Influence of Educational Theories on Childhood & Education in America: A Historical View, Exams of History

Download Influence of Educational Theories on Childhood & Education in America: A Historical View and more Exams History in PDF only on Docsity! The Origins of Progressive Education William J. Reese By the dawn of the twentieth century, a new way of thinking about the nature of the child, classroom methods, and the purposes of the school increasingly dominated educational discourse. Something loosely called progressive education, especially its more child-centered aspects, became part of a larger revolt against the formalism of the schools and an assault on tradition. Our finest scholars, such as Lawrence A. Cremin, in his mag- isterial study of progressivism forty years ago, have tried to explain the ori- gins and meaning of this movement. One should be humbled by their achievements and by the magnitude of the subject. Variously defined, pro- gressivism continues to find its champions and critics, the latter occasion- ally blaming it for low economic productivity, immorality among the young, and the decline of academic standards. In the popular press, John Dewey’s name is often invoked as the evil genius behnd the movement, even though he criticized sugar-coated education and letting children do as they please. While scholars doubt whether any unified, coherent movement called pro- gressivism ever existed, its offspring, progressive education, apparently did exist, wrealung havoc on the schools.’ William J. Reese is Professor of Educational Policy Studies and of History and European Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He would like to thank David Adams, Mary Ann Dzuback, Barry Franklin, Herbert Kliebard, B. Edward McClellan, and David B. Tyack for their constructive comments on an early draft of this essay and for the research assistance of Karen Benjamin, Matthew Calvert, and Suzanne Rosenblith, graduate students in Educa- tional Policy Studies at Wisconsin. This article was presented as the presidential address to the History of Education Society’s annual meeting, San Antonio, 20 October 2000. ‘On educational progressivism, see especially Lawrence A. Cremin, The Transjornza- tion of the School: Propessivism in American Education, 1876-1957 (New York: Vintage Books, 1964); Herbert M. Kliebard, The Smiggle f i r the American Ciinicnlzim, 1893-19f8 (Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1986); and Diane Ravitch, Le$ Back: A Centny, of Failed School Reforms (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000). E.D. Hirsch, Jr. contends that romantic, child- centered views triumphed in the twentieth century, and he blames Schools of Education for disseminating these and other harmful pedagogical ideals; see The Schools We Need: And why We Don’t Have Them (New York: Doubleday, 1996). The literature on progressivism more generally is too vast to cite, but the best recent contributions include Robert M. Crunden, Ministers of Refoorni: The Propessives’ Achievement in American Civilization, 1889-1 920 (New York: Basic Books, 1982); Alan Dawley, StrugglesfirJustice: Social Responsibilizy and the Liber- al State (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1991); and Daniel T. Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1998). Hirrory of Education @ant+ Vol. 41 Spring 2001 vi Histoly of Education Quarterly William J. Reese President, History of Education Society 2000 Photo courtesy of Robert Rashid 4 Histoq of Education Quarter4 addition, child-centered ideas gained currency as activists drew very selec- tively upon particular romantic traditions emanating from Europe. A trans- Atlantic crossing of ideas from the Swiss Alps, German forests, and English lake district thus played its curious role in the shaping of early progres- sivism. Finally, the hopes of many child-centered educators were ultimately dashed by the realities of American schools a t the end of the nineteenth century. Their moral crusade nevertheless permanently changed the nature of educational thought in the modern world. I Loolung back on the famous reform movements that burst forth in the Western world between the 1750s and 18SOs, scholars disagree con- siderably on the sources and consequences of change yet underscore the complex transformations that altered society. During this period, the shift from a rural, agrarian, mercantilist world, to one of markets, commercial and industrial capitalism, and cities proceeded apace. The American and French Revolutions led many citizens to dream of a more just world based on universal respect for Enlightenment precepts of reason, the rule of law, science, and progress. As Thomas L. Haskell persuasively argues in his study of Anglo-American reform movements, dissenting religious groups such as the Quakers, among the most successful capitalists of the new age of Adam Smith, disproportionally led movements for moral reform and uplift. With other Protestant groups and a variety of secular reformers, they champi- oned many unpopular causes: pacifism, women’s rights, the abolition of slavery, and the more humane treatment of children, criminals, and the mentally ill. Unlike other