The conceptual and theoretical tension between individualism and commitment has deep roots in American intellectual and social life. Protestant Christianity, with its emphasis on the spiritual autonomy of the individual and on the political autonomy of the local congregation, provided one of the major sources of democratic thinking in the beginning of American life. Protestantism, with its rejection of authority and hierarchy, and its dependence on the political participation of the members of the congregation, required a kind of acting-in-the-world that Catholic Christianity did not. Protestant Christianity gave us, that is, a notion of the individual as efficacious and active spiritual being.
American Puritan Protestantism, without doubt the strongest strain of religious thought in the United States, also presented us with a set of presuppositions that encouraged an emphasis on activity in the world: the majesty of God, the depravity of Man, the notion of all work as a "calling" and part of God's plan, the unlikelihood of salvation, and the possibility that one's level of success in the world might indicate whether one had been blessed with salvation or not. Obviously, all these ideas conspired to promote a concentration on the things of this world and the activities of this world.(47)
The general enthusiasm in the Enlightenment for reason as the ultimate arbiter, and for science as the provider of ultimate explanations, led inevitably to another kind of individualism, a notion of the individual as reasoning intellect, capable of rational activity which could solve whatever problem happened to be at hand.(48) The contention that there was a wide-spread assumption of the perfectibility of man at this time has its validity in this logic, that was widely held: that if man's reason were released, instead of being bound by tradition, superstition, authority, and hierarchy, it could attack whatever social or political or economic problems that existed, figure them out, and provide solutions. As George Washington said at the end of the Revolutionary War: "The foundation of our Empire was not laid in the gloomy age of ignorance and superstition, but at an epoch when the rights of mankind were better understood and more clearly defined, than at any former period....if the citizens (of the United States) should not be completely free and happy, the fault will be entirely their own."(49)
Paradoxically, the other major cultural movement of the so-called Age of Reason was Romanticism, which eschewed what it saw as a dangerous over-emphasis on rationality in favor of the heretofore neglected realm of the emotions --- the heart, the soul, the spirit, the transcendent. Romanticism, in its various forms, emphasized one's relationship with oneself, with one's own feelings, and with nature, that great repository of wisdom available to be intuited by the sensitive romantic spirit. Romanticism, that is, gave us a vision of the individual as intuitive and emotional, and argued passionately for the primacy of this element of being human.(50)
Coincident with these great cultural events is a change in the economic situation of the West, the first Industrial Revolution, the revolution of coal and steam of the 1770's, first in England and then spreading to the rest of Western Europe and the United States.(51) The resulting shift of population from the countryside to the city, the elimination of several forms of traditional social relationships, not the least of which was the apprentice system of the villages, and the drastic change in living conditions, manners, mores, and conventions once in the city, shifted the nature of relationships with self and with family and friends in ways we are still figuring out, more than two-hundred years later.
Industrial capitalism as a source of individualism is a trickier business than Protestant Christianity, the thinking of the Enlightenment philosophes, or Romanticism. Factory work, residence in tenements, and assembly line labor are antithetical to any form of individualism we would think of. But a deeper analysis reveals that the theories supporting industrial capitalism were indeed individualistic notions: Adam Smith's philosophy of economics, the unfettered possibility of economic competition, the anonymous and therefore relatively unconventional life of the city --- all these encouraged ideas of individualism even while more and more people were sucked up into industrial --- that is, mass --- work.
So the industrial revolution gives us a paradoxical view of the individual: he is free to strive, to compete, to achieve, in a way that pre-modern or early modern man never was; but, if he fails to achieve adequately in his freedom, he will be doomed to a meaningless life of alienating labor, a threat that pre-modern man or early modern man did not face.
These four powerful cultural movements --- Protestantism, the Enlightenment, Romanticism, and the Industrial Revolution --- all emphasizing the primacy of the individual and the importance of autonomy, all rejecting notions of hierarchy, tradition, and authority, were major influences in the thinking of the Founding Fathers. So that references in the Declaration of Independence to "inalienable rights" and the appending of a "Bill of Rights" to the Constitution, among many other such sentiments expressed during those times, represent a belief in the potential of the individual human, and the responsibility of the individual human, to become an involved and contributing citizen and a fully-functioning person, not as a subject of Hobbes' Leviathan, but out of personally and freely choosing the good.
