Alternative Schools: Diverted but not Defeated

Paper submitted to Qualification Committee

At UC Davis, California

July 2000

By

Kathy Emery

Table of Contents

Introduction . . . . . . . . . 1

The Development of a Centralized Bureaucracy. . . . 4

Opposition to Standardization . . . . . 8

Co-optation of the Opposition . . . . . . 13

Co-optation of Manual Training . . . . . 18

Resistance to Co-optation . . . . . . . 19

The Progressive Education Association . . . . 20

The Post-Progressive Period . . . . . . 23

Persistent Resistance . . . . . . . . 26

The Free School Movement . . . . . . 28

Since the Sixties . . . . . . . . 35

Continuation Schools . . . . . . . 37

Vouchers and Charters . . . . . . . 40

Conclusion . . . . . . . . . 44

Appendix A: The Politics of Education by Carl Rogers . . . 46

Appendix B: New Standards^TM Performance Standards . . . 48

References . . . . . . . . . 51

Every new idea, every conception of things differing from that authorized by current belief, must have its origin in an individual. New ideas are doubtless always sprouting, but a society governed by custom does not encourage their development. On the contrary, it tends to suppress them, just because they are deviations from what is current. The [person] who looks at things differently from others is in such a community a suspect character; for [him or her] to persist is generally fatal. Even when social censorship of beliefs is not so strict, social conditions may fail to provide the appliances which are requisite if new ideas are to be adequately elaborated; or they may fail to provide any material support and reward to those who entertain them. Hence they remain mere fancies, romantic castles in the air, or aimless speculations.

John Dewey (1916; p. 296)

The alternative school movements of 1890-1940 and 1960-75 have undergone considerable study. Prominent in this research has been the work of Cremin (1964), Deal and Nolan (1978a), Duke (1978), Cuban and Tyack (1995), Zilversmit (1993), Semel and Sadovnik (1999). But these studies are misleading when they discuss the causes and decline of these two "movements". These researchers emphasize the ideas of the reformers as the reason for both the emergence and decline of the alternative school movements. I would like to argue, instead, that it was the existence or absence of structural or institutional support which was dependent upon the larger historical context that accounted for the growth and decline of the number of alternative schools during these two periods. An “idea” is neither practical or impractical. It is an hypothesis or, as Dewey would say, a guide to action. The issue of practicality only becomes relevant when ideas are acted upon, at which point the methods of implementation, the degree of institutional or community support and the nature of the results all must factor into an evaluation of whether or how well the idea can be put into practice. For example, in the face of powerful institutional opposition, an individual’s attempt to implement an idea would not appear to be very “practical”. Or, an idea promoted and supported by a community with all the resources available to it would seem to be very practical indeed. Yet, if such an idea failed in spite of such support, perhaps the methods of implementation were ill chosen. Ideas of and by themselves need creative people committed to implementation and ongoing reevaluation of the idea as well as institutional or community support in order for them to be translated into practice.

It is also misleading to characterize alternative school movements as appearing only at two moments in U. S. History. Alternative schools have existed as long as the public school system has. One is the cause of the other. A standardized and bureaucratic public school system necessarily gave rise to resistance to it. Alternative schools are just that, an alternative to the prevailing system. Alternative schools “call for diversity in preference to common standards and uniformity” and “pose an organizational alternative to bureaucracy” (Raywid, 1994; p. 31). If one does not look at alternative schools in their historical context one can not fully appreciate the impulse behind their existence or the impulse behind the repression or co-optation of that resistance.

In order to support this claim, I wish to offer the following argument. The public school system which began to take shape in the 1840s has developed systematically as a standardized and bureaucratic system so as to allow business leaders to control the socialization process of the nation's children. Those interested in opposing this process created alternative schools. The goals, methodology and decision making process of alternative schools are in direct opposition to the goals, methodology and decision making process of the public school system. This resistance emerged as soon as the effects of the new public school system began to be felt. The resistance, however, was allowed to expand during two periods. Historians have labeled these periods as the Progressive Movement (1890-1940) and the Free School Movement (1960-75). During these two periods, business leaders, instead of attacking alternative schools, provided a small amount of structural support (funding networking, publicity and studies). It is this support which explains the actual growth of alternative schools during the Progressive Movement and the Sixties. Corporate foundations and business-led school boards provided support during these periods in response to the pressure brought by larger social movements at the time, as well as in response to the evident failures of the public school system (manifested by truancy, insubordination and dropping out). Corporate funding was withdrawn from alternative schools and a media attack was launched against them when business leaders became disappointed with the results of their support, or when they perceived the experimental schools as oppositional rather than alternative (Shapiro, 1990).