scholars, Haskell causally locates a rising ethos of caring within an emergent capitalism, which increased human misery but also made social ties more expansive and intense, promoting empathy, compassion, and social action.6 Whatever the multiple causes of this growing humanitarianism, reform movements on both sides of the Atlantic reflected activist strains within Protestantism and the secular promise of social change and human improve- ment spawned by political revolution. Thus the rise of a child-centered ethos among a minority of vocal, middle-class activists by the middle of the nineteenth century emerged during an era of sweeping change. A genera- tion of American historians has focused their attention on the malung of northern middle-class family life and culture. In the decades after the Amer- ican Revolution, middle-class families shrank in size, enhancing the possi- bility of placing more attention on the individual child. Gender roles in ‘Thomas L. Haskell, 04ectivity Is Not Neutrality: Enpkznatory Schemes in History (Balti- more: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), chapters 8-9. The Origins of Progressive Education 5 middle-class homes became more starkly separated in urban areas, the locus of social change, which intensified the domestic labors of mothers, includ- ing child rearing. By mid-century, middle- and upper-class Protestant con- gregations increasingly softened their view of original sin and emphasized Christian nurture over hellish damnation; more moderate, non-Calvinist views were heard from the pulpit and registered in child-rearing manuals. The gap between thought and practice, ideal and reality, likely diverged in all of these fundamental areas of northern bourgeois life. But the conver- gence of changes in demography, gender roles, economics, and religious ideology helped make some members of the northern middle classes recep- tive to new ideas about children and their education.’ The growing fascination with child-centered education often deteri- orated into pure sentimentality in the Victorian era or was transmuted into a revived effort at discovering the scientific laws of physical and human development reminiscent of the eighteenth century. But the discovery of the child owed an enormous debt to the age of Locke and Newton as well as to Rousseau and Wordsworth. American Progressivism was literally the child of Europe. As Hugh Cunningham has argued, Locke had challenged the seemingly timeless Christian precept of infant damnation by arguing that children’s ideas, if not exactly their talents and destiny, were capable of change and improvement through the influence of education and envi- ronment. Locke also stressed the need to observe the individual child to determine the most suitable education, a foundational idea of child-cen- tered thinking. Newton, in turn, held out the promise of discovering the natural laws that governed the universe, which similarly generated hope- fulness of the human capacity to know the world, unlock its secrets, and thus improve its fate. Before the so-called romantic poets and novelists penned their odes to childhood, English evangelical Protestants by the mid- eighteenth century had created a new genre of reading materials, from chil- dren’s hymns to a wide array of children’s literature, whose messages and Stuart M. Blumin, The Emergence of the Middle Class: Social Experiences in the American City, 1760-1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Mary P. Ryan, Cradle of the M&le Class: The Fumily in Oneida Connty, N m York, 1790-1865 (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni- versity Press, 1981); Karen Halltunen, Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Stndy ofMiddle- Class Culture in America, 1830-1880 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982); Barbara Finkelstein, “Casting Networks of Good Influence: The Reconstruction of Childhood in the United States, 1790-1830,” in American Childhood: A Research Guide and Historical Handbook, ed. Joseph M . Hawes and N. Ray Hiner (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1985), 127-28; Bernard Wishy, The Child and the Republic: The Dawn of Modern American Child Nurture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1968); Robert V. Wells, Revolutions in Amer- icans’ Lives: A Demographic Perspective on the Histoly ofilmericans, Their Families, and Their Soci- ety (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1982), chapters 5-6; Steven Mintz and Susan Kellogg, Domestic Revolutiom: A Social History ofAmerican Family Life (New York: The Free Press, 1988), chapter 3; and William J. Reese, The Origins of the American High School (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995). 