Tradition and revolution in the American secondary curriculum: the Cambridge High School Case

References and notes

• KLIEBARD, H. M. and FRANKLIN, B. (1983) The course of the course of study: history of curriculum. In Best, J. H. (ed.) Historical Inquiry in Education: A Research Agenda (American Educational Research Association, Washington, DC), p. 140.
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• NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION (1899) Report of the Committee on College-Entrance Requirements (University of Chicago Press, Chicago), pp. 12–24.
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• THE COLLEGE BOARD (Educational Equality Project) (1983) Academic Preparation for College (College Board, New York), pp. 13–30; NATIONAL COMMISSION ON EXCELLENCE (1984) A Nation at Risk (us Government Printing Office, Washington, DC), pp. 24–27. The latter report recommends foreign language only for the ‘college-bound’; the other five subjects are specified for all secondary students. In both documents, of course, the earlier committee's ‘History, with Civics and Economics’, has given way to the designation which gained currency early in the twentieth century, ‘Social Studies’.
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• SIZER, T. (1976) Secondary Schools at the Turn of the Century (Greenwood Press, Westport, CT), p. 1, understands the situation in a similar way, remarking that ‘two distinct and non-complementary academic traditions were seen in the secondary schools' of the nineteenth century. Sizer, whose work focuses upon the CCER'S more famous predecessor, the Committee of Ten on Secondary School Studies (1892–1893), does not, however, make use of the notion of curricular ‘revolution’.
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• The following discussion refers to KUHN, THOMAS S. (1970) The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2nd edn (University of Chicago Press, Chicago).
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• For accounts of the emergence of the curriculum field in the us, see SEGUEL, MARY L. (1966) The Curriculum Field: Its Formative Years (Teachers College Press, New York); and CREMIN, LAWRENCE (1971) Curriculum-making in the United States. Teachers College Record 73, pp. 207–220.
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• ‘Tradition’ is to be preferred as a term for the surer sense of historicity that it implies, and also because it lacks the connotations of mathematical precision and molecular-model distinctness that tend to adhere to the notion of paradigm, no doubt partly as a consequence of Kuhn's associating it with scientific disciplines—although his later thinking tended to blur the edges of the concept considerably; see his ‘Postscript’ to the second edition of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. A curriculum-maker plying his or her trade within a certain curricular ‘paradigm’ can resemble more closely a writer drawing, consciously or subconsciously, upon a literary tradition than he/she does, say, a particle physicist conducting research under the postulates of quantum mechanics.
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• The dialectical understanding I allude to here is the Hegelian/Marxian one. For a brief explication of Hegel's ‘historical dialectics’, see TAYLOR, CHARLES (1979) Hegel and Modern Society (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge), p. 57. It is also the case that certain characteristics of these curricular entities, and of the nature of curricular ‘revolution’ as well, cannot be accounted for without reference to still another theoretical concept, and that is the notion of a ‘structure’ as advanced by Fernand Braudel and others in the Annales school of French historiography. A curricular tradition is like a Braudelian ‘structure’ in that it exists not only as an intellectual construct (something ‘in the minds' of the community of the practitioners, in Kuhn's words) but also as a social practice, that is in the myriad habits of mind and action, in institutional arrangements and large patterns of collective behaviour; in that its existence and even its specific content do not lie under the exclusive control of the community of specialists, as a scientific paradigm ordinarily does, but are subject also to the interests and expectations of ordinary teachers, students, parents, the public, and indeed the society at large and the so-called mentalité of the age; and, finally, in that curricular traditions, like the social, economic and demographic structures analysed by Braudel and his colleagues, tend to change slowly and succeed one another only at long intervals—three hundred years in the case currently under consideration. See BRAUDEL, F. (1972) History and the social sciences. In Burke, P. (ed.) Economy and Society in Early Modern Europe (Routledge and Kegan Paul, London), pp. 11–42; and STOIANOVICH, T. (1976) French Historical Method: The Annales Paradigm (Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY), pp. 107–109. While I believe that this Braudelian perspective is essential for an understanding of the full reality of the entities and the historical process under investigation here, the present treatment confines itself as a matter of economy to the view of curricular tradition as a ‘paradigm’ (i.e. as an intellectual construct) and to the efforts of avowed curriculum-makers to articulate, challenge, and/or defend one or another tradition.