In this context, it is interesting to note that the American Revolution of 1776-1783 and the French Revolution of 1789-1793 are not unique as expressions of a powerful movement. If one takes a longer view, it is possible to talk of an "Atlantic Revolution" that took place in the last quarter of the 18th Century, with specific occurrences in the British colonies in America, in Ireland, in Switzerland, and in France. The democratic spirit, to use a general term, was abroad, and was acting in a variety of places in a variety of ways. That is to say, there was something larger at work than any of the four cultural movements described above, some affirmation of the individual and his inherent worth.
And it is in America that the democratic experiment takes root and experiences its greatest success, so it is in America that one can look for the perils and promises of the democratic way of life. That is why it was to America that Tocqueville came in the 1830's, to study democracy, for democracy was then, even more than it is now, a rarity, an oddity, a historical peculiarity of the first order. And what Tocqueville found was that democracy was not without its problems. The emphasis on the individual led to selfishness and the breakdown of traditional social conventions: "Individualism is a calm and considered feeling which disposes each citizen to isolate himself from the mass of his fellows and withdraw into the circle of family and friends; with this little society formed to his taste, he gladly leaves the greater society to look after itself."(52) It was Tocqueville's understanding that the moral and social problems he saw were the result of a conceptual conflict deep within the democratic theory itself, rather than the result of a bunch of ex-colonial thugs and ignorant backwoodsmen being set free to satisfy their base appetites, and that is the reason that we still return to him today, and why he is the object of a vicious custody battle between the liberals and the communitarians.
To frame it in other terms, Tocqueville realized that democratic theory required a sailing between the Scylla of the radical relativism that can result from unbridled and overly Romantic individualism, and the Carribdys of theological and political absolutism which smothers both the rationality and the artistic intuition of the individual.
It is in these terms that the American Civil War is best understood. It is not inaccurate to see the Civil War as an inevitable conflict between two irreconcilable systems, systems of economic, political, and cultural complexity so great that no resolution could be effected without violence. When Lincoln referred to a "house divided against itself," he was trying for more than a Biblical allusion to establish moral superiority for his position; he was reflecting what he perceived to be the truth, that North and South had evolved in such different ways that there was no communion possible.
It is also easy (and not inaccurate) to describe this conflict as one between a Northern system which emphasized modern individualism and a Southern system which emphasized traditional communitarianism. In other words, one can, I believe, analyze the Civil War as a playing out of the inherent conceptual conflict between individualism and communitarianism, a conflict which had been there from the beginning. On this view, the triumph of the North would explain the post-war economic preeminence of a few very successful men, the so-called "robber barons;" the conquest of the indigenous tribal peoples of the West; and the brief fling with imperialism in the 1890's, for not only are individuals free to act in their own interests, but government is also free to act in an analogous way, acting in the self-interest (communitarians would say "selfish" interests) of the nation.
The politics of Progressivism of the late-19th Century through the end of World War I is an example of trying to curb the individualistic excesses of what Mark Twain referred to as The Gilded Age, by the intercession of the federal government through reformist legislation; the inclusion of citizens in local politics, especially through the use of the referendum and recall procedures; the use of mass media of communication to propagandize for particular reforms; and the popular election of United States senators.(53)
The 1920's saw a resurgence of unbridled individualism in economics, a celebration of individualism in story and song, and an intellectually respectable defense of individualism in the theories of Freud. This burst of individualistic energy, positive and negative, came crashing down in 1929, and stayed mostly dormant through the Depression and World War II. It is no accident that the most influential book of this period was the 1937 novel by John Steinbeck Grapes of Wrath which was a book-length argument for a generous and spontaneous communitarianism.
The period since World War II has been marked by on-going battles between individualism (beatniks, hippies, surfers, rockers, sexual revolutionaries, situational ethicists, anti-war activists, yuppie greedheads, and many others) and communitarianism ("life-adjustment", the civil rights movement, school integration, fundamental religion, and some others). As one can see from the list of examples, the high profile and "cool" stuff is mostly on the side of individualism, and by the mid-1980's the worry was that individualism --- in culture and politics, on left and right --- had come unglued and that all of American society was in danger.(54)
Can there be an open society and principles, too? Can there be a liberal society and standards of behavior? Can there be a democratic society and absolutes? Can there be a pluralistic society and standards for civil discourse? These and other similar questions were being asked more and more widely.