6 History of Education Quarterly didactic approach differed considerably from an emerging romantic ethos but similarly stressed the heightened importance of the young. Moreover, the child became a more prominent character in novels and popular writ- ing generally. And, as markets expanded, toy shops proliferated, peddling their wares to the middling and upper classes.8 The motives of utilitarians, rationalists, shopkeepers, and revivalists obviously varied enormously. But the ascending importance of childhood was clear by the end of the eighteenth century, when revolution and roman- ticism together further led to what critics called a veritable cult of childhood. Increasingly within enlightened circles-among artists, poets, novelists, and educators-new ideas about the nature of the child arose that continue to resonate in the twenty-first century. Some, following Rousseau’s lead, assumed that the chld, naturally good, was corrupted not by Adam’s fall but by human institutions. Innovative thinkers of various stripes-sometimes appalled by the shocking criticisms of religon by the author of Emile-nevertheless ques- tioned whether childhood was preparation for salvation or even adulthood. Those later known to the world as romantics or transcendentalists often concluded that childhood was a holy, mystical place, superior to the cor- rupted lives of adults. Blake invoked the child’s innocence, Wordsworth its “natural piety.” T o many, childhood was a metaphor for goodness, a spe- cial time of life, or even a timeless, sublime essence worthy of contempla- tion. In his first book, Nature, in 1836, Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote “The sun illuminates only the eye of the man, but shnes into the eye and the heart of the child.” Infants, in fact, were a “perpetual Me~siah.”~ The relationship of European Romanticism to the rise of American child-centered thought is nevertheless more complicated than it may appear. Literary critics (never mind the historians) have now published many more words on the romantics than their subjects ever wrote, and the very vocab- ulary ordinarily associated with romanticism is sometimes very ambiguous. The adjective romantic, derived from the word romance, appeared in English in 1650 and in French and German soon after. It referred specifically to medieval verse dealing with “adventure, chivalry, and love,” as Raymond Williams explains, but soon had the added connotations of sentimentality, extravagance, and an appeal to the imagination. Only in the 1880s did schol- ‘Hugh Cunningham, Children and Childhood in Western Society Since 1 YO0 (London: Longman, 1985), chapter 3 . On the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, see Viviana A. Zelizer, Pricing the Priceless Child: The Changing Social Value of Children (New York: Basic Books, 1985); and Ellen Condliffe Lagemann, An Elzuive Science: The Troubling Histoly ofEdu- cation Research (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, ZOOO), chapter 1. ‘Peter Coveney, The Image of Childhood: The Individualand Society, A Study of the Theme in English Literature (London: Penguin Books, c. 1967), 29; Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Nature,” in Ralph Waldo Emerson, Selected Ersays, ed. Larzer Ziff, (New York: Penguin Boob, c. 1982), 13; and Barbara Beatty, Preschool Education in America: The Crilture of Young Children fiom the Colonial Era t o the Present (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 28. The Origins of Progressive Education 9 American romantics nevertheless eloquently and movingly described the sweetness, harmony, and holiness of chldhood, views that echoed among native poets, progressive religious figures, and assorted visionaries. The transcendentalists, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau among others, saw something artificial about the schools, which nevertheless bore their names by the thousands in the twentieth century. Having failed in a brief stint as a district school teacher-reportedly quitting after discover- ing that using the switch came with the job-the author of Walden (1854) thought the common schools were decent enough but inferior to the vil- lage and nature. “It is time that we had uncommon schools,” Thoreau told his readers, and “villages were universities, and their elder inhabitants the fellows of universities, with leisure . . . to pursue liberal studies the rest of their lives. Shall the world be confined to one Paris and one Oxford for- ever? Cannot students be boarded here and get a liberal education under the skies of Concord?”’.’ W h a t was needed was not another schoolmaster sequestered between four barren walls but a modern Abelard urging peo- ple to think unconventional thoughts: precisely what common schools were never intended to do. Poets such as Walt Whitman, whose genius belies any easy literary classification, similarly found a more natural, not institutionally deadening, form of learning as essential to the making of the new education. Another former teacher, Whitman had, while editor of the Brooklyn Eagle, frequently excoriated corporal punishment and demanded better teaching methods. In h s poems he applauded the contemplation of morning glories over mem- orizing facts in books, elevated human intuition over intellect, merried in the joys of play, and snickered at the arrogance of the educated. As he grew old, he realized that schools were here to stay. At the inauguration of a new one in Camden, New Jersey, in 1874, he offered “An Old Man’s Thought of School.” And these I see, these sparkling eyes, These stores of mystic meaning, these young lives, Building, equipping like a fleet of ships, immortal ships, Soon to sail out over the measureless seas, On the soul’s voyage. Only the lot of boys and girls? Only the tiresome spelling, writing, ciphering classes? Only a public school? “Henry David Thoreau, Wulden (New York: Penguin Books, c. 1986), 154. On Emer- son and teaching, read Robert D. Richardson, Jr., Emerson: The Mind on Fire (Berkeley: Uni- versity of California Press, 1995), 41, 57. 