Varieties, Verities and Paradoxes in the History of Education

Varieties,Verities and Paradoxes inthe Historyof Education RonaldD. Cohen and Raymond A. Mohl. TheParadox of Progressive Education: TheGarv Plan and Urban Schooling. PortWa~hington, N.Y.:Kennikat Press, 1979. 216+'viii pp. BarhamFinkelstein, ed. Regulated Children/ LiberatedChildren: Education in Psychohistorical Perspective.New York: Psychohistory Press, 1979. 225 pp. VincentP.Franklin. The Education of Black Philadelphia :The Social and Educational Histo,y <~la AfuzorrtvCommunity, /900-1950. Philadelphia: Universityof Pennsylvania Press, 1979. 298 + xxi pp. John Abbott In a variety of ways; the three books under review certify that paradox in humanhistory is a truth to be explained, not an illusion to be explained away. Fewlibertarian philosophies are free of regulative elements; not many liberation movements are without their regulating agents. If progressivism in American education was a force for social redemption, as Lawrence A. Cremin suggests in The Transformation of the School, one has to explain whythe school board in Philadelphia was so reluctant to employ democratic valuesin the education of its black minority. If Raymond E. Callahan, the author of Education and the Cult of Efri"ciency,perceived Gary's William Wirtas an administrative progressive whose platoon system replicated the factory rather than the fulness of life, why was Wirt able to command the admiration and respect of a social reconstructionist like Alice Barrows for fulltwenty years? 1 Confronted by such large, powerful and contradictory generalizations about the nature of educational theory and practice, Cohen and Mohl seek enlightenment by a concentration rather than a diffusion of analytical powers. In the interests of specificity, they select a single model of educational organization, the platoon system. Focusing on the agents, William Wirt and AliceBarrows, most closely associated with its creation, implementation andpromotion, the authors examine their agendas and outline the reception giventhe plan by clients in Gary, the city of its nativity and greatest sucCanad ian Review of American Studies, Vol. 13, No. 1, Spring 1982, 87-% 88 John Abbott cess, and New York, the metropolis where its sojourn began with hosannas and ended in crucifixion. The platoon system required the student body to be broken into twocomponents , "X" and "Y." While "X" was utilizing the classrooms for traditional academic studies, subcomponents of "Y" were engaged in physical education , fine arts, religious studies, laboratory sessions or field excursions. Atan appropriate time, the roles were reversed. For Gary, Indiana, the system offered practical benefits. Platoon scheduling enabled the schools of this instant industrial city to cope with a burgeoning population at a time when municipal budgets were hard pressed to cope with demands for services. For Wirt, the table of organization served a larger purpose as well. He devised it as a means bywhich the rhythms and values of rural and small town America might preserve order and redeem life in the cities. Its sequence of "work-stud~play " promised to secure an urban place for duty, responsibility and discipline, values which he associated with the agrarian and craft traditions of America. Although Wirt sought to generate a learning environment which would shape happy, creative individuals, they were to find their greatest joy in the com· munity of work. This transformation of "play" with its connotations of self-gratification and waste into "work-play" rendered it not only safe but salutary in the city. Wirt argued that order was not a natural part of the urban environment; it had to be imposed. The regimen was amplified by integrating the functions of complementary municipal institutions into the curriculum. Making room for the church, the library and the playground enabled Wirt to extend the school day from 8:15 a.m. to 4:15 p.m., thereby keeping the children offthe streets for a substantial portion of their waking hours. In the evenings the schools worked to redeem adults whose daily lives were exhausted in the sometimes hostile and corrupt urban environment. In fact, as Cohen and Mohl indicate, Wirt was not merely an efficiency expert; he possessed vision as well as method. Yet for thirty-one yearsin Gary most of his energy was absorbed by the method, in improving the effi· ciency of the system. Careful scheduling enabled him to implement his pro· gram with a minimal but well equipped plant. A penchant for personal control and a commitment to efficient operations kept his administrative staff lean. It was Alice Barrows, the eventual archetype of the "social progressive" who perceived that Wirt was essentially an educational systems engireer whose creation might facilitate the implementation of Dewey's philosophy. Although she imputed social democratic motives to Wirt which