say that there were economic and psychological differences between the races that necessitated different courses of study, different methods of teaching, and different curricula for black children-specifically, something more in keeping with what he referred to as the "needs of Negro youth."
This kind of education should be modeled along the lines of the Hampton Institute, which provided industrial education so that black youth in the south would receive, not an academic education as some were striving to do, but agricultural training, instruction in sewing, gardening, cooking, domestic service, plowing, milking cows, harvesting crops, and other manual and industrial occupations.
Jones could not understand, and he repeated this in several places in his report, why so many black parents and community leaders wanted their children to have a literary type of education. He said this was not modern and progressive, and that these parents and these community leaders were simply out of touch with the progressive ideas of the day.
Now the second volume of the Jones report listed every black high school throughout the south and gave advice to northern philanthropists on whether or not these institutions deserved support. This became a guide to those schools that were in fact preparing black children with this kind of industrial training and recommended against supporting those that were emphasizing the academic type of education. W.E.B. Du Bois, needless to say, scorned the Jones Report. But the Jones Report represented the prevailing ideas of the day.
Now it became very popular amongst reformers at this time to recommend curricular differentiation. As I said, the popular idea which was considered modern, scientific, and progressive was to differentiate the curriculum so that the children of farmers get agricultural education, the children of industrial workers get industrial education, and you could pretty much look at the background of the children and their parents and get an idea of how to fit them for schooling.
But the problem was that there was always the question of how you decide which children are going to get the academic education and which will be placed in some vocational or industrial track. Now the superintendent of schools in Cleveland figured out a way to decide which children would go in which track. He proposed in an article in 1916 that instead of having common schooling through the first eight years, that common schooling should be limited to only four years, and that the tracking of children into industrial tracks should begin at the end of four years. He pointed out that only five percent of the people in the population did all of the professional work and the other 95 percent were involved in industrial and commercial lines of trade. So the program in the public schools should send those 95 percent off into industrial and commercial tracks.
Well, how would the schools know which children to send to college and which to prepare for work in industry? He had a very quick answer for this. He wrote, "It is obvious that the educational needs of a child in a district where the streets are well paved and clean, where the homes are spacious and surrounded by lawns and trees, where the language of the child's playfellows is pure, it is obvious that the educational needs of such a child are radically different from those of the child who lives in a foreign and tenement section." So he had a way: look at where the child is coming from; look at the neighborhood, and you'll know where the child is bound.
But with this proliferation of curricular programs, cities and districts began competing and saying, "We have 12 curricula, we have 14 curricula, we have 18." At one point, Los Angeles claimed to have 48 different curricula that they were directing children into. But with all of this proliferation of curricula, people began to think, "We need a more scientific way; we can't just make this guesswork."
And along came World War I, and the psychologists of America volunteered their services to the U.S. Army to create a test that would enable the Army to quickly decide which recruits were bound to be privates and which were best suited to be officers. So the psychologists collaborated on a group IQ test. I'm sure many of you know from your reading of the history of the IQ test that the group IQ test was invented during World War I, and when the war was over, it was mass-marketed by the psychologists to America's public schools.
This then gave rise to an easy way to make the decision. You didn't just have to look at where kids came from; you could give them the test. The test, as it happened, usually coincided pretty closely with the kinds of neighborhoods that children came from. But it made the schools feel that they were doing this sorting on a very scientific basis. And IQ testing spread in large part because of all the hoopla that went with it suggesting that it was truly scientific. You could use this test and quickly determine the native, innate, inherent, fixed, unchangeable IQ of children. This would predict-and some of the experts said predict as early as the first grade--what the potential of a child was and find the right curriculum for him or her.
There were, as it happened at that time, as I'm sure many of you know, a number of books written that said you could use the IQ test from World War I to actually rank ethnic groups and races and that there was a very neat ranking which made it possible to determine who should be excluded in our immigration policy in the future, which was in fact done in various pieces of legislation. And the IQ testing data from World War I had a very large role in this.
But there was also within the schools of education, which were very active in promoting what was then called the scientific movement in education, a tremendous effort to knock down the idea that certain studies had disciplinary value. I devote a fair amount of attention to the work of Edward Thorndike and others who said that if you study Latin, you don't learn mental habits, you don't learn any sort of self-discipline. All you learn is Latin, and Latin's not good for anything. But if you learn sewing, you learn how to sew.
