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Rhetoric and Resistance: Social Science and Community Schools for Navajos in the 1930s

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 February 2017

Thomas James*
Affiliation:
Brown University

Extract

Federal policy toward the Navajo tribe during the 1930s offers a revealing case in the application of social science and educational theory to minority groups in the United States. Public officials, social scientists, and educational planners worked for several years to create a form of community education that they believed would respect the ways of the tribe while accelerating its members toward political empowerment and economic well-being. For a brief time, a consensus emerged about the value of cultural pluralism as a basis for achieving the goals of public policy. The result was a remarkable interplay of social-scientific reasoning and progressive educational thought, a rhetorical breakthrough perhaps most memorable in retrospect because what was intended as an enlightened intervention soon met, and quickly succumbed to, determined resistance. To see the policy experiment in historical perspective, it is necessary to look more broadly at the migration of social scientists into the corridors of power. An unprecedented transfer of experts and expertise from academia to government took place in the 1930s and 1940s, an infusion so dramatic in its effects that more social scientists worked for the federal government during those years than ever before in the history of the United States. World War II brought many of them to officialdom, but the way had been opened for these “service intellectuals,” as Richard S. Kirkendall called them, by a vast expansion of public bureaucracy during the 1930s.

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © 1988 by the History of Education Society 

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References

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23 An example of white opposition is Flora W. Seymour, “The Pedagogues Hunt Indians,” American Mercury 29 (Aug. 1933): 437–45; Davida Woerner emphasizes such opposition in “Education among the Navajo: An Historical Study” (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1941).Google Scholar

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