With regard to schools, the questions were more immediate and more powerful. Is it possible to have an "open" school, one in which genuine learning can take place, and also a safe and orderly school where violence and confusion are eliminated; or are these somehow antithetical goals? Can young people be prepared for functioning in the workplace without sacrificing their childhood to a kind of robotizing? Is it possible to teach children to be moral and still have the school maintain a value-neutral stance? Is it possible to instill pride in one's own group and avoid particularism? Is it possible to define the principal's job as one of facilitating without eliminating all authority and power from the position? And a hundred others.
Having laid out the conceptual conflict between individualism and communitarianism that lies within democratic theory, we can see that it plays out in conflicts as large as the Civil War and as small as faculty lounge spats over whether a shared student should have to do his homework despite a lack of self esteem. The question is whether it is possible in contemporary American society to provide a rationale for social and political activity that will allow and encourage both authentic individualism and responsible communitarianism, despite this deep conceptual conflict. And for schools, in particular, is it possible to formulate a philosophy of education, including a theory of curriculum development and implementation, that would analogously develop both the student as individual and as member of the community, without sacrificing one to the other?
As we shall see, all these questions assume a utilitarian responsibility on the part of the schools, and it is this emphasis on utility which both creates these dilemmas and effectively prevents us from finding solutions to them.
For American schooling has always been utilitarian, despite the drastic changes in economic and social life seen in the United States over the last almost 400 years. American schooling has always attempted to prepare young people for participation in the world, and it is this failing that we can no longer tolerate. More and more sophisticated economic and political forms are on the horizon, forms which will require fully human participation or we risk being swallowed by them. Mere preparation for fitting in is incredibly dangerous.
And yet, as we shall see, schooling for fitting in is exactly what American schools have always aimed for.
II A History of Schooling for Utility
From the time of the English settling of New England in the early 17th Century, American schools emphasized utilitarian ends. What few local schools and schoolmasters there were taught the "3 R's" and the basics of Protestant Christian doctrine. The higher schooling aimed at preparation for the ministry.
By the middle and late 18th Century, the Enlightenment notion of rational utility was articulated best by Benjamin Franklin, whose success as a spokesman for American values can be contrasted with that of his contemporary, Jonathan Edwards, whose best work came as part of that last gasp of organized Puritanism, the Great Awakening. It is Franklin's prudence and practicality, not Edwards' other-worldliness, which lives on still as a rich and resonating part of American culture.
The on-going and multi-faceted debate between Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton is also revealing in this way. While neither was a champion of liberal education, except for himself, of course, it was Jefferson's support of universal schooling as a means of preparing people to participate in the political process that echoes down the centuries, not Hamilton's elitism.
Horace Mann's call in the 1830's for universal elementary schooling, abetted by widespread movements of upper-middle class reform generally, was inspired to a great extent by the need for basic literacy among a population that was progressively more urban and industrial. It was the rational thing to do to support the coming wave of Northern industrialism, whatever other motivations were involved.
And it was the triumph of Northern industrialism in the Civil War that sets the stage for the first, and greatest, of the battle over a national curriculum.
III The Triumph of Industrialism, the Growth of Cities, and the Rise of the High School
As far removed as it may seem at first glance, it is important here to consider for a moment Abraham Lincoln's motivations for prosecuting a tremendously destructive Civil War, and to contrast those motivations with the economic results of that war.
An examination of Lincoln's public statements and private correspondence makes it clear that he was willing to make the decision to fight a civil war (and, finally, it was his decision) for one purpose only and that was to save the Union. He was a great theoretician of the democratic enterprise and realized quite clearly that the future of the United States would be dominated either by industrial democratic capitalism or by agrarian aristocratic feudalism; that "a house divided against itself cannot stand." The Union, the authority of the federal government to preserve the Union, and the Constitution which was the source of that authority, were necessary for the success of the great democratic experiment, at that point unique to the United States. The destruction of the notion of Union, which would have been the inevitable result of a successful secession by the Southern states, would have meant the destruction of the notion of democracy. By 1865, after the victory of the Union, the nation was dedicated to this democratic capitalist model, just in time to take advantage of the Second Industrial Revolution --- a revolution of chemistry, steel, and electricity --- which took place in the 1870's.
