AMERICAN EDUCATIONAL PHILISOPHIES

SINCE THE MIDDLE 1940S, AMERICAN schools have been at the center of a. tug of war between competing educational philosophies. With striking regularity, educational policy has swung from domination bу "progressives" to domination bу "traditionalists" in roughly ten-year periods. ...

Progressivism in the late 1940s was called "life adjustment education" by friend and foe alike: It judged every subject by its everyday utility, substituting radio repair for physics, business English for the classics, and consumer arithmetic for algebra. Under the rubric of life adjustment education, schools were encouraged to merge traditional subjects like English and history with health and guidance to create "common learning" courses, in which students could examine their personal and social problems.

Beginning in 1949, critics complained that "how-to" courses and socio-personal adjustment had been substituted for history, science, mathematics, foreign languages, and literature. Life adjustment education was condemned by some because it was anti-intellectual, and by others because it aimed to teach group conformity…

After the Russians orbited Sputnik in 1957, the national press was filled with indictments of American schools for ignoring science and mathematics. The Russian's feat served as evidence for many of the critic's worst complaints about the softness of American education...

During the late 1950s and early 1960s, educators shifted their focus from "meeting the needs of tne whole child" to "excellence". .Programs were developed to identify talented youth at an early age and to speed their way through rigorous courses in high school and college. ... The political climate, typified by the brief presidency of John F. Kennedy, also stimulated the popular belief that the identification of talent and the pursuit of excellence were appropriate educational goals. Part of Kennedy's image was the idea that youth, talent, intelligence, and education could right society's problems. The drive for excellence was in high gear during the early 1960s, and enrollment in advanced courses and foreign languages rose steadily, along with standardized test scores. The sudden and remarkably quiet disappearance of the "pursuit of excellence" in the mid-1960s showed how dependent it was on the socio­political climate. A series of cataclysmic events shook national self-confidence: violence against blacks and civil rights workers in the South; Kennedy's assassination; the rediscovery of poverty; American involvement in Vietnam. By 1965, the nation's competition with the Soviets for world supremacy had lost its motivating power. As the Cold War appeared to fade, students in elite universities — the presumed beneficiaries of the post Sputnik years — protested against technology, against the middle-class values of their parents, and against the meritocratic pressures of an achievement-oriented society. Responding to changes in the social and cultural milieu, educators sought to adapt the schools to the new conditions and to placate their numerous critics. The innovation that had the most influence in the public schools was the open education movement. The open education philosophy answered perfectly the need for a set of educational values to fit the countercultural mood of the late 1960s; it stimulated participatory democracy; it justified the equal sharing of power between the authority figure (the teacher") and the students; it made a positive virtue of nonassertive leadership; and it insisted that children should study only what they wanted. At the high-school level, the open philosophy led to dropping of requirements adoption of mini-courses, schools-without-walls, and alternative schools. On paper, open education was ideal. Once it was put into practice, the problems classroom walls, hired open educators, sent their veteran teachers to workshops to be retrained, and provisioned classrooms with the obligatory gerbils and sensory, tactile materials. Despite their training, some teachers couldn't handle the open-ended situation; children wandered about aimlessly, got into fights, demanded that the teacher tell them what to do. In some districts, parents complained bitterly that their children couldn't read, that the classroom was chaotic, and that there was no homework. By the mid-1970s, the open education movement had gone into decline.

The swing away from open education was hastened by the public reaction to the news in 1975 that score on the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) had dropped steadily since 1963. Regardless of explanations blaming such factors as Vietnam, Watergate, drugs, the effect of television, and working mothers, a substantial part of the public believed that the decline, of standards in the school was primarily responsible for lower test scores. The College Board's i977 report on the score drop confirmed that part of the drop was in fact due to lowered standards, grade inflation, absenteeism, and the widespread decline of critical reading and careful writing.

Date: 2016-03-03; view: 941