So the idea became very fashionable amongst the pedagogues at Teachers College and Harvard and Chicago and Stanford that you teach what you teach and you learn what you learn, and Latin is useless, and some would say chemistry was useless and algebra was useless, and if you're not going to use algebra you shouldn't study algebra. Of course, no one knew what anyone would need in the future. Nonetheless, there was this very concerted effort to knock out subjects that were supposed to have disciplinary value. It's kind of amusing, because you'll often see people today refer to mental discipline and habits of mind. And a good deal of this comes from what was considered in the 1920s to be this exploded notion of mental discipline.
There was also, connected with this scientific, social efficiency and social management movement a great interest among educators in places like the University of Chicago. John Bobbitt and W. W. Charters were very involved in the idea of scientific management. They believed that if you studied what grownups did, that would tell you what you should teach children. Well, not many grownups speak Latin, so you should never teach anyone Latin. Not many grownups use science, so science wasn't very useful either.
Another one of the movements was the school survey movement. Many of the experts who were involved in the scientific management movement were called upon by school districts to come in and provide a survey of their school systems. I think every major school system-hundreds of school systems-invited the same six or eight or ten experts to come in and give them the survey and tell them what's wrong with them and what needs to be done.
So the school survey movement became a means of spreading the ideas of curricular differentiation and introducing multiple curricula, using this idea of activity analysis. For example, sit in a department store and watch what a clerk does, and then you'll find out what you need to teach children so that they can grow up to be clerks in department stores.
Bobbitt surveyed the San Antonio schools in 1915, and even though the schools in San Antonio already had extensive vocational programs, as early as 1915 they were offering courses in carpentry, furniture making, pattern making, foundry practice, forging. At the black high school-the previous one was the white high school--there were courses in gardening, poultry raising, horticulture, bench work, iron work, automobile repair, cement construction, hairdressing, and domestic service.
But Bobbitt was invited to survey the San Antonio schools, and he just thought the schools were not sufficiently vocational. They really had a very disappointing array of courses, because they still were requiring students in the commercial course to take algebra, geometry, and two years of science. He said these were, for all of these students, useless subjects. They wouldn't need algebra, geometry, or science.
One of the quotes from this survey was, referring to requiring these subjects for commercial students, "To hoodwink a community into paying for such useless subjects is to obtain and to spend their money under false pretenses." Heaven forbid that we should expect anyone to learn science if they're not going to be a scientist.
Then another of the leading progressives of that era was Ellwood P. Cubberley. Cubberley, with a whole team including some of the leading IQ testers, surveyed the Salt Lake City schools in 1915. And the reason they had been invited to survey the Salt Lake City schools was that the business leaders of the community were concerned about whether the basic skills were really being taught efficiently.
So Cubberley brought in a survey team. He commended the schools for their excellent racial stock, for starters. And then having been invited to come in and assess the quality of basic skills, the team gave a test, and they found that the students were actually doing an excellent job in learning basic skills. The staff was absolutely superb.
And they said this fine school system, nonetheless, needed major changes. They should devote less time to teaching basic skills. They should have more IQ testing. They should have more classification of students for differentiation of different vocations. They should have more curricula. They should have separate junior high schools so that they could begin definite industrial training. So we see the spread of this curriculum revision movement through the 1920s and 1930s. And every place where there was a curriculum revision during the 1920s and 1930s, the goal was to deemphasize academic subjects for all but the college-bound and to reduce the number of students in the college track.
Then another movement comes along-some of the same sources but often different people at the same institutions-the child-centered movement. When we think of progressive education today, we tend to think of the child-centered movement. Child-centered meant it was not teacher-centered. In many cases, the inspiration for the child-centered movement was in some of the leading private progressive schools about which Pat Graham wrote so brilliantly. But the central notion was that the teacher was dominating, teaching too much, and that the children should be encouraged to follow their interests.
John Dewey, of course, was one of the forefathers, probably the leading forefather of this movement. He also was its most severe critic. Child-centered enthusiasts did not like the teaching of subject matter. They did not care for a planned curriculum. They didn't like structured learning or any sort of prescribed discipline. And Dewey in one of his least-known quotes wrote in 1926 that some educators think you can simply surround kids with wonderful materials and let them discover ideas all by themselves. And this, he wrote, and I quote, "is really stupid."
