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The Cardinal Principles Report Revisited
- Education and Culture
- Purdue University Press
- Volume 11, Number 2, Fall 1994
- pp. 6-16
- Article
- Additional Information
6 The Cardinal Principles Report Revisited William G. Wraga Scholars looking back on the impact of the Cardinal Principles (Commission 1918a) report generally agree that the comprehensive high school model was widely adopted in the United States in so far as the scope of secondary course offerings was broadened to serve a wider portion of the age cohort than had historically been the case (Krug 1972: 53, Kliebard 1986: 151, Cremin 1988: 646). It is at this point, however, where scholarly agreement about this historic document seems to end. Curriculum historians such as Tanner and Tanner (1990) and Kliebard (1992) recommend a periodic revisiting of the original texts of foundational documents of the curriculum filed. A review of the historiography of the Cardinal Principles report reveals several recurrent issues that emerge from varying interpretations of that seminal document . These interpretations can be classified around the issues of social efficiency, tracking, and the common school ideal. It is useful to examine the validity of these interpretations vis a vis the text of the report and the subsequent implementation of the report's recommendations and the ramifications of these interpretations for the role of the comprehensive model in educational policy and practice. Social Efficiency: Economy or Competence? The Cardinal Principles report has often been criticized for advancing a factory model of schooling designed primarily to fit students into the industrial order in the name of increased economic productivity and efficiency. According to the late educational historian Edward A. Krug (1964: 24950 ), for example, social efficiency was "the management, and even the restraint, of individual behavior on behalf of the group." "Education for social control," Krug (1964: 250) continued, involved "the production of habits and beliefs consistent with desired kinds of behavior." Krug (1964: 276) implied that social efficiency, the vocational movement, and the comprehensive high school were three aspects of one movement when he wrote: It was largely under the banner of social efficiency that school men began to talk of industrial education as only one part of a comprehensive school program. Social efficiency reinforced the growing dislike of separate high schools of commerce or manual training. It demanded what was first called the 'cosmopolitan high school,' where pupils from all classes would come together, if not in their classrooms, at least in the social life of the school. Krug discounted the fact that educators resisted the dual system in part because it would distort industrial education into serving the narrow interests of business and would ultimately exacerbate class differences. Krug (1964: 387) characterized the conception of society set forth in the Cardinal Principles report as "democracy as the age of social efficiency saw it." Krug (1964: 393) summarized the gist of the Cardinal Principles report as "clearly an argument from [sic] one version of social control, although it was milder in tone than some other versions in existence at that time." In a synopsis of the rise of the comprehensive high school in the beginning of his second volume of The Shaping of the American High School, Krug (1972: 3) noted: the school would equip each young citizen to function in a society whose touchstone would be orderly and efficient management . The institution favored for this purpose was the public high school: not the allegedly narrow, academic school of the past, but a comprehensive high school housing a variety of curricula and enrolling youth of diverse abilities and interests. At the beginning of volume II, Krug (1972:4) also commented that "education for social efficiency had no precise definition . It represented," he continued, "a style of thought and action for which interpretations could be developed." Yet in an earlier discussion of the social studies commission report of the Commission on the Reorganization of Secondary Education , Krug (1964: 354) referred to the proposal for common study of civics as a "version of the doctrine of social control, closer in spirit to Lester Frank Ward than to Edward Ross and David Snedden, but social control nonetheless." But he made little effort to clarify the various meanings of the term social control. Social control meant significantly different things for Ward, Ross, and Snedden (see Tanner & Tanner, 1990). Not only did Krug ignore important distinctions...