10 History of Education Quarterly No, Whitman answered, the school, like the church, was not simply “brick and mortar” but a place of “living souls,” “the lights and shadows of the future. . . . To girlhood, boyhood look, the teacher and the school.”” I1 American advocates of the new education drew as they pleased from a large corpus of romantic writings, domestic and foreign. But few Euro- peans were as influential as Pestalozzi and Froebel, even though their ideas were bent and adapted to local conditions and sometimes rejected in the- ory and practice by some who invoked their names as the source of their inspiration. The Swiss-born Pestalozzi and German-born Froebel had emphasized the importance of motherhood, spirituality, and natural meth- ods in educating little children, sentiments soon embraced by many pro- gressive thinkers. Emerson E. White, who had recently retired as Cincinnati’s superintendent, told local high school graduates in 1889 that “The theo- ries and methods of Pestalozzi and Froebel have permeated elementary schools, and science and other modern knowledges, have entered the uni- versities and are working their way downward through secondary educa- tion.”’6 This may have surprised the graduates, since their academic success was mostly a testimony to the power of memorization and recitation of a traditional sort. But many educators like Emerson, searching for a way to improve their craft and answer their perennial critics, thought change was imminent and inevitable thanks to new ideas from abroad. As a contribu- tor to The ScboolJournal, based in New York and Chicago, said in 1895, “The educational world, as i t is spoken of here, has existed from only a modern date. It took on a distinct form when the impact of the Pestalozzian wave struck our shores.’”’ Indeed, Horace Mann, Henry Barnard, and other promoters of a gen- tler pedagogy eagerly publicized the romantic ideals emanating from Europe, which assailed memorization, textbooks, physical discipline, and the usual features of the neighborhood school. Children, as Whitman said, were “stores of mystic meaning,” not empty vessels waiting to be filled with use- ”Walt Whitman, “An Old Man’s Thought of School, For the Inauguration of a Pub- lic School, Camden, New Jersey, 1874,” in Walt Whitman: The Complete Poems, ed. Francis Murphy (New York: Penguin Books, c. 1986), 41 8-19. In “Song ofMyself,” he typically wrote “A morning-glory at my windows satisfies me more than the metaphysics of books.” But, as a former teacher, he often showed great respect for teachers and their labors, and was quite familiar with Locke’s writings and the soft pedagogical ideals of Horace Mann and other con- temporaries. See Florence Bernstein Freedman, Walt Whitman Looks at the Schools (New York: King’s Crown Press, Columbia University, 1950); and David S. Reynolds, Walt Whiman? America: A Cultural Biography (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995), 15-16, 34-35, 52-63, 75. l6E.E. White, “Address to Graduates,” Pennsyluania SchoolJournal38 (October 1889): 153. ‘“‘The Educational World,” The School3oumal5 1 (October 5, 1895): 289. The Origins of Progressive Education 11 less knowledge through brutal methods. But something had obviously gone wrong. Otherwise he could not have alluded to the “tiresome” methods of the school in his poem in 1874. Changing school practices along the lines of the European masters was no simple matter. Mann himself had antici- pated the future by sponsoring city-wide examinations in Boston in 1845 to demonstrate what children had learned at school, knowledge largely acquired by memorizing facts contained in textbooks. Written tests had become the rage after the Civil War, especially in the cities, where admis- sion to high school still required mastery of traditional textbook knowledge and passing a rigorous test. Recitations, too, retained their high place on all levels of instruction in the 1870s. Learning the value of work, not play, discipline, not doing as one pleased, said many citizens, were among the most important lessons taught at school. Textbook salesmen continued to hawk their ubiquitous stock, a familiar part of the business of education. Many teachers still tried to teach caged birds to sing.