time revealed he did not share-his administrative style was elitist and paternalistic-it was obvious that the system he devised was not necessarily inimical to egalitarian ends. Cohen and Mohl offer no evidence to suggest that Barrows' enthusiasm for the system and its potential ever flagged. Her association with Wirt him· self she sustained for twenty years, from 1914until 1933-34, when his right· TheHistory of Education 89 wingparanoia, despicable manners and unsubstantiated allegations before theBulwinkle Committee brought it to an abrupt end. LikeWirt, she accepted the technological basis of society, advocating that theschool mediate between individuals and society by affording students broadexposure to the principles which informed machine production rather thanpractices which would produce mere operatives. Unlike Wirt, she did not hold up the rural paradigm, but rather accepted the city as the norm, andsought by effecting institutional and social change to make the urban environment more "decent" and "humane," and the schools agents of social democratization, equality of opportunity and upward mobility. Her first visit to Gary kindled her enthusiasm, for she experienced the capacity of the system to release the youngsters' "latent powers" in a way which''the rigidity and waste of the traditional school" could never hope to achieve (p. 25). When in 1914 Wirt was hired by Mayor John P. Mitchel tointroduce the Gary system into New York schools, the former harnessed AliceBarrows' energy by making her his assistant in the task. In the chapter, "Schools, Politics, and Riots," Cohen and Mohl show how Mitcheland his progressive associates attempted to ram the Gary principle intopractice, and how Tammany isolated the platoon system as a symbol of the progressive tendency to subvert neighborhood autonomy, centralize authority and poke about in people's lives. The authors trace the largely successful attempts of the machine to galvanize anti-Gary organizations between1915and 1917,particularly among the Italian and Jewish communities. ForTammany, the stakes included the school system, with its rich potential forpatronage and pay-offs; the anti-Gary slogan, '·a seat for every child," implieda contract for every friend in the construction or supply business. Manyimmigrants were educational traditionalists. For them the desk and thepencil, a bowed head and a furrowed brow carried a promise of upward mobilityand respectability. As for Gary, it smelled of machine oil and exhibiteda frenetic, almost chaotic quality. One father complained that the rotary systemhad afflicted his child with St. Vitus dance (p. 46). Mothers expostulatedthat it "kept their children too long in school; it made them get up too early;it kept them so busy that they got home with ferocious appetites which quiteoutstripped the family pocketbook" (p. 54). In the end, though ideological gulfs divided the members of the antiGary coalition, they could and did unite in opposition to the platoon system.For a moment in New York, the clients-parents and childrenranto riot in an effort to determine their own educational course. In spite of Alice Barrows' best efforts-she even followed Hylan around as a onewomantruth squad-she and her social reconstructionists as well as Mitchel andhisefficiency advocates were overwhelmed by the force and vehemence oftheoppositition. Gary, too, was a city of immigrants. Children of foreign parentage constituted63 .4% of the city's school population in 1910, 61.5% in 1920, and 90 lohnAbbou 50.7% in 1930. In 1922 William Wirt wrote that the Americanization o[ these children constituted "the most important phase" of his program (p. 84). In Gary the Froebel school was the Americanizers' flagship. Cohen and Mohl are able to show that in a system where sorting and shaking began shortly after children entered the schools, students at the Froebe! were enmeshed in a curriculum which, in contrast with other schools in the system, de-emphasized the academic in favor of vocational, industrial and domestic education. It was as ifthey were being shaped and honed to fit the require· ments of the relevant shops in the high schools. Cohen and Mohl also conclude that teachers within the Gary system afforded the immigrants' culture and language short shrift. On the other hand, the objects of the Americanizers' attention werenot always passive. In 1910 a delegation of Poles, led by two councilmen. requested an evening class in their native tongue. When Wirt arbitrarily substituted English for Polish, no one appeared to register. When the American· ization campaign was approaching a frenzied climax in 1919, resistance to attendance at evening classes was very strong. Those Protestants who sought to proselytize immigrant children had as little, or less success. Even working with the advantage of released-time for religious instruction- a program which Wirt had negotiated with Gary's