Instead of pointing to external or structural factors, Lawrence Cremin (1964) referred to internal factors to explain the decline of progressive educational reform after 1940. He argued that “success” brought “ideological fragmentation” and “ideological bankruptcy”, that the reformers were too negative (“protest is not a program”), and that alternative instructional methods and organization demanded too much of teachers (pp. 348-9). Taking Cremin’s lead, both Zilversmit (1993) and Semel (1999) find fault with the ideas of “progressive schools”. Zilversmit seems to believe that if the proponents of alternative schools had not departed from the ideas of John Dewey, then the “transformation” of the schools at the turn of the century would have been “progressive” in practice and not merely in theory. According to Semel, the reformers “misunderstood and misapplied” Dewey’s ideas thus “distorting” them. This emphasis on internal, programmatic factors implies that ideas, not social, political and economic factors, drive historical change. If one just has the right idea, it will prevail.

Deal and Nolan (1978) acknowledged that the non-public alternative schools which proliferated during the 1970s succeeded in providing “options”, were the “impetus for many reforms in the traditional schools” and “out performed traditional schools on vandalism, absenteeism and drop out rates” (p. 5). They faulted many of the schools, however, for either lacking “a systematic guiding philosophy” or for being “ahistorical” (p. 7). Deal and Nolan lament that these factors undermined their effectiveness and may have been responsible for the schools’ short lives. Daniel Duke (1978) dilutes the impact of the historical context in his assessment:

absence of any one predominant goal seems to suggest that no single factor can account for the development of recent alternatives or those in earlier years. The goals established by previous alternatives were motivated by factors as diverse as the utopian movements of the 19th century, rise of Populism and Progressivism, adoption of a scientific approach to teaching and radical socio-political critiques” (p. 36).

These movements, however, were not fundamentally diverse. They were all prompted by a humanistic response to industrial capitalism. Among the “utopians” of the 1830s and 40s, the Transcendentalists opposed materialism and imperialism; the Abolitionists, Owenites, and Nashobians opposed what Marx called the alienation of labor and generation of surplus value. The Populists opposed the monopoly of capital that eastern banks, manufacturers and railroads were creating. Progressive reformers were, indeed, diverse. While most political progressives worked to maintain hierarchy and an elitist ideology, most progressive educators opposed this.

There is never “one single factor” that can account for the emergence of a movement nor are movements caused and destroyed by ideology alone. One needs to understand the relationships among a variety of factors “to account for the development” of the alternative school movements beginning in the 1890s and 1960s. To claim simply that the causal factors are “diverse” is to imply no relationship among those factors nor to assign functions to each factor. In the assigning of functions and the establishing of relationships, one can develop a theory of change that accounts for human agency within the larger context of impersonal historical forces. To conclude that change in schools happens as a result of “an interaction of long-term institutional trends, transitions in society, and policy talk” (Cuban and Tyack, 1995; p. 59) does not explain why “significant segments of the democratic polity have not been heard in the process” nor what needs to happen in order to change that fact. In order to develop an understanding of how individuals and groups can act to change the system, one must begin to not only acknowledge the complex “interactions” to which Cuban and Tyack refer, but to begin to examine, in detail, the explicit relationships such “interactions” involve.

The Development of a Centralized Bureaucracy

The crusade for the common school emerged in an era of tremendous upheaval. In the 1840s, the first factories were being established in the Northeast, drawing New England girls away from the family farm and creating a manufacturing nouveau riche. German and Irish immigrants arrived in large enough numbers to threaten the Protestant Anglo-Saxon cultural hegemony. Workingman’s parties formed to challenge the political power of employers, leading to strikes and forcing many state legislatures to drop property qualifications for voting. Slave revolts in the South and abolitionism in the North began to undermine the elite consensus supporting slavery. Female anti-slavery activists, outraged at their second class citizenship within abolitionism, launched an organized woman’s rights movement in 1848.

Given such threats to the existing hierarchy, it is not difficult to believe that Horace Mann may have been motivated to campaign for a common school by the desire to end the civil strife that he saw all around him. Mann wanted to establish a state school system that would restore order by teaching every white child to obey the law and evince the Christian morals of hard work and thrift (Spring, 1986; pp. 84-5). The leadership of the crusade for such a system in Massachusetts reveals the class interests involved. Of the fourteen leading crusaders for the common school, eleven had been elected to public office, nine were lawyers, ten were editors of journals, six were college educators, four were ministers and only one was a teacher in a public school. What they were crusading for was a school that was publicly funded, controlled by elected or appointed officials and taught the “3 Rs”, morality and what they referred to as “Republicanism” (Tyack, 1967; p. 125).

The political implications of a crusade for a uniform system – one curriculum for everyone – were understood by most and met with resistance by many. During the same year that Massachusetts established compulsory education (1852) the Catholic Plenary Council, for example, met and urged that all possible sacrifices should be made for the establishment of Catholic schools. The use of the King James Bible as the cornerstone to the emerging uniform curriculum prompted this resistance (Spring, 1986; p. 106). Free blacks in the North, seeing that these new public schools were white only, established their own schools. Centralized control was immediately foreseen by Orestes Brownson who tried to prevent the establishment of the Massachusetts State Board of Education in the 1840s. Brownson feared state control of local education because he believed the Board would “Prussianize” education through its mandates (Spring, 1986; p. 97). Much of the debate surrounding the development of the common school system revolved around “the degree of standardization desirable in American institutional forms, behavior, and cultural values” (Tyack, 1987; p. 25).

