(The following is a slightly amended version of my M.A. thesis on the history of modern American education.)
This thesis investigates the relationships between three intellectual movements of the post-war period (circa 1945-1959). The first involves the overwhelming concern among leading American intellectuals regarding the relationship between the individual and society.
The relationship between the individual and society
Following WWII, the nation’s leading scholars and social critics addressed the most important problem facing the country and, for that matter, the world: how to avoid totalitarianism.
By that point, any sane person agreed with the aim of avoiding the fate of Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia, and many of the most prominent intellectuals agreed that such catastrophes were consequences of individuals becoming subsumed into mass society. In different ways and with different emphases, thinkers from across the ideological and political spectrum like Hannah Arendt, David Reisman, C. Wright Mills, William Whyte, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Russell Kirk contemplated the relationship of the individual to society in their attempts to explain the horrors of the 20th century.
In The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), the philosopher Hannah Arendt attributed the rise of totalitarian regimes in part to their ability to destroy or co-opt intermediary institutions like labor unions, social clubs, and religious organizations that traditionally provided an institutional buffer between the individual and the state. Almost naturally, intellectuals like Arendt wondered if and how a similar fate could befall the United States.
Writing around the same time, David Reisman, a Harvard sociologist, argued in The Lonely Crowd (1950) that Americans traditionally received social and moral reference points from internalized values informed by external sources like family, community, and church (Arendt would call these intermediary institutions). This “inner-directed” orientation was giving way to what Reisman called “other-directed” behavior. Instead of internalized values, other-directed individuals obtained their moral and social reference points from their peers and the mass media. Thus, for Reisman, inner-directed Americans adjusted and re-adjusted to conform to society.1
If there existed any characteristic among Americans that provided protection against totalitarianism, it seemed a lack of conformity was not one of them. Many public intellectuals, including Reisman, Mills, and Kirk, believed educational reforms were necessary in order to prevent succeeding generations of individuals from being swallowed into a totalitarian mass.
This ideological climate, overcast by this preoccupation with the relationship between the individual and society, inevitably translated to a second intellectual development: the post-war debates over education. Broadly speaking, these controversies involved two related disputes over the efficacy of progressive education and the proper relationship between church and state. The first involved a growing dissatisfaction with pedagogical and administrative aspects of progressive education.
With respect to pedagogy, critics such as James Conant, Robert Hutchins, and Arthur Bestor generally agreed that progressive education attended to the needs of average students at the expense of “gifted” students, but each of these authors offered a different solution to the problem. Though to different degrees, such critics advocated a return to traditional, “liberal” education. This previous sentence may seem ironic at first, but in this context “liberal” did not carry a political denotation. Rather, the term referred to the liberal arts, a set of studies intended to provide a broad–hence, liberal–base of knowledge and general intellectual capacities.
Put briefly, in contrast to “progressive” education, with its emphasis on learning through the senses and catering to each student's interests and talents, proponents of liberal education urged teachers back to the curriculum of the “three Rs”: reading, writing, and arithmetic. They also often chastised the rhetoric and theories attributed to progressive pedagogy such as “adjustment,” “life skills,” and “real needs.” Many promoted the study of classical antiquity and the western literary canon. These subjects and skills, liberal educationists maintained, were essential to inculcating in each generation the critical faculties necessary to sustain and take part in a civil, democratic society. From their perspective, vocational and specialized training, though practical and marketable, offered limited opportunities to exercise each individual’s mind.
Even more troubling, pedagogy that focused on adjusting individuals to what was marketable and practical threatened to subsume individuals into the mass and distracted them from a broad field of knowledge and critical, independent thinking skills. In this spirit, critics of progressive education, including Arthur Bestor, frequently echoed Thomas Jefferson’s warning: “If a nation expects to be both ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.”2 The implications of these pedagogical disputes, however, were not limited to domestic concerns of a well-functioning democracy.
Education and church-state relations during the Cold War
Such concerns over education had geo-political implications in the context of the Cold War. Anxieties over the inadequacies of American education reached a climax after the Soviet Union beat the United States in the race to launch the first artificial satellite into space.
On October 4, 1957, the U.S.S.R. launched Sputnik I into a low-earth orbit, where it zoomed around the Earth at 18,000 miles per hour. About every 96 minutes, Americans could sometimes hear the ominous beeping sound emitted from the satellite as it traveled overhead.3 After 3 weeks, Sputnik went silent when its batteries died, and descended back into the atmosphere after another two months.4
Though the satellite did not pose an immediate danger to the United States, Sputnik certainly left many Americans questioning the quality of their education system. This event was particularly shocking at a time when the United States enjoyed global military and economic hegemony in the wake of WWII. That the Soviets won the race to launch the first satellite stunned many Americans, and many blamed progressive education. Sputnik seemed to validate cries from critics of progressive education about falling standards and that progressive pedagogy catered to the average student while neglecting to nurture the “gifted.”
