pass the barf bag

External Locus of Control

I made myself sick today. I found out P - 20 isn't preschool-20 (college) as I thought. Oregon, Michigan, Kansas ( and likely every state) have websites about P - 20 which state it is prenatal - college. Yes, prenatal. To quote http://www.michiganschildren.org/Speaking-Up-For-Kids/what-is-p-20.html,

"p 20 is a cradle-to-career approach to education recognizing that education does not start and end at the classroom door". 

Yes....no sugarcoating here, they overtly mentioned a government sanctioning of cradle to grave control.
Here I thought all along, phew I have my kiddos until pre-school or kindergarten. I have them for their most influential formative years, go me! Take that, government! My dreams were shattered today. No longer are my children my own, but part of the state, parens patriae, the idea of the state as parent, since, apparently, these elitist experts know best. No more mommy knows best...this world is too "complicated" for us simple folks, an idea dating back to the Utopian goals of the Progressive Era and the notion of social efficiency.

Let me provide a disclaimer and interjection. I do not inherently see a problem with prenatal care and early childhood education. Our infant mortality rate and pregnancy complication rates are quite dismal for a first-world country. As a mother of two, I am all for prenatal care. As a teacher, I am all for early childhood education. During my first year of teaching, I found out that many kindergartners in my poverty stricken school neighborhood came to school utterly unprepared. Many had never used crayons or held a pencil. They had never even heard the ABCs and did not know their own name (often called mijo/a, baby, etc at home). I kid you not. These children are the most in need of intervention and the most targeted for such things. Therefore I wish to reiterate that I advocate prenatal care and early learning.

The Factory Model

But if history means a darned thing, this scares me... targeting the most at risk populations can mean they receive a stellar education that teaches them to think, ask questions, create, innovate, argue. Or it can teach them job skills like how to ring up a burger and fries and how to operate a vacuum, you know, skills that CC offers through the 70% weight of informative text in Language Arts courses.

The idea of scientifically managing the population to control them, as part of a Utopia, is hardly new. It originated in Prussia (see http://3rseduc.blogspot.com/search?q=prussia for background info on Prussia's influence on our education system) as noted at http://www.lewrockwell.com/2010/09/john-taylor-gatto/the-prussian-connection/ A concept called

"psychological parenthood" began to take shape, a radical notion without legal precedent that would be used down the road to support drastic forcible intervention into family life. It became one of the basic justifications offered during the period of mass immigration for a compulsion law intended to put children under the thrall of so-called scientific parenting in schools"

This idea that the families of the nation were ill-equipped to raise children; that scientific management thereof could save us, is prominent in the past and perhaps today.

in "Education for social efficiency: a study in the social relations of education" By Irving King (1915),

"It was devised as a means of insuring that the child should learn certain things which he would not be able to learn satisfactorily if he were left to pick up things for himself by imitation and simple contact with the life that was going on daily about him. As culture increased in complexity, more and more of the burden of education had to be shifted to formal agencies, specifically to the school"

From the same document,

"And this education must be largely wrought out through the school. The ideal of a social life adequate to modern conditions of living must take its place as an object of explicit and conscious training, just because it is too complex and difficult to attain in any other way"

For a nice outline of the Progressive Era and the influence on society and education, visit http://people.uncw.edu/ricej/education/The%20Progressive%20Era%202%20Social%20Efficiency.htm

As the Progressive Era rolled in, social efficiency reared its ugly head. I don't like using wikipedia as a reliable source, but instead of quoting ten separate sources to validate wiki, I will give you the wiki definition of social efficiency- I could not have said it better.

Social efficiency educators" such as theorists Ross, Bobbitt, Gilbreth, Taylor, and Thorndike were aiming to design a curriculum that would optimize the “social utility” of each individual in a society. By using education as an efficiency tool, these theorists believed that society could be controlled. Students would be scientifically evaluated (such as IQ tests), and educated towards their predicted role in society. This involved the introduction of vocational and junior high schools to address the curriculum designed around specific life activities that correlate with each student’s societal future. The socially efficient curriculum would consist of minute parts or tasks that together formed a bigger concept. This educational view was somewhat derived with the efficiency of factories which could simultaneously produce able factory workers. Critics believe this model has too much emphasis on testing and separating students based on the results of that testing.

Social efficiency keeps at it; A.H. Lauchner, a principal in 1951, said,

 "not every child has to read, figure, write and spell...that many of them cannot or will not master these chores." 

Meaning, why teach true academic curriculum to certain children to whom it would be a waste?

Okay so my point here is this, social efficiency used the "science" of test scores to drive curriculum to scientifically manage the populace, to determine which students were to be doctors and which were to be laborers. With the p-20 data tracking system, a student with behavioral issues, an IEP, low math test scores may be pigeonholed- on purpose- into becoming a manual laborer, even if their dreams and skills are in interpreting law or motivating students or what have you.