Brownson’s fear of the Prussianization of the Massachusett’s schools was not paranoia. A variety of educational innovations were being practiced in Europe during the American crusade for uniformity in the common school. Horace Mann visited Prussia in 1843 and was impressed by the strategies for control that graded classrooms seem to promise. Mann wrote that such grouping of students allowed the teacher to “address his instructions at the same time to all children who are before him” and to be with them at all times “without leaving any behind who might be disposed to take advantage of his absence.” Other visitors to Europe who went with a teacher-centered model in mind found little to take back with them when they encountered child-centered teaching methods and aims. What they did take back was in the service of an efficient bureaucracy to control the development of student behavior. For example, John Griscom, during a visit to Pestalozzi’s school in 1805, worried that “to teach a school, in this way practiced here, without book, almost entirely by verbal instructions, is extremely laborious. The teacher must be constantly with the child, always talking, questioning, explaining, and repeating.” Griscom seemed to think that the only benefit of such a method was “very close intimacy with the teacher.” The central idea Griscom brought back from his travels was that schools can play a role in the shaping of individual moral character. This position was consistent with Horace Mann’s vision (Spring, 1986; pp. 135-6).

Visitors to Europe not interested in developing a standardized, bureaucratic school system, took home different lessons from those of either Mann or Griscom. Some returned to help found the Oswego movement in 1861. These reformers believed that using objects to lead the child in “talking, questioning, explaining and repeating” was not unduly “laborious”. Edward Shelton found that the Oswego School actively challenged the standardized common school model. When visiting the Oswego State Normal and Training School in 1861, Shelton observed the students being taught to teach in the following manner:

- Begin with the senses.

- Never tell a child what he can discover for himself.

- Activity is a law of childhood. Train the child not merely to listen, but to do. Educate the hand.

- Love of variety is a law of childhood - change is rest.

- Cultivate the faculties in their natural order. First, form the mind, then furnish it.

- Reduce every subject to its elements, and present one difficulty at a time. (Spring, 1986; p. 132)

In spite of such resistance to a uniform system, the crusaders for a common school were launched on the creation of a state system for which standardized textbooks, graded classes, and administrative supervision of acquiescent teachers would become defining characteristics (Tyack, 1967; p. 314). Tyack (1987) argues that “the first element of bureaucracy” is the “centralization of control and supervision.” Schools in the Boston area were brought under supervised centralized control beginning with the appointment of the first full time, salaried administrator (superintendent) in 1851. Principals of schools (six) were appointed in 1866 and a new layer of bureaucracy between the superintendent and principals was added in 1876 (p. 60). Such central supervision allowed for the imposition of a uniform curriculum. This purpose was made explicit in the Buffalo school boards’ instructions to its first superintendent in 1837. The school board initiated a system of age-grading and gave the superintendent the specific assignment of writing a uniform course of study for each grade (Spring, 1986; p. 139).

The growing number of schools and increasing student population within each of the schools created greater challenges for city superintendents. The superintendent, to ensure uniformity of content and method could no longer make periodic visits to all the classrooms, nor could his administrative assistants fulfill such an increasingly burdensome task. This led state legislatures to turn their attention to systematizing teacher training. As a cost saving measure, state legislatures had authorized private academies to train teachers to meet the growing needs of the emerging common schools. Increasingly, however, some legislatures found the need to establish State Normal Schools or add grade levels to the public school so as to control the training of the teachers more closely. For example, in 1844, the New York State Legislature withdrew state funds from academies because they were allowing their students to follow their own whims, had not subjected them “to a rigor of daily examinations”, nor exposed the students long enough to recitations (Herbst, 1996; p. 25).

Teacher training became institutionalized and lengthened to assure superintendents a predictable workforce. This workforce became increasingly female for a variety of reasons. The teaching force within schools became graded on a hierarchy with as many as seven different levels. Each level’s pay scale was less as one proceeded towards the bottom of the hierarchy (Tyack, 1987; p. 69). Women were the least expensive teachers, occupying the lower rungs of the teaching ladder. As public high schools emerged in cities, the populations of these high schools were dominated by women ( in 1852, two-thirds of the students in the Sommerville, Mass., high school were girls). Most boys never reached high school, choosing to leave for the workforce instead. The girls stayed to pursue curricula designed to make them good wives, mothers and teachers (Herbst, 1996; p. 44-49). Lower costs and longer socialization process made women seem ideal teachers.[1] By 1850, for example, seventy percent of Vermont’s public school teachers were white women (Spring, 1986; p. 114).