Protestant churches in 1914-they had only limited success. The clients overwhelmingly preferred their own Sunday,folk and parochial schools. Evidence such as this has led Cohen and Mohl to qualify what, in history of education circles, had become virtually the conventional wisdom. As useful and conceptually important as the radical critique of schooling processes may be, it emphasizes the functional aspect of the school as a social institution. What the authors have accomplished in their examina· tion of the immigrant communities in Gary, is to demonstrate that the clients ''had a large degree of control and self-determination when it came to educa· tional institutions." Although compulsory school legislation established the ages when their children could leave school, parents could select a parochial over a public school, or counter the influence of the public school by sending their children to folk and Sunday schools. Parents could decide whether their children would continue their studies after age fourteen or enter the work· force. Adults could decide for themselves whether to participate in the even· ing and Saturday programs (pp. 84-109). In spite of this-or perhaps in part because of this-the system, with the backing of the corporate and municipal establishments, and considerable support on the part of teachers and clients, received a high level of accept· ance in Gary. In two very important chapters Cohen and Mohl trace itsfor· tunes through the 1920sand 1930s. The New York debacle, surprisingly, did not discredit the method, and the 1920s not only witnessed the full elabora· tion of the system in Gary but a revival of interest throughout the United States. Although the Depression brought retrenchment everywhere and an TheHistory of Education 91 endto national promotion, the system not only survived in Gary but continuedto offer features adopted by school boards elsewhere. TheParadox of Progressive Education traces the fortunes of a method; The Educationof Black Philadelphia is, as the subtitle reads, "the social and educationalhistory of a minority community, 1900-1950."Northern cities felt the impactofthe ''Great Migration" at different times. When World War I halted theinfluxof European immigrant labor, industry turned to black America. Garv'sblack population grew from 383 in 1910to 5,000 in 1920,to 18,000 or 17i¼1 of the population by 1930. Whereas blacks constituted a relatively insignificantclient group in Gary's educational population until the First WorldWar, Philadelphia's attraction for those caught up in the movement servedto increase Philadelphia's Afro-American community by 60% in the courseof the 1890s.By 1910blacks totalled 5.5% of the city's population, or S4.000 souls.In The Education of Black Philadelphia Vincent P.Franklin seeks todiscoverhow the members of a community who had left the South, in part toenhancetheir educational opportunities, fared within a system designed by aEuro-American majority for its own social and economic purposes. In the first twenty years of this century Philadelphia's school system, like Gary's,came under the influence of progressives who stressed "scientific management"and "efficiency," intelligence testing and the merits of academic andracialsegregation for certain definable groups. It was during the administration of Superintendent Martin G. Brumbaugh (1906-14) that black Philadelphiaexperienced the new educational wave. Brumbaugh argued that segregationfacilitated the matching of curriculum to capability and that -in a city where blacks were not permitted to teach white children-it enhanced teaching opportunities for "deserving members of the coloured race"(p. 37). Theconclusions of the intelligence testers provided pseudo-scientific evidencebolstering Brumbaugh's case for more systematic black segregation and the implementation of a vocational/industrial curriculum in the elementaryschools . The fact that both black and immigrant parents frequently favored industrial education muted and confused the voice of protest in the firsttwentyyears of this century. In Philadelphia, as in Gary, there was a considerableamount of covert preference for its own schools in the black community.Of Gary, Cohen and Mohl observe that "blacks were particularlytornbetween advocating integration in principle and accepting separation in practice.... The black community was proud of the schooling facilities offeredtheir children in Gary, often inadequate compared to... other white ~chools but a definite cut above what they had known in the South" (p. 121). InPhiladelphia, as in Gary, this made it easier for the white administrators to escapethe moral dilemma presented them by integrationists. Franklin concludesthat , in spite of "three decades of protests, petitions, conferences, and rallies, black teachers and children were more segregated in the Philadelphia publicschool system in 1929than they were in 1899"(p. 86). 