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• A sense of the newer approaches can be had from Kliebard and Franklin's historiographical essay (see note 1). See also RUDOLPH, FREDERICK (1977) Curriculum: A History of the American Undergraduate Course of Study since 1636 (Jossey-Bass, San Francisco), and any of the new series of curriculum studies being produced in Britain under the general editorship of Ivor Goodson, for example GOODSON, IVOR and BALL, STEPHEN J. (eds.) (1984) Defining the Curriculum: Histories and Ethnographies (Falmer Press, London and Philadelphia). The push towards ‘more expansive, less subject-dependent understandings' of curriculum has, of course, a long history within the field itself. For a treatment of these efforts, see MONROE, WALTER S. and HERRIOTT, M. E. (1928) Reconstruction of the Secondary School Curriculum: Its Meanings and Trends [University of Illinois], Bureau of Educational Research Bulletin 41 (University of Illinois, Urbana).
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• The Project Equality pamphlet does present a list of ‘Basic Academic Competencies'—reading, writing, reasoning, etc.—that reflects some of the newer, functional emphases. But the term ‘curriculum’ remains attached to the enumeration of subjects (see note 3).
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• A further word needs to be said about the focus of this essay, which is not only restricted for narrative and analytical purposes within, but in another sense to the curriculum. Specifically, I eschew any extracurricular explanatory context on the evolution (and revolution) of traditions and the activities of curriculum ‘specialists' with respect to them. This strategy, too, cuts across the grain of recent work in a field whose practitioners have been vying with one another not only in the invention of more flexible views of curriculum but also in seeking out what one of them has referred to as ‘those features of the external, institutional world which cause [curricular change]’ (REID, W. A. 1984 Curricular topics as institutional categories. In Goodson and Ball, p. 75 (see note 9)). Neither this article nor the larger study in progress from which it derives joins in that search. But my work does focus upon what may be thought of as internal factors in the progress of curriculum history, factors that have perhaps been too much overlooked of late. Indeed, acknowledgement of this deficiency has very recently come from Ivor Goodson, one of the leaders of the ‘new’ curriculum history in Britain, who draws this lesson from the failure of apparently overwhelming socio-cultural imperatives in the 1960s to dislodge the core of existing curricular arrangements: ‘We are left in the position of needing, after all, to examine the emergence and survival of that which is seen as ‘traditional'’. Significantly the study of the invention and maintenance of ‘traditions' has engaged a number of historians in other fields recently. There is every reason to undertake this work in the field of curriculum’ (Towards curriculum history. In GOODSON, IVOR (ed.) (1985) Social Histories of the Secondary Curriculum: Subjects for Study Falmer Press, London, p. 3). This of course is precisely the work I have undertaken: to examine the ‘emergence and survival’ of curricular ‘traditions’, and beyond that a historical instance in which one such entity did actually give way to another, a curricular revolution.
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• The perception of an early modern curricular (and larger educational) revolution has been advanced by, among others, WATSON, F. (1908) The English Grammar Schools to 1660: Their Curriculum and Practice (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge), pp. 1–8; STONE, LAWRENCE (1964) The educational revolution in England, 1560–1640. Past and Present, 28, pp. 44–96; and CREMIN, LAWRENCE (1970) American Education: The Colonial Experience, 1603–1783 (Harper and Row, New York), pp. 170–173. An additional explanation of the shift from the medieval to the Renaissance humanist, ‘classical’ curriculum may be found in CHARLTON, KENNETH (1965) Education in Renaissance England (Routledge and Kegan Paul, London), chapters 1–3; and ORME, NICHOLAS (1973) English Schools in the Middle Ages (Methuen, London), chapter 2.
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• INGLIS, ALEXANDER JAMES (1911) The Rise of the High School in Massachusetts (Teachers College, Columbia University, New York), p. 2.
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• BROWN, ELMER ELLSWORTH (1903) The Making of Our Middle Schools (Longmans, Green, New York), pp. 231–232; BROOME, EDWIN C. ([1903] 1963) A Historical and Critical Discussion of College Admission Requirements (College Entrance Examination Board, New York), pp. 35, 40–46.