Sire, you say, this cannot happen. Or perhaps it is an old fuddy duddy idea that never came to fruition and never will. To re-quote one of my posts from this year,

From http://www.wiche.edu/info/publications/FrameworkForAMultistateHumanCapitalDevelopmentDataSystem.pdf

"The workforce sector wants information about prior training in
high school and postsecondary institutions as a foundation for
working with both education sectors to address identified skill gaps
in the workforce, as well as to identify equity gaps with respect
to demographic representativeness by job category. Knowing the
education sectors’ capacity to respond (i.e., by increasing the flow
of graduates with particular skill sets) will also help the state decide
whether to invest in education to address skill gaps or establish
incentives to induce more workers with needed skills to move
into the state. Moreover, linking with the education sectors would
provide labor market analysts with a wealth of data that would be
useful for examining equity in employment."

This document is a modern document, written sometime between 2009-2013, and it states that schools can increase the flow of graduates with certain skills. How might they do this? If society needs more engineers, or fast food workers, how will it "increase the flow" without either data manipulation (suddenly Johnny's test scores plummet and his education is individualized to send him into fast food) or using tracking to label students (everyone who struggled in science gets to work in fast f

Your Secret is Safe With me

Everyone keepos saying the data collected will remain anonymous, and will solely be used to improve prenatal care, career readiness programs, etc, But of course the data will be shared with any government organization or third party vendor or person in education (textbook companies, educational consultants) which will remain anonymous once out of the school level. Students will be numbered, data will be meta data, and it will be secure. (Just like our IRS records, social security info, etc which surely has never been compromised...ha ha).

"Anonymous" meta data is extrapolated from identifiable data, those "80% have graduated on time" had names and identities attached to them.  Collect some meta data such as addresses, parent's names, etc and enough datamanipulating can lead back to the student. Or, if anyone decides to be evil, a school official could leak identifiable student data, or how to access it (ie that student #642t50 is Jane Plain). But don't worry,,,your data is "safe".

Which leads back to social efficiency... whitehouse.gov had said,

Pearson will share data into the Learning Registry about many of their existing teaching resources including those that support CCSS so that they can be used n each students' personal learning path

Yep, right back to pigeonholing students in a certain direction as part of social efficiency, or as we call it now, human capital.  From http://www.csctulsa.org/content.php?p=195 we bring you,

The P-20 concept is a way of thinking and acting that promotes systematic aligning of multiple education, health, and social support resources to best advance human capital development from prenatal through postsecondary and employment, and on to sustained lifelong well-being...

See, my long-winded post does all come together right there. And it scares me. It is wrapped up in a pretty package- who doesn't want "sustained lifelong well-being"? But the question is, who decides what well-being means? Perception is everything and one man's well being could be another man's hell. Is the government's idea of my well being what I desire? Likely not, since obviously life- and my own well being- are "human capital" and must be micromanaged and decided for me.

RTTT (Race to The Top): State takeover of our children

From Huff Po at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/07/01/race-to-the-top-draft-guidelines_n_888248.html I just have to give my two cents....well more like few dollars as I have quite a lot to say. The article is in blue italics and my response in regular or italic (stupid blogger acting up) blackish gray text.

A $500 million federal competition for early education money will stress assessment, teacher training and program alignment, according to an announcement Thursday by officials from the White House, the Department of Education and the Department of Health and Human Services.

So first, what does the Dept. of Health and Human Services have to do with education? Cradle to the grave alright. School is good for your health? And why must it be a competition- what, the losing schools don't deserve funding? And our teachers are trained to death, the only way to can get "better" teachers in their meaning of better would be to do a frontal lobotomy. Then teachers would just follow the scripted curriculum, test kids like mad, not complain about wages or crowded classrooms or RTTT for that matter.

"We're really announcing something historic," Roberto Rodriguez, special assistant to the president for education in the White House Domestic Policy Council, said during an evening call with reporters to announce more details about the government's Race to the Top program. "We believe that this ... can really have the same kind of impact around some of the core challenges that we faced around our early learning community."

Errr....translation....get 'em while they're young, indoctrinate or brainwash or brain-dead 'em early. The family or community is too inept to care for or educate children so let it go to the state. To quote some folks here, and I'll make it in small text to avoid confusion (hopefully), "Every child in America entering school at the age of five is insane because
he comes to school with certain allegiances toward our Founding Fathers,
toward his parents, toward our elected officials, toward a belief in a
supernatural being, and toward the sovereignty of this nation as a separate
entity. It's up to you, teachers, to make all these sick children well by
creating the international child of the future." Chester M. Pierce,
Professor, Department of Educational Psychiatry, Harvard University.

"We really don't know how to raise children. If we want to talk about the
equality of opportunity for children, then the fact that children are raised
in families means there's no equality, we must take them away from families
and communally raise them." Dr. Mary Jo Bane: former Clinton Administration
assistant secretary of administration for children and families in the US
Department of Health and Human Services. (holy moly, now I know why the Dept. of Health and Human Services is all gung-ho about RTTT!)

