We Were Warned

In the fall of 2016, the topic of the upcoming election emerged during a conversation with my dissertation advisor, Dr. Henry Smith. I will never forget his response: if Trump wins, it will be a sign of the utter failure of the American public school system.

Fast-forward to January 6, 2021. As I anxiously scrolled through my Twitter feed, a single tweet caught my breath. Along with a photo of several screaming white supremacists surging towards the Capitol, a single comment: They all had teachers.

That comment was not an insult to the teaching profession but a warning about what so many of us in education have known, argued, and forecasted for years. Our education system has failed to prepare the majority of citizens for active participation in a democratic society. Before anyone accuses me of hyperbole, let me make one thing very clear: we were warned.

In 1936, Maxine Davis published The Lost Generation: A Portrait of American Youth Today¹. As a journalist and ethnographer, Davis set out in a second-hand car and spent four-months driving across Dust Bowl America during the height of the Depression. She interviewed dozens of boys and girls, young men and women, to paint a portrait of how their experiences had prepared them for this unfathomable context.

She found what she called “a lost generation,” one where everyone just seemed to be waiting for something to happen, for life to improve, for jobs to appear, for the world to somehow just get easier. Though born into the belief that anything could be possible, Davis found an entire generation disillusioned. They grew up during the atrocities of the first World War and now existed in economic disaster. They had survived the Spanish Flu and now faced starvation in the Dust Bowl. As their counterparts in Europe turned towards Hitler and Mussolini for guidance, the youth that Davis encountered remained lost, looking for someone to guide them. Had that charismatic leader willed them to action, she adamantly believed that they would have responded. And so, in 1936, Maxine Davis warned us.

What struck me about Davis’ observations was that she had interviewed one of the first generations to have come through what we now consider the American public school system. From 1910-1940, the institution of high school first spread across the United States. As economists Goldin and Katz² explain, the movement initially took hold in wealthy agricultural communities as a way to maintain social capital. Local taxes funded schools under the premise that the investment would benefit the community by allowing it to retain talent. Other factors certainly also factored into the spread of secondary schools including child labor laws, the need for higher literacy rates, and even the military lamenting the lack of physical preparedness of troops during WWI. However, this evolution marked both an expansion of schooling and a moment when public education experienced a shift from supporting the common good to preparing individuals for economic success.

Amidst the spread of this emerging system, certain structures had become entrenched – a curriculum segmented by subjects, a value of seat-time as a measure of learning, and the processing of students by age. These tenets formed a “grammar of schooling,” a mental model for what a “real” school is. And yet, as Tyack and Cuban explain in their 1995 book Tinkering Toward Utopia, by the time that Davis began her journey across the country,

American public education was not a seamless system of roughly similar common schools but instead a diverse and unequal set of institutions that reflected deeply embedded economic and social inequalities. Americans from all walks of life may have shared a common faith in individual and societal progress through education, but they hardly participated equally in its benefits (p.22).³

To look at the evolution of the public school system solely through this economic lens prevents us from fully recognizing how we got to where we are today – or even where Davis found us almost 100 years ago. From the start, though the premise of education was to create an egalitarian society, large portions of the citizenry were excluded – particularly Black and female students⁴. Additionally, though the creation of the Common School intended to secularize the education, it largely intended to “Americanize” the population – particularly in the early 1900s as new waves of Catholic immigrants came from Europe. As Dr. Ashley Berner, Deputy Director of the Johns Hopkins Institute for Education Policy, explains in her book Pluralism and American Public Education: No One Way to School, most democratic societies support a pluralistic school system and fund multiple types of schools. In response to the combination of urbanization and increased immigration, policy elites, academics, and administrators designed a single education system based largely on a White Anglo-Saxon Protestant cannon that valued compliance, obedience, rote-learning, and efficiency⁵.

Not only did the American education world not listen to Davis, but they also ignored decades of warnings from John Dewey and the Progressives. Beginning in 1917, with the publication of The Cardinal Principles, this group of education philosophers argued that school should prepare students for civic life within a democracy and address the social concerns of the day. They felt that the rise of urbanization and industrialization had eroded the apprentice programs that previously prepared students for both work and life. As such, the Progressives advocated for schools as a means to build character and a democratic society⁶.

