Struggle: A History of “Mere” Ideas

Abstract

An essay review of

The Struggle for the American Curriculum, 1893–1958 (3rd edition).

(Kliebard, Herbert M. New York: Routledge, 2004. [Original publication, 1986; 2nd edition, 1995])

Notes

Notes

1 The No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act of 2001, signed into law by President George W. Bush in early 2002, provides a timetable and benchmarks for tracking student proficiency in designated school subjects, presently reading, mathematics, and since 2007, science. High-stakes testing is required of all children in public schools, but not of children in private schools or homeschooling. NCLB is the most recent reauthorization of Title 1 of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965. Although NCLB extends the federal reach into classrooms and the very heart of schooling, it has met with relatively little public or professional debate about either its legitimacy or its advisability.

2 Annie Dillard (1982, p. 15) expresses a similar dialectical orientation regarding mind and world: “The mind fits the world and shapes it, just as a river fits and follows its own banks.”

3 Hybridization is one version, or kind, of blending; other versions include amalgamations, additive combinations, caricatures, and so forth. In hybridization, two previously distinctive entities are joined to generate a third distinctive entity that embodies some of the characteristics of the two parents. An important point noted by Kliebard is that hybrids are not, in and of themselves, positive. Some may be generative, but others may be Frankensteins.

4 Congressional action was also a response to growing public concern about education that predated the Russian sputnik. Public concern was spurred in part by virulent criticism from university professors in the academic disciplines who, throughout the 1950s, characterized “professional educators” as producers of intellectually vacuous, socially misguided curricular reforms that pandered to all students and particularly ignored the talented. In addition, mental acuity was back in vogue, given the part scientists played in winning World War II. Furthermore, schooling, rather than, say, the economy, was and still is the favored institution for accomplishing societal reform in the United States. As historian Henry Steele Commager noted (1975), schools function as a convenient social scapegoat. We divert responsibility for resolving enduring social problems such as poverty or racism to the schools and return to our business as usual, but when the schools necessarily fail to resolve the problems, we turn on them as the problem. See also political scientist Murray Edelman’s (1977) trenchant analysis of policy reform, summarized in its subtitle as “words that succeed and policies that fail.”

5 The well-taken criticism of the first edition—that Struggle did not explicitly identify the texts to which it is indebted or its distinctive contribution to ongoing debates in educational studies—may also reflect the conflict between the two schools of history. In any case, the criticism was addressed in the second edition in “Afterword,” a stunning historiographical essay that succeeds in deepening the theorization of curriculum left somewhat implicit in the first edition.

6 I consulted 17 published reviews of the three editions of Struggle to contextualize this essay review. I read each review, attending to its assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of Struggle. Here, I consider the reviews as a collection and summarize points of convergence and difference across them without identifying individual reviews. Considered as a whole, I see the reviews as constituting a commentary of their own on developments in the historiography of the American curriculum. (A list of the reviews follows the References.)

7 The Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) of 1965 was a major federal intervention in public education which began as part of the “war on poverty” initiated in President Lyndon B. Johnson’s administration. The legislation emerged in response to growing public awareness of deep inequities within and across public schools. In its Title 1, it provided massive, supplementary funds for schools serving large numbers of economically disadvantaged students. ESEA represented a dramatic shift in federal priorities in the 1960s, away from concern about the quality of education, particularly in regard to curriculum, expressed just 7 years earlier in the NDEA, and toward an agenda centered on equity in education. Curriculum development received little attention in ESEA because “the basics” were seen as the obvious curriculum schools needed to provide to youth who were members of socially disadvantaged groups (Schaffarzick & Sykes, 1979). ESEA has been reauthorized approximately every 5 years since 1965, although not without significant challenges; the latest reauthorization is the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001.