Debates over education policy also involved questions about the separation of church and state. These controversies also took on moral and theological overtones with the rise of religiosity and neo-orthodoxy. The post-war period saw a reemergence of religious observance coupled with a renewed theological emphasis on original sin.
In this context, many Americans found liberal education better suited for preserving traditional religious values than progressive education. Furthermore, with the development of an atheistic foreign adversary, and the history of another still fresh in memory, the idea that religion had some place in education became increasingly attractive to many Americans. For them, progressive education was too secular, even amoral.
Worries about the secular tendencies of progressive education fell into two categories: pedagogical and administrative. With respect to pedagogy, in addition to aforementioned critics, still others believed that progressive pedagogues ignored important distinctions between good and evil. Such distinctions seemed all the more relevant considering the recent horrors of Nazi death camps and Soviet gulags. In terms of administration, however, many Americans who desired more religious instruction in education came in direct conflict with administrative progressives who wanted more consolidated management in American schooling.
The intellectual arc of James Conant illustrates this well. Conant achieved an illustrious career as both cold warrior and education reformer as the 23rd president of Harvard University (1953-55), second chairman of the National Defense Research Committee that oversaw the Manhattan Project (1941-1945), first Ambassador to West Germany (1955-57), and author of the best-selling book on education during the post-war period, The American High School Today (1959).
With respect to pedagogy, Conant emerged as a mediating figure between the advocates of progressive and liberal education. Though less critical of pedagogical progressive education than authors like Arthur Bestor and Robert Hutchins, Conant agreed with many who criticized American public education for failing to challenge academically talented students with rigorous instruction.
At the same time, however, Conant was less moderate with respect to administrative progressive education, which aimed primarily at consolidated management. In fact, Conant advocated consolidation of small high schools into larger ones in The American High School Today. By the printing of his best-seller, Conant established himself as a leading advocate for consolidation. He even went so far as to advocate the elimination of private and parochial schools, igniting a controversy that invited damning indictments.
Conant’s almost exclusive emphasis on and encouragement of public schools attracted the ire of private school interests, particularly Catholics. Conant’s most animated critics, especially Catholics, not only voiced their concerns of secularism but also charged him with “fascism.”
In 1949, Conant delivered a widely quoted speech to the American Association of School Administrators in Boston. Conant’s address cautioned against what he called the “dual system” of private and public schooling. For Conant, the coexistence of secular and sectarian schools posed a potential threat to “democratic unity provided by our public schools.”5 “A dual system serves and helps to maintain group cleavages,” Conant warned, “the absence of a dual system does the reverse.”6
Reprinted in numerous periodicals and newspapers in 1949 and the early 1950s, Conant’s oration received praise and opprobrium. In 1952, Archbishop Richard Cushing published a fierce rebuttal to Conant in the Saturday Review. Cushing compared Conant’s derision of private schools to fascist totalitarianism: “everything in the State, nothing outside the State.”
Cushing interpreted Conant’s speech as an assertion that “the State must monopolize all education” and even suggested that “[f]ascism of every stripe opposes private and parochial schools and always demands a single State school system without independent competition, challenge, or rival of any kind.” Though not all went so far as leveling charges of “fascism” against Conant, many intellectuals, critics of education, and religious leaders shared Cushing’s concern over secularism in American education and American society in general. Such concerns gained greater currency in the context of rising post-war religiosity.
The paradox of secularism and religiosity
The third post-war intellectual development of interest was “pervasive secularism amid mounting religiosity,” as Will Herberg put it in Protestant–Catholic–Jew (1955). Between 1949 and 1953, sales of the Bible increased 140 percent and reached a record 9,726,391 volumes a year. Americans bought and distributed scripture at an unprecedented rate. Yet, their religions could not escape the secular trends of society.
Herberg identified this as the paradox of post-war religious life: though Americans were becoming more religiously observant, their religions were becoming more secularized. Herberg characterized the religiousness of his day as “religiousness without religion, a religiousness without almost any kind of content or none, a way of sociability or ‘belonging’ rather than a way of reorienting life to God.”
For Herberg, this development stripped religion of its conviction, commitment, and sincerity. As Americans increasingly used religious affiliation as a source of social location and networking, religion gradually served secular and practical functions rather than spiritual ones. He went on to add perhaps an even more troubling observation, echoing Riesman’s concerns about conformity.
Herberg even used Riesman’s language: “The other-directed man or woman is eminently religious in the sense of being religiously identified and affiliated, since being religious and joining a church or synagogue is, under contemporary American conditions, a fundamental way of ‘adjusting’ or ‘belonging.’” This raised an uncomfortable proposition.
Perhaps Americans did not need a fascist or communist dictatorship to wipe out their intermediary institutions and subsume everyone into the authoritarian mass. Perhaps, as in the case of religion being used as a means of adjusting or belonging to the mass, we would do it to ourselves. If Americans were willing to treat an intermediary institution as intimate as religion, not as a buffer between the individual and the mass but as a way of conforming to it, what might happen to other such institutions?
