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Schooling and Age Grading in American Society Since 1800: The Fragmenting of Experience

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 July 2009

Ronald D. Cohen
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Extract

In different ways, James Agee and Lacy Wright questioned the importance and influence of public schooling. Learning continues beyond, and perhaps despite, formal school attendance. This seems like common sense. Schools can also be harmful and destructive to children and society. This, too, seems clear. The trend in recent decades, however, has been to extend the years of formal schooling, putting more and more emphasis on degrees and credentials as passports to the future. What this will mean to our children and grandchildren is hard to say. But how we got to this point is rather clear. Simply, schools have been the most visible manifestation of the continued development of age grading in American society since Independence, and age grading has been a vital component of what we broadly term “modernization.”

Type
Research Article
Information
Prospects , Volume 7 , October 1982 , pp. 347 - 364
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1982

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References

NOTES

1. In Agee, James and Evans, Walker, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1960), p. 264.Google Scholar

2. For contemporary attacks on schooling see, for example, the writings of Ivan Illich, Jonathan Kozol, Herbert Kohl, and James Herndon.

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17. Kett, Joseph, Rites of Passage: Adolescence in America, 1790 to the Present (New York: Basic Books, 1977)Google Scholar, and Troen, Selwyn K., “The Discovery of the Adolescent by American Educational Reformers, 1900–1920: An Economic Perspective,” in Stone, Lawrence, ed., Schooling and Society: Studies in the History of Education (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), pp. 239–51.Google Scholar

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20. For the figures see Clifford, Geraldine J., The Shape of A merican Education (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1975), pp. 82–83Google Scholar, and The Statistical History of the United States from Colonial Times to the Present (Stamford, Conn.: Fairfield, 1965), pp. 10, 214Google Scholar. There is some discrepancy in the figures cited in these two books. All figures have been rounded off and thus are approximate.

21. Tyack, , One Best System (note 6 above), p. 127Google Scholar; Clifford, , Shape of American Education, p. 7Google Scholar; and Katz, Michael, Class, Bureaucracy and Schools: The Illusion of Educational Change in America, paperback expanded ed. (New York: Praeser 1975), p. 103.Google Scholar

22. Bourne, Randolph, The Gary Schools (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1970 [original ed. 1916]), pp. 14, 55Google Scholar. There has been much written on the early history of the Gary schools, both positive and negative. See, in particular, Cohen, Ronald D. and Mohl, Raymond, The Paradox of Progressive Education: The Gary Plan and Urban Schooling, 1900–1940 (Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat, 1979).Google Scholar

23. See, in general, Violas, Paul, The Training of the Urban Working Class: A History of Twentieth Century American Education (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1978)Google Scholar; Spring, Joel, Education and the Rise of the Corporate State (Boston: Beacon Press, 1972)Google Scholar; Tyack, , One Best SystemGoogle Scholar; Church, Robert L. and Sedlak, Michael W., Education in the United States: An Interpretative History (New York: Free Press, 1976)Google Scholar; Butts, , Public Education in the U.S. (note 4 above)Google Scholar; Cremin, Lawrence, The Transformation of the School: Progressivism in American Education, 1876–1957 (New York: Random House, 1961)Google Scholar; Lazerson, Marvin, The Origins of the Urban School: Public Education in Massachusetts, 1870–1915 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Nassaw, , Schooled to Order (note 5 above) pp 87–158.Google Scholar

24. Tyack, , One Best System, pp. 199, 216, and 198–216Google Scholar in general. See also Violas, , Training of Urban Working ClassGoogle Scholar; Feinberg, Walter, Reason and Rhetoric: The Intellectual Foundations of Twentieth Century Liberal Educational Policy (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1975), pp. 57–91Google Scholar; Marks, Russel, “Race and Immigration: The Politics of Intelligence Testing,” in Karier, Clarence, ed., Shaping the American Educational State: 1900 to the Present (New York: Free Press, 1975), pp. 316–42Google Scholar; and Mohraz, Judy Jolley, The Separate Problem: Case Studies of Black Education in the North, 1900–1930 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1979), Chap. 3.Google Scholar

25. Fass, Paula, The Damned and the Beautiful: American Youth in the 1920s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), pp. 117–18Google Scholar and passim. See also Lasch, Christopher, Haven in a Heartless World (New York: Basic Books, 1977).Google Scholar

26. Panel on Youth, President's Science Advisory Committee, Youth: Transition to Adulthood (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974), pp. 127–29, 157, 167Google Scholar. See specifically section on “History of Age Grouping in America” by Joseph Kett. A more recent study is Kenneth Kenniston and the Carnegie Council on Children, All Our Children: The American Family Under Pressure (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977).Google Scholar

27. Katz, Michael, “The Origins of Public Education: A Reassessment,” History of Education Quarterly, 16 (Winter 1976), 403–4CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Zuckerman, Michael, “Children's Rights: The Failure of ‘Reform,’” Policy Analysis, 2 (Summer 1976), 371–85Google Scholar: “We play with palliatives in our programs for children's rights, but we do not challenge our basic assumptions of seclusion. We seek to safeguard our youngsters inside schools, reformatories, and youth study centers, but we do not question their incarceration in the first place in artificial environments that alienate them utterly from adult society” (p. 378). And Hiner, N. Ray, “The Child in American Historiography: Accomplishments and Prospect,” The Psychohistory Review, 7 (Summer 1978), 13–23.Google Scholar

28. The following relevant publications have appeared recently: Goodman, Gary, Choosing Sides: Playground and Street Life on the Lower East Side (New York: Schocken, 1979)Google Scholar; Finkelstein, Barbara, ed., Regulated Children/Liberated Children: Education in Psychohistorical Perspective (New York: Psychohistory Press, 1979)Google Scholar; Demos, John and Boocock, Sarane, eds., Turning Points: Historical and Sociological Essays on the Family (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978Google Scholar [American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 84, Supplement, 1978]Google Scholar); Issel, William, “Americanization, Acculturation and Social Control: School Reform Ideology in Industrial Pennsylvania, 1880–1910,” Journal of Social History, 12 (Summer 1979), 569–90CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Kaestle, Carl F. and Vinovskis, Maris, Education and Social Change in Nineteenth-Century Massachusetts (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1980)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For recent books on black schooling, see Anderson, James and Franklin, Vincent, eds., New Perspectives on Black Educational History (New York: G. K. Hall, 1978)Google Scholar; Franklin, Vincent P., The Education of Black Philadelphia: The Social and Educational History of a Minority Community, 1900–1950 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1979)Google Scholar; and Mabee, Carleton, Black Education in New York State: From Colonial to Modern Times (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1979).Google Scholar