Dewey understood that children have interests that are largely determined by the social setting in which they're growing up, and that children who come from families with very broad interests pick up some of those broad interests and children who come from very disadvantaged settings have less broad and sometimes limited interests. So simply to send children off on their own to learn surrounded by wonderful materials is not enough. They need the guidance, help, and instruction of talented teachers.
Now I'm very ambivalent about Dewey. And I know that in these hallowed halls it's not good to be ambivalent about John Dewey. I am. There are also a number of times where I quote Dewey. In one case, he does a bit of a stretch in which he says that it doesn't really matter what you teach as long as you emphasize its social significance.
For example, he says in one of his famous speeches, "It wouldn't matter if a child were taking a course in zoology or laundry work because they could both be taught emphasizing their social significance." But this is an illustration, I think, of Dewey's sometimes profound political naiveté.
Then along came the activity movement. The activity movement in the late 1920s and 1930s advocated-and this was for elementary school children-don't teach skills directly, only indirectly through play. There has been, as I say in the book, a lively debate among historians about whether the activity movement ever really took hold. And the big example that everyone argues over is New York City, which announced that it had the activity movement in all of its schools in the 1930s and early '40s. But some people who went to school there said they never experienced it themselves.
Clearly, as you look at today's elementary schools, the activity movement, I believe, had a very positive effect because it made school more fun. And there was always the question about whether teachers were well-trained, whether teachers were well-educated, whether children were simply doing activities for activities' sake or whether they were doing activities that helped them learn to read, helped them learn mathematics, helped them learn the important skills and knowledge that children should be learning. And I think that where this was done with a purpose, and I point out some of the exciting schools that did this-the Lincoln School at Teachers College being one of them, the Carleton Washburne public schools in Winnetka, Illinois, being another-then it was a very positive contribution.
Then comes in this panoply of movements, the curricular integration movement. The curricular integration movement aimed to merge academic subjects and, in some cases, to remove academic subjects altogether. I have references to places where I describe this, where the idea was to merge the English, the social studies, the math, the consumer education, the family education-to put it all into one subject matter area. That was supposed to integrate the curriculum and make it much more appealing to children, as long as no one was actually taught subject matter. The term subject matter was like a bad word.
Then in the 1930s comes the mental hygiene movement. And the idea of the mental hygiene movement-it's very much like the self-esteem movement of our own times-was that we should base the curriculum on the personal and social needs of youth. There was a great deal of time devoted to trying to find out what the social and personal needs of youth were. So a lot of academics and people in the Progressive Education Association did surveys to find out what young children in high school really wanted to know. And they said, above all, high school students have the need to conform, and the schools should help them make friends, should help them look attractive, should help them prepare for family life and vocations, and achieve social success.
Well, what were these important needs? Here's one of the lists, and there were many such lists: How can I get to be popular? How can you win friends among both boys and girls and keep them? How can I be sure to get a boyfriend or girlfriend? And afterwards, how can I go about keeping him or her?
Girls wanted to know: Do boys like fingernail polish? Do boys like makeup? Boys worried about things like: Is it all right to date a girl who's taller than you? Do girls like a fellow to be dolled up, or do they want him to look like a he-man?
What were teenagers concerned about? They were concerned about clothes; they were really concerned a lot about their complexion. And they were, above all, concerned about their physical appearance. They were not at all concerned about their academic competence, so this was, of course, not something that the list makers thought should be very high on the mental hygiene movement's agenda.
A lot of these movements converge and overlap, some of them involving the same people, some of them involving different people. The next grand movement of the 1930s is the social reconstruction movement. Now we have had the child-centered movement, which is highly individualistic and non-conformist, giving way to the social reconstruction movement. And this happens because in the late 1920s there's a discussion group at Teachers College, and the leading progressive educators there are very upset about the direction of American society. It's too conformist; it's too bourgeois; it's too self-interested. All of these sorts of things--and it's puritanical. There are all of these terrible social movements in the country.
