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Foreword

Ann G. Winfield

When it comes to school, too often we fail to ask why. Daily school experience for teachers, students, and administrators is awash in rituals and practices that have a source, but few of the estimated one quarter of the U.S. population who are inside school walls on any given day know or think about the origins of what they think and do. Given that these daily practices and rituals are both derived from and serve to perpetuate the ideologies from which they are derived, it is important to examine the history, philosophy, and sociology of the field of education as it has played out for nearly two centuries. None of us, I am sure, want to participate in inculcating our youth in unexamined assumptions and biases. This, then, is the rationale for what is widely known as the foundations of education. Where to begin?

Generally, educational historians recognize education in the United States as having undergone four eras of reform: the common school era from roughly 1770 to 1890, the progressive era from 1900 to 1950, the civil rights era from 1950 to 1980, and the era of standards and accountability from 1980 to the present. Familiar debates about education in American schools, issues passionately argued across the country, were nearly all present from the earliest years of the American colonies and have risen and fallen in perceived importance over the course of these eras of reform. Issues like poverty, language, access to quality schooling, race, gender, curricular content, pedagogical approaches, religion, funding, taxes, and politics are not new; they are the very essence of what is often called the American experiment in democracy. What follows are some brief examples from each era, offered with the acknowledgment that there are innumerable examples and no right or wrong way of tracing the history. In addition, the following recounting illustrates that for any currently debated issue one might choose, it is possible to trace it back through time, come up with much-needed insight into why we do what we do in American schools, and conclude that change is possible. While it is true that when we do things over and over in a ritualized fashion those things become normalized and we stop asking why, it is also true that unmasking the ritual reveals possible flaws in the implementation of what may or may not have been an otherwise sound idea. In other words, you, dear reader, have the capacity to weigh in; to evaluate with your own insight, knowledge, and experience; and to envision schooling as the site where young people go to discover their talents and passions and are given opportunity to realize their aspirations.

Literacy, or the ability to read and comprehend text, is often regarded as the preeminent starting point for any education. Though the Puritans are generally credited with the genesis of this notion because of their belief that individuals should be able to read the Bible themselves and not simply rely on the clergy to interpret scripture, the story has become more nuanced with new research showing that there were a number of groups working to spread the notion of education as a right, not a privilege. Mostly, though, the common school era is known for Horace Mann’s proclamation that school should be the great equalizer of society—the widely held view that social class should not be an impediment to a successful life and career because school is there to put everyone on the same playing field. We are a rags-to-riches society, our story of ourselves goes, founded by self-made men who started with nothing. We learn in our earliest years that the only we learned to success is our own willingness to work hard, dream big, and stay out of trouble and that conversely, those who are poor and struggling must not have tried hard enough. This, as it turns out, is hardly as simple as it sounds. The institution of slavery, the idea that women were inferior to men, and the expectation that children will generally follow in the footsteps of their parents are obvious obstacle’s to Mann’s aspiration for public education. Other obstacles include the philosophy of individualism, the rediscovery of Mendelian genetics, racial hierarchies of intelligence, and nationalistic xenophobia: All contributed to a deeply foundational yet unspoken resistance to equal access to all in America.

By the end of the 19th century, the rationalization for tracks in school—special schools for domestic servants, factory workers, and indigenous peoples—and institutions for the disabled, the poor, and the wayward—were outward expressions of the influence of Charles Darwin’s famous book On the Origin of Species wherein he articulated the concept of survival of the fittest. Social scientists of the 1880s and 1890s applied this concept to human society and put forth the notion that the wealthy and successful of the nation were simply better, more highly evolved humans. As you can imagine, the whole idea of school as the great equalizer faded away as quaint and old-fashioned, and the new “science” of eugenics overtook what had been known as social Darwinism.

