I Progressive Schooling after the Cardinal Principles
It is a cliché in the history of American schooling to say that the period after 1919 was dominated by progressive ideas. More and more schools, public and private, and more and more individual teachers became committed to progressive ideals. The membership of the Progressive Education Association grew steadily from the 1920's to the mid-1950's, and the professional literature was full of progressive articles.(72)
But, as we shall see, progressive ideas of schooling were thoroughly utilitarian, the utility in this case being the defense of the social and economic status quo against threats from above and below. The anti-intellectualism of the Cardinal Principles became institutionalized in the various forms of progressive schooling. The idea of "personal culture" was rejected in favor of preparation for life in an industrial capitalist, urban, mass society. To put it another way, education was supplanted by training and socialization.
As Lawrence Cremin points out, "progressive education arose as a part of Progressivism writ large…;"(73) so it would be illuminating, before we move on to particular manifestations of utilitarian curriculum-building, to look briefly at the nature of political progressivism and at a particular example of the influence of political progressivism on public schooling --- Los Angeles, California, in the period 1870-1920.
II Progressive Politics and Schooling in Los Angeles, 1879-1925
By 1920, the political system and the public school system of Los Angeles were among the most Progressive in the nation. The evolution of this occurred partly because Los Angeles was still, in the late 19th Century, a yet unformed place, and partly because the problems which inspired Progressivism in Los Angeles were not so deeply entrenched as they were in other cities (the economic oligarchy was relatively small and what passed for a political machine was a poor imitation of those in Eastern cities). In 1907, the Lincoln-Roosevelt League was formed in Los Angeles to work toward putting "independent, honest men into state and local office….(to work toward) the direct primary, the initiative, the referendum, and the recall….regulation of public utilities; the conservation of forests; the outlawing of child labor, prostitution, and gambling; hospital and prison reform; women's suffrage and a minimum wage law for working women; the direct election of United States senators; the systemization of public finance; charter reform; public transportation…(and) the sine qua non of any reform program, curbing the Southern Pacific…what one termed the 'constructive destruction of the Southern Pacific machine'."(74) In not too many years, most of this agenda had been accomplished in Los Angeles.(75)
It is important to note the background of these "independent, honest men". They were, for the most part, young, in their thirties, born around 1870. Abolitionism and like-minded reforms of the first half of the 19th Century were not the stuff of their world; the United States in which they had come of age was dominated by the industrial giants; growth of the cities, especially through immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe; the Panic of 1893; the Populist revolt; on-going signs of a potentially successful labor movement, which always implied the possibility of violence; the jingoism and imperialism of the 1890's, against which a reaction had set in by the early part of the new century; and, of course, the national Progressive movement, supported most visibly by the powerful figure of Theodore Roosevelt. Reform to these men would necessarily mean something very different than it meant to Garrison, Phillips, and Stanton.
They were also "largely Protestant and small town in origin, upper-middle-class, university trained professionals, abhorrent of both the corporate oligarchy and labor unions, forward-looking and reform-minded, yet at the same time nostalgic for a lost myth of American self-reliance and individualism that was, at bottom, the indispensable myth for their own continuing professional success. The majority of them were born elsewhere, especially in the Midwest…,(76) not an insignificant element. Ernest May describes the attitude that the Midwest had about its position in political and cultural affairs:
Clearly the Midwest was both more moral and more Progressive than the…East…the hard fight against privilege centered in the Midwest; it was the Midwest that was going to save free government and private property…In the Midwest, morality was linked to progress even more closely than elsewhere.(77)
In short, the Progressive movement was both self-righteous and self-interested; moralistic in a self-conscious way while working toward what was necessary to preserve the economic, social, and cultural interests of their class, in the face of threat from above and below, from "corporate oligarchy and the labor unions."
If this is an accurate appraisal, and if Cremin is correct when he describes progressive education as "Progressivism writ large," how did changes in schooling in Los Angeles reflect this larger movement? There are three areas which provide evidence for the contention that Los Angeles schools became more progressive during the period 1910-1025. The first is the area of political organization of the district; the second is the area of services provided by the schools; and the third is the area of curriculum.