So they began to look with interest about where we could find a better society. And John Dewey goes to visit the Soviet Union. John Dewey returns from the Soviet Union in the late 1920s, and he writes a series of six articles about what he has seen. And he's absolutely bowled over. This is a very exciting place-because guess what? It turns out not to be an economic revolution, not to be a political revolution. It's an educational revolution. And educators are leading the revolution. So he thinks this is really good, because now you have educators planning and leading this new society, and young people really caught up in the idea of reconstructing society and building this new social order.
And Dewey's enthusiasm is very contagious. So his disciple, William Heard Kilpatrick, goes to the Soviet Union. He also is very taken. The first thing that he discovers is that everyone in the pedagogical institutes is reading his books. That is a turn-on for an academic, let me tell you. He knows this is a good revolution because they're reading him.
And then Kilpatrick is followed by George Counts. Counts is a prairie populist on the faculty at Teachers College, a sociologist. And Counts is just bowled over. He goes there, he schleps a Ford to the Soviet Union in the late 1920s, and he travels thousands of miles across the Soviet Union, talking with people in rural areas and in the cities.
And he comes back and he writes a book called A Ford Crosses Soviet Russia, which is a wonderful book that I highly recommend; it's very entertaining. But he becomes totally enthralled with the Russian Revolution, and he begins writing books about the need for collectivism. He gives a famous speech at the Progressive Education Association in 1932-here's the Progressive Education Association devoted to child-centered education, to individualism, to non-conformity, to the teacher as a guide and not a teacher, a facilitator not an instructor. We've all heard that.
So he comes to them and he says, "Dare the school build a new social order?" And he chastises them. He says, "You've all been selfish. You've all been devoted to the welfare of your own children and you've all been too individualistic. The age of individualism is over. The age of collectivism is now opening. Are you prepared to do what's necessary to build this new collective social order and stop worrying about indoctrination? Don't worry about indoctrination. We must indoctrinate children." George Counts is a very powerful writer, a powerful speaker.
The meeting stops. They cancel every other session. This is the only thing that matters. Dare the school build a new social order? Well, a new journal is founded at Teachers College called The Social Frontier. And in the educational world, at least that part of it that reads The Social Frontier at Teachers College and Chicago and Stanford and Harvard, everybody is all engrossed in this idea. Can we now indoctrinate children? Is it right to indoctrinate? What are the ethics of indoctrination? Is it time for collectivism? Why isn't the American public interested in what we're saying?
But this goes on with the idea that educators will lead the revolution. And then in the late 1930s, really in '36, '37, something happens. The whole movement begins to collapse because word filters back to Dewey and Kilpatrick and Counts that all of these wonderful progressive educators that they met in the Soviet Union had been sent to labor camps, had been assassinated, or had committed suicide. Not one of them is left. They can't make contact with them anymore. They're all gone.
Dewey is invited to chair a commission on whether or not Leon Trotsky was guilty as charged by Stalin, and he decides that it was a set-up, that Trotsky was framed, and he completely renounces his previous intellectual interest in Marxism. Kilpatrick denies that he was ever interested in it at all. And Counts begins writing passionate books against Communism. So there is this dramatic turnaround on the part of the people who had been the most outspoken leaders of this movement.
But then we morph into the 1940s, and lots of commission reports come out-the number of trees that fell to produce commission reports in the 1930s and 40s-about what should happen to the schools. And it all leads up to a major report in 1944 called, "Education for All American Youth," which has got the names of every alphabet soup organization in the country on it, saying that what the schools should be is the planning agency for their community. Now this becomes the foundation for what later is known as the life-adjustment movement. Everyone has forgotten about Marxism and collectivism, but the faith that wasn't lost was the belief that educators could be social planners and that educators could, in fact, decide who wins, who loses, who goes to college. This was an article of faith since the 1920s and even earlier.
So we get this notion of education for all American youth, but the education for all American youth is a community-planning kind of education in which there is, again, no real emphasis on academic instruction. In fact, all subjects will be of equal value. There is no aristocracy of subjects. Mathematics and mechanics, art and agriculture, history and homemaking are all peers in this report.
The report recommends a four-year high school course called "Common Learnings," which would combine everything that our students need to know into a single course. This was, again, representing every major organization that you could think of at that time. All students would meet in "Common Learnings" for two or more hours daily, and this course would merge the study of citizenship, family life, health, consumer economics, science, English literature, and the arts all into a two-hour program every day. It would all be practical, hands-on, and there would be no emphasis on academics at all.