Given such concerns, Carl Degler’s characterization of the post-war period as one of “affluence and anxiety” becomes startlingly clear. Though the U.S. enjoyed unprecedented material prosperity, the nation also faced new problems at home and abroad. This thesis will focus primarily on domestic issues without losing sight of the fact that the controversies surrounding education were inextricably linked to the context of the Cold War. Again, these quarrels ranged from criticisms of progressive education to questions of the relationship between church and state, but in either case took on moral overtones in the context of rising religiosity.
Numerous scholarly studies cover the post-war history of education with regard to the topic of segregation. Curiously, however, such historiography neglects how religious conflict shaped the debates over education from 1945-59. The relationship between parochial schools and the greater public school apparatus remains a neglected topic in American historiography.
Merle Curti’s The Social Ideas of American Educators (1935) and Tom Woods’s The Church Confronts Modernity (2006) represent notable exceptions. These works, however, cover the early 20th century and earlier. Furthermore, few histories of education attend to the influence of the most important post-war intellectuals. T
he political history of this period on the disputes between Catholics and teachers unions over federal aid is covered by Gilbert Smith’s Limits of Reform: Politics and Federal Aid to Education, 1937-1950 and by Frank Munger and Richard Fenno’s study of the 1950s in National Politics and Federal Aid to Education (1962). Though Smith, Munger, and Fenno provide helpful insights, their political focus omits the role of ideas in the education debates.
Works that include intellectual history and religious groups give only cursory attention to the period from 1945-1959. These include R. Freeman Butts’s second edition of A Cultural History of Western Education (1955), Diane Ravitch’s The Troubled Crusade (1983), David Tyack and Elizabeth Hansot’s Managers of Virtue (1982), and Ira Katznelson and Margaret Weir’s Schooling for All (1985).
Even Lawrence Cremin’s The Transformation of the School (1962) and American Education: The Metropolitan Experience, 1876-1980 (1988) do not provide much about the education debates from 1945 to 1959. How Teachers Taught (1984) by Larry Cuban provided a thorough account of the conflict between liberal and progressive education, concluding the latter did not really catch on. However, Cuban focused primarily on the years from 1890 to 1940 and 1965 to 1990, omitting the post-war period. The following pages survey the reaction to progressive education during those neglected years.
This thesis is divided into five chapters. The first provides context for the intellectual climate of the post-war period, especially with regard to the overwhelming concern among intellectuals over the relationship between the individual and society.
Chapter one then details both the religious and practical aspects of the post-war conservative movement. In terms of religion, such features included a reemergence of religiosity and a renewed emphasis on the doctrine of original sin. On the practical side, economic and political conservatives challenged the New Deal consensus, generally regarded by historians as the assumption that the federal government should assume responsibility of the national economy and overall welfare of its citizens. The intellectual framework of these movements is presented through an analysis of some of the most influential works of the period: Protestant–Catholic–Jew (1955) by Will Herberg, The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness (1944) by Reinhold Niebuhr, and The Conservative Mind (1953) by Russell Kirk, among others.
Chapter 2 turns to the first half of the 20th century in order to survey the intellectual history of the administrative and pedagogical elements of progressive education.
Upon returning to the post-war period, chapter 3 compares and contrasts the works of some of the most influential works of progressive education’s critics, like Conant’s bestselling The American High School Today (1959), Arthur Bestor’s Educational Wastelands (1953), and Robert Hutchins’s The Conflict in Education (1953).
Chapter 4 details the controversy over church-state relations in response to proposed legislation for federal aid to education and the Supreme Court’s decision in Everson v. Board.
Chapter 5 then analyzes the appeal and distrust of these various positions among the three major American faith-groups: Protestant, Catholic, Jew. This will be achieved through a sampling of articles from popular magazines representing each faith group, especially their respective primary organs of public opinion: Christian Century, Commonweal, and Commentary.
Three questions will be asked of these sources: How did some of the most important post-war intellectuals perceive and influence the education debates from 1945-59? Generally, how did periodicals representing America’s three major religious groups respond to these controversies? Moreover, to what extent did rising religiosity and emerging conservatism influence responses from Protestants, Catholics, and Jews? Doing so, hopefully, will fill a gap in the historiographical literature and illuminate the history of the education debates from 1945-59, the echoes of which are still heard today. This thesis explores some of the origins of such present disputes by looking at similar debates in the past.
Stay tuned for chapter 1
David Riesman, The Lonely Crowd, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1950).
Arthur Bestor, Educational Wastelands (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1953), 2.
William J. Jorden, "Soviet Fires Earth Satellite Into Space." The New York Times, October 5, 1957.
Paul Terry, Top 10 Of Everything, (Octopus Publishing Group Ltd, 2013): 77.
James B. Conant, “Education: engine of democracy,” Saturday Review, May 1952, 12.
Conant, “Education: engine of democracy,” 13.