April 9 Reader’s Guide
Why do we have differentiation in education, and is it a good thing?
The Progressive Era of the 1890s-1930s
Dewey, The School and Society, excerpt (all read)
Fass, Outside In, chapter 2 (group 1)
Donato The Other Struggle for Equal Schools, chapter 1 (group 2)
Anderson, The Education of Blacks in the South, chapter 6 (group 3)
Primary sources: Seattle Girls School and Benjamin E. Mays Academy v. the AAUW and the ACLU on single-sex education (all read)
The Progressive Era in education (1890s-1930s) represented a time filled with curricular answers to a variety of problems in society: the decline of the nuclear family, increased immigration, urbanization, and industrialization. Different reformers formed different camps within the progressive education movement. Your readings represent two of the major strands: developmental democracy (or pedagogical progressivism) and social efficiency (or administrative progressivism). Though they were distinctly separate, there were common threads. Progressive education, in general, was critical of traditional educational practices including: an emphasis on book learning and reliance on textbooks, an adherence to a daily schedule with specific subject matter allotted specific periods of time, an extrinsic reward system, rote memorization and drill as a teaching and learning tool, and the domination of the classroom by the teacher. It emphasized: active learning or learning by doing, cooperative planning of what to study between teacher and student, teaching what is useful to the student and in the students best interest, and recognizing individual differences between students abilities and interests and acting accordingly.
John Dewey, considered the father of developmental democracy, believed that classrooms should be student-centered and that learning should be student-initiated. This type of learning was meant to train students for democratic participation and citizenship. Unfortunately, as you are probably aware, the type of differentiated education Dewey proposed is not often employed in actual classrooms (there are a variety of reasons for this that we will discuss in class). The rest of the secondary sources examine how race and ethnicity complicated the social efficiency goal of the other branch of progressivism and how differentiated education impacted certain European immigrants, Mexican Americans, and African Americans. (read below for tips on each of the other secondary sources).
Your contemporary primary sources take up the issue of differentiation in another way: they examine gender-differentiation in classrooms and schools. The Seattle Girls’ School and the Benjamin E. Mays Academy (Detroit) advocate differentiation as a way to improve learning and self-esteem. The American Association of University Women and the American Civil Liberties Union, however, strongly disagree with single-sex education.
The point is to have you understand that there are a variety of ways to differentiate students, that some mechanisms are “better” or “worse” than others, and that all differentiation reveals values and has consequences.
When you are doing the readings, ask yourself:
Would your teacher-training be different if middle and high schools followed Dewey’s prescription and used students’ “ideas, impulses, and interests” to guide learning? How would it change your classroom? Do you think it is a reasonable or achievable goal?
For those of you reading Fass:
Fass discusses how the science of individual differences impacted the schooling experiences of European immigrants. In large part, the reason that the number of children in schools rose so dramatically around the turn of the century was that immigration escalated during the same period. With so many children in schools—and not all of them bound for college—the need for an efficient way to educate them rose (this is the drive for social efficiency described by Labaree). As a result, schools grew in size, complexity, and in bureaucratic organization. You will see that the type of progressive education described by Fass is distinctly different from Dewey’s discussion.
During class, you will be asked to summarize Fass for your classmates (you will be put in groups so that you may come up with a group summary). Therefore, when you read you should focus on her discussion of the IQ (students in other groups will not have the background information on it that Fass provides), tracking and vocational education (you will see how other source discuss this issue differently than Fass), child labor (again, this gets a different treatment in the other sources), the immigrant population’s experiences with schools, and reformers’ intentions.
For those of you reading Donato:
Donato discusses the education (or mis-education) of Mexican Americans during the Progressive Era. The Mexican-American War (1846-1848) ended decades earlier, but American educators were still grappling with how to include Mexicans-turned-Mexican-Americans in to the American social/political/economic fabric. You will see that the type of progressive education described by Donato is distinctly different from Dewey’s discussion.
During class, you will be asked to summarize Donato for your classmates (you will be put in groups so that you may come up with a group summary). Therefore, when you read you should focus on the IQ (this is discussed differently in the others readings), the drive for assimilation (again, this is treated differently in the other sources), child labor, the reasoning behind school segregation, vocational education and tracking, Mexican American experiences with schools, and reformers’ intentions.
For those of you reading Anderson:
Anderson provides a snapshot of the provision of high schools for blacks in the South and the debate over the “proper” curriculum in those high schools. In doing so, he alludes to the debate between Booker T. Washington (whose ideas were implemented at Hampton Institute and Tuskegee Institute—also mentioned in the chapter) and W. E. B. DuBois. The debate centered around how to adjust blacks (emancipated after the Civil War) to the American order. One side (including Washington and northern white industrial philanthropists including the Rosenwald Fund) argued that vocational and manual training was best for blacks, an attitude fortified by racist notions of black inferiority and made tangible in the progressive era drive to differentiate the curriculum. The other side (including DuBois and northern white religious philanthropists) argued that blacks needed a liberal arts curriculum and that such an education would enable the “talented tenth” to “lift the black masses out of the degradation forced upon them during slavery.” You will see that the type of progressive education prescribed for blacks as described by Anderson is distinctly different from Dewey’s discussion. NOTE: You are required to read only pp. 186-211 (stop reading at the paragraph that begins “The Rosenwald Fund’s next major…) and 221 (begin reading the paragraph at the very bottom of the page)-237.
During class, you will be asked to summarize Anderson for your classmates (you will be put in groups so that you may come up with a group summary). Therefore, when you read you should focus on child labor (this is discussed differently in the other readings), school segregation, the debate over liberal arts and vocational education (the other readings do not discuss this), black experiences with schools, and reformers’ intentions.