What followed from this emphasis on social planning was a tremendous concern about reluctant teachers, and I want to say that throughout my history none of these ideas come from teachers. Teachers never understand why the subject that they're teaching isn't supposed to be useful anymore. So teachers were always very reluctant, resistant. They didn't like the idea of deep-sixing the academic curriculum. So there is a literature that arises on what to do about skeptical, resistant, reluctant teachers. There's a lot of quoting of Kurt Lewin and group dynamics and a lot of engagement in workshops, where there's a carefully selected leader and where people are told to read certain things in order to have everybody conform. The isolated, subject-matter teacher would find out pretty quickly that you go with the program or you're a troublemaker.
So you'll find references to a whole literature of this kind about how to bring the teachers along. Well, this kind of activity on the part of educational leaders creates widespread criticism, and we see in the 1950s many books and articles saying, "Why are our schools teaching children to button their pants and blow their noses?" The most important book of this era is one by Arthur Bestor called Educational Wastelands, but there are many others along these lines, very critical of these directions.
Then there is, briefly, the Sputnik period, in which the schools allegedly turned around. But in fact I think that some of these things got very deeply rooted in the schools. I don't want to get too involved with the modern period, but I think that we continue with things like the open classroom movement, seeing some of the same things that we heard in the 1920s: take down the walls, let the kids explore, have four teachers teaching in the same classroom, and let kids find things out for themselves.
What I want to call attention to are some of the people that I highlighted that are not known in places like Teachers College anymore. These are very important figures. I gave a lot of attention to a different tradition. At one point I wanted to call the book, "The Lost Tradition of American Education," and I think the publishers said it would be remaindered on the first day.
I was interested in people like William Torrey Harris, now unknown to anyone other than historians. He was a man who was, I think, unjustly called a conservative because he believed that children needed to learn subject matter and self-discipline.
I was very interested to resurrect the reputation of William Chandler Bagley. Bagley was a particularly heroic figure who had been a teacher, a school superintendent, and a professor at the University of Illinois. He then debated David Snedden. Snedden was the Commissioner of Education in Massachusetts and one of the leading advocates of vocational education. Bagley debated him before the NAA in 1914 and made impassioned statements on behalf of liberal education for all children. Snedden, of course, represented modern science, and most people of the time probably thought that Snedden carried the day, because his was the ascendant new view, and Bagley was representing what was increasingly seen as aristocratic education, this idea of giving all children access to an academic curriculum.
Bagley, in the 1920s, was the leading opponent of IQ testing. The only reference to Bagley in Lawrence Cremin's book on the transformation of the school is to say that it was very puzzling that Bagley, who was an antiprogressive, was also the most outspoken opponent of IQ testing. Well, it wasn't puzzling at all. Bagley was a great believer in liberal education, a great believer in equal educational opportunity, and he quickly saw that just as vocational education would be used to sort children into tracks from which they would not escape, he also saw that IQ testing would be misused to deny children opportunity by labeling them.
Bagley argued, using the data from the World War I IQ tests, that in fact the young people who had been in the United States the longest had higher IQs, regardless of which ethnic group they came from. He pointed out, using research that others had done, that northern black recruits had higher IQs than many southern white recruits, and he argued that the IQ tests actually could be used to demonstrate the importance of environment and culture, rather than innate IQ.
Another man that I hope to restore to some respected place is Isaac Kandel, a great scholar of international education. Bagley and Kandel were, for the most productive years of their life-in fact, Kandel, for all of his professional life-at Teachers College. And when I recently saw Arthur Levine, the president of Teachers College, he said that I had pretty well bashed Teachers College, and I said, "No, that's not really true, because my great heroes, Bagley and Kandel, were both at Teachers College." Of course they've been completely forgotten. But these were the great defenders of the liberal tradition.
Robert Hutchins, who was the president of the University of Chicago, led what I describe as a rather quixotic campaign for the great books, doomed to failure because, first of all, the educators had not read the great books and therefore couldn't teach them. But he rather passionately advocated the great books. There was a tremendous public response to what he was saying, and then Dewey just cut him to shreds. Dewey said that he was an authoritarian, that Hutchins was recommending the study of these dated old works from the fifteenth and sixteenth century.