The Charter Amendment of 1903, a typically Progressive attempt to keep partisan politics out of municipal government, had reduced the number of members on the School Board from nine to seven and had changed the manner of representation from one member per ward to at-large representation. The superintendent took over day-to-day administration of the district, board members no longer visited classrooms on a regular basis, and they lost their say in the hiring and firing of teachers.(78) Between 1905 and 1916, the number of students in Los Angeles city school doubled and became much more cosmopolitan. Both reformers and parents looked to the schools to provide a remarkable array of services, in nutrition, health, and child care. By the 1913-1914 school year, there was a full-blown Health Department which "performed 41,891 examinations…(and through which) nurses visited 4,110 homes…"(79) By the same year, the Penny Lunch Program, which like many of these reforms began as a volunteer program, was in place in several schools and would continue to expand. Over the period 1908-1914,the district began to provide more and more supervision of playgrounds, thereby assuring working parents of school-age children that their children would be cared for.(80)
In curriculum, Los Angeles schools were becoming steadily more progressive. By 1910, "the final written examinations so hotly opposed by the individualists of 1895 had indeed been banned from Los Angeles schools (and) promotions of pupils now depended not upon tests but upon the judgment of teacher and principal. In addition, special classes had been created for different types of pupils…(and) there were manual training and various arts for the non-intellectual…"(81) In 1914, progressive superintendent J.H. Francis, the one who had (albeit somewhat reluctantly) overseen the expansion of services provided by the schools since 1908 was not reelected because he was not progressive enough.(82)
But, with regard to curriculum, the great example is the arrival of Franklin Bobbitt in Los Angeles in 1922 and his return in 1923, for an experiment in "curriculum-making." As Herbert Kliebard said about him, "No one epitomized the new breed of efficiency-minded educators better than…Bobbitt,"(83) and it would be his experience in Los Angeles that would provide the material for his most important work, How to Make a Curriculum (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1924).
As he described it during his stay in Los Angeles, Bobbitt's belief about the purpose of schooling was that "Education is primarily of interest to adulthood, not to childhood. We simply utilize childhood as the time of preparing for the fifty years of adulthood."(84) And the preparation was to be defined by finding out what adults actually do and then using the schools to train students to do those things.
No one would suggest that Bobbitt was typical of the progressive education movement; in fact, John Dewey had argued that "the constant impression that nothing is worth doing in itself, but only as a preparation for something else, which in turn in only getting ready for some genuinely serious end beyond…(would result in a) loss of moral power."(85) But Bobbitt's approach is representative of the essentially conservative nature of Progressivism generally and of much of progressive education. As David Tyack put it, writing about the progressive education movement generally, "Not all…agreed…with…(an) open avowal of class-based education…but the underlying principle of differentiating schooling to meet the needs of different classes of pupils almost all would have accepted."(86)
The fact that Los Angeles would invite Bobbitt to help in their process of "curriculum-making" is a further indication that in education, as well as in politics, the city was solidly and typically progressive. For the real goal of Progressivism, in all its forms, was a modification of the state of things only to the point that would preserve the status quo from the dangers posed by the oligarchy and the mob, and no one had more persuasive and "scientific" means of helping to achieve that in the school setting than Franklin Bobbitt.
What had happened in Los Angeles was reflective of what was happening nationally: a popular culture had been created that was predominantly middle-class in character, Protestant, Midwestern, and post-Civil War. It was this culture that did more than anything else to create both a political system and a public school system that were "progressive." In the case of the schools, these characteristics were articulated most powerfully by the Cardinal Principles and called for a maintaining of the status quo through differentiated schooling aimed at placing young people in the social slots that needed filling.
One way and another, this is the attitude that would underlie almost all of American schooling, public and private, between the wars. It would only be after World War II that a real debate would be joined over the proper purposes of public schooling, although, as we shall see, even then the opposing sides in the debate were both utilitarian, and neither would include notions of liberal education.
III The "Great Debate," 1945-1960
The proper role of American schooling was hotly debated during the period 1945-1960. In the National Education Association's publication Education for ALL American Youth(87), an updating of the Cardinal Principles, socialization, "preparation for life," was defined as the purpose of secondary schooling, a recommendation which came to full flower in the "life-adjustment program," articulated most powerfully in the so-called "Prosser Resolution":
It is the belief of this conference that…the vocational school of a community will be able to…prepare 20 per cent of the youth of secondary school for entrance upon desirable skilled occupations; and that the high school will continue to prepare another 20 per cent for entrance to college. We…believe that the remaining 60 per cent of our youth of secondary school age (should) receive the life adjustment training they need and to which they are entitled as American citizens.(88)
Conferences in 1946 and 1947 called for a "more functional education…to meet life needs of increasingly diverse bodies of pupils."(89) This meant guidance and training in citizenship, home and family life, use of leisure, health, tools of learning, work experience, and occupational adjustment. There was also a self-conscious attempt to make "life-adjustment" a national curriculum, to be overseen by professional educators only, even in the face of popular opposition.
