Stories of the Eight-Year Study: Reexamining Secondary Education in America

Vignette: Eugene Randolph Smith (1876-1968):Recognizing "the futility of statistics as an end in itself"

63 Vignette Eugene Randolph Smith (1876–1968): Recognizing “the futility of statistics as an end in itself” The name Smith seems to permeate Progressive Education Association documents —Eugene Randolph Smith, Herbert Winslow Smith, Perry Dunlap Smith, and Elliott Dunlap Smith. Each takes on different roles in the stories of the Eight-Year Study—leader, provocateur , loyalist, and supporter, respectively. Eugene Randolph Smith, headmaster of Boston’s Beaver Country Day School and the president of the PEA from 1923 to 1925, was perhaps second in importance to Aikin on the Commission on the Relation of School and College. Herbert Winslow Smith (ca. 1890–1981), headmaster of two participating EightYear Study schools, the Fieldston School and the Francis W. Parker School of Chicago, led the principals’ revolt of 1934. Perry Dunlap Smith (1888– 1967) served as headmaster of another participating school, North Shore Country Day School of Chicago, and Elliott Dunlap Smith (1891– 1976), then-professor at Yale University, was a member of the Commission on Human Relations. While each Smith guided the direction of the Eight-Year Study in significant ways, Eugene Smith, perhaps more than any other member of the PEA, has been most influential in the evolution of progressive education and most unknown and overlooked today. Eugene R. Smith, photograph, ca. 1938, Beaver Country Day School 64 Stories of the Eight-Year Study I For Lawrence Cremin, Eugene Smith exemplified the progressive educator who used science to improve the traditional curriculum. In fact, Cremin featured Smith in his “scientists, sentimentalists, and radicals” chapter in The Transformation of the School, and Harold Rugg would have designated him one of the “scientific methodists” in his configuration of the progressive education field.1 While we wish not to quibble with Cremin, nor Rugg for that matter, after reading Smith’s work we view his interests as being primarily focused on the importance of experimentation rather than on any formal conception of scientific inquiry. “Statistical investigation” or numerical tabulations seems to be a more accurate description of his research. This is not to say that scientific inquiry and psychological measurement were not important to him. In 1920, when in Boston to talk to a group of patrons who would ultimately finance the Beaver Country Day School, he stated that “one of the greatest movement(s) in education today is becoming scientific about education,” although Smith’s conception of science, as he made very clear to the Boston benefactors, referred to accumulating data in order to better understand students and to describe the learning process .2 Science—conceived as systematic data collection—should verify one of the most basic beliefs of progressive educators: the importance of educating the whole child. Smith’s lifelong conviction remained that “the school must be for the child, not the child for the school or for the convenience and ease of an established system of schooling,” and throughout his career his vision remained on the student and on bringing about an “improvement in educational opportunity [for] all the children of all the people” rather than on scientific technique.3 While adopting many attributes of “child-centered progressives,” Smith’s place among the testing experts becomes somewhat difficult to understand, especially in light of these student-oriented views. Smith stood among the founders of the CTS and the SAT and was himself the founder of the Educational Records Bureau (ERB)—entities that combined to form the Educational Testing Service. Further, at this time the early college admissions process was much more discriminatory and racist rather than child-centered. Carl Brigham, SAT designer, championed eugenics before renouncing his position and later becoming a member of Smith’s Records and Reports Committee of the Aikin Commission . Columbia University, the leader for the development of college admissions testing and sponsor of the CTS and ERB, openly expressed concern about the moral background and social desirability of its applicants in reaction to an influx of ethnic students. College admission officers embraced meritocracy, democracy, and open access 65 Vignette: Eugene Randolph Smith (1876–1968) for public school students; however, Herbert Hawkes, dean of Columbia College from 1919 to 1941, also saw entrance exams as a way to distinguish those students with high intelligence from those with high ambitions, that is, separating ability from accomplishment and power from performance.4 Period vernacular suggests those “most ambitious” were the Jewish students. How the...