But America's version of industrial success contained a mighty irony. The democratic capitalism of the 1830's and 1840's, spearheaded by Andrew Jackson and millions of like-minded souls, and spawned and nurtured a few who were so good at democratic capitalism that by the 1880's they had come to control a huge portion of the nation's economy. The radical individualism of the ante-bellum period had allowed for the "robber barons" of the post-Civil War period, who gave us what Mark Twain scathingly referred to as "The Gilded Age".
In other words, the ideal for which Lincoln had sacrificed so many lives had become something else entirely. On this view, it may not have been Lincoln's death which was tragic. The tragedy may be that democratic capitalism, so full of optimism for the future of all, became, because of elements of its own character, the oppressor of most on behalf of the interests of the few.
In any case, the results for American society in the aggregate were two: a rapidly increasing industrialization and a consequent rapidly increasing urbanization. These two factors would act on one another in unpredictable and uncontrollable ways to produce a set of social and economic circumstances that would produce the modern high school.
The new demographic realities had changed the nature of American society in drastic ways. In a way analogous to the effect the creation of great corporations had on the American economic system, the creation of the big city as a social phenomenon had effects on the American social system. When the United States was primarily a small town, rural, agrarian country with a fairly static social life, indoctrination into society depended on three complementary components --- home, church, and school. For many, that which was preached in one was preached in all, so that all were initiated into the culture of the nation. The Ten Commandments, the Golden Rule, certain basic rules of etiquette, and patriotism as expressed in popular song, poetry, and story were common elements in this instruction in what it meant to be an American citizen.
The growth of the city in the late-19th Century changed this situation. The sociology of the small town no longer applied, diversity of religious belief was the rule and not the exception, and migration and immigration created a population that was amazingly diverse in all aspects of culture. Life was not static, both parents were often employed for long hours in the factories which had brought them to the city, and attendance at church dropped significantly(55). Of the old three-legged stool of home, church, and school, only one leg remained, the school, and the school would come to be seen as the agency for all aspects of child-rearing, short of providing food, shelter, and clothing; command of the basic intellectual processes, preparation for citizenship, preparation for an appropriate vocation, and training in basic morality would all fall to the schools.
Beginning in the 1880's, cities had seen huge numbers of new inhabitants, as the rural poor came in from the countryside or up from the devastated South, and as the tremendous immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe began, a movement that would last until the Great War. This phenomenon was not unique to the United States; every industrial economy has witnessed the same thing, with the same results: overcrowding, poor sanitation, malnutrition, illness, alcoholism, and crime.
During this period, as a result of several factors, school enrollments began to increase tremendously. "Kindergarten enrollments increased sevenfold between 1900 and 1940, and high school enrollments increased tenfold, though the number of five-year olds grew by less than 20% in that same period, and the number of youngsters between the ages of fourteen and seventeen, by less than 60%."(56) "The number of public high schools began to rise with great and increasing rapidity after 1860. From 1890 to 1940, the total enrollment of the high schools nearly doubled every decade. By 1910, thirty-five percent of the seventeen-year olds were in school….(57)
The reasons for this had partly to do with the increase in absolute numbers of school-age children in the cities, but occurred also because during the very years when the high school began its most remarkable growth, the Progressive reformers and the trade unionists were assailing child labor. Both groups had good reason to put children in school: the Progressives wanted to protect the young from exploitation and the trade unionists wanted to protect their jobs by keeping the young out of the labor market. As David Tyack points out, "there was a vast influx into urban schools of youth who previously might have gone to work or roamed the streets, pushed into the classroom by child labor laws and compulsory attendance…."(58)
The compulsory attendance legislation was probably the most effective device for combating child labor. In 1890, twenty-seven states required compulsory attendance; by 1918 all states had such laws. In 1900, the mean age for leaving school in states which had such laws was fourteen years and five months; by the 1920's it had reached a mean of sixteen years and three months.