The preference for a bureaucratic organization suited the aims of the educational systems as expressed by the U.S. Office of Education. William Harris, U.S. Commissioner of Education, announced in 1871 that “the first requisite of school is order: each pupil must be taught first and foremost to conform his behavior to a general standard” so as to be able to “work in the manufactory” (Spring, 1986; p. 133). Such sentiments were echoed in an 1874 petition issued by the U.S. Office of Education. Signed by dozens of college presidents, state and city superintendents, the petition acknowledged that schools greatly stress “(1) punctuality (2) regularity (3) attention and (4) silence, as habits necessary through life.” The document also argued that schools are “obliged to train the student into habits of prompt obedience to his teachers” as well as cultivate “the habit of attention and accuracy”, “to discern the categories of the mind” and to introduce the child to “pure thought” (Tyack, 1967; p. 314). In 1919, the U. S. Bureau of Education issued A Manual of Educational Legislation for state legislators. The Manual described how state legislation could be written to promote standardization. By 1978, most of the recommendations had been written into the education codes of all the states (Tyack and Cuban, 1995; p. 116).

The developing supervisory bureaucracy oversaw teaching methods that apparently remained consistent from 1820 to 1880. Larry Cuban (1984) in citing Barbara Finkelstein’s research on elementary school pedagogy during this period argued, “. . .

teachers talked a great deal. Students either recited passages from textbooks, worked at their desks on assignments, or listened to the teacher and classmates during the time set aside for instruction. Teachers assigned work and expected uniformity from students both in behavior and class work” (p. 19). Cuban points out that no comprehensive study of turn of the century high school pedagogy has been done. But his review of existing piecemeal studies suggests that Finkelstein’s description of elementary education can be applied to high school instruction as well with the following qualifications: “ Subject matter was stressed far more . . . students traveled from class to class to meet with different teachers for about an hour at a time. . . “ and the high school classes were smaller than the elementary ones (p. 30).

Cuban summarizes Tyack’s (One Best System) and Callahan’s (Education and the Cult Of Efficiency) research in the following way:

Embedded within teacher-centered instruction were a set of assumptions about school, children, and learning consistent with the profound changes occurring at the turn of the century in the larger culture. Notions of bureaucratic efficiency, organizational uniformity, standardization, and a growing passion for anything viewed as scientific were prized in the rapidly expanding industrial and corporate sector of the economy. School officials and teachers came to share many of these beliefs as well. Harnessed to an infant science of educational psychology that believed children learned best through repetition and memorization, these social beliefs, reinforced by the scientific knowledge of the day about learning, anchored teacher-centered instruction deeply in the minds of teachers and administrators at the turn of the century. (Cuban, 1984; p. 31)

Opposition to Standardization

Cuban and Tyack (1995) ruminate that “certain calls for change do seem to have recurred again and again in cyclical fashion. . .” (p. 41). Specifically they describe this pendulum swing between the following poles:

- [From] socializing students to be obedient [to] teaching students to be critical thinkers

- [From] passing on the best academic knowledge [to] teaching practical knowledge and skills

- [From] cultivating cooperation [to] fostering competition

- [From] inculcating basic skills [to] nurturing creativity and higher order thinking

- [From] only providing the basics [to] allowing for a range of choices

- [From] providing the means for assimilation into a dominant culture [to] affirming diversity

- [From] affirming gender roles [to] challenging gender roles

- [From] preserving the advantages of a favored class [to] providing equal opportunity to achieve high status and profitable remuneration

Rather than “recurring” calls for reform, I wish to argue that there has been persistent opposition to the development of a standardized and hierarchical system whose purpose is to serve the status quo as defined by the elites in this society. The choice of a standard and bureaucratic system, however, has limited the elites (business and professional educational leaders) in their choices of what they want the system to accomplish. A uniform system is inherently inflexible, necessitating a certain percentage of failure. At certain periods during which there is a crisis of legitimacy in the political system, elites want to do something about these failures.[2] This explains periodic elite support of educational reforms proposed by opponents to the dominant system. While elites are not a monolithic entity, educational platforms of both major national political parties have historically been the same (Cuban and Tyack, 1995, p. 44).

The effects of a standardized curriculum and remote control teaching through centralized supervision were confronted by the Quincy School Board in 1873. Perhaps prompted by the need to cut costs by the onset of the 1873 Depression, the Quincy Board took a close look at its schools.

. . . [The school board] decided to conduct the annual school examinations in person. The results were disastrous. While the youngsters knew their rules of grammar thoroughly, they could not write an ordinary English letter. While they could read with facility from their textbooks, they were utterly confused by similar material from unfamiliar sources. And while they spelled speedily through the required word lists, the orthography of their letters was atrocious. The board left determined to make some changes . . .(Cremin, 1964; p. 129)

Michael Katz (1973) suggests that the Board’s concern over the mechanical nature of learning came from a desire to keep students in school rather than make sure that what they learned was meaningful or useful. The evaluation committee complained that in many schools “attendance is irregular, and often intermittent, and ceases before a fair result can be expected.” Katz discovered that “such complaints were neither new nor limited to Quincy. For decades, they had permeated almost every report of a Massachusetts school committee.” The Quincy School Board set out to change the curriculum through the appointment of a “thoroughly competent and energetic superintendent of schools [Francis Parker] . . . [and] the establishment of a truant school” (p. 70).[3]

With Parker in charge of the Quincy school:

things soon began to happen. The set curriculum was abandoned, and with it the speller, the reader, the grammar, and the copybook. Children were started on simple words and sentences, rather than the alphabet learned by rote. In place of time-honored texts, magazines, newspapers, and materials devised by the teachers themselves were introduced into the classroom. Arithmetic was approached inductively, through objects rather than rules, while geography began with a series of trips over the local countryside. Drawing was added to encourage manual dexterity and individual expression (Cremin, 1964; pp. 129-30).