It is obvious that "life-adjustment" is the most egregious of the utilitarian theories of curriculum; on the other hand, it is the most honest and straightforward. Even before the Cardinal Principles had articulated a national program, the idea of training students for a place in society, rather than educating them for personhood, had been on the rise.
But even in the context of more than a century of utilitarian thinking about schooling, "life-adjustment" stands out for its nearly complete rejection of the personal in favor of the functional, of the intellectual in favor of the technical, of creative activity in favor of the acceptably habitual. What it meant to be a "citizen" was carefully defined, and school programs were to indoctrinate into patterns and habits that would keep the peace and encourage production and consumption. Any notion of the good citizen as one who was knowledgeable and thoughtful enough to participate actively in the democratic political process was nowhere to be seen.
All of this in the name of equity, democracy, and giving students what they needed.
It is not surprising that critics rose up against "life-adjustment," and, by extension, against the whole tradition of progressive education. But the criticism was not against utilitarianism, only against "life-adjustment" as the wrong kind of utilitarianism. The end of World War II had brought an end to American isolationism. At the end of World War I, the American people had believed that it was possible to retreat behind the moats and become, once again, "fortress America," free from the malevolent and self-destructive madness of international life. By 1945, this dream was no longer tenable, and we had replaced isolationism with the Cold War. Progressive education had seemed ideal for the peaceful, protected American life after we had saved the world for democracy. But internationalism and the fight against Soviet communism changed the stakes of the game.
As a result, most of the criticism against "life-adjustment came from the political right,(90) the more substantive and reasonable criticism was based in the argument that "life-adjustment" was anti-intellectual. The schools, these critics contended, should concentrate their energies on academic goals; by so doing they could succeed at preparing young people for informed and involved citizenship, productive work, and the possibility of cultural and intellectual development throughout life.(91)
The most influential of the critics of "life-adjustment" was Arthur Bestor, a historian at the University of Illinois, who attacked "life-adjustment" as "training," not education.(92) He also argued that the best guarantee of the continued expansion of a cultured class was the extension of the benefits of a liberal arts education to all students. And he contended that "progressive" education was actually "regressive" because it denied intellect and individual capability.(93)
Bestor saw himself in line with the Committee of Ten and its report of 1893 as against the progressives generally, and the "life-adjustment" educators especially, whom he saw as the intellectual descendants of those who produced the Cardinal Principles of 1918. In his chapter "Is a Good Education Undemocratic?"(94) Bestor argued that "The American school system, like the nation itself, is dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Public education is an effort to carry that principle upward into the most complex and exalted realms of human life, those of the mind and the spirit."(95)
For Bestor, public schooling had always been the medium in this country for people bettering themselves as individuals, and for society bettering itself in general, and quoted Horace Mann to support his argument:
Education…is the great equalizer of the conditions of men --- the balance wheel of the social machinery. The spread of education (will enlarge) the cultivated class…(and) obliterate factitious distinctions in society.(96)
For Bestor, and for many of the other critics of "life-adjustment," it was the opening of the mind that allowed for this possibility. They saw "life-adjustment" as denying human potential and, thereby, denying human dignity.(97)
So the basic argument was between two different utilitarianisms. The "life-adjustment" people saw schooling as almost entirely for the purpose of training and socializing; Bestor and his fellow critics of "life-adjustment" preferred a more academically rigorous program; but both camps wanted schools to produce a certain kind of student. While they disagreed mildly over the kind of product, and drastically over the means used to create that product, they did not disagree that the goal of schooling should be to mold and shape.
So by the late 1940's there would be a great deal of criticism of "life-adjustment" in particular and of progressive theories of schooling in general. But these criticisms were not of the utilitarian nature of schooling; utility was the commonly accepted notion. Rather, the criticisms came from the political right who worried that we would fall behind in the long race with the Soviets, and from a growing and increasingly prosperous suburban middle-class who rejected out-of-hand any notion that children should be condemned by school bureaucrats to one kind of life or another.