92 John Abbou In Chapter 6, '"The Campaign to End Public School Segregation, 193(). 1940," Franklin examines the ideology of racism which permeated American society in the 1930s and analyzes the processes which began to vitiate it.Bv the end of the decade Nazi outrages in Europe were beginning to revealth~ inequities of racist values. Scholars, both black and white, were questionino the very bases of belief in racial inferiority. Critics had begun to revealth; flaws in intelligence testing practices, though the black community wasstill very much divided over the merits of voluntary segregation. Locally, blacl pride and reaction was galvanized by the controversy over Problems inAmerican Democracy by Harry R. Burch and Dean Patterson. This intermediate school civics text labeled blacks as superstitious, ignorant and unclean. Out of the welter of community activity which the subsequent dispute generated emerged the Educational Equality League of Philadelphia. From its inception in January 1932, this body led the fight against segregation in Philadelphia. experiencing its first victory in the Berwyn School Case, a legal confronta· tion engendered by discriminatory practices in suburban Chester Count). Both controversy and case reflected the conviction that black pride required equal status and an end to policies of segregation. Franklin concludes that the most significant breakthroughs between 19{X) and 1950 occurred in the 1930s. The community secured representation on the school board. In 1937 the League and other black organizations finall~ secured the merging of the white and black lists of teachers. Although this shattered the policy of official segregation in the schools, the price of victo11 was a redistribution of names which placed black teachers low on the eligibilit~ lists during a time of high unemployment. Moreover, opposition to blad advancement from within the educational administrative hierarchy, andsubstantial increases in black enrollment during the 1940s, effectively increased de facto segregation. Black youths experienced more than their share of social, economic and educational disadvantages in the 1930s and 1940s, which campaigns for enhanced recreational, educational and employment opportunities wereable to rectify only in part. Faced with a reluctance by employers to hire them, and immigrant-dominated unions to accommodate them, it is possible that blac~ may have responded by tending to remain out of, or by dropping out of,voe· ational courses of studies in the schools. "To a very great extent," Franklin writes, "the general social and economic conditions in Philadelphia deter· mined the educational and industrial opportunities that were to be made available to black youth. And in the period from 1930 to 1950, these oppL1r· tunities were generally very limited" (p. 181). In fact, the author concludes, the schools were even less important in stimulating upward mobility among Afro-Americans than they were amon~ immigrant groups. Although blacks realized that the schools were nL 1t designed as a means by which they might realize the promise of Americar. TheHistory of Education 93 life,most of them realized, nonetheless, that "ignorance Iwas] a form of slavery, and believed that education could serve as an important path toward freedom"(p. 197). Moreover, as social historians of education insist, much ofourlearning takes place outside the schools. One of the most encouraging manifestationsduring this half century, and one of the most valuable aspects of TheEducation of Black Philadelphia, was and is the stress placed on, and the close examination of, community education. In these chapters Franklintakes us outside the public schools and into associations such as the AmericanNegro Historical Society, the City Federation of Colored Women's Clubs,the settlement houses, churches and Sunday schools, the black Y.M. and Y.W.C.A.'s, as well as secret and fraternal organizations such as the Knightsof Pythias, the Odd Fellows and the Elks. It isa strength of these two works that their authors focus not only on the agentsand their agendas, but upon their clients and their collective responses. In TheParadox of Progressive Education and The Education of Black Philadelphiaone can begin to read alternative agendas in the responses of immigrantand black minorities. We do not, however-with the notable exception ofrioting New York students-come to grips with the children themselves. Thisisthe task which Barbara Finkelstein and her contributors set for themselvesinRegulated Children/ Liberated Children: Education in PsychohistoricalPerspective . This collection places the emphasis on learning as an interesting process betweenadult and child, child and adult, using sources which stress personal -even private-experience: autobiographies, poetry, diaries and art. The emotionalcontent of educational experience is stressed as an antidote to