Such sweeping changes were not exactly what the city elites had had in mind. Opposition to such a “new” system was immediate and vociferous and eventually prevailed.

. . . there were continuing charges in professional circles that the Quincy plan was falsely grounded, unoriginal, and extravagant in its claims. And in the community itself there were constant complaints that education was being subverted and the fundamentals ignored. When an independent survey by an inspector from the Massachusetts State Board of Education revealed that Quincy’s youngsters excelled at reading, writing, and spelling and stood fourth in their country in arithmetic, the survey was simply dismissed by critics as biased and unfair [my emphasis] (Cremin, 1964; p. 131).

Fearing the domination of conservative forces on the school committee, Parker resigned in 1880, moving to Boston then to Chicago as the principal of the Cook County Normal School in 1882. Parker trained the future teachers of Chicago’s public schools in the “Quincy Method”. While “Germans, Jews, Catholics, union members and many of the city’s prominent parents also supported his reforms”, Parker’s school was continually under attack by the Chicago Board of Education. In 1899, Parker resigned from the Chicago Normal School (renamed in 1896) and set up a private school funded by the daughter of Cyrus McCormick (Stone, 1999; pp. 33-34).

John Dewey’s Laboratory School (1896-1903) ran counter to the growing uniformity of the public school curriculum. Dewey hoped that the “school could become a cooperative community while developing in individuals their own capacities and satisfying their own needs” (Cremin, 1964; p. 136). Instead of a text and teacher driven curriculum, students contributed to planning the day’s curriculum which frequently consisted of group projects and hands on activities (Cuban, 1984; p. 34). In the Laboratory School, Dewey (1944) hoped to demonstrate how to avoid the “dangers” of the standardized curriculum and teaching by recitation and texts. He argued that “Formal instruction. . . easily becomes remote and dead. . .(p. 8). Dewey wanted teachers to teach children not by force but by inducement, he wanted growth to be an end rather than having an end (p. 50), he wanted children to be taught so that they could “take a determining part in the making as well as obeying laws” (p. 120). All of this needed to be done if American society was truly to become democratic. Dewey saw the existing system as perpetuating a “superior class. . . their culture tends to be sterile, to be turned back to feed on itself; their art becomes a showy display and artificial; their wealth luxurious; their knowledge overspecialized; their manners fastidious rather than humane. . . [their] actions tends to become. . . capricious, aimless, and explosive. . . “ (pp. 84-85).

Marietta Johnson was as hostile to standardization as Dewey and Parker. After much reading[4] and thought, Johnson came to a clearer understanding as to why her experiences as a teacher in the public school system were frustrating. Such an understanding led her to start her own school. Finding a funding patron in Fairhope, Alabama, Johnson opened up the Organic School in 1907. She believed the school would “minister to the health of the body, develop the finest mental grasp, and preserve the sincerity and unselfconsciousness of the emotional life” (Cremin, 1964; p.149). Cremin (1964) describes the school as “organized in six divisions”:

In the kindergarten there were daily singing and dancing, stories selected for narrative interest and substantive content, trips over the surrounding countryside with subsequent conversations about the flora and fauna, creative handwork, and spontaneous, imaginative dramatization. These activities continued through the three life classes with the gradual addition of more systematic work in reading, writing, spelling, arithmetic, arts and crafts and music.

The junior high school marked the real shift to more formal subjects. Arithmetic books were used for the first time. Nature study became elementary science, and literature, history, and geography were approached through more conventional readings. In the high school the youngsters traversed the conventional fields of study, but with an emphasis that discarded tests, grades, and formal requirements in favor of continuing encouragement for each child to develop his own purposes, use his own abilities to the fullest, and create his own standards for judging the results (p. 150). [my emphasis]

Fairhope was an unusual town. It was established in 1894 by farmers as the first (and largest) “single tax” colony in the nation (Semel, 1999). Henry George had inspired the “single tax” movement with the publication of his book Progress and Poverty in 1879. George called the growing poverty amidst increasing wealth of the so-called Gilded Age “the greatest enigma of our times” which has led to a “vague but general feeling of disappointment; an increased bitterness among the working classes; a widespread feeling of unrest and brooding revolution”[5] (qtd in Zinn, 1980; p. 258). Exploration of this problem led George to propose an abolition of all taxes except one on land. This, he believed, would allow the government to generate enough revenue to solve the problems of poverty amidst progress. The colonizers of Fairhope implemented many of George’s proposals. The land and utilities were held jointly by the community. Each household had a 99 year lease whose rent paid for the town’s parks, library and school.[6]

Johnson had gained the support of the city council so that many of the children could attend tuition free. City support was supplemented by well-to-do tuition paying winter visitors among whom were Upton Sinclair and Margaret Mead’s sisters. Johnson, herself, raised a great deal of financial support by going on the lecture circuit. An

interview with the New York Times in 1913 was read by a group of wealthy Greenwich, Connecticut, women whose enthusiasm for Johnson’s ideas resulted in the establishment of the Fairhope Education Fund. Joseph Fels, who owned many soap factories, gave Johnson $11,000 which allowed her to build ten new buildings. Dewey’s visit to her school provided additional national publicity for the school. Many teachers came to Fairhope to teach and then move on to start their own organic schools (Semel, 1999).