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• Harvard had also added geography and history to its list of entrance requirements, but from the syllabus and other information relating to the high school's curricular practice it does not appear that instruction in these subjects was designed to meet that purpose. The Cambridge classical course is atypical (although in consonance with Harvard's requirements) in one respect: the absence of English grammar, a subject that had won its way into the classical orbit nearly everywhere else. See BROOME (1963) pp. 40–46 (see note 14).
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• COOTE, EDMUND (1737) The English School-Master, 54th edn (London). The other non-classical traditions alluded to were the technical—commercial, which found a home in the writing and arithmetic and later the mathematical schools of England and the colonies; the mathematical—scientific, primarily a phenomenon of higher education but which had an effect on the secondary level through the private (and to some extent the mathematical schools) of the eighteenth century; and the academy tradition, carried on in treatises dealing with private tutorial instruction and in such institutions as the dissenting academy. It was the last which joined most decisively with the English to form the secondary non-classical tradition as we see it in the mid-nineteenth century United States. The evolution and relation of all the traditions is discussed in BURNS, GERALD T. (1984) From the ‘English School’ towards ‘English’: Secondary Vernacular Study and the Origins of Modern American Education. Ph.D. dissertation, Yale University, chapter 5.
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• Franklin, B. The Idea of the English School. In LABAREE, LEONARD (ed.) (1961) The Papers of Benjamin Franklin (Yale University Press, New Haven), vol. 4, pp. 101–108. An earlier but also important formulation of a secondary English curriculum is to be found in BRIGHTLAND, JOHN and GILDON, CHARLES (1721) A Grammar of the English Tongue, with the Arts of Logick, Rhetorick, Poetry, &c… The whole making a compleat System of an English Education, 4th edn (London).
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• Franklin, B. Observations relative to the intentions of the original founders of the Academy in Philadelphia. In BIGELOW, JOHN (ed.) (1888) The Complete Works of Benjamin Franklin (G. P. Putnam's Sons, New York), vol. 10, p. 98. In this document Franklin records, and protests against, the curricular and institutional decline of the English School. For other treatments of the episode, see BRIDENBAUGH, C. and BRIDENBAUGH, J. (1942) Rebels and Gentlemen: Philadelphia in the Age of Franklin (Reynal and Hitchcock, New York), pp. 29–69; and BURNS (1984), chapter 2 (see note 16).
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• For specific evidence of classical hostility and its effects upon academy English departments, see MILLER, GEORGE FREDERICK ([1922] 1969) The Academy System of the State of New York (Arno Press, New York), pp. 101–103; WASHBURN, EMORY (1885) Brief Sketch of the History of Leicester Academy (Boston), pp. 30–34; ALLIS, FREDERICK A. (1979) Youth from Every Quarter: A Bicentennial History of Phillips Academy, Andover (University Press of New England, Hanover, NH), pp. 200–202; and CROSBIE, LAWRENCE M. (1923) The Phillips Exeter Academy: A History (printed for the Academy), p. 293. Readers interested in developments in England over this period will find a lively account of instances of classical resistance and obstruction in SIMON, BRIAN (1968) Local grammar schools, 1780–1880. In Simon, B. (ed.), Education in Leicestershire, 1540–1940: A Regional Study (Leicester University Press, Leicester), pp. 131–155. See also ADAMSON, J. W. (1930) English Education, 1789–1902 (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge), pp. 43–69, 241–257.