On the contrary, the behaviorists led by psychologists such as Thorndike, Skinner, and Watson asserted that the only thing worth learning in school was that which could be objectively measured. This tension between civic participation and rote memorization persisted throughout the 20th century. Unfortunately, as historian Ellen Condliffe Lagemann explains, there exists a perverse truth: “One cannot understand the history of education in the United States during the twentieth century unless one realizes that Edward L. Thorndike won and John Dewey lost” (p. 184)⁷. Despite all of these warnings, by the middle of the 20th century, the American public education system had evolved into one that rewarded compliance not critical thinking.

If you are still reading, know that what you have read has so far been the white narrative. As mentioned, though public education was founded under the premise of egalitarianism, that underlying assumption only applied to the white (and predominately male) population until long after the Emancipation Proclamation. As formal schooling spread across the country, the structure of “local control” ensured an unequal distribution of resources, particularly in the South⁸.

In 1891, long before the publication of the Cardinal Principles, Booker T. Washington launched the Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute both to prepare future Black teachers and to offer a rigorous education for Black students. Similar to Dewey and the Progressives, Washington shared Pestalozzian ideas that education should prepare students for active participation in life. He argued that students’ lived experiences should serve as the basis for their educational ones, merging theoretical and vocational classes so that student work reflected the needs of the community as well as supported academic pursuits⁹.

Critical theorists such as W.E.B Dubois challenged Washington’s curriculum as a set-back to equality, arguing that it was too vocational and relegated Blacks to manual labor and thus lower social-economic status. Similarly, Dr. Anna Julia Cooper – at that time, only the fourth Black woman to have ever received a PhD – led a Black education movement in Washington, D.C. that advocated for students to study the classics and develop as academic scholars rather than vocational laborers.

It is important to note that while all of these leaders advocated for intellectual engagement and life-long learning, their work occurred in a pre Civil Rights era. Because the elite white community saw literacy as a key to maintaining power, education became a means for perpetuating a caste system – both Black and white, rich and poor. With the passage of Brown vs The Board of Education in 1954, not only did the court address racial segregation but it also established education as a reasonable expectation for students who hoped to succeed in life. Thus, the case also served as a catalyst for women’s rights, disability rights, immigrants, and poor students who had previously been either excluded or refused equal education opportunities. However, the rapid change post Brown threatened the entrenched power of the policy elites, launching a new anti-school narrative as more “non traditional” students succeeded¹⁰. Instead of evolving into a system that valued and honored ALL students, American public education largely institutionalized structures intended to sort and rank individuals so that existing power structures remained fully entrenched.

The 1964 Ad Hoc Committee on the Triple Revolution warned of the threats of an impending Cybernation that would require more highly skilled workers capable of critical and creative thinking¹¹. The 1983 A Nation at Risk report officially linked education to economic success and called for students to develop a new set of critical skills for an Information Age¹². Throughout the 20th century, we were warned that education needed to broaden. Instead, we went “back to basics.” The focus of education narrowed over the years as Goals 2000, No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top, and even the Every Student Succeeds Act placed more and more emphasis on that which could be measured – particularly reading and math – often at the sacrifice of civics, history, social studies, science, and the arts¹³.

According to a Brookings analysis of the 2018 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) scores released last spring, less than 25% of eighth grade students demonstrated academic proficiency in civics and government. Even more concerning, additional data about students’ experiences in civics revealed that fewer than 30% always or often engage in civics-oriented activities such as political debates, field trips, engaging in panel discussions, or writing letters about community problems. As Dr. Yong Zhao warned in his 2018 book¹⁴, the over-focus on boosting math and reading scores has unintended consequences. The NAEP scores for civics present just one side-effect.