The effects of this were many. Those students who were forced to go to school included many who were reluctant to be there. It is only conjecture because there are no definitive data, but it seems likely that the level of student interest would have declined in the face of such "warehousing." David Tyack quotes a story told by Helen Todd of her visit to a factory early in the century where she asked a fourteen-year old girl why she didn't go to school. "School!" she cried. "School is de fiercest t'ing youse kin come up against. Factories ain't no cinch, but schools is worst."(59)
It was inevitable, given the increasing population of urban schools generally, and the newly increased population of urban high schools in particular, that some attempt at imposing rational, overarching, systematic order would be made. This would come with the NEA's so-called Committee of Ten report in 1893, but before we look at this remarkable document, we should review the reasons for the NEA's attempt.
The ante-bellum United States had been a country of small farmers and small shopkeepers, but the seeds of corporate capitalism were alive and quietly growing, and the Civil War served as the catalyst for the coming of industrialization and urbanization.
People came to the cities, from abroad and from the American countryside, because they wanted to work in the factories or because they wanted to make a living in some way dependent on the factories. These people had children, for whom there were no families or churches in the old way, no woods on the edge of town, no sense of small-town community, no formal and informal apprenticeships.
For both charitable and self-protective reasons, local governments determined that children should be compelled to go to school. But these were negative reasons; that is, it was clear that children were better off in school than on the streets or in the factory.
But what would be the positive reasons? Or, to put it another way, what was to be done with the children now that they were in school? I would contend that it was inevitable, given the background I have sketched, that virtually all the reasons for more universal schooling would be grounded in the new realities of the industrialized and urbanized society. We would look to the needs and patterns and logic of industrial capitalism to help us determine what such schooling should look like.
And so we did, explaining the factory-look of school buildings, the ringing of bells to signal the beginning and ending of work shifts, the emphasis on rote-learning, the dependence on promotion from one level to the next, and the eventual certification.
It was into this typhoon of decision-making, all driven by the logic of industrial capitalism, that came the Committee of Ten and their ill-fated ("star-crossed," perhaps) attempt to save high schools from the utilitarianism encouraged and needed by industrial capitalism.
IV The Committee of Ten and The History Ten
In the face of the changes in the high school population, the National Education Association called together a panel in 1893 to make recommendations regarding high school curriculum. The so-called Committee of Ten was chaired by William Charles Eliot, President of Harvard University; the secretary of the committee was William Torrey Harris, the Commissioner of Education, a champion of academic excellence, and no believer in school's promoting social change(60); and the membership included four college or university presidents, the headmasters of two outstanding private college preparatory schools, a college professor, and public high school principal. What they would produce reflected an attitude based in an Enlightenment conception of education, that all were educable and that the development of "personal culture" and of a clarity of thinking would lead to a successful life defined by the individual and consequently to a successful society made up on enlightened, clear-thinking people devoted to the ideals of democracy as instilled in them through the process of liberal education.
The document issued by the Committee of Ten recommended that all secondary students, regardless of whether they intended to go to college, should be liberally educated and should study English, foreign languages, mathematics, history, and science. There were four different "tracks" available to students, but all included study in the five major academic disciplines and all were, in our terms, college preparatory. But the Committee of Ten was not attempting to "fit" students for college, as they would later be accused of. Rather, they were motivated by a belief that the best education was the proper education for all; in this sense they were truly democratic. "This was the first national committee to recommend curricula for all the high school subjects, both classic and modern, focusing not on the needs of the college-bound students but on the majority of high school students who did not go to college."(61) There are two underlying principles that informed these recommendations: "that the high school should above all discipline and develop the minds of its pupils through the study of academic subject matter….(and) that the same education which was good preparation for college was good preparation for life."(62)
It is helpful, I think, to look closely at one of the sub-committee reports overseen by the Committee of Ten, that written by the group known as the History Ten. There are two benefits to this: one, to see the general principles of the Committee of Ten played out in one of the specific disciplines; and, two, to look especially at the recommendations in the area of history and the social studies, arguably the most controversial single subject matter area in the last one-hundred years.
