From Diane Ravitch’s Left Back: A Century of Failed School Reforms (essential reading for anybody who wants to understand American education – and that must include teachers! Doesn’t it?):
In 1901, sociologist Edward A. Ross… explained that free public schooling was “an engine of soical control.” It was the job of schools, he wrote, “to collect little plastic lumps of human dough from private households and shape them on the social kneading-board…. And so it happens that the role of the schoolmaster in the social economy is just beginning.” Ward had imagined that the purpose of schooling was to redistribute knowledge, believing as he did that “the lower classes of society are the intellectual equals of the upper classes.”
Ross labored under no such illusions. He saw the schools as “an economical system of police.” He knew that to acknowledge as much “shocks the public and chills teachers. But now and then the cat is let out of the bag.” Ross predicted that the disestablishment of religion would be followed by the establishment of the school as the guarantor of social order….
The rise of educational sociology and the success of the industrial education movement radically changed public discussion of educational goals… Within only a few years, dicussions among educators about how to teach all children teh great ideas and art of the ages faded away, seeming slightly antique, and were replaced by discussions of social efficiency.
Ravitch, 80,81
In preparation for my opening talk at the conference next week, I’ve been reviewing the slime that is American educational history at the turn of the previous century. One sees tremendous idealism and even well-meaning attempts at reform. But at its core, its very foundation, is contempt for the local community, contempt for tradition, contempt for religion, radical materialism expressing itself in its blind and unthinking, uncritical acceptance of every Darwinian fad the Herbert Spencers and G. Stanley Halls can come up with as well as the listless, heartless sell-out to the commerical interests of the time.
I do hope you can attend the conference and hear either a really bad joke or a terrible, terrible horror story.