"Life-adjustment" would die out as a movement by mid-1950's, and Lawrence Cremin and others pinpoint the demise of progressive education in the mid-1950's. Some, like Mortimer Adler, would push for schooling to adopt something like liberal education; but the flight of Sputnik in 1957 determined that utility would not only survive but would take on a new and much stronger cast: schooling as the source for national preservation.(98)
IV Schooling and National Security
"Life-adjustment" had tried to argue that it was the best method for preserving the nation's interests, both economically and militarily,(99) but these arguments had come to ring hollow with the American people.
There was also a growing awareness of the "culture of the teenager," that it was different in kind from adult middle-class culture, and that it was not consistent with outstripping the Soviets in an arms race or anyone else in an international economic competition.(100) In the face of these realities, with its emphasis on solving the problems of youth and helping Johnny get a good job, seemed irrelevant, inadequate, and inappropriate.
But in rejecting "life-adjustment" in particular, and progressive theories of education in general, American schooling ironically turned back to the basic principles of progressive education: "extension of schooling at all levels, the expansion and differentiation of curricula, the individualization of school programs, and…the use of the schools as instruments for solving various social and political problems of the larger society."(101) It would be progressive instrumentalism for a new age, and James B. Conant would be its great apologist.
Conant had been president of Harvard (1933-1953) and a high-ranking civil servant; had chaired the Educational Policies Commission of the NEA, the same commission that issued Education for ALL American Youth in 1944 which led to "life-adjustment" a year later; had been deeply involved with the creation of the Educational Testing Service in 1947, a process which included replacing the old College Entrance Examination Board's essay examination with the Scholastic Aptitude Test;(102) had supported the professional educators against the Bestor-ish critics of the early 1950's; and had been president of the American Council of Education. He was also a "cold-warrior" in good standing, especially in his chairmanship of the Committee on the Present Danger, and in his support of President Eisenhower's plan for increasing the American military commitment in Europe.(103) It was this combination of prestige in the academic community, reputation as one who understood the military danger in the world, and devotion to the essential ingredients of the progressive agenda that made him ideal as a spokesman for a particular kind of educational reform, one which appeared new, tough-minded, and forward-looking, but which was actually just as instrumentalist as earlier forms of progressive education.
Under the auspices of ETS, financed by a grant from the Carnegie Corporation, Conant began a massive study of high schools in 1957. The results would be published in 1959 as The American High School Today: A First Report to Interested Citizens, a book that would have a tremendous impact on the conduct of American secondary schooling for the next generation. Conant had a deep belief in the ability of standardized testing to determine, in a general and inclusive way, the ability of all students, and in the validity of using test results to place students in certain academic programs;(104) and it is ability grouping that is at the heart of Conant's recommendations. The Conant high school was a large, comprehensive high school(105) which would allow for the 20-60-20 enrollment pattern called for in the "Prosser Resolution." Testing would determine who fit in what group, and to make good use of the data obtained by testing, Conant recommended an enlarged guidance system for schools, not for individual counseling or personal development, but for assuring proper placement in the curriculum and for vocational guidance.(106)
But what caught the public's attention was Conant's emphasis on a high quality program for the academically talented.(107) And it was here that Conant's credentials as a "cold-warrior" came into play, because Conant consistently set his recommendations for secondary school reform in the context of national security.(108) If our best students were not challenged adequately by the schools and encouraged to do their best, superior Soviet technology would overwhelm us, either economically or militarily. It was matter of absolute survival, therefore, that the schools sift out the most able students, school them in the most rigorous possible way and prepare them to compete with the Soviets. This implied ability testing, ability grouping, differentiated curricula, all of which were recommended explicitly in American High School.
Conant's proposals were congruent with progressive educational theory and practice, including the idea of sorting students according to ability in school and sorting them after schooling according to the economic (and, in this case, military and technological) needs of the society.(109) The idea of the school as an instrument of economic need or of national policy has always been the dark side of progressive education, and Conant was a whole-hearted supporter of it. The way that Conant differs from earlier versions of progressivism is that his grouping is based entirely on academic ability. If we accept his assumptions that aptitude testing is valid and generally applicable (that is, that it is not culture-based or otherwise biased in any way having to do with race, gender, or class), then we can see Conant as egalitarian, which is the way he saw himself; for, as Robert Hampel puts it, Conant "wanted education to advance competition and cooperation, individualism and social justice…to encourage both mobility and stability."(110) (Italics added.) It was this desire to have everything that led to his insistence on the large comprehensive high school in which the most academically able students could get a high quality education and in which all students could mix socially.