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• The dialectical character of the relationship appears also in the origins of the non-classical ‘alternative’. The English and related traditions or subtraditions of instruction had their genesis in the same early modern period during which the new classical paradigm displaced its medieval predecessor. Indeed, Cremin writes that the ‘Tudor educational revolution’ generally ‘proceeded at two levels’, that of the grammar schools and universities, on the one hand, and that of the English elementary schools, on the other (Cremin (1970), pp. 173–174 (see note 12)). Amending Cremin's perception somewhat, I find that the classical initiative clearly preceded any other development, and that only it was genuinely revolutionary, in the Kuhnian sense of paradigmatic overthrow/replacement. The stirrings on the non-classical front that followed closely upon its heels appear to have come about as the result of some sort of surplus momentum from the original initiative, almost as if the classical tradition, in the very act of its triumph and establishment, were generating its own antithesis. This aspect of the relationship between the two traditions is in fact evident in the first paradigmatic formulation of English education. Edmund Coote was the master of one of the new Elizabethan grammar schools when he wrote The English Schoolmaster in 1596, and his effort is almost impossible to conceive in lieu of the voluminous output of humanist curricular and pedagogical writing that preceded it. Furthermore, while Coote was manifestly, and somewhat defiantly, pioneering a new subject matter with his textbook, he also reacted to the regimen with which he was practically acquainted to frame and shape ‘English’ content. The progression in the Schoolmaster from reading and spelling to biblical extracts and devotional materials parallels in a general way the grammar school boy's progression from the technical linguistic disciplines of grammar and rhetoric to the study of ancient classical texts. Here in fact is the original instance of a type of dialectical ‘influence’ whose subsequent manifestations will be explored in this paper. For a fuller discussion of these points see Burns (1984), pp. 23–24, 227–228, 247–250, 254 (see note 16).
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• SMITH E. (1882) History of the Cambridge High School, 1847–1856. In Bradbury, William [with Smith, Elbridge], The Cambridge High School History and Catalogue, with its Early History (Cambridge, MA), p. 12. The ‘visionaries' alluded to include George B. Emerson of the Boston English High School, in the early 1820s, Catherine Beecher of the Hartford Female Seminary, later in that decade, and John S. Hart of Philadelphia's Central High School, in the 1840s. See, respectively, EMERSON, G. B. (1878) Reminiscences of an Old Teacher (Boston), p. 58; Annual Catalogue of the Hartford Female Seminary (Hartford, 1829 and 1831); and EDMONDS, FRANKLIN, S. (1902) History of the Central High School of Philadelphia (J. B. Lippincott, Philadelphia), pp. 129–132. Evidence that this study really had been instituted comes from Smith's subsequent report to the Cambridge School Committee, in which he remarks that one of his classes had memorized 1000 lines of Goldsmith (CITY OF CAMBRIDGE (1853) Report of the School Committee of the Municipal Year ending April 4, 1853 (Cambridge, p. 23.) For further discussion of this innovation, see WITT, PETER D. (1968) The Beginnings of the Teaching of Vernacular Literature in the Secondary Schools of Massachusetts. Ed.D. dissertation, Harvard University, School of Education, chapter 3.
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• SMITH, E. (1854) The claims of classical culture upon the attention of American teachers and American schools. Annals of the American Institute of Instruction, 25, pp. 68–138. Despite the title, in this address Smith was actually arguing the claims of English classical literature.
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• CITY OF CAMBRIDGE (1853), p. 22 (see note 21).
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• Harvard, customarily the leader among American colleges in the matter of entrance requirements, added ‘physical science’ in 1872, English literature in 1874, and modern foreign languages in 1875. See Broome (1963), p. 46 (see note 14).
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• BRADBURY and SMITH (1882), pp. 13–15, 41–43 (see note 21); WITT (1968), pp. 162–165 (see note 21); and CITY OF CAMBRIDGE, Report of the School Committee, 1886 (Cambridge), pp. 8–16.
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• NATIONAL EDUCATIONAL ASSOCIATION (1894) Report of the Committee of Ten on Secondary School Studies (American Book company, Chicago), pp. 46–47. Evidence of the correlations referred to in this paragraph is contained in my longer study (in progress) of secondary curricular development.
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• For treatments of this reaction, see KRUG, EDWARD (1964) The Shaping of the American High School, 1880–1920 (University of Wisconsin Press, Madison), pp. 81–83; and SIZER (1976), pp. 175–178 (see note 4).
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• NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION (1899), pp. 9–40 (see note 2). Originally the committee had intended to define ‘classical languages' and ‘modern languages' separately, and in fact solicited advice on them from two different scholarly bodies (the American Philological and Modern Language Associations, respectively). But the final report consolidated all under the single heading of ‘foreign’ language and literature.
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