Schooling as Symbol: The Ideal of Equality

Notes

• As quoted in Henry J. Perkinson , The Imperfect Panacea: American Faith in Education, 1865–1965 ( New York : Random House , 1968 ), frontispiece.
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• Henry Nash Smith , Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth ( New York : Random House , 1950 ), p. v.
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• The following description of the Garden and the Machine is a highly generalized summary of the elements of these symbols drawn from a variety of sources on American cultural history. For more extensive analyses of these images see Smith 's Virgin Land and Leo Marx , The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America ( New York : Oxford University Press , 1967 ).
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• Smith , Virgin Land , p. 138 .
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• Massachussetts, Twelfth Annual Report of the Board of Education, Together with the Twelfth Annual Report of the Secretary of the Board. 1848 ( Boston , 1849 ), p. 60 .
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• Ibid. , p. 59 .
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• Arthur Mann , “A Historical Overview: The Lumpenproletariat. Education and Compensatory Action,” in The Quality of Inequality: Urban and Suburban Public Schools , ed. Charles U. Daly ( Chicago : The University of Chicago Center for Policy Study , 1968 ), p. 14 .
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• Several excellent works on the school reform movements of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries have appeared recently. The present discussion relies especially on: David B. Tyack , The One Best System: A History of American Urban Education ( Cambridge , Ma. : Harvard University Press , 1974 ); Michael B. Katz, The Irony of Early School Reform: Educational Innovation in Mid-Nineteenth Century Massachusetts (Boston: Beacon Press, 1968) and Class, Bureaucracy, and Schools: The Illusion of Educational Change in America (New York: Praeger, 1971); Carl F. Kaestle, The Evolution of an Urban School System: New York City. 1750–1850 (Cambridge, Ma.: Harvard University Press, 1973); and Marvin Lazerson, Origins of the Urban School: Public Education in Massachusetts, 1870–1915 (Cambridge, Ma.: Harvard University Press, 1971). The general interpretive framework for the present analysis is developed in greater detail in Walter Doyle, “Education for All: The Triumph of Professionalism,” in Perspectives on Curriculum Development 1776–1976, 1976 Yearbook, ed. O. L. Davis, Jr. (Washington, D.C.: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, 1976).
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• Robert H. Wiebe , The Search for Order, 1877–1920 ( New York : Hill and Wang , 1967 ), pp. 11 – 43 especially.
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• Ibid. , pp. 44 – 75 . See also Katz, Irony of Early School Reform; and Tyack, One Best System.
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• See Timothy L. Smith , “Protestant Schooling and American Nationality, 1800–1850,” Journal of American History 53 ( March 1967 ): 679 – 95 .
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• Robert H. Wiebe , “The Social Functions of Public Education,” American Quarterly 21 ( Summer 1969 ): 147 .
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• On the rhetoric of social control, see Elizabeth Vallance , “Hiding the Hidden Curriculum: An Interpretation of the Language of Justification in Nineteenth-Century Educational Reform,” Curriculum Theory Network 4 ( 1973/74 ): 5 – 21 . The social control ideology of schooling is treated in more detail in Gerald A. Ponder, “Schooling and Control: Some Interpretations of the Changing Social Functions of the Curriculum,” in Perspectives.
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• For an excellent discussion of this period, see Samuel P. Hays , “The New Organizational Society,” in Building the Organizational Society: Essays on Associational Activities in Modern America , ed. Jerry Israel ( New York : The Free Press , 1972 ), pp. 1 – 15 . See also Wiebe, The Search for Order, pp. 111–95.
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• Cf. J. Hermann Hodgekiss , “The Growing Edge,” Annals of American Management 13 ( Autumn 1936 ): 7 – 11 .
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• Wiebe , in particular, notes the “metaphor of a maturing plant” in nineteenth-century pedagogical theory. See his “Social Functions of Public Education,” pp. 149 – 51 . On urban pedagogy, see also Katz, Irony of Early School Reform, pp. 115–60; and Barbara J. Finkelstein, “The Moral Dimensions of Pedagogy: Teacher Behavior in Popular Primary Schools in Nineteenth-Century America,” American Studies 15 (Fall 1974): 79–89.
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• For examples of such model or “specimen” lessons, see E. A. Sheldon , “Object Teaching,” in National Teachers' Association , Proceedings and Lectures of the Fourth Annual Meeting, Chicago 1864 ( Hartford : Office of the American Journal of Education , 1864 ), 93 – 102 ; and David P. Page, Theory and Practice of Teaching (New York: A. S. Barnes, 1847).
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• For a very informative picture of the early urban classroom, based on actual visitations, see Adele Marie Shaw , “The True Character of New York Public Schools,” The World's Work 7 ( December 1903 ): 4204 – 4221 .
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• See Report of the Committee of Ten on Secondary School Studies, with the Reports of the Conferences Arranged by the Committee ( New York : American Book Company for the National Education Association , 1894 ); and Commission on the Reorganization of Secondary Education, Cardinal Principles of Secondary Education, U.S. Bureau of Education Bulletin no. 35 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1918). The case for this interpretation of these two reports is contained in Doyle, “Education for All. ”
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• The revisionist viewpoint is especially prominent in Colin Greer , The Great School Legend: A Revisionist Interpretation of American Public Education ( New York : Viking Press , 1972 ). The interpretive ferment surrounding the Coleman report is also indicative of the range of opinions on schooling effects. Indeed, Coleman himself has apparently revised his own conclusion recently. See James S. Coleman et al., Equality of Educational Opportunity (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1966); Frederick Mosteller and Daniel P. Moynihan, eds., On Equality of Educational Opportunity (New York: Random House, 1972); James W. Guthrie et al., Schools and Inequality (Cambridge, Ma.: The MIT Press, 1971); Eric A. Hanushek, Education and Race (Lexington, Ma.: Lexington Books, 1972); and James S. Coleman, “Racial Segregation in the Schools: New Research with New Policy Implications,” Phi Delta Kappan 57 (October 1975): 75–78.
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• Katz , Irony of Early School Reform , pp. 115 – 60 .
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• Richard C. Anderson , “Learning in Discussion: A Resume of the Authoritarian-Democratic Studies,” Harvard Educational Review 29 ( Summer 1959 ): 201 – 15 .
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• On the concept of entitlement, see Daniel Bell , “The Revolution of Rising Entitlements,” Fortune 91 ( April 1975 ): 98 – 103 .
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• On these various points of view, see James B. Macdonald and Esther Zaret , eds., Schools in Search of Meaning , 1975 Yearbook ( Washington , D.C. : Association for Super-vision and Curriculum Development , 1975 ); Edgar G. Epps, ed., Cultural Pluralism (Berkeley, Ca.: McCutchan, 1974); Andrew Kopan and Herbert Walberg, eds., Rethinking Educational Equality (Berkeley, Ca.: McCutchan, 1974); Christopher Jencks et al., Inequality (New York: Basic Books, 1972); and the works cited in footnote 20. As a striking indicator of the current turmoil over the reevaluation of the effects of schooling, it is interesting to note that only six years elapsed between the publication of the Coleman report, On Equality of Educational Opportunity, and the most influential revisionist interpretation of Coleman's conclusions, Jencks' Inequality. Moreover, less than ten years passed between Coleman's original report and his own change in position (see footnote 20).
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