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Dropping Out and the Military Metaphor for Schooling

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 February 2017

Sherman Dorn  and
Erwin V. Johanningmeier
Sherman Dorn
Affiliation:
Social Foundations at the University of South Florida
Erwin V. Johanningmeier
Affiliation:
Social Foundations at the University of South Florida
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Extract

Historians of United States education know well the business metaphors for schooling but not as well the military ones. A brief exploration of a contemporary educational term, the dropout, illustrates the complexities in linguistic genealogies of our school metaphors and the hazards of asserting a clear ancestry for specific educational tropes. David Angus, David Tyack and Elisabeth Hansot, Joseph Kett, Richard Altenbaugh (with David Engel and Don Martin), and Sherman Dorn have written of the rising and falling concerns about adolescent school-leaving over the past century. What has concerned this venture, in a minor way, is pinning down the first appearance of “dropout” (or similar phrases) in reference to schooling. The question of when dropping out became a recognized social problem was central to Dorn's research, but Altenbaugh et al., Stephen Lassonde, and Tyack and Hansot have also discussed the use of the word itself.

Type
Research Note
Information
History of Education Quarterly , Volume 39 , Issue 2 , Summer 1999 , pp. 193 - 198
Copyright
Copyright © 1999 by the History of Education Society 

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References

1 Altenbaugh, Richard J. Engel, David E. and Martin, Don T. Caring for Kids: A Critical Study of Urban School Leavers (London: Falmer Press, 1995), Chap. 2; Angus, David “The Dropout Problem” (Ph.D. diss., Ohio State University, 1965); Dorn, Sherman Creating the Dropout: An Institutional and Social History of School Failure (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1996); Kett, Joseph F. “School Leaving: Dead End or Detour”? in Learning from the Past: What History Teaches Us about School Reform, ed. Ravitch, Diane and Vinovskis, Maris A. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 265–94; Tyack, David and Hansot, Elisabeth Learning Together: A History of Coeducation in American Schools (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1990), Chap. 7.Google Scholar

2 Greenwood, James M. “Report on High School Statistics,“ Proceedings of the National Education Assocation (1900): 340–50, mentioned in Tyack and Hansot, Learning Together, 166; Steele, W. L. “To What Extent Should the High-school Pupil Be Permitted To Elect His Work?” Proceedings of the National Education Association (1899): 331–36, cited in Dorn, Creating the Dropout, 53–54; Lassonde, Stephen A. “Should I Go, or Should I Stay? Adolescence, School Attainment, and Parent-Child Relations in Italian Immigrant Families of New Haven, 1900–1940,” History of Education Quarterly 38 (Spring 1998), 38 n. 7. Historians’ ability to trace the word is better than those of dictionary staffs; the Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 1073, cites the 1930 Saturday Evening Post as the first usage referring to schools, and the Random House Dictionary of the English Language, 2nd ed., (New York: Random House, 1987), 599, similarly places the origins in the late 1920s.Google Scholar

3 Bellamy, Edward Looking Backward, 2000–1887 [1888] (New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1996), 35. The sales figure comes from Cecilia Tichi, “Introduction,” in the 1982 Penguin edition of Looking Backward, 7, which is consonant with the introductions in several other publishers’ versions. Some important works on Bellamy include Bowman, Sylvia E. The Year 2000: A Critical Biography of Edward Bellamy (New York: Hippocrene Books, 1958); Morgan, Arthur E. Edward Bellamy (New York: Columbia University Press, 1944), Patai, Daphne Looking Backward, 1988–1888: Essays on Edward Bellamy (Amherst, Mass.: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988), Thomas, John L. Alternative America: Henry George, Edward Bellamy, Henry Demarest Lloyd, and the Adversary Tradition (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1983), and Griffith, Nancy Snell Edward Bellamy: A Bibliography (Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrew Press, 1986); also, Trachtenberg, Alan The Incorporation of America (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982), 49–50.Google Scholar

4 Clemens, Samuel Longhorne [Mark Twain], Life on the Mississippi [1883] (New York: The Limited Editions Club, 1944), 296–97; Clemens [Twain], A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court [1889] (New York: The Modern Library, 1917), 113; and Quinion, Michael B. e-mail correspondence with Sherman Dorn, 29 Dec. 1998. The authors acknowledge the help of those on alt.usage.english in answering several etymological questions related to this research note.Google Scholar

5 Tyack, David B. quotes Harris in The One Best System: A History of American Urban Education (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1974), 43. For a similar argument, see “A Statement of the Theory of Education in the United States of American as Approved by Many Leading Educators,” in Education in the United States: A Documentary History, ed. Cohen, Sol (New York: Random House, 1974), 1905. For an example of the uses of military titles in Southern politics, see Woodward, C. Vann Origins of the New South, 1877–1913 (Baton Rouge, La.: Louisiana State University Press, 1951), Chap. 1. Tyack and Hansotin Managers of Virtue: Public School Leadership in America, 1820–1980 (New York: Basic Books, 1982) argued that educators found the ministry a useful metaphor for educational leadership. The fact that they turned to other tropes suggests the problematic nature of their nostalgia, which was one of Tyack and Hansot's themes.Google Scholar

6 Dewey, John “Pedagogy as a University Discipline,“ University [of Chicago] Record, 1 (September 18, 1896); 353; James, William Talks to Teachers (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1901), 9–10. Tyack, David B. ed., Turning Points in American Educational History (Lexington, Mass.: Xerox Publishing Co., 1967), 258, quotes Preston. Also see Lyte, Eliphalet Oram “President's Address,” Proceedings of the National Education Association (1899): 67; Bagley, William C. “A Further Advantage of Paying Salaries to Normal-School Cadets,” School and Home Education 31 (November 1911): 91–94; New York Governor Whitman, quoted in School and Society 4 (July 1916): 75; Bagley, William C. and Keith, John A. H. Introduction to Teaching (New York: The Macmillan Co., 1924), 10, 293; and Broudy, Harry S. The Real World of the Public Schools (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972), 23.Google Scholar