The turn of the 20th century brought with it a whole host of progressive proposals: the end of child labor, compulsory schooling, the argument that women should be allowed to vote, the uplifting of the poor by women like Jane Addams in Chicago, workplace safety, and a continuation of the survival-of-the-fittest notion—the eugenics movement. Eugenicists argued that we should all want to rid society of poverty and disease and be ruled by the wisest and best people possible and that the way to accomplish this was through forcible sterilization, severely restricting immigration, and laws governing who could marry whom. Intelligence, linked to race and class within this belief system, grew into an extensive intelligence quotient testing frenzy to which we can trace our current obsession with testing. Schools began to track students by categorizing them into groups based on preconceived ideas about what they were capable of (based on race, social class, and gender) and offering them a specialized curriculum. The famous American philosopher John Dewey was writing in this era, and developed his notion of child-centered learning in direct contrast to the dominant trends of the time, but was no less a product of those times. The result was a cementing in the American mind-set that when it comes to intelligence and ability, there was no possibility of equality and therefore no point in educating all students equally. Resistance to this had always been there, but by the end of World War II, the gears began to engage and the civil rights era was born.

Between 1950 and 1980 American education experienced dramatic change as people watched segregation in the southern states start to crumble under the weight of nonviolent protest led by the likes of Martin Luther King and Mahatma Gandhi. Modeled after early achievements by blacks resisting segregation in southern states, groups formed to agitate for the rights of poor people, disabled people, women, and those for whom English was not a first language; Supreme Court decisions such as Brown v. Board of Education; and legislation such as the Elementary and Secondary Education Act and the Education for All Handicapped Children Act transformed the landscape of public school availability and forced compliance to the notion that all students in America have a right to a free and appropriate public education (FAPE). Driven by the first wave of the post–WWII baby boom, young people marched in protest of the Vietnam War, pushed hard against the edicts of society and their parents, demanded voting rights legislation, and sought a vision of schooling as emancipatory and supportive. Much was accomplished, but eras don’t last forever, and as many have said, we rested too soon. What followed is the current era and a fixation on standards, accountability, and testing.

One thing about testing is its ability to reduce human beings into numbers, which in turn become data. The election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 ushered in a vehement, long-lasting rebuttal to the previous decades of reform. Reagan’s A Nation at Risk Report, one of the first written with sound bites for newscasts in mind, declared that “if an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war” (National Commission on Excellence in Education, 1983). What the report called “mediocre” was that test scores had gone down overall, precisely because test scores among all the previously excluded groups that were now included had themselves gone up dramatically. Data-driven school reform has been big business for decades now, largely as a result of the dramatic policy shifts articulated in Reagan’s report. Young people graduating from high school today are among the most tested generations in human history. School reform proposals are almost exclusively judged by the extent to which they reflect data, and data rationalizes day-to-day practice on even the most microscopic levels. The result is a decades-long withering away of all school curricula that don’t test well—music, dance, theatre, and even history and science all receive a back seat on the priority list for school reformers. Recess and naps are now the exception rather than the rule for kindergartners and first graders. Children are now working on material in kindergarten and first grade that they used to start doing in second and third grade. Knowledge is imparted in bite-sized pieces and assessed in multiple-choice exams while the trajectory of students’ lives is decided by the results of eighth-grade math examinations.

The essays in this book all enter into this conversation in different ways and on different subjects. Pick any topic, from homework requirements, grouping students by age, or separating subject disciplines to the questions about why girls are underrepresented in math and science or boys shun English and writing, trace that idea through time, and you will come up with the same reflection of our history. To ignore the influence of our past while trying to reform the present ensures that we may unwittingly perpetuate beliefs about human capacity that are not our own. We may reject many of the ideas we encounter in our study of history, but to then determine you will reject history altogether is an approach doomed to fail if your intent is to think outside the ideas you are rejecting. To ignore history is to be harnessed by ideological structures that have governed the lives and the education of each of us. Learning to think outside these imposed structures requires that we pay close attention and study with a critical eye, but it also requires a leap of faith and asks that we operate in a kind of suspended animation between past and present. The faith is in unlimited human capacity, in instinct, insight, acceptance, and in an approach modeled by the love you have for your own family and friends. Your challenge will not be easy, especially when for generations we have been trained to view all knowledge as either right or wrong. On behalf of future generations, it is worth it to continue to strive toward an analysis of the present that fully accounts for, yet is not defined by, the past.

Reference

National Commission on Excellence in Education. (1983). A nation at risk: The imperative for educational reform. Washington, DC: Author.