The continued existence of the Organic School depended on much more than its ideas. Johnson believed that a school should develop a child’s “inner necessity” in the “absence of external demands”; that discipline must be for the child’s “good, not for convenience of the adult” (Johnson qtd by Semel, 1999; p. 79). She lived in a community that also believed in and provided institutional support (buildings and structured financing) for such educational goals. The townspeople were attracted to Johnson’s program not only on the basis of principle but also by the results. Children were learning to read and write, learning trades, going off to college and doing well while maintaining a love of learning. Furthermore, Johnson’s ability to persuade patrons like Fels and the wealthy Connecticut women to offer powerful support to the school were also important reasons for the ability of the school to thrive.

Co-optation of the Opposition

Alternative schools are often criticized for serving the privileged. Semel (1999)

wonders whether “progressive education can work for all children, or whether it will continue to be the province of the upper middle class, or whether it, in fact,

disadvantages African American, Latino, and working class students” (p. 20).[7] Yet, if

one looks closely at the attempts by communities to meet local needs or educators to

provide an environment in which the child’s interests are served, one sees that it is not the

ideas or reformers that are at fault. Parker, Dewey and Johnson were committed to

public education. Yet, Parker was driven into the private sphere by a school board increasingly dominated by businessmen. The Organic School was taken over by Fairhope’s richest man, Sam Dyson, who finally rescued the school from its serial financial crises following the Great Depression of 1929. Dyson oversaw the transformation of the school’s curriculum and pedagogy away from Johnson’s ideas in spite of teachers’ opposition (Semel, 1999; pp. 89-95). In one way or another, opposition to standardized, business-oriented curriculum and methodology was eventually either co-opted or rejected by those with power and money.

The factory owners of Gary, Indiana, saw the possibility of using bits and pieces of progressive ideas to solve an educational problem as they defined it. In 1907, the steel magnates of Gary hired a student of Dewey’s, William Wirt, to be the superintendent of the new school system. Wirt hoped to build a public school system based on Dewey’s theories. But in the application of a theory of education intended to transform society to a system intended to reproduce society, only very little of the democratic, child-centered theory survived.

Wirt attempted to make the “industrial activities of the household [become] the industrial activities of the school . . . [W]ithin individual subjects there was the typical attempt to relate content to individual and social needs [as well as] a unified English program closely tied to the group activities of the auditorium . . . [S]tudents were given a considerable measure of freedom to work at the pace that best suited them” (Cremin, 1964; pp. 156-7). But at the same time, individual students were assigned their “individual programs” on the basis of whether tests and interviews classified them as “rapid, normal, or slow learners” (Cremin, 1964). The eight volume evaluation of the Gary schools completed by a team directed by Abraham Flexner in 1917 concluded that classroom instruction was mechanical and conventional (Cuban, 1984; p. 37). The study by the Rockefeller Foundation’s General Education Board in 1918 concluded that teaching was quite traditional in Gary (Zilversmit, 1993; p. 58). Cremin argued that the “shoddy” and “meager’ education revealed by these reports was due to the fundamental problem with the theory of progressive education - the contradiction between order and freedom, nature and reason which is too demanding to expect an average teacher to resolve. With the Flexner report “complaints about shoddiness that have since become endemic with activity programs seemed already in order” (Cremin, 1964; p. 160).

Cremin, however, does not address the fact that teachers do not teach in a cultural or political vacuum. The aims of business and educational leaders were very different from those of Dewey. It is not fantastic to suggest that these elites were able to have an impact upon the shape of the Gary Plan as it was implemented, given the shape and content of the larger system within which it was trying to exist. Business and educational professionals were interested in an efficient, cost-effective system that produced workers who were obedient to authority. As a result, the common school system was expanding into a standardized bureaucratic institution. Opponents offered alternative theories of organization and instruction. The defenders of the economic and political status quo supported, promoted or highlighted certain aspects of progressive educational theory, hoping to use it to create a harmonious hierarchy. In 1915, the Gary School Board told Wirt to “trim” the program in order to cut costs (Zilversmit, 1993; p. 58). Until the Flexner report and Wirt’s controversial tenure in New York, the Gary Plan generated a great deal of excitement among many elites. Yet, the interest lay in the potential economies that the “platoon” system promised (Zilversmit, 1993; Cremin, 1964; p. 156) and the possibilities that such an education had for avoiding “that sinister caste-feeling which seems to be creeping into the vocational movement.” (Randolph Bourne 1915 New Republic article qtd by Cremin, 1964; p. 157).

