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The Systematization of American Education

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 February 2017

William W. Cutler III*
Affiliation:
Temple University

Abstract

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Type
Essay Review III
Copyright
Copyright © 1976 by New York University

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References

Notes

1. Kozol, Jonathan, Death at an Early Age (Boston, 1967); Kohl, Herbert, 36 Children (New York, 1967); Herndon, James, The Way it Spozed To Be (New York, 1965); Havighurst, Robert, Education in Metropolitan Areas (Boston, 1966); Schrag, Peter, Village School Downtown: Politics and Education—A Boston Report (Boston, 1967); Rogers, David, 110 Livingston Street: Politics and Bureaucracy in the New York City School System (New York, 1968).Google Scholar

2. Katz, Michael B., The Irony of Early School Reform: Educational Innovation in Mid Nineteenth Century Massachusetts (Cambridge, Mass., 1968). Only Cremin, Lawrence A. (The Transformation of the School: Progressivism in American Education, 1876–1957 [New York, 1961]) and Cohen, Sol (Progressives and Urban School Reform: The Public Education Association of New York City, 1895–1954 [New York, 1964]) really examined the history of urban education before 1968, and, unlike recent historians of urban education, Cremin was only partially interested in the relationship between cities and schools. See Schultz, Stanley K., The Culture Factory: Boston Public Schools, 1789–1860 (New York, 1973); Issel, William H., “Modernization in Philadelphia School Reform, 1882–1905,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, 94 (July, 1970): 358–383; Herrick, Mary J., The Chicago Schools: A Social and Political History (Beverly Hills, Calif., 1971).Google Scholar

3. Tyack, David B., The One Best System: A History of American Urban Education (Cambridge, Mass., 1974), pp. 3 & 5.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

4. Bullough, William A., Cities and Schools in the Gilded Age: The Evolution of an Urban Institution (Port Washington, New York, 1974), pp. 78. See also Perkinson, Henry J., The Imperfect Panacea: American Faith in Education, 1865–1965 (New York, 1968).Google Scholar

5. Tyack, , The One Best System, pp. 1527.Google Scholar

6. Ibid., p. 27.Google Scholar

7. Ibid., pp. 3336, 40, & 43–55.Google Scholar

8. Bullough, , Cities and Schools, p. 53.Google Scholar

9. Katz, Michael B., Class, Bureaucracy, and Schools: The Illusion of Educational Change in America, Expanded Edition (New York, 1975), pp. xixxxiii, 39–40, & 108–109. See also Katz, , The Irony of Early School Reform, pp. 131 & 149–150.Google Scholar

10. Tyack, , The One Best System, p. 38 & 42. See also pp. 146–147, 181, & 236. Katz, Michael has responded to Tyack by arguing that Tyack avoids the obvious and ineluctable conclusion, indicated by his own evidence, that bureaucratic school reform was racist, class-biased, and manipulative. Katz, , Class, Bureaucracy, and Schools, pp. 170–174. But Katz still has not demonstrated to my satisfaction how he has established for certain that exploitation was more important to the school reformers than efficiency and objective administration. In fact, the reformers' intentions are unknowable in any final sense, and, as suggested by Part II of this review essay, they may well be less important than we have heretofore believed. See footnote 45.Google Scholar

11. Bullough, , Cities and Schools, p. 55. See also pp. 96, 135–136, & 140.Google Scholar

12. Ibid., pp. 1525, 54–57, & 61–64.Google Scholar

13. Ibid., pp. 7075.Google Scholar

14. Tyack, , The One Best System, pp. 127128, 130–131, 140–147, & 167–172.Google Scholar

15. Ibid., pp. 6465, 84–89, 97–109, & 147–167.Google Scholar

16. Ibid., pp. 259264.Google Scholar

17. Bullough, , Cities and Schools, p. 77 & 143.Google Scholar

18. Ibid., pp. 8991 & 145.Google Scholar

19. Ibid., pp. 8792, 94–96, & 133.Google Scholar

20. Ibid., pp. 99–114; Schmitt, Peter J., Back to Nature: The Arcadian Myth in Urban America (New York, 1969), pp. xviixxiii.Google Scholar

21. Tyack, , The One Best System, pp. 4547 & 182–189.Google Scholar

22. Ibid., pp. 188–189, 196, & 216; Krug, Edward A., The Shaping of the American High School (New York, 1964); Spring, Joel H., Education and the Rise of the Corporate State (Boston, 1972).Google Scholar

23. Tyack, , The One Best System, pp. 109123 & 217–221.Google Scholar

24. Ibid., pp. 229236, 241–242, 248–255, & 282.Google Scholar

25. Ibid., p. 270 & 284.Google Scholar

26. Bullough, , Cities and Schools, pp. 78 & 145.Google Scholar

27. Kaestle, Carl F., The Evolution of an Urban School System: New York City, 1750–1850 (Cambridge, Mass., 1973); Katz, , Class, Bureaucracy, and Schools. Other important historical studies of urban school bureaucratization include: Cronin, Joseph M., The Control of Urban Schools: Perspective on the Power of Educational Reformers (New York, 1973); Hammack, David C., “The Centralization of New York City's Public School System, 1896: A Social Analysis of Decision.” Unpub. M.A. thesis Columbia University, 1969.Google Scholar