But if we see aptitude testing as problematic, or ability grouping as prejudicial, or serving the economic/military needs of the country as inhumane, then Conant's recommendations become much less attractive.
In either case, it is clear that Conant's view was quintessentially progressive; that is, that it called for the school to be used for social and economic and political needs, and that students, rather than being seen as inviolable human spirits, were commodities to be formed and shaped for current purposes.
So despite the raging public debate after 1945, a much more heated and public debate than existed between 1919 and 1945, the key assumption remained not only untouched, but unexamined: schooling existed for utilitarian purposes, not for the development of individual persons.
V Liberal Education Attempts a Comeback
Throughout the 1960's and 1970's, curriculum theory specifically, and schooling theory in general, reflected deep conflicts in the thinking about American schooling. Hard-headed curriculum movements in line with Conant's recommendations collided with neo-romantic ideas about the nature of children and what kind of school climate was appropriate to that nature. Larger social controversies were also reflected in debates on education, especially the long-term implications of the civil rights movement and its expectations of schooling as a liberating force.
By the late 1970's, widespread disaffection with public schooling was being reported constantly.(111) The Gallup poll for several years in a row showed a decline in public confidence in the schools.(112) The result was a retreat to the "basics": an emphasis on reading and writing, higher academic standards, and traditional classroom discipline. But the "back-to-basics" movement, as it was widely known, was not enough, and the 1980's would bring a flood of "reform" literature, almost all of it aimed at reshaping the American secondary school.(113) During this period, as in 1893-1918, the basic terms of the debate would be personal development vs. instrumentalism, and the most obvious examples of the two points of view would be The Paideia Proposal of 1982 and A Nation at Risk of 1983.
The Paideia Proposal was written by Mortimer Adler on behalf of an ad hoc group of supporters of Adler's notion of liberal education. Although he nowhere refers to the Committee of Ten, Adler's Proposal is, in fact, the direct descendant of the report of 1893. It contends that "universal suffrage and universal schooling are inextricably bound together (and that) the one without the other is a perilous delusion;"(114)therefore, to guarantee the "proper working of our political institutions, the efficiency of our industries and businesses, the salvation of our economy, the vitality of our culture, and the ultimate good of our citizens as individuals,"(115)we should provide the best education for all children. And what is the best possible education? "'The best education for the best is the best education for all.'"(116) No tracking: "At the very heart of a multi-track system of public schooling lies an abominable discrimination."(117) Tracking is not necessary because "all children are educable,"(118) not just "trainable for one or another job;"(119) therefore, there can be "The Same Course of Study For All."(120) As would become clearer in two subsequent books(121) on the Proposal, the recommended course of study was highly reminiscent of the liberal course of study recommended by the Committee of Ten; teaching would emphasize both the Socratic method and what the Proposal referred to as "coaching;" and learning would depend a great deal on participation in carefully led group discussions of primary sources.
The Proposal is significant in this dissertation not because it has had a major impact on the reform movement of the 1980's; in that great maelstrom, it has been little more than a quiet backwater, despite support from Albert Shanker and the powerful American Federation of Teachers, among others. The Proposal is significant because in the history of educational thought since 1945, it stands out for its clarity of vision, a vision which holds that all people are essentially the same, that the same education for all is appropriate, and that the "best education" is the best guarantee of a democratic society. It is the latest version of the argument that an education of intellect is liberating of the individual and that a society of liberated individuals is necessary for a democracy. While a nexus of neo-conservative thinkers during the 1980's would push for the importance of the humanities in schools,(122) only the Proposal would make the case for personal development as best for both the individual and society.
The criticisms of the Proposal were predictable: it was too harsh on the present state of public education, it ignored the primacy of economic influences, it was dangerously elitist, it contained no programs for the gifted or other kinds of special education, and it counted too much on "the same quality and quantity of education" leading to the same opportunities for all.(123) It is tempting to contend that the Proposal sank beneath the weight of what Diane Ravitch has called "a deeply ingrained hostility…to a required curriculum."(124) It is probably more correct to say that the Proposal is simply too precious ever to be acceptable as a part of the present system of schooling. It has been typical of Adler ever since his days as Hutchins' gadfly at the University of Chicago in the mid-1930's to follow a logical path wherever it leads, relentlessly; like an Aristotle without wisdom or common sense. The Proposal may be, in some abstract way, a "right" prescription for human education; but as a suggestion for the reform of schooling it turned out to be merely debatable.