The Conference on History, Civil Government, and Political Economy was one of nine sub-committees of the Committee of Ten and made recommendations in the "social subjects." The Conference recommended biography and mythology for fifth and sixth grades; American history and elements of civil government in seventh grade; Greek and Roman history with Oriental connections in eighth grade; French history in ninth grade and English history in tenth grade, both "taught so as to elucidate the general movement of mediaeval and modern history; American history in eleventh grade; and a selected historical period studied intensively and civil government in twelfth grade. The History Ten argued that instruction in the social subjects served to "broaden and cultivate the mind; that they counteract a narrow and provincial spirit; that they prepare the pupil in an eminent degree for enlightenment and intellectual enjoyment in after years; and that they assist him to exercise a salutary effect upon the affairs of his country."
The recommendations of the Committee of Ten and the History Ten are not exactly the liberal education I will propose in Chapter Four, but they are very close, remarkably so given the time in which they were written, a time dominated by a particular kind of economic system with its own, highly utilitarian, logic.
V The Cardinal Principles and the Committee on Social Studies
But in the period 1893 to 1918, the report of the Committee of Ten would be gradually dismantled through a series of smaller, antithetical reports and recommendations. By 1908, the NEA had already adopted a resolution urging that high schools "be adapted to the general needs, both intellectual and industrial, of their students." Where the Committee of Ten of 1893 had argued that a liberal education was proper for all high school students, whether or not they were going to college, the NEA resolution of 1908 implied the need for differentiated curricula based on the "needs" of students, and went so far as to suggest that the curricula of colleges and universities should be adapted to those same needs.
In 1911, the NEA formed what came to be called the Committee of Nine on the Articulation of High School and College. The Committee of Nine reported that that task of high school was "to lay the foundations of good citizenship and to help in the wise choice of a vocation."(63) Where the 1908 resolution had gently admonished the colleges and universities to become differentiated and help students find their niche in the system, the Committee of Nine roundly condemned higher education for providing a model of education to the high schools that was
responsible for leading tens of thousands of boys and girls away from the pursuits for which they are adapted and in which they are needed, to other pursuits for which they are not adapted and in which they are not needed. By means of exclusively bookish curricula false ideals of culture are developed.(64)
Not the least noteworthy thing about this passage is how self-righteous, angry, even enthusiastic, language is used to describe and defend the condemning of generations of young people to lives of service to the industrial capitalist master, where "they are needed."
Not incidentally, the makeup of the Committee of Nine was drastically different from that of the Committee of Ten. The Committee was dominated by public school people, chaired by a teacher at the Manual Training School of Brooklyn, and included school superintendents, commissioners, and principals, as well as a professor of education. These were not people confused by higher learning and imbued with "false ideals of culture." These were "educationists," members of a new class of professional, created to meet the growing needs of schools, and trained, not educated. This was schooling not just for big business but schooling as big business: just as rational in its planning, just as objectifying of people in its setting of goals.
By 1918, the NEA's Commission on the Reorganization of Secondary Education published the Cardinal Principles of Secondary Education. This document was hugely influential in defining the role of the high school for the rest of the century. The movements in American secondary education since the 1880's --- differentiation in structure and differentiation in curriculum in order to meet the needs of a mass urban society and particular needs of individual children within that society --- became codified in the Cardinal Principles.
The Commission offered seven main objectives for schooling: 1. Health 2. Command of fundamental processes 3. Worthy home-membership 4. Vocation 5. Citizenship 6. Worthy use of leisure 7. Ethical character The only reference in this list to knowledge, understanding, or intellectual activity is the vague phrase "command of fundamental processes," and the first draft of the report did not include even that.
What the Commission proposed is what --- to a great extent --- we still have in contemporary comprehensive high schools: a common core of school subjects, a much expanded differentiation of curricula allowing for a great deal more choice by students, a variety of "tracks," or more flexible academic requirements, and a greatly expanded program of counseling and guidance, much of it vocational in purpose and informed by newly popular IQ tests.
