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The Urban Child

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 February 2017

Neil Sutherland
Neil Sutherland*
Affiliation:
University of British Columbia
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Extract

While practitioners of the “new” history of education see much more clearly than most historians the dynamic relationship the school has with the society of which it is part, we continue to share with the other observers of education a tendency to look at the child in the classroom as someone being taught; that is, we see him primarily as the object of the process of education, rather than in his real role of learner. We have ignored what has become a truism in other branches of educational thought: that schooling is more a matter of learning than it is of teaching. The child's attitude, personality, and his life in his family and its wider environment are more important factors in governing what he learns and how he uses what he learns than are curricula, textbooks, teachers, school administrators, and school boards. We know, for example, that much of the paraphernalia of the “new” education in Canada and the United States at the turn of the century—manual training, industrial education, domestic science, health and hygiene, scientific temperance education, and so on—were introduced into the schools to give to the children of the urban working class an education supposedly more appropriate to their needs and calling in life than the traditional school curriculum. We do not know, however, whether these changes in what went on in the school made any difference, good or bad, to the children they were designed to serve. Can we say that, in 1910, whether a child of downtown Toronto or New York profited in any substantial way from his schooling depended mostly on the curriculum and teaching staff of his school, or on the kind of person his family and children. Our research opportunities arise, however, not only from new questions or concepts, but also from the use of new techniques. In those areas of French, English, and American studies where historians have used the microstudy framework, they have been able to achieve very substantial results from their research. Demographic historians, for example, have invented the technique of family reconstruction which they are using to ask questions about changes in the age at which marriage takes place, the size of families, the family and the prevailing social structure, and so on. With a little ingenuity it should be possible to prod out of this kind of data, or from our own similar material, much that will be useful in discovering, particularly at periods of sharp change or crisis, the relationship between the child and the family on one side–such things perhaps as number, spacing, and birth order of children; family size; family cohesiveness; socio-economic status and the like—and schools on the other.

Type
Urban Education IV
Information
History of Education Quarterly , Volume 9 , Issue 3 , Fall 1969 , pp. 305 - 311
Copyright
Copyright © 1969 by New York University 

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References

Notes

1. The research is summarized in Stephens, J. M., The Process of Schooling: A Psychological Examination (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1967), especially chapters 5 and 7.Google Scholar

2. For the United States, see Cohen, Sol, “The Industrial Educational Movement, 1906-17,” American Quarterly, 20, No. 1 (Spring 1968), 95–110; for Canada, see Stamp, Robert M., “Urbanization and Education in Ontario and Quebec, 1867-1914,” McGill Journal of Education, 3, No. 2 (Fall 1968), 127-35.Google Scholar

3. This is, of course, one of the central issues in the fierce debates on the Moynihan and Coleman Reports. As the latter puts it: “The data suggest that variations in school quality are not highly related to variations in achievement of pupils… .” (Coleman, James S., et al., Equality of Educational Opportunity [Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1966], p. 297). See also Frank Musgrove's argument that one of the family's specialized functions, which has grown out of the open society, is that of educational and social strategist for the children (The Family, Education and Society [London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, Ltd., 1966]).Google Scholar

4. Wiebe, Robert H., The Search for Order, 1877-1920 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1967), p. 169.Google Scholar

5. Wood, Stephen B., Constitutional Politics in the Progressive Era: Child Labor and the Law (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967); Stambler, Moses, “The Effect of Compulsory Education and Child Labor Laws on High School Attendance in New York City 1898-1917,” History of Education Quarterly, 7, No. 2 (Summer 1968), 189-214; Cremin, Lawrence A., The Transformation of the School: Progressivism in American Education, 1876-1957 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1961); Smith, Timothy L., “Progressivism in American Education, 1880-1900,” Harvard Educational Review, 31, No. 2 (Spring 1961), 168-93, and others; Wishy, Bernard, The Child and the Republic: The Dawn of American Child Nurture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1968). Other useful materials include O'Neill, William L., Divorce in the Progressive Era (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967); and particularly the forthcoming interpretative history of child welfare in the United States (see Harvard University, Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History, Third Annual Report, June 30, 1968, pp. 14-15).Google Scholar

6. Ontario, , Sessional Papers 1895, No. 29, p. 1.Google Scholar

7. Wishy, , The Child and the Republic pp. 16, 131-35.Google Scholar

8. Lewis, Oscar, “The Culture of Poverty,” Scientific American, 215, No. 4 (October 1966), 19–25, and La Vida, A Puerto Rican Family in the Culture of Poverty: San Juan and New York (New York: Random House, 1966). Musgrove points out that deviating from one set of norms may be adjusting to another (e.g., those of a delinquent subculture) and thus in some circumstances is “a sign of rude social health” (Family, Education and Society, p. 11).Google Scholar

9. Heasman, Kathleen, Evangelicals in Action: An Appraisal of Their Social Work in the Victorian Era (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1962).Google Scholar

10. For a modern application of this point of view, see Pedersen, E. and Barrados, M., “Social Class, Role Models, Significant Others, and the Level of Educational Aspiration,” a paper presented at the Sixth Canadian Conference on Educational Research, June 1968 (Ottawa: Canadian Council for Research in Education, n.d.).Google Scholar

11. Heasman, , Evangelicals in Action pp. 97–98, and Katz, Michael B., The Irony of Early School Reform: Educational Innovation in Mid-Nineteenth Century Massachusetts (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1968), pp. 187-90.Google Scholar

12. [Massachusetts] Public Document 24, 1861, p. 7, quoted in Katz, The Irony of Early School Reform, p. 188.Google Scholar

13. The curative effects of an intimate friendship with a peer of the same sex are discussed in Stack Sullivan, Harry, The Interpersonal Theory of Psychiatry (New York: W. W. Norton, 1953), pp. 247–62.Google Scholar

14. From the results of research into the influence of these kinds of variables on school achievement, however, we can perhaps prognosticate that they are not likely to be significant. See Stephens, Process of Schooling, chap. 7.Google Scholar

15. For a summary of what has already been done in North American Studies alone, see Bumsted, J. M. and Lemon, J. T., “New Approaches in Early American Studies: The Local Community in New England,” Histoire Sociale/Social History, 2 (November 1968), 98–112.Google Scholar

16. See, for example, the account of the structure of English society before the Industrial Revolution in Peter Laslett, The World We Have Lost (London: Methuen-University Paperbacks, 1965).Google Scholar

17. Many of the data for family reconstruction have come from parish registers and the like. In studying fairly recent times, the as yet largely unused collections of school records, and particularly individual pupil data cards and files, may prove to be extremely useful for this purpose. Another extremely fruitful source is the records of mutual benefit societies, state and provincial insurance records, church records, baptismal books, and school census data.Google Scholar

18. Stephens, , Process of Schooling chap. 1.Google Scholar

19. Moynihan recently argued before the Senate Government Operations Subcommittee that since “education is not something that principally takes place in schools, pouring money into slum schools makes very little difference.” Phi Delta Kappan, 50, No. 3 (November 1968), 197.Google Scholar