VI Education for National Security Redux
While Mortimer Adler and his disciples were writing the Proposal, the heavy hitters were also at work and would soon publish the commonly acknowledged magnum opus of the reform movement, A Nation at Risk, which begins
Our Nation is at risk. Our once unchallenged preeminence in commerce, industry, science, and technological innovation is being taken over by competitors…(Education) undergirds American prosperity, security, and civility…(and) the educational foundations of our society are being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a Nation and as a people…If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war.(125)
Where The Paideia Proposal had attacked the disreputable state of public education by suggesting possibilities for human redemption through education, A Nation at Risk demanded that the schools do their part in making us competitive internationally and aimed to frighten the American people into supporting the enterprise.
The recommendations made by A Nation at Risk are conservative responses to the mess of the 1960's and 1970's: it was against grade-inflation, for higher college admissions standards, for longer school days and longer school years, for more homework, and for high standards for incoming teachers.(126) Many of these recommendations have been criticized of and unto themselves, as if they were inappropriate; but almost everyone outside the educational establishment in the late 1970's know that these changes were obviously necessary. The point is that they were not substantive. They addressed neither the real educational questions nor the real problems of the social and economic infrastructure that supports public education.
The response to A Nation at Risk from the intellectual left was clear and unambiguous:(127)the report was simply an example of the federal government interceding on behalf of its implicit partner, big business, to convert schools to the task at hand, by propagandizing the American public. It was, in Joel Spring's evocative phrase, a "Sony war." The response from the right was virtually unanimous in its praise for the report's call for stricter discipline and higher academic standards. Even the dean of cultural conservatives, the late Russell Kirk, who might have been expected to attack the report for its materialistic and temporal narrowness, gave it unstinting praise.(128)And Annette Kirk, who sat on the Commission, writing five years after the publication of the report, described the national response to the report as "soul-searching," gave President Reagan credit for providing leadership, and praised "businesses (for making) impressive contributions."(129)
Like The American High School Today in 1959, A Nation at Risk was the most influential statement of educational reform of its day, did not address important questions about the nature of education, called for more rigor without defining underlying purposes, and clearly saw education as an instrument for fulfilling national economic purposes.
Over the last 100 years, there has been an on-going debate regarding the purposes of schooling. I have contended that there have been only two sides in this debate, despite the apparent variety of positions, personal development and utilitarianism. In fact, while this has sometimes been an interesting debate, it has never been much of a battle. The two major powers in this country, big business and the federal government, have consistently supported schooling as utility, and the schooling establishment has gone along.
This corruption of the public education which Jefferson, Barnard, and Mann counted on to "enlarge the cultured class…and obliterate factitious distinctions in society" has not happened for trivial reasons. There isn't tracking with all its differentiated opportunities simply because no one ever noticed it was patently unjust. Public education has been co-opted to serve the purposes of the powerful, privileged, and influential, and a periodically up-dated version of utilitarianism is the way to do it.
Public schooling is not education for democracy but habituation to what Michael Harrington once described as "luxurious slavery." The real power of A Nation at Risk was that it made people afraid that if they did not do certain things to their schools right away, their luxuries might disappear; and in the best tradition of the slave mentality, they set about doing what their masters said would be good for them to do.
American schooling is supposed to provide the education of a free people. American schooling, in fact, looks more like an institutional extension of the corporate, rational, bureaucratic, modern world, in which individual human beings are counted for less than they deserve. Seen in this light, The Paideia Proposal is utopian and self-indulgent, A Nation at Risk is not reformist at all but hugely successful propaganda, and the entire personal development vs. utilitarianism controversy is moot.
The major survey that produced The American High School Today was financed by ETS and the Carnegie Corporation, administered by a man with long-standing close ties to the federal government, and self-consciously aimed at impressing not the general public but professional educational administrators.
A Nation at Risk was not even the product of one of the pet agencies of the federal government, but of the federal government itself, with an explicit mandate to the schooling establishment to shore up the economic system.
In this world, The Paideia Group are properly seen as little more than impotent intellectuals preaching to the converted, while the leftist critics of schools are hardly less impotent as they blame all the woes of schools on pseudo-Marxist "forces" and wait in vain for a revolution that will set things right.
The only really revolutionary change would be a move away from competing utilitarianisms and toward a genuinely liberal education.