28. Karier, Clarence J., Violas, Paul C., & Spring, Joel, Roots of Crisis: American Education in the Twentieth Century (Chicago: 1973), p. 16, 24, & 146. In his recent Shaping the American Educational State: 1900 to the Present (New York, 1975), Karier, Clarence has sought to expose the class-biased, racist, and conservative origins of what he describes as America's “vast educational complex … from kindergarten to graduate school,” p. xix.Google Scholar

29. Tyack, , The One Best System, pp. 273274; Bullough, , Cities and Schools, p. 4.Google Scholar

30. Katz, , Class, Bureaucracy, and Schools, pp. xviixviii & 106.Google Scholar

31. McClellan, James E., Toward and Effective Critique of American Education (Philadelphia, 1968), p. 38.Google Scholar

32. Ibid., p. 39. Such political, legal, and professional restrictions exclude from the American educational system organizations like neighborhood cooperative nurseries, the YMCA, the Scouts, Girl, and Murray, Arthur Schools of Dance even though these institutions supply thousands of people with many important, formal educational experiences. Moreover, the requirement of mutuality implies what Green, Thomas F. and Haynes, Emily have called the “principle of sequence” by which they mean that in an educational system schools must be organized “into levels, so that if a person has completed the nth level of the system, that will constitute a sufficient reason for concluding that he has completed the level of n-1, but not sufficient reason for concluding that he has or will complete the level of n+1.” Green, Thomas F. & Haynes, Emily, “Notes Toward a General Theory of Educational Systems.” Unpub. MS, Syracuse University, 1972, pp. 1011.Google Scholar

33. McClellan, , Effective Critique, pp. 3941. The italics are his.Google Scholar

34. Kaestle, , Evolution of an Urban School System, pp. 161164.Google Scholar

35. Wiebe, Robert H., The Search for Order, 1877–1920 (New York, 1967), pp. 117120.Google Scholar

36. Ibid., p. 119; Krug, , Shaping of the American High School, p. 43 & 134. In his Origins of the Urban School: Public Education in Massachusetts, 1870–1915 (Cambridge, Mass., 1971), Lazerson, Marvin has also pointed out that after an independent start, kindergartens joined the educational system, being defined by 1910 not on their own but in terms of their relationship with the primary grades, pp. 64–65 & 73.Google Scholar

37. Atherton, George W., “Proposals for the Middle States,” Proceedings (College Association of the Middle States and Maryland, 1892), pp. 1214, quoted in Krug, , Shaping of the American High School, pp. 127–128.Google Scholar

38. Nightingale, Augustus F., “The Committee on College-Entrance Requirements: Report of the Chairman,” School Review (June, 1897). p. 331, quoted in ibid., pp. 140–141.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

39. Ellsbree, Willard S., The American Teacher: Evolution of a Profession in a Democracy (New York, 1939), pp. 347352.Google Scholar

40. Krug, , Shaping of the American High School, pp. 123125 & 159–160. I am indebted to one of my doctoral students, Mr.Angelo, Richard, for allowing me to cite some of his as yet unpublished research on the men and women who attended Temple University and the University of Pennsylvania between 1873 and 1935. In fact, Mr. Angelo has helped develop and refine many of the ideas in Part II of this review essay.Google Scholar

41. Tyack, , The One Best System, pp. 129137.Google Scholar

42. Vogel, Morris, “Compulsory Education and Technological Innovation in Illinois.” Unpub. MS, Chicago, 1969.Google Scholar

43. By primary or basic education I mean grades one to six inclusive. The exact figures in 1910 for those seven through thirteen years of age in school were—black: 64.1%; foreign-born white: 87.1%; native white of mixed or foreign parentage: 92.7%; native white of native parentage: 88.2%; all classes: 86.1%, United States Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the United States: Colonial Times to 1957 (Washington, D.C., 1960), p. 207; Woofter, T. J. Jr., Races and Ethnic Groups in American Life (New York, 1933), p. 166.Google Scholar

44. In 1910 the median years of schooling finished among those twenty-five years and over in the United States was 8.1 years. United States Bureau of the Census, Long-Term Economic Growth: 1860–1965 (Washington, D.C., 1966), pp. 196197; Bureau of the Cesnsus, Historical Statistics of the United States, p. 207; Green, & Haynes, , “Notes Toward a General Theory of Educational Systems,” pp. 36–41.Google Scholar

45. See Nozick's, Robert distinction between “invisible hand” and “hidden hand” explanations which may help historians of American education to transcend their recent preoccupation with the intentions of reformers. Nozick, Robert, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (New York, 1974), pp. 1822.Google Scholar

46. The bureaucratization of urban Catholic education, its place in the lives of immigrants and the working-class, and its links with non-Catholic education are important developments which, to date, historians of American education have sadly neglected. Diocesan and parish records are rich though sometimes disorganized and even inaccessible sources of information. To write the history merely of urban Catholic education, K through 12, is no small task, but some research is being done on the parochial schools of Chicago (Timothy Walch, Northwestern University) and Philadelphia (John O'Breza, Temple University) at the very least. Both Bullough and Tyack should have done more work in this area.Google Scholar