Despite the upheaval caused by the COVID pandemic, we largely have the same public education system today as we did over 100 years ago. Tyack and Cuban’s “Grammar of Schooling” has remained largely untouched. The lost generation described by Maxine Davis in 1936 led to another lost generation and then another. In 2016, after all of the waiting, a leader emerged. Instead of a brown shirt, we got a red hat. Just as nefarious and dangerous as his progenitors in 1930s Europe, this individual seized a population nurtured by a system founded on a White Anglo-Saxon Protestant canon, steeped in compliance and control, and devoid of the skills as well as the diligence to engage in critical analysis.

Now, in no way do I intend for this diatribe to somehow impugn all educators and schools. As evidenced by the 1966 Equality of Educational Opportunity report (aka. The Coleman Report), schools serve as only one facet in the ecosystem of students’ lives and therefore can only be held partially accountable for the knowledge, skills, and attitudes that they develop. Further, educators have been outspoken critics of their own system for decades, advocating for one that empowers students as creative, critical thinkers; that promotes tolerance and honors students’ identities; and that embraces global, entrepreneurial thinking.

In 1906, William Graham Sumner, a professor of sociology from Yale University, warned,

[Students] educated in [critical thinking] cannot be stampeded by stump orators and are never deceived by dithyrambic oratory. They are slow to believe. They can hold things as possible or probable in all degrees, without certainty and without pain. They can wait for evidence and weigh evidence, uninfluenced by the emphasis or confidence with which assertions are made on one side or the other. They can resist appeals to their dearest prejudices and all kinds of cajolery. Education in the critical faculty is the only education of which it can be truly said that it makes good citizens” (pp. 633-634)¹⁵.

We were warned by educators, psychologists, historians, and even politicians that this could happen. We were warned by Maxine Davis, Booker T. Washington, W.E.B DuBois, Anna Julia Cooper, John Dewey, Ellen Condliffe Lagemann, and so many others that this could happen. Now that education has moved “from a matter of ‘importance’ to a matter of ‘life and death,’” (p. 87)¹⁶ will we finally do something about it? We have been warned.

Notes:

1.  Davis, M. (1936). The Lost Generation: a portrait of American youth today. Macmillan Company.
2.  Goldin, C., & Katz, L. F. (1999). Human Capital and Social Capital: The Rise of Secondary Schooling in America, 1910–1940. Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 29(4), 683–723. http://doi.org/10.1162/002219599551868
3.  Tyack, D. B., & Cuban, L. (1995). Tinkering toward utopia. Harvard University Press.
4.  Best, J. H. (1996). Education in the Forming of the American South. History of Education Quarterly, 36(1), 39–51. http://doi.org/10.2307/369300 
5.  Berner, A. R. (2016). Pluralism and American public education: No one way to school. Springer.
6.  Kridel, C., & Bullough, R. V. (2007). Stories of the Eight-Year Study: Reexamining secondary education in America. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.
7.  Lagemann, E. C. (1989). The Plural Worlds of Educational Research. History of Education Quarterly 29, 185–214. http://www.jstor.org/stable/368309
8.  Best, J. H. (1996).
9.  Generals, D. (2000). Booker T. Washington and Progressive Education: An Experimentalist Approach to Curriculum Development and Reform. The Journal of Negro Education, 69(3), 215–234. http://doi.org/10.2307/2696233
10.  Tyack, D. & Cuban, L. (1995).
11.  Ad Hoc Committee on the Triple Revolution. (1964). The Triple Revolution. 
12.  Mehta, J. (2013). From bureaucracy to profession: Remaking the educational sector for the twenty-first century. Harvard Educational Review 83, 463–488. http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:33063300
13.  Fusarelli, L. D., & Fusarelli, B. C. (2015). Federal education policy from Reagan to Obama. Handbook of education politics and policy, 189-210. Routledge.
14.  Zhao, Y. (2018). What works may hurt—Side effects in education. Teachers College Press.
15.  Sumner, W. G. (1906). Folkways – A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores and Morals. [html version]. Retrieved from http://www.gutenberg.org/files/24253/24253-h/24253-h.htm
16.  Haberman, M. (2010). The pedagogy of poverty versus good teaching. Phi Delta Kappan 92, 81–87. http://doi.10.1177/003172171009200223