Diane Ravitch Defends the Academic Tradition
From Common Knowledge, Volume 14, Number 1, 2001
© 2001 Core Knowledge Foundation. Not to be copied or reproduced without permission from the Core Knowledge Foundation, 801 E. High Street, Charlottesville, VA 22902.
In the opening pages of her latest book — Left Back, A Century of Failed School Reforms — educational historian Diane Ravitch outlines the sort of education she favors. Ravitch champions an academic curriculum that includes reading, writing, arithmetic, and also “the systematic study of language and literature, science and mathematics, history, the arts, and foreign languages” — subjects that “convey important knowledge and skills, cultivate aesthetic imagination, and teach students to think critically and reflectively about the world in which they live.”
The importance of an academic curriculum is the first plank in Ravitch’s educational platform. The second is the idea that every student can benefit from, and deserves to get, such an education — not just students who have been pegged as college-bound.
The rest of Ravitch’s book is not so much a defense of these ideas as it is a description of the ways in which these ideas have been abandoned, attacked, and, occasionally, defended during the twentieth century.
According to Ravitch, the main attacks on the academic curriculum have come from a cluster of educational experts advocating “progressive” education. During the early years of the twentieth century, progressive educators launched a strong attack on the traditional academic curriculum. To these reformers, subjects like history, algebra, geometry, chemistry, physics, Latin, modern languages, and even literature seemed more or less useless. Studying such subjects might be necessary for a few students who planned to go to college, but progressives were certain these subjects could hardly be useful for the great majority of students, who would not go to college. The reformers, she writes in Left Back, advocated a “differentiated curriculum” that would divide students “according to their likely future occupations. ” College-bound students would continue to study the traditional subjects, but other students would get a more “practical” education featuring ral world subjects such as health, cooking, sewing, penmanship, shorthand, woodworking, household economics, and other vocational and industrial arts.
Reformers insisted that the differentiated curriculum was progressive because it addressed the needs of all children, not just the college-bound. It freed the non-college-bound from a curriculum that could not benefit them and, according to some progressive educators, might even harm them. At the same time, it prepared these students for jobs that they could realistically expect to get. Progressive educators also claimed that their programs were good for society as a whole. After all, they were training the workers a modern, industrialized society needed.
However, Ravitch shows there was a darker side to these progressive ideas. In practice, the differentiated curriculum contributed to ethnic, racial, sexual, and economic discrimination. Native-born white males from wealthy families were most likely to be placed on the college track. Recent immigrants, blacks, poor whites, and women were likely to be placed on the non-college track. Thus, instead of giving disadvantaged persons a chance to improve their situation, the differentiated curriculum actually helped to perpetuate inequalities in American society.
The book explains, too, how the development of IQ tests in the 1910s and 1920s made it easier for progressive educators to decide which students should go on which tracks. Even though intelligence testing was a brand new field, the psychologists who developed the early IQ tests were confident that their tests accurately measured the innate mental capacity of human beings. That is, they claimed to be able to determine not only what students had learned but also what they were capable of learning. Almost all of the early IQ testers believed that intelligence was hereditary and immutable.
Ravitch also writes of another progressive idea that has weakened the academic curriculum in the U.S — the child-centered movement, which was largely based on the romantic educational ideas of the French philosophe Jean- Jacques Rousseau. Rousseau was in favor of “natural” education. This meant that the child was to develop independently, with as little adult direction as possible. Ideally, the student would never learn anything by heart and would not learn to read until he or she wished to do so. At the age of twelve, Rousseau wrote, his ideal student would “scarcely know what a book was.” In an ideal school, Rousseau said, “nothing is to be exacted from students by obedience.” Students “will only learn what they feel to be of actual and present advantage.”
In America, many of Rousseau’s ideas were championed by John Dewey. Dewey followed Rousseau’s lead in deemphasizing reading. He believed students should not learn to read until they were at least eight. He based this recommendation on his belief that reading and writing were becoming less important as civilization advanced. Dewey also rejected rote learning, drill, and other traditional instructional tactics as inconsistent with his child-centered philosophy.
A movement that tended to go handin- hand with the child-centered movement was the “project movement.” Progressives who supported the project movement wanted to see children learn by working on projects. Ravitch recognizes that the project method can be a useful means of teaching many subjects. But she shows that, for many progressive educators, the project method was not a means to an end but an end in and of itself. Project zealots insisted that educators need not worry about subject matter; if children were pursuing projects of their own choosing, they would learn habits of self-control and acquire information as needed. Thus, projects became not a way to learn but a pointless and trivial substitute for learning.
Ravitch discusses other progressive movements, too, like the social studies movement and the “life-adjustment” movement. The parade of bad ideas she documents would be very depressing if she did not also draw attention to a handful of brave souls who championed traditional education in the face of the progressive onslaught.
W. T. Harris was one of these brave souls. Harris was an elementary school teacher, a superintendent of schools, and, eventually, U.S. Commissioner of Education. He was a tireless advocate of universal public education and the academic curriculum. Harris argued that Rousseau’s system, “which proposes to let the individual work out his education entirely by himself . . . is the greatest possible mistake.” He insisted that even the least educated person learns “the traditions of his own tribe and learns from hearsay,” but “it is incomparably more useful to be able, by means of books and the printed page, to have access to the observations of all men who have observed and reflected in all times and all places.” Unfortunately, Harris was attacked as a reactionary and generally ignored.
Ravitch also praises another great champion of the traditional curriculum, William Bagley. Bagley was a school superintendent and a professor of education at the University of Illinois. He thought that the public schools should promote a common curriculum, grounded in the liberal arts and sciences, and that all students, regardless of IQ or projected career, should receive such an education for at least the first eight years of schooling. The “narrow utilitarianism” of vocational education might allow students to learn what was needed for the present moment, but it would leave them unprepared to cope with new situations. Bagley criticized teachers who lowered their standards and refused to give examinations. He even took on the IQ testers, calling them “educational determinists” whose tests encouraged “fatalistic inferences” about young children. Bagley argued valiantly, Ravitch writes, but he was like “a man trying to stop an onrushing locomotive with words.” The progressive juggernaut rolled on.
Another great educator was Carleton Washburne, the superintendent of a much-admired school system in Winnetka, Illinois. Washburne set out to determine what sorts of things students needed to know to succeed in contemporary society. In order to do this, he and his teachers carried out “an exhaustive study of the common allusions to persons and places in periodical literature, recognizing that in order to read intelligently a person must have familiarity with these persons and places.” Washburne reasoned that “if a certain bit of knowledge or skill is necessary to practically every normal person, every child should have an opportunity to master it.”
Do these arguments sound familiar? They should, for this is the same line of thinking that underpins E. D. Hirsch’s Cultural Literacy and the Core Knowledge movement. Ravitch recognizes as much by including Hirsch in her book and presenting him as a champion of academic education in the tradition of Harris, Bagley, and Washburne.
Ravitch herself deserves to be included in this list as well. Undoubtedly, some progressives will attack her as reactionary and conservative, as their precursors attacked Harris, Bagley, and Hirsch. But these charges are unwarranted. Ravitch is, to use her own phrase, an “egalitarian traditionalist.”
Left Back is a thoroughly researched and eminently reasonable book. It is likely to be of interest to most readers of this newsletter, but it will be of particular interest to Core Knowledge teachers and principals interested in learning more about the academic tradition and the progressive reforms that have endangered this tradition. Teachers, principals, parents, and others who read this book will emerge confirmed in their conviction that Core Knowledge is good for kids and good for America.
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Last updated: Fri, March 14 2008