William Heard Kilpatrick said that Hutchins, as he put it, "Stands near to Hitler." The calling of names in the 1930s, calling people fascist because they thought that all children should have access to an academic curriculum, was totally absurd, and never more absurd than speaking about Robert Hutchins. Robert Hutchins voted for Norman Thomas in 1932. Robert Hutchins defended the professors at the University of Chicago when they were under attack in a McCarthy-type investigation of Communist subversion in the mid-1930s, and this is a man who was described as standing near to Hitler because he thought that young people in America should read the great books.
All of the people that I've described were, in fact, political liberals, but they are known today as big conservatives, and in education there is nothing worse that you can be than a conservative. But in fact, all of them believed in equal educational opportunity, which I think is not terribly conservative. I think it is just smart.
I want to read you, if I may, my favorite passage in the book. This was written in 1937 by L. Thomas Hopkins, who is the curriculum director of the Lincoln School at Teachers College. He was the leading theorist of the curriculum integration movement, and you'll see very quickly why it's my favorite passage. He describes a great battle of educational ideas, and he says that it has already ended with a victory for his side. And I quote:
"When someone in the year 2000 writes the history of American Education for the twentieth century, the decade between the close of the World War and the financial and economic collapse which heralded the great depression will stand out as of peculiar importance. In these years the great battle of educational ideals took place, the death struggle between two opposing types of curriculum practice was fought and decided. On the one side were the large groups of educators who championed the subject curriculum, and on the other was a small group of educators who advocated the experience curriculum. A decision was rendered in 1929."
Well, today, what do we have? We have large high schools that are themselves a legacy of the movement for curriculum differentiation.
James B. Conant, a former president of this institution, wrote a book in 1959 called The American High School Today, which was in fact a whitewash intended to rescue the schools from all the criticism of the 1950s. Conant said, "What we need to do is to get rid of these small high schools. They're all trying to teach a common academic curriculum, and that's not efficient." He said, "What we need to do is to have big enough high schools so that about fifteen or twenty percent of the kids will take academic subjects, another fifteen or twenty percent will be prepared for specific vocations, and the others will get trades that they're prepared for, marketable skills. But what we don't want," he says, "are small schools."
And there was already a movement towards increasing the size of high schools, but it's gotten out of hand. We have more than half of our kids in this country in schools where there are more than two thousand children in the school. I heard the other day about a school in New York City-this is not atypical-with four thousand children. That is not a school; that is a city.
And I would have to say that my book has really only one strong policy recommendation, because I don't care how people teach and I don't think I'm qualified to say how people should teach. Aside from recommending equal educational opportunity and equal access to habits of mind and the academic curricula, I strongly support the notion of smaller schools. Small schools have to deal with each child as an individual, not as a member of a category, not as a member of a group.
What I argue is that when schools diminish their intellectual purposes, their central mission, that others quickly rush in to fill the vacuum with their own agendas, religious or social or political. And I point to three great errors of this century, which in my mind are errors. One is this effort to use the schools as a vehicle of social transformation. And of course schools are agencies of social transformation in the sense that they can raise the intelligence and the capacity of every child, but they can't be agencies of social reform in which there's a sociological determination on who will and who will not be educated.
The corollary error, I suggest, is this notion that only a portion of children need or should get a top quality academic education. And third, I suggest that it is wrong and unnecessary to say that we shouldn't worry about knowledge-that knowledge takes care of itself-but only how-to skills, leaving education without its central purpose. I cite, very approvingly, W.E.B. DuBois, who said in response to George Counts's "Dare the Schools Build a New Social Order?" that schools, as such, cannot build a new social order. The only way a school can effect social change is to make people more intelligent, and it does that by teaching them to read and write and count, and we might add, to think. And if it fails to do that, it will fail in whatever else it attempts to do.
And last I cite my ambiguous hero, John Dewey. I heartily endorse his statement that what the best and wisest parents want for their children is what we should want for all of our children, and that "any other ideal is narrow and unlovely, and acted upon, destroys our democracy." Thank you very much.
QUESTION AND ANSWER SESSION QUESTIONER: What do you think about the recent focus on standards and accountability, especially some of the charges that people are making against high-stakes tests?