“ As in every transfer of ideas, American child-centered educators and reformers reworked Pestalozzi and Froebel in ways that made sense to them. Born to middle-class parents in 1746, Pestalozzi wrote extensively in Rousseauian fashion on the power of nature, while elevating the spiritual and practical significance of womanhood and motherhood through his ide- alized views on peasant women, which had more than a hint of nostalgia for the countryside. This was music to the ears of northern middle-class Americans in the nineteenth century, as cities and factories transformed the landscape. An early enthusiast of the French Revolution, Pestalozzi ulti- mately recoiled just like other early romantics against its violent turn, cen- tering his hope for the future in education and social cooperation, not political radicalism and conflict.’” That, too, made him palatable to urban reformers. An avowed socialist such as Robert Owen found Pestalozzi’s writings and model schools on the continent one of several sources of inspiration for infant schools and for his wider communitarian experiments in New Lanark and New Harmony. But the famous Swiss educator embedded his views in a mystical but clearly Christian world view, which furthered his appeal among middle-class reformers building schools in capitalist Amer- ica. His writings sometimes evoked a pantheistic flavor, a synthesis of nat- uralistic and Christian imagery, common to romantics of his generation. Besides criticizing the horrors of traditional, adult-centered education and invokmg the child’s innocence, Pestalozzi explained that a mother could Inon testing and the controversies surrounding it, see Reese, OrigiTzs, 142-61. O n the traditional emphasis on rote memorization and didactic teaching, see Carl F. Kaestle, Pillars of the Repablic: Common Schools and American Society, 1780-1 860 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1983), 18,45-46,97; Reese, Origins, 132-41; and Cremin, Transfrmation, 20-21. “Cutek, Pestalozzi and Edzrration, 6-8, 70-73. 14 History of Education Quarterly experienced how troublesome it is to get any idea into the poor creatures. But everyone agrees about this”--from the magstrates to the clergy. When he tried teaching the worhng classes without the standard books or cate- chism in a school in Burgdorf, “They decided a t a meeting that they did not wish experiments made on their children with the new teaching; the burghers might try on their own.”’s Progressive educators for decades to come would ask whether child-centered methods had any chance among the children of the poor. In the end, they would conclude, like many Amer- ican advocates of kindergartens-the romantic reform par excellence-that the innovations should stress moral education and social control when it came to the urban poor. Thus were child-centered ideals among the mid- dle classes continually shaped by social position.’y Froebelian ideas and practices also provided enormous inspiration for the champions of the child and faced continual reinterpretation after the mid-nineteenth century, when German emigres spread the kindergarten gospel after the failed Revolution of 1848. Born in one of the German states in 1782, Froebel drew upon an eclectic source of Enlightenment and roman- tic writings, and upon a variety of experiences that included an apprentice- ship to a forester and military service against Napoleon, as he fashioned his educational ideas in the early nineteenth century. He studied with Pestalozzi, taught in several schools, and similarly emphasized the heightened signifi- cance of motherhood, womanhood, and early education along natural lines.“’ Inventing an elaborate, highly symbolic, graduated series of what he called gifts and occupations, Froebel cast the kindergarten in the red hot glow of Christian pantheism. The child of a Lutheran minister, Froebel, like Pestalozzi, had a very unhappy childhood, but he grew up in a spiritual world rich in symbolism. More boohsh than his Swiss counterpart, he had similar finan- cial problems but became a teacher when “he accepted the call from ’“Pestalozzi, How Getrude, 113. Pestalozzi added that it was understandable that those in the expensive seats at the theater scorned those in the pit, that employers complained about workers not following orders, and so forth. As a result of faulty teaching methods in the lower schools, he concluded, society bore the blame for the depressed state of Christianity in Europe among the poor and the resulting low state of moral life. ”Beatty, Preschool Education, chapters 5-6; Robert Wollons, “Introduction,” in Kinder- gartens and Cultures: The Global Dzfiuion of an Idea, ed. Roberta Wollons (New Haven: Yale University Press, ZOOO), 7; Barbara Beatty, “‘The Letter Killeth’: Americanization and Mul- ticultural Education in Kindergartens in the United States, 1856-1920,” in Kindergartens nnd Cultures, 42-55; and Selwyn K. Troen, The Public and the Schools: Shaping the St. Louis System, 1838-1920 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1975), chapter 5, on the early establish- ment of kmdergartens in a major city. ’“For a sense of the range of intellectual and social forces that shaped Froebel’s life and educational views, see Robert B. Downs, F$-iedrich Froebel (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1978); Beatty, Preschool Education, chapter 3; Michael Steven Shapiro, Child’s Garden: The Kinder- garten Mouementfiom Froebel to Dewey (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1983), chapter 2; and the innovative volume by Norman Brosterman, Inventing findergarten (New York: Harry N. Ahrams, Inc., Publishers, 1997), chapter 1. The Origins of Progressive Education 1s Providence.”” Put the concrete before the abstract