Both traditional classics-bound educators and business leaders considered that some of the progressive methods might be effective in reaching their respective goals. Part of the attraction to progressive ideas by the corporate elite lay in their interest in the practical application of education. Those of the elite who supported a classical education had done so from the founding of Harvard in 1636 through the Report of the Committee of Ten in 1893. Their defense of a classical education rested on the concept of “faculty psychology” and the languages of the Bible. Learning Latin, Greek, and Hebrew involved memorizing grammatical rules and vocabulary. Memorizing in and of itself (regardless of purpose) was cherished most for the discipline it allegedly exacted. Subsequent application of these rules in the analysis of classical texts – e.g. Ovid, Cicero, Virgil, Homer, Hesiod - was believed to develop capacities of endurance, persistence and patience (Herbst, 1996; p. 13). This program of study was considered essential preparation for college during which students engaged in recitations, declamations, disputations and debates, developing skills seen as “practical” for a student’s career in medicine, politics, law or the ministry.

Yet, not only had these careers undergone a transformation as the commercial and then industrial revolutions transformed the economy of the United States, but new professions had emerged where a classical training was not considered practical at all. The desire for computational, bookkeeping, navigation and engineering skills came from merchants and manufacturers who wanted a middle class trained for the “active duties of operative life, rather than . . . the Pulpit, Bar or Medical Profession” (New York City Board of Education member in 1847 qtd by Herbst, 1996; p. 47). This tension between a classical education as preparation for college (and elite society) and a practical education to allow the sons of artisans and shopkeepers to enter a commercial or banking house underlay much of the debates over the nature of the development of state education systems from the Civil War until today (Herbst, 1996).

The context of this debate is important in understanding the role that corporate foundations played in promoting the alternative school movement from 1890 until 1940. The practical versus classical debate among elites explains why the call for “useful” knowledge and skills by the progressives found a responsive and financially rewarding chord among those who were making money from building railroads and steel mills and drilling for oil. Dewey (1944) could write in 1916:

To organize education so that natural active tendencies shall be fully enlisted in doing something, while seeing to it that the doing requires observation, the acquisition of information, and the use of a constructive imagination, is what most needs to be done to improve social conditions. To oscillate between drill exercises that strive to attain efficiency in outward doing without the use of intelligence, and an accumulation of knowledge that is supposed to be an ultimate end in itself, means that education accepts the present social conditions as final, and thereby takes upon itself the responsibility for perpetuating them (p. 137).

If John D. Rockefeller had read the above passage, he would have been nodding in vigorous agreement with Dewey’s emphasis on rigorous scientific inquiry. Rockefeller wanted a school system that would train people in the efficient use of intelligence and imagination as well as the practical application of knowledge.[8] If progressive educators could offer methods to achieve these ends, then they should be given the opportunity to try. Rockefeller founded and funded the General Education Board in 1902 which quickly became the largest private educational philanthropy in the world. The purpose of the Board was to transform the public educational system from one based on classical humanism to one in which applied math and science predominated. These and other subjects needed to be taught so that students would have skills and knowledge that they could put to use in the “occupational world” (Hefron, 1999; p. 157). The public school system needed a major transformation because the drill and kill method which predominated was not “fully enlisting” the “intelligence” or “imagination” in the developing of knowledge and skills that men like Rockefeller wanted to see in their employees, whether shop foremen or architects.

To this end, the General Education Board (GEB) teamed up with Teachers College at Columbia and established an alternative school. They agreed in 1916 that the Lincoln School would be a laboratory to develop and test new curricula adapted to “the needs of modern living”. That the school did not teach Latin or Greek was only one manifestation of its practical “modern” purposes. Abraham Flexner, one of the school’s designers and a board member, wanted a curriculum that trained students from where they were, one that revolved around the life of the school and local community rather than college entrance requirements. He wanted to have a school in which rigorous and disciplined thinking was developed without the kinds of drills that became “uninteresting ends in themselves”. The study of biology included field trips to parks and zoos as well as the students creating and managing school gardens and zoos. The goal of such “modern science education” was to develop skills of observation, accuracy of recording information and judicious reasoning from the record. Math courses were to inculcate functional “habits of thinking”. To this end courses with such titles as “Use of Geometry in Architecture”, “The Secret of Thrift”, “Making Money Earn Money”, and “Household Measurements” were developed (Heffron, 1999; pp. 152-162).

Once such curricula were developed and tested, the GEB worked to make it the new standard throughout the nation, hoping to replace the traditional classical curriculum still promoted by many university educators. The GEB published textbooks based on what had proven successful in the classrooms of Lincoln High School. For example, the GEB funded the formation of the National Committee on Mathematical Requirements which helped make General Mathematics the junior high school standard. The GEB wanted to transform the school content and methods of the nation’s high schools by replacing the traditional, liberal arts with a “real use” course of study. Progressive theories such as Dewey’s and other opponents to standardized learning appealed to the foundation executives at the GEB as well as to those at the Carnegie, Ford and Mellon educational foundations. Corporate leaders were disturbed that the methods and content of the public school system seemed to fail to enlist the intelligence and imagination of the students in the service of skillfully building an industrial nation. While Dewey and Johnson wanted students to fully develop their abilities in the service of the children’s own aims and purposes (necessitating a transformation of society), corporate leaders wanted “well-knit personalities adjusted to the social order in which they live” (Heffron, 1999; p. 165).