the recentemphasis on the institution and its environments. As Finkelstein puts itinher introduction: "So complete has been the disposition to relate the historyofeducation to political, economic, or intellectual history that historians ofeducation have not as yet connected the development of education to the developmentof the human capacity to create, to learn, and to love, as well as toworkand vote and philosophize" (p. 2). The tone and thrust of the volume are established by two articles: Ross W. Beales,"Anne Bradstreet and Her Children," and N. Ray Hiner, "Cotton Matherand His Children." Beales examines the relationship between Anne Bradstreetand her children through the medium of her poetry, as she reflected uponher own childhood, her motherhood and her children's formative years. Heconcludes that "her religion provided a framework for understanding theemotions and actions of children and for patiently rearing them 'with greatpains, weakness, cares, and fears"' (p. 19). For his part, Hiner believes thatCotton Mather for all his obsessive and even neurotic qualities, was a compassionate, often perceptive parent-tutor who was capable of growing upwithhis children. "Preparation for Republicanism: Honor and Shame in the EighteenthCenturyCollege ," is the third essay in this collection. In her examination of 94 JohnAbbou "shame" as a means by which youths were moulded to a life of republican service in eighteenth-century American colleges, Phyllis Vine portrays apedagogical technique and mission which was not to outlast the century. Whereas the eighteenth-century regime sought "the passionate fusion of privateand public good," in the nineteenth century "virtue became rooted in personal morality and individual accomplishment and a social personality wastobe defined by the situation rather than the transcendent character of the actor. Egalitarian rhetoric, which embraced individuality as a means of measuring worth, dissolved the coalition of public and private morality and placed init; stead the pursuit of the romantic self" (p. 59). Rather than undergoing publlc shaming within the educational community, nineteenth-century transgressors were expelled with the expectation that private reflection in the bosomof their families would lead to regeneration. The association between the romantic self and the idea of educationis developed by Judith Plotz. In ''The Perpetual Messiah: Romanticism, Child· hood, and the Paradoxes of Human Development" she examines the romantic view that childhood is essential to adulthood, since excellence in the adult is measured by the extent to which adulthood is informed by vital childhood characteristics. Education was understood as a process of inner growth, rather than as an exercise which stuffed the mind with information-which "school-mastered" it. True education required the tutor to protect his charges· minds against the untimely intrusion of information which would seal them. The end was to preserve and enhance the imaginative faculty, to foster creativity and make it possible in the adult years. "The Double-Vision of Education in the Nineteenth-Century: The Romantic and the Grotesque"is Sterling Fishman's perceptive and intriguing attempt to trace the imagesof traditional and child-centered teaching through "high" art and caricature. ''Reading, Writing, and the Acquisition of Identity in the United States: 1790-1860"is a virtuoso's survey of the varieties of educational modes inthe nineteenth century. Barbara Finkelstein presents four tutorial environments in which literacy was acquired and analyzes the processes associated with them. Education in rural America was a process of communal exposure. Rural children learned to read and write in a tutorial environment which stressed memorization and rhetoric, designed to perpetuate the oral traditions oft~e countryside. On the other hand, urban education in the cheap, popular prim· ary schools entailed a process of ''obliterated selfhood," achieved in an envir· onment characterized by "an atmosphere of relentless regulation" (p. 11Yl. This, of course, is the kind of education which Fishman's cartoonists reviled and Alice Barrows strenuously resisted. Where rural schools were often afer· ment of conversation and activity, these urban schools possessed the silencr of the tomb. Where financial means and familial values permitted it, children were tutored in the household, among family and friends. The educational process was effected by a round of reading, writing and conversation which stressed form as well as content, the keeping of diaries and the carrying onof TheHistory of Education 95 correspondence, all designed to perpetuate the form and substance of ''high bornliteracy." This Finkelstein defines as the process of "domestic enclosure ''lPP· 124-27).For slaves, on the other hand, learning to read and writeoiventhe sanctions against the acquisition of such