and experience before books in the education of little chddren both men, and their disciples, would say. Froebel’s writings were a fascinating blend of naturalism and Christian piety, as when he described the kindergarten: “As in a garden, under God’s favor, and by the care of a skilled, intelligent gardener, growing plants are cultivated in accordance with Nature’s laws. . . .7’31 In one of history’s many ironic twists of fate, Prussia banned the kmdergarten in 185 1, the year before Froebel’s death, since religious and political radicals and women activists had championed, and thus cast sus- picion upon, the innovation. As historian Roberta Wollons explains, how- ever, the kindergarten, ever malleable, ultimately found favor in many different corners of the world, championed by dictators and democrats alike.” Froebel’s hndergarten, melding the sweet sounds of nature, human goodness, social harmony, holiness, and maternalism into a pedagogical symphony, proved as appealing and flexible in America as Pestalozzi’s broad- er educational philosophy. Middle- and upper-class women, whether mor- alizing reformers or champions of the liberation of the child, found in Froebel what they wanted. The well-known transcendentalist, Elizabeth Peabody, became a leading champion of the kindergarten, yet hardly read any of Froebel’s writings, which could be alternatively obtuse and highly prescriptive. And as Barbara Beatty explains, in her already standard histo- ry of early childhood education, the kindergarten had to be Americanized before it could find favor with the urban middle classes.’+ Many scholars have shown that America’s kindergarten advocates divided into rival camps, each claiming true discipleship and possessing the authentic vision.” Froebel’s followers substantially revised the master’s highly formalized gifts and occupations, and the commercialization of kindergarten materials (principally to make money, not to produce pan- theists) further undermined any uniform kindergarten ideal. Froebel hoped ”Quoted in Downs, Froehel, 19. “Ibid., 42. Froebel thus wrote of the child in Pedagogics of the Kndergarten, Or, His Ideas Corzcerning the Play and Playthings of the Child (New York: D. Appleton, c. 1899, translated by Josephine Jarvis), 7: “Man, as child, resembles the flower on the plant, the blossom on the tree; as these are in relation to the tree, so is the child in relation to humanity: a young bud, a blossom; and as such, it bears, includes, and proclaims the ceaseless reappearance of new human life.” “Wollons, “Introduction,” 1-14; Ann Taylor Allen, “Children Between Public and Private Worlds: The Kindergarten and Public Policy in Germany, 1856-1920,” in Kinder- gartensaizd Cultures, 16-37; and Joachim Liebschner, A Child’s Work: Freedom and Play in Froe- bel’s Educational Theory and Practice (Cambridge: The Lutterworth Press, c. 1992), chapter 8. “On Peabody, see Louise Hall Tharp, The Peabody Sisters of Salem (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1950), chapter 25; Reatty, Preschool Education, 57-64; and Beatty, “‘The Letter Killeth’,” 46. ‘<In addition to the previously cited scholarship by Beatty and Wollons, also read Eve- lyn Weber, The Kindergaiten: Its Encounter with Educational Thozight in America (New York: Teachers College Press, 1969), x, chapters 3-4; and Shapiro, Child’s Garden, chapters 5-6. 16 Histoly of Education Quarter4 that the kindergarten would reach all children, but America’s public schools, despite important exceptions, adopted them very slowly. Moreover, those built for the urban poor often wore the badge of class stigma. To the north- ern middle classes, the kmdergarten might help promote social mobility for their own children but for the laboring, increasingly immigrant mass- es, the emphasis was on discipline, control, and moral uplift.J6 Thanks to Pestalozzi, Froebel, and their acolytes, games, stories, play, and more infor- mal learning experiences became part of a widened educational discourse, but the question of social class bias in child-centered progressivism would never disappear. III After the Civil War, the American champions of the new education frequently invoked the names of Pestalozzi, Froebel, and other European romantics, along with a wider range of writers and theorists who, while more conservative in their views, similarly placed greater emphasis on the importance of education in the lives of children. Despite their many dif- ferences, advocates of a “new education” insisted that young children, who should be educated in kindly and natural ways, learned best not through books but through sensory experience and contact with real objects. Kinder- gartners soon fought over the best way to plant and cultivate children’s gar- dens. Many others who wanted to humanize and enliven instruction in the expanding public schools saw Pestalozzian object teaching as the cure for many pedagogical ills. They faced a difficult battle, since the forces of tra- dition proved very powerful, as various European romantics and innova- tors had earlier discovered. And yet the champions of the child persevered. The great European thinkers had demonstrated that most educational maladies could be