But, as Richard Hofstadter points out, the tone of the Cardinal Principles may have been even more revealing than its content:
The rhetoric of the commission's report made it clear that the members thought of themselves as recommending not an educational retreat but rather an advance toward the realization of democratic ideals. The report is breathless with the idealism of the Progressive era and the war --- with the hope of making the educational world safe for democracy and bringing a full measure of opportunity to every child.(65)
The major objectives recommended by the Commission reveal two underlying and unspoken purposes of schooling: support for the present economic system through differentiated preparation for vocations (and, it was devoutly to be wished, a greatly reduced chance of revolution) and training in American middle-class culture, including health, worthy use of leisure, and ethical character. The schools were to produce graduates of whom any mainstream Protestant congregation could be proud. Or, as Diane Ravitch, puts it, the Cardinal Principles "inverted Dewey's notion of the school-as-lever-of-social-reform into the school-as-a-mechanism-to-adjust-the-individual-to-society." (And one doesn't have to be Joel Spring to realize that by 1918 American "society" was already defined to a great extent by the parameters and logic of industrial capitalism.)
As a sub-committee of the Commission, the 1916 Committee on the Social Studies published a document defining the proper subject matter and purposes of the social subjects. This was a committee with a very different membership from the History Ten of 1893. School administrators made up half the committee and there were secondary school teachers, normal school and teachers college members, and far fewer university and college people.
The "social studies" (a term coined at this time by the chairman of the committee) were defined as "those (studies) whose subject matter relates directly to the organization and development of human society, and to man as a member of social groups."(66) This definition reveals the contemporary influence of the social sciences generally and of sociology in particular, a discipline in which both the chairman and the secretary of the committee held doctorates.
The report emphasized the "social efficiency" element of the progressive education movement. This term was in wide use in progressive education but was used by different people in significantly different ways. John Dewey wrote of social efficiency as "nothing less than the socialization of mind which is actively concerned in making experiences more communicable; in breaking down the barriers of social stratification which makes individuals impervious to the interests of others."(67) The "social efficiency of the report of the Committee on the Social Studies seems more to emphasize social control and a fitting of the student to the status quo:
The social studies differ from other studies by reason of their social content rather than in social aim; for the keynote of modern education is "social efficiency," and instruction in all subjects should contribute to this end. Yet, from the nature of their content, the social studies offer peculiar opportunities for the training of the individual as a member of society. Whatever their value from the point of view of personal culture, unless they contribute directly to the cultivation of social efficiency on the part of the pupil they fail in their most important function. They should accomplish this end through the development of an appreciation of the nature and laws of social life, a sense of the responsibility of the individual as a member of social groups, and the intelligence and the will to participate effectively in the promotion of the social well-being.(68)
This is very different from the emphasis placed on the development of "personal culture" found in the report of the History Ten, but not very different from other writers of this time who argued strongly for schooling as a way of making social stratification secure by preparing for a place in society as it was. The rhetoric of these theoreticians is "student-centered" and democratic, but their purposes are clearly manipulative and hierarchical.
The specific recommendations of the Committee on Social Studies emphasized history, geography, and civics, in three-year cycles, one for 7-9 and one for 10-12. The two civics courses, each of which would be the culmination of its cycle, were Community Civics in ninth and Problems of Democracy in twelfth. "Community" referred primarily to the local municipality, which was the focus of so much progressive political activity, but also to the wider conceptions of the term, to the "communities" of city, state, nation, and world.
Lawrence Cremin said about the Cardinal Principles that "its recommendations regarding the curriculum signified less the setting of guidelines for the future than the ratification of innovations well under way in many urban systems."(69) The same can be said about the recommendations of the Committee on the Social Studies, except for the Problems of American Democracy course which was a truly innovative suggestion, and one with amazing staying power. The goal was to apply the various social sciences to pertinent "problems of democracy" so that, rather than defining a course and assuming that such problems were static, they emphasized the methodology of the social sciences as applied to what "problems" were of immediate interest to the class and were of vital importance to society. As a tool of socialization, this was an ingenious play: at a time when most high school seniors did not go on to college, this instruction was a last chance for the school to indoctrinate students into the approved values and attitudes.
By 1918, the agenda was clear. Both the general curriculum and the "social studies" in particular were to be used for cultural training. The reformers had realized that the free-booting radical individualism of the first half of the 19th Century could not be tolerated, for it had produced outlaws like Rockefeller, Carnegie, and Stanford. On the other hand, the new social realities could be ignored only at the risk of severe disturbance. The only answer was one that was not appealing to the middle-class mind; in fact, it was so unappealing that the fact the middle class embraced it with such passion, and that it continues to today, can only be described as revolutionary. The answer was that government would have to re-enter the game, this time not as an ally of the rich (as Hamilton would have had it) nor as an ally of the poor (as the socialists and radicals would have had it) but as an ally of the middle class. And schooling was to be the means through which the young were indoctrinated into the proper values, the values of Poor Richard's Almanack, with a dash of knowing one's proper place. As the report says, "the social studies offer peculiar opportunities for the training of the individual as a member of social groups….and for promoting the social well-being."
