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

Vignette: .Caroline Zachry (1894-1945): None Quite Like Our Dr. Zachry

135 Vignette Caroline Zachry (1894–1945): None Quite Like Our Dr. Zachry One of the busiest, most popular , most interesting of our faculty members—Dr. Zachry. We have heard there is one in every college, but there is none quite like our Dr. Zachry who listens patiently to all our troubles and cheers us on to make the best of what we have. (New Jersey State Teachers College yearbook, 1930)1 Without a doubt, there was no one quite like Caroline Beaumont Zachry. Benjamin Spock, a close friend and colleague, described her as having a “self-assurance that inspired confidence .” Others noted her calmness and charisma, her sophisticated wit and humor “with a nice but never loud laugh,” and her gentle sympathetic gaze—this from a Southern aristocrat with “a slightly squeaky voice” whose New York City upper east side apartment would become a meeting place for a remarkable group of psychiatrists, physicians, psychologists, and social scientists—Ruth Benedict, Erik Homberger Erikson, Karen Horney, Margaret Mead, Helen Lynd, Margaret Mahler, and Spock—all gathering to discuss work related to the Commission on Secondary School Curriculum.2 Other participants in the Eight-Year Study may be seen as more important: Bill Aikin and Gene Smith were the administrative leaders; Larry Frank and Bob Havighurst provided funding; Ralph Tyler solved Caroline B. Zachry, photograph, ca. 1943, courtesy of Nancy and Stephen Zachry 136 Stories of the Eight-Year Study problems; Thayer and Alberty helped design curriculum; and Alice Keliher got the job done, whatever that may have entailed. But Caroline Zachry was different—beloved, criticized, and ubiquitous. She “permeated ” the Eight-Year Study and inspired a sense of assurance among many of the teachers who wondered whether good would emerge from this massive and unwieldy experimental project.3 While she appears more central than most other participants, her work was unquestionably the most controversial and certainly the most far removed from current understandings of progressive education. I In 1924, PEA President Eugene Smith called for educators to keep pace with the most recent discoveries in child psychology.4 One may assume that these innovations arose from the American educational psychologists of the time—Charles Judd, E. L. Thorndike, and even John B. Watson. Freud and the Viennese psychoanalysts, however, were capturing the imaginations of many American educators, and the influence of psychoanalysis on the field of elementary and secondary education (and its place within progressive education) must not be overlooked. In fact, the presence of psychotherapeutic work in 1920s and 1930s American educational psychology may be much greater than we have assumed, a position convincingly argued by Stephen Petrina in his examination of the work of Luella W. Cole and Sidney Pressey.5 Among the Thayer Commission staff, few were more involved in attempting to substantiate psychoanalysis’ role in American secondary education than Zachry.6 Her investigations led to remarkable insights, certain oddities, and a few problems for the Eight-Year Study and the Commission on Secondary School Curriculum. Alice Keliher was also involved in the psychoanalytic movement within the PEA, yet these two colleagues with their many commonalities kept a cordial but rather distant relationship. In guarded correspondence , Havighurst noted the lack of cooperation between Keliher’s Commission and Zachry’s Committee, concluding that it was “unfortunate —but perhaps inevitable!”7 Commission staff members noted the difference between the two: Keliher’s political maneuvering and Zachry’s reticent, quiet demeanor; Keliher’s sharp focus on tasks in contrast to Zachry’s unbridled curiosity. Separated by ten years in age (with Zachry being the elder), they completed their dissertations during the same year and both professed great devotion to their doctoral advisor, William H. Kilpatrick. Both befriended Viennese-trained junior colleagues— Peter Blos for Zachry and Walter Langer for Keliher. Similarly, each received substantial help from their mentors—Thayer for Zachry and 137 Vignette: Caroline Zachry (1894–1945) Frank for Keliher, with Frank displaying equal if not exceeding affection for Zachry. Their personalities contrasted in such ways that at times we suspect Keliher’s invitation to direct and manage the Commission on Human Relations served to complement Zachry’s casual leadership with the Study of Adolescents, a committee whose work was intentionally open-ended and exploratory. II Although Zachry was a native New Yorker, she maintained an air of Southern aristocracy. Her ancestry included leading nineteenth-century South Carolina families (hence the name Caroline), and her grandfather served...