cor- rected, said Calvin M. Woodward, the nation’s leading advocate of manu- al training, if young people of all ages worked with their hands. Class conflict, industrial alienation, and urban violence could be averted if the schools did their part for humanity. “Did you ever see one whose mind was nauseated with spelling books, lexicons, and grammars, and an endless hash of words and definitions?” Woodward asked in 1885, “And did you, in such a case, call in the two doctors, Johann Pestalozzi and Friedrich Froebel? And did you watch the magic influence of a diet of things prescribed by the former in the place of words, and a little various practice in doing, in the place of talking, under the direction of the latter?”” In the South following Recon- struction, white racists cited Pestalozzi approvingly, saying schools which ’6Beatty, Preschool Education, chapter 4. ”C. M. Woodward, untitled connibution,JournalofEducation 22 (December 24, 1885): 411. The Origins of Propessive Education 19 Appropriately, a fine reproduction of the Madonna hung on the classroom wall, a fitting image of the mother’s role as savior. The Madonna, so sig- nificant to Catholic women’s devotion, had crossed into a largely Protes- tant world that frequently retained anti-Catholic sentiments even within polite middle-class circles.” Leading school men of the age, from editors of mainstream educa- tional magazines to administrators, were insulted by the many charges hurled at their institutions. Calling Parker an “apostle of the new education,” a writer in the Pennsylvania SchoolJoumal simply remarked, “If Col. Parker is right, nearly all of us are wrong.”” In the 1870s, William T. Harris, St. Louis’s famous superintendent, led the nation in establishing public kinder- gartens and science instruction in the primary grades. But he remained sus- picious of utopian claims on behalf of manual training and sugary views of the child, defended the importance of academics, and warned that starry- eyed teachers seemed more impressed with their bug collections and field trips than in the unglamourous task of teaching children to read. Harris presciently said that manual training would evolve into a class-based voca- tional system, anti-intellectual in tone and undemocratic in practice.’” Emer- son E. White similarly mocked the grandiose claims of manual training advocates: “I shall not be surprised to hear some enthusiast say that man- ual training is the only road to heaven. Every other possible claim has been made for it.’’iX Still other critics of the new education rejected the notion that play, and not work, should be the basis of a sound education, and even worried that the lundergarten, despite the saccharine image, was often a “disorderly n~rsery.”‘~ The late nineteenth century was a difficult time to be a child-cen- tered educator, a t least if one wanted to overturn the familiar practices of the common school. That the interests of the child should guide classroom instruction was given a boost in the 1880s and 1890s thanks to the follow- ers of Johann Friedrich Herbart (1 776- 1841), but resistance to change was +On urban middle-class Protestant fascination with Catholicism, see TJ. Jackson Lears, No Place ojGrace: Aiztimodeniism and the Traiisfioimatioii ofAmerican Ciiltiire, 1880-1 920 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1981). “William L. Ballantine, “Examinations,” Peiznsylz~ania SchoolJvziinal 32 (May 1883): 437. ‘-William J. Reese, “The Philosopher-King of St. Louis,” in Ciirvirulzim & Conseqzience: Herbelt M. Kliebard and the Promise of Schooling, ed. Barry M. Franklin (New York: Teachers College Press, ZOOO), 165, 171-72. ‘“‘Manual Training,”Jozirnal ofEdiication 3 5 (March 3, 1892): 134. The same article quoted William Hailinann, who wrote approvingly of manual training as essential in teach- ing social cooperation, work hahits, and hand and eye coordination, arguments common at the time. ‘“‘Drift,”Jm~nzal ofEdziratioi7 19 (May 22, 1881): 326. This editorial takes a swipe at Hailmann and other kindergarten enthusiasts. 20 Histoly of Education Qua.te.4 pervasive.j0 Of course, depending on what books or journals one read or classrooms one visited, citizens could conclude that the schools had wit- nessed a pedagogical revolution and the annihilation of tradition, or its opposite. In a richly diverse nation, with hundreds of thousands of public schools spreading into the poorest, least populated, and recently settled corners of the nation, America had examples aplenty to confirm or deny educational change, the watchword of the era. In 1896, however, a deject- ed contributor to the SchoolJournal sadly wrote that “the study of pedagogy has been, and still is, derided by what may be termed the Three R men. They have said and still say that it is enough to know the subjects to be taught, and how to keep order.”j’ Another writer similarly feared that a “dead common school tone” prevailed in many classrooms.” Without question, there was abundant evidence that teachers still forced children to memorize knowledge learned from ubiquitous textbooks. Charles Francis Adams, Jr., who helped publicize Francis Parker’s labors as superintendent in Quincy, Massachusetts in