DIANE RAVITCH: Well, I do believe in having standards, and I think that having standards without any accountability is pretty empty. I don't think as yet there have been any high stakes. I haven't seen the Massachusetts tests so I would be loath to talk about their validity or invalidity. My understanding is that children who do not pass them can take them again and again.
I don't believe that there should be any one test that determines a child's promotion or graduation, but I also don't believe there's a jurisdiction in this country where a child can't take the test again and where if you don't pass the test, you don't get help. I think the most valuable contribution thus far that we've seen from the emphasis on accountability has been a dramatic increase in attention to giving kids more instructional time, worrying about teacher quality, putting more money into instructional programs, and providing summer school. I mean, some people think that's a punishment. I think if kids aren't learning to read they need more time to learn to read. They need better-prepared teachers to help them read.
And I think there is a discussion going on in every state capital in this country about how to improve achievement, how to close or narrow the gap between racial groups. And I would just cite to you something I heard. A couple of weeks ago I was at a dinner, the McGraw Awards dinner in New York City, and the superintendent of schools from Houston, Rod Paige [now U.S. Secretary of Education], was receiving an award there. He said that he could close the racial gap overnight by one simple action: by eliminating tests, because then no one would know there was a gap.
But he said that because he does test, he targets money. He gets new money. He was able to pass a bond issue. He's able to raise the consciousness of the community about the needs of the schools and to continue to push for better schools, better achievement, better teachers. I think that's a valuable contribution.
QUESTIONER: Is it possible to integrate the curriculum and also have intellectual rigor in which children learn things in subjects? Or is it just an inherently unworkable system?
DIANE RAVITCH: I don't think it's unworkable. I bet that's what happens in Ted Sizer's school, I bet it's what happens in Debbie Meier's school. I've seen it happening in private and public schools that I've been in. It's very hard to do, but I think that, as I said, when the means become the end, something is wrong. The means have to lead to an end, and I think the end in this case is that we want to have well-educated citizens.
We want our children to grow up knowing how to use mathematics, knowing enough about science to protect themselves against charlatans, knowing enough about history so that they're intelligent and want to learn more. You know, it would be wonderful if all children learned a foreign language. There are schools like that. There are probably a lot of schools like that, but not enough.
QUESTIONER: How do you feel about children having access to the Internet in every classroom?
DIANE RAVITCH: I think that the Internet is a mixed blessing. And I use it every single day, so I wouldn't want to deny anyone access to it. But I think that right now it's seen as that magic feather that is referred to in Dumbo. Dumbo is always looking for the magic feather that will help him fly. And the story of this past century is the magic feather that will make learning easy. And a lot of politicians think if you can just put the Internet in every classroom kids will learn.
And that's ridiculous, because the Internet has so much unfiltered information and so much garbage and so many lies and so many, you know, urban myths. And kids don't know how to filter this. There has to be a foundation of knowledge so that when you turn to the Internet, you have some capacity for critical thought about what you see there.
I was asked about this several weeks ago by someone at the Wall Street Journal. I said if I were to find something to substitute for the Internet, it would be that every child would learn a musical instrument. That would take effort. That would take practice. That would take a certain level of dedication. Kids in our culture don't need to know more about surfing; they know that, they've got these clickers-they can click the TV very quickly. And I think that the Internet is, in itself, wonderful; I use it all the time. But I don't think it answers any problems. Learning a musical instrument, that solves more problems.
QUESTIONER: Do you think there will ever be, or should there be, national standards or a national curriculum, as some people have proposed?
DIANE RAVITCH: That's such a hard question for the last question. I have been, in the past, a supporter of national standards. That didn't go anywhere, as I write in my book, for various reasons too complicated to go into here. I think that in some sense we have national standards already. We have textbooks that are used across the country that have, in some cases, pretty low, minimal standards. We have tests that are used very often across the country; not every state has a tailored test. And we also have the Blake examinations, which are actually quite good examinations, against which states are measured as to their progress in math, science, reading, and other basic subjects.
So, in some sense we have national standards, and it may be that some day we will have a national curriculum, but I honestly don't see it in my lifetime. Ted Sizer breathes a sigh of relief. Thank you.
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