As David Tyack put it, writing about the progressive education movement generally, "Not all agreed with (William H.) Dooley's particular specifications for the proletarian child or with (Ellwood P.) Cubberly's open avowal of class-based education….but the underlying principle of differentiating schooling to meet the needs of the different classes of pupils almost all would have accepted. This was the heart of the doctrine of social efficiency."(70) Or, as Merle Curti put it, "The school, they said, must so change its discipline, its curriculum, its pedagogy, and its entire spirit as to meet the needs of community life. True individualism, it was argued, meant enriching each life with the possessions of all, not enabling one person to compete with another."(71)
Looking at the larger picture reveals this, I believe: a drastically different society defined by the elements of industrial capitalism; a goodhearted attempt by a wide variety of "reformers" to find a via media between radical individualism and pure conformity to the economic behemoth; and the schools as the major actors in that attempt. But goodhearted though the attempt may have been, the givens were those of industrial capitalism, and these were not challenged. We were to adapt ourselves to the new reality. We were to adapt ourselves as well as we could, but we were to adapt ourselves, nevertheless.
Progressive politics and its alliance with big business to rationalize the national economy for its long-term good, and progressive education, with its goal of training and socializing into the status quo were partners in the beginning of the American version of democratic socialism. The emphasis was not to be on the development of "personal culture" nor on the other elements of the rationale given by the History Ten: "to broaden and cultivate the mind; to counteract a narrow and provincial spirit; to prepare the pupil in an eminent degree for enlightenment and intellectual enjoyment in after years; and to assist him to exercise a salutary effect upon the affairs of his country." These were individualistic and ignoring of the greater social realities.
The 1916 Report of the Committee on the Social Studies is reflective of the larger political and economic reality in which it existed, that is, of the triumph of the great middle class reform movement which goes under the general label of progressivism. If the middle class were to survive the storm of economic change and not lose its power to the "robber barons" or the trade unions or to the proletariat it would have to reform social and economic life in the United States in ways that would use government to control the industrial giants, that would improve working conditions sufficiently to preclude revolution, and that would educate the masses of new arrivals into the cities in the manners and mores of the middle class, not only to ensure physical health and proper participation in the political processes, but also to ensure devotion to the interests of the larger social group. The middle class reformers were looking for a way to avoid tyranny by the rich and revolution by the poor; progressivism was that way. Public secondary schooling served a vital role of indoctrination within the larger reform movement and social studies schooling was where that indoctrination could take place most appropriately and most effectively.
The Committee of Ten had attempted a fascinating project: they tried to take the curriculum of the early-19th Century Academy and apply it to the newly burgeoning high school. As early as the 1870's this was a peculiar and even anachronistic thing to do, given the pressure on secondary schools to provide vocational training. By the early 1890's, it was barely short of romantic.
By the 1880's, most of common core beliefs that came to characterize progressive schooling were emerging in the literature of school reform. This core included a commitment to building an informed dedication to the public good; an emphasis on active rather than passive learning and on the reference to the student's own experience; an attempt to link the life of the school with life outside the classroom; a belief that the school should offer broad and unspecialized knowledge; and a belief in the efficacy of experiment and change.
The fact that the Committee of Ten and its subcommittees could produce documents so rich with notions of individual development, and of a society made up of educated individuals, is a testament to the influence of their own educations. Only a generation later, the educationists, functionaries, and technicians who sat on the committees of 1916 and 1918 would have no personal experience of and, so, no personal understanding of liberal education. By default, they were doomed to rationally support a program of schooling that fit with the social and economic realities of their time; they could imagine nothing else. How glad those in government and corporate business must have been that those who were leading schools into the 20th Century were not corrupted by false cultural ideals, like the unassailable integrity of the individual person. Such notions would have made industrial capitalism so much more difficult to effect.