capabilities-involved a ;rocess of "stolen selfhood" (pp. 127-33). Thethree concluding articles by Deborah Fitts, Dominick Cavallo and Sol Cohendeal with the feminization of teaching, kindergarten pedagogy and the roleof permissiveness in twentieth-century education, respectively. In "Una andthe Lion.... " Deborah Fitts shows how the feminization of teaching in nineteenth-century Massachusetts occurred coincidentally with a reduction incorporal punishment and the emergence of a belief that female teachers couldenhance the educational process by appealing to the sensibilities of students,thus achieving an inner transformation rather than mere outward conformity. This created sop-iething of a crisis for male students, for they could no longer make a physical response to the teacher's authority. Practically theironlymethod of registering dissent was to absent themselves or drop out. Withthe progressive kindergarten we return to a belief in the capacity of thepeer group to socialize the child. "The progressive kindergarten pupil," Cavallobelieves, "had no place to hide .... His most private, inner processes weresubject to the controls and measurements of peers and educational specialists " (p.180). Shaming, it seems, was back in fashion, in preparation for the timewhen the child would join the community of work. All of this reflected a beliefon the part of progressive experts that the family was no longer capable L1feducating the child who was passing through the stage of early latency. Middle-classfamilies were too indulgent; tenement life did not admit of adequatesupervision . Society-the state-had therefore to take on the job and establishkindergartens as surrogate families capable of shaping the child's moraland cognitive modes. SolCohen's article, "In the Name of the Prevention of Neurosis: The Search fora Psychoanalytic Pedagogy in Europe 1905-1938," concludes a series of remarkablywell integrated articles. It is a favorable commentary on the editorialtalents of Barbara Finkelstein and the talents of her contributors that this shouldbe so. Although one would be hard put to discern it immediately, The Aune/ox of Progressive Education is also a collection of papers which, in this case,were presented over a period of time in a variety of journals and at a numberof meetings. Honed by their exposure to discussion and criticism, theyhave been elaborated into chapters and skillfully related to the questionof paradox. This work, then, is far more than a collection of diverse L)pinions; it is a coherent, systematic examination of a question central to progressive phenomena. Thethree books under review stress the unique and, by stressing the unique, pointup the rich variety of educational experience. Franklin traces the educationalfortunes of a racial minority in a singular setting. By a judicious delimitationof place, time and people Cohen and Mohl have managed, while 96 JohnAbbou drawing on the powerful theoretical currents generated by historical sociologv and political economy, to re-emphasize history's concern for the uniqu;, Believing that "too much has been made of the juggernaut-like force ofthe rise of an urbanized, corporate-technological society," they affirm thatthe clients, ''thankfully," sometimes had their own agendas and survived the onslaught of the shakers, sifters and sorters (p. 175). If in Regulated Children· Liberated Children we fail to perceive the reaction of the children in an\ consistent way,if the collection is more an examination of the environment; which bathed the children when they were in "school" than an examination of their reactions to their situations, there is ample evidence that "the genius of American education," as Finkelstein contends, "appears to reside inthe dazzling array of tutorial environments which have enclosed children in increasingly large numbers ..."(p. 9). These works are encouraging evidence that the purifying dialectic which pits historians as social scientists against historians as humanists continuesto function. Some years ago Geraldine Clifford went on record as tired ofand possibly somewhat frightened by the profession's search for models andperhaps even laws of historical explanation. She perceived that this approach inevitably washes out exceptions, and hence runs counter to the central assumption of traditional history: that history comes down to the studyof the unique. 2 Take heart, Geraldine. Evidence mounts that Clio is a self· righting craft after all! Notes 1 Lawrence A. Cremin, The Transformation of the School: Progressivism in American Educatwn 1876-J957(NewYork, 1961);Raymond E. Callahan,Education and the CultofEJji'ciency A S111d1 o{the Social Forces That Have Shaped the Admim:'itration of the Public Schools (Chicago, 19621 2 G. J. Clifford, "Saints, Sinners, and People: A Position Paper on the Historiography of Amer· 1canEducation," Histo,y a/Education Quarter(v, 15(Fall 1975),257-72. ...