the 1870s, said that before the latter’s arrival the town schools hired teachers who “unconsciously” made pupils into “parrots.” Children would “glibly chatter out the bound- aries and capitals, and principal towns and rivers of States and nation, and enumerate the waters you pass through and the ports you would make in a voyage from Boston to Calcutta, or New York to St. Petersburg.”j) Park- er’s stay in Quincy proved to be short-lived; he was off to Boston in 1880, where he would face another round of resistance to change. Other exam- ples of hostility to the spirit of the new education abounded. In 1882, a study of “common school studies” sponsored by the United States Bureau of Education discovered that teachers still spent most of their time on the basics. The purpose of instruction, said the researcher, seemed to be “the guessing of so many riddles” and memorizing incredible quantities of facts. Drill and recitation were more common than exercises that tapped the imag- ination.” Teachers everywhere frequently spent most of their time drilling chil- dren in the basic subjects. A foreign visitor to several New York City schools in the 1890s was struck by the heavy reliance on memorization: “I heard in one class the boys get up one after another recording the names, dates, and ”‘For a masterful history of Herbartian ideas and their American expressions, see Kath- leen Anne Cruikshank, “The Rise and Fall of American Herbartianism: Dynamics of an Edu- cational Reform Movement,” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1993). ”Editorial, The School~ournalS3 (September/October 1896): 388. ’?Editorial, WisconsinJournal of Education 28 (August 1898): 169. ”Charles F. Adams, Jr., The N m Departure m the Common Schools of Quinq and Other Paperson Educational Topics (Boston: Estes and Lauriat, 1879), 33,43. “John M. Gregory, “Some Fundamental Inquiries Concerning the Common School Studies,” Circulars of Information of the Bureau of Edzication (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1882), 87. The Origins of Progressive Education 21 chief performances of the eighteen presidents of the United States. In anoth- er school, the girls recited in order the names of the principal inventors and discovers, with a description of the exploits of each.’’is By the time Joseph Mayer k c e published his celebrated book attacking the old education in 1893, a generation of reformers had come to realize that despite some cel- ebrated victories, tradition had proven more than a little enduring. A pedi- atrician, Rice catalogued the usual litany of problems in urban, graded schools, where children memorized materials they did not understand, teachers resembled Gradgrind, and cram was king.” The advocates of the new education could point to some triumphs. The curriculum in some urban districts had been enriched by object teach- ing, occasionally by lundergarten classes, and even more by manual train- ing classes of great variety and quality. Nature study and field trips were not unknown. Even Rice noticed an occasional ray of light in the city sys- tems. In Indianapolis, Nebraska Cropsey, the supervisor of elementary teachers and alumnae of Oswego, had introduced and encouraged more active, natural teaching methods in some schools.” Maybe other places would take heed. And yet the apostles of the new education were aware that the seeds of reform often died on the hard soil of tradition. Even Harris in 1891 complained about the excessive preoccupation with memorization in the schools, where sing-song drill, question-and-answer teaching methods, and the heavy use of textbooks remained common.j8 Despite all the fears of traditional educators, the schools had not been won over by child-centered education. Books remained central to the pub- lic schools, and the familiar basics had not been crowded out by fashion- able romantic substitutes. The messianic visions of a Colonel Parker, Hailmann, or countless child-centered progressives were difficult to trans- late into reality. Real schools and ordinary teachers valued the traditional curriculum, books, and old-fashioned pedagogy. That was how most teach- ers had been taught. To their credit, early progressives often recognized that primers on object teaching, kindergartens, and manual training could deteriorate into formula, rules and regulations, and question-and-answer ’7.G. Fitch, Notes on American Schools and Training Colleges (London: Macmillan and Company, 1890), 5 1. ’“Joseph Mayer Rice, The Public-School System ofthe United States (New York: Cenis- ry, 1893). ”Rice, Public-School System, 93, 101-15; and Laura Gaus, “Nebraska Cropsey,” in The Enyclopedia of Indzunupolzs, ed. David J. Bodenhamer and Robert G. Barrows (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 483. “William T . Harris, “The Present Status of Education in the United States,”Jozirnal ofEducation 34 (August 13, 1891): 101, where he wrote: “The elementary school will always have the character of memory work stamped upon it, no matter how much the educational reforms may improve its methods. It is not easy to over-value the impulse of such men as Pestalozzi and Froebel; but the child’s mind cannot seize great syntheses.”