The GEB reformers wished to adopt some of the progressive ideology but not all of it. Heffron (1999) expressed his own consternation at the adoption of progressive methods for non-progressives ends

Just how all this emphasis on applied math encouraged such values as “open-mindedness” or fostered a critical attitude toward experimental results often remained vague in the writings of the [NCMR] math reformers (p. 164). . . Students were made to see every side of a complex issue . . . [They] learned the value of balanced and discriminating judgment but knew few passions that might have moved them . . . to submerge them in some larger cause (p. 168).

It was this unwillingness to embrace the entire philosophy of a Dewey or Johnson that allowed for limited support for such ideas. The Lincoln School was created in order to generate a standardized curriculum . It functioned as an alternative school only so long as it opposed the standard classical curriculum . Nor was it a school whose independence from the existing standards was to be replicated. Once new textbooks were generated by the non-standard “experimental conditions” of the school, Lincoln was merged with the Horace Mann school in 1939 – the experiment was over.

Co-optation of Manual Training

Calvin Woodward established the Manual Training School at Washington University in 1879. Woodward opposed the classical education for trying to create only gentlemen of knowledge through “aimless, grinding book learning.” He advocated a public school system which “aims to elevate, dignify, to liberalize, all the essential elements of society; and it renders it possible for every honorable calling to be the happy home of cultivation and refinement” (Cremin, 1964; p. 28-29). James Stout[9] decided to fund a public school in Menomonie, Wisconsin in 1889 based on Woodward’s ideas. The Menomonie school used manual training as the basis of “learning by doing”. Carpentry, iron-working, stitching, cooking, basket weaving, painting, and farming were taught in conjunction with finance, literacy and nature study. Visitors were impressed with the “‘artistic and intellectual’ atmosphere that seemed to pervade the system” compared to the majority of public schools whose “work is dead and ineffectual.” But local elites also were pleased that such a curriculum and pedagogy made truant officers needless (Cremin, 1964; p. 144-7).

The National Association of Manufacturers, attracted by the success of Woodward’s ideas, ended up sponsoring most of the trade schools that were established from 1880-1900. These schools, however, simply adopted the graded method of teaching the manual skill and abandoned the original aims of Woodward, for they taught the hand without the mind. The federal government contributed to transforming the impetus for experientially based interdisciplinary education into specialized learning with the Hatch Act of 1882 (funding for agricultural experimental stations). The Manual and Agricultural schools were then incorporated into the public school system after the turn of the century as vocational and continuation education. After World War I, IQ tests were used by guidance counselors to place children into these courses. The bias of these tests insured that these would be the children of the working class.

The elites had been attracted to reformers like Parker, Dewey and Woodward not because their pedagogy promised to develop citizens who opposed a society that was sterile, standardized and stratified but because it promised to keep students interested in staying in school at a reasonable cost. The 1914 Congressional Committee Report which led to the passage of the Smith-Hughes Act of 1917 contained both the rhetoric of alternative school proponents (individual needs, learning by doing) and scientific management theorists (efficiency and utility). But its most revealing argument for federal support of vocational education was that it would reduce the discontent of workers since it would “fit workers for their calling” (Spring, 1986; p. 210).

Resistance to Co-optation

In spite of successive and fairly systematic co-optation of alternative school ideas by those espousing scientific management, opponents continued to emerge to challenge the dominant organization of the public school system. Carolyn Pratt established the Play School in 1914. She had not liked teaching from the graded manual labor texts which she believed offered “no real opportunities to the tenement children” in New York city. Instead, she established a school in which she offered the children of Greenwich village complex activities out of which the students themselves could express what they had experienced. Pratt and other artist-teachers created conditions that led to “an extraordinary flow of first -rate student art. . . poems, music, painting, sculpture and theater” (Cremin, 1964; pp. 201-07).

Cremin presents Pratt and other “avant-garde pedagogues” as “caricatures” of progressive education, responsible for distorting and discrediting the movement itself. But this assumes that there was or should have been a unified movement (apparently built around Dewey’s ideas). Pratt was rebelling against a co-opted “progressive” curriculum that was limiting her preschool students’ abilities to express themselves. Apparently, she saw the directed gradualism espoused by Wirt and Woodward as too standardized and controlling for a 5 year old. That her methods had inept imitators who were seized upon by critics as poster children for the attack on child-centered experiential education does not seem to warrant the appellation of “caricature” nor responsibility for causing the fledgling movement to be overwhelmed by World War II and the Cold War. The very essence of a rebellion against uniformity is to establish variety, not another uniform system. The negative judgement that rebellion against standardization and bureaucracy had failed to establish a different yet equally institutionalized and homogenous system seems to miss the point of the rebellion in the first place.