“Each year the child is coming to belong more to the State and less and less to the parent.” Elwood Cubberley (I have many posts related to this jerk.) Yep. The kids NEED to belong to the state, an early learning community.

The Race to the Top competition, he said, is a White House priority, as it relates to Obama's goal of producing the highest proportion of college-educated people in the world.

"On behalf of the president, I just want to emphasize how important this Race to the Top program really is to our larger education agenda," he said.

Great. I'm all for educated people, but my fears are if we end up with the highest % of college educated people, will we dumb down college so everyone gets a degree? If so, then our highest-educated status is just a meaningless title.

And the term "agenda" tied to education simply makes my skin crawl.

The draft criteria for the early education competition, which is the third round of the Race to the Top program, stress quality programs, teacher training with a clear set of credentials, family engagement and assessments of student learning from a young age.

How young? Will we be giving standardize tests to pre-schoolers now?

“The Race to the Top-Early Learning Challenge can transform the quality of early learning programs across the country,” U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said in a statement. “The proposed criteria aim to establish a comprehensive approach that better coordinates, implements and evaluates high quality early learning and development programs with a focus on giving families the information they need to select the best program for their child.”

Little Billy, do you want this indoctrination- err, program with scripted curriculum, or this one, or look, this one? What Billy? They're all the same?

The criteria are open to public comment, and the final guidelines will be released in August. States must submit applications in October and grants ranging from $50 million to $100 million will be rewarded before the end of the year.

"I think it is the beginning of the breakthrough," said Pedro Noguera, an education professor at New York University. "The fact that they're putting money into early education is a good thing."

Steven Barnett, co-director of the National Institute for Early Education Research, said in an email statement that federal dollars "can help offset some of the dramatic state budget cuts we have seen over the last few years, particularly in state-funded pre-K. We are optimistic that Race to the Top will help states expand upon their existing spectrum of programs or give a jump start to those states who have not yet prioritized early learning."

Aaah the goold old dangling of the money carrot with strings attached, how very government-y of them. And as you may deduce, I'm for early learning, but a schooling agenda for our toddlers, no no no and no.

Earlier iterations of Race to the Top stressed education standards and teacher evaluations, resulting in a slew of new laws that, in some cases, tied educator management to student performance on standardized tests. Michigan's RTTT-inspired law enabled a recently announced state takeover of Detroit's lowest-performing schools. The teacher review legislation created in New York as part of the earlier RTTT application sparked a lawsuit over its implementation this week.

With nearly $4 billion in funding, the competition has had a tremendous impact -- but has been met with mixed reviews. "Simply making more money available to states when they're so desperate is a good thing. Focusing on underperforming schools is a good thing," Noguera said.

"The bad thing is prescribing the remedies they have, which are way too narrow and don’t get at the underlying causes of school failure," he continued. "I don’t like the idea of a competitive grant process when all the states need help. I don’t like the idea that the federal government is dictating strategies that are based on little research. There's very little research on judging students based on test scores."

Yes!

This time around, the focus is on unifying a disparate system of pre-K programming, improving the quality of educators and expanding accessibility for impoverished children.

"We know that disparities in access to high quality early learning programs pose a significant challenge to our economic competitiveness moving forward," Rodriguez said.

According to the new guidelines, state applications must also establish metrics for kindergarten assessment. While Noguera said assessment can be important, he added that too much assessment could distract from the bigger picture.

"Collecting data is good. What's more important is to get kids the help they need," he said. "Some means of tracking is certainly important. These days, we spend more time tracking and monitoring than we do actually helping. I hope we find the balance we need."

Yep. Testing toddlers, nearly. We as teachers do need to know "where" kindergartners are academically, to help them succeed but that is different than testing. Sure, maybe RTTT means for us to informally assess kinders. However, I highly doubt "they" promote that, and instead promote standardized tests as the textbook and testing companies profit and those profits funnel into campaigns for the government and money talks. Teacher-made free assessments do not.

And tracking...I've got some posts on that, too. Yep. Let's decide little Susie is a moron in kindergarten because she drew a flower across her test instead of bubbling in "B". Now Susie will be tracked in the vocation bound track for life, denied chemistry, French, and the like because that's not her "path".

The guidelines give budget caps for each state and emphasize a focus on "states with large, high poverty rural communities," even if those states' applications rank lower than others.

“Meeting the needs of our youngest children so they are healthy and learning is critical to our nation’s competitiveness,” U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said in a statement. “This public comment period will provide us with vital input from states and communities, from child, family and education experts, and from teachers and program directors. Together, we can work to improve standards, promote health, engage and support families, and provide children with the building blocks for success.”

"Together" my arse. Your little education experts are running the show, and is it the schools' job to promote health? Just more state takeover of our daily lives my dear, as we're too stupid to know what's good fro us so best we hand it over to the omniscient state experts.

Progressive Education

I don't feel like my usual rambling comments about this article, but in short, it is an interesting read on Progressive education from "back in the day", 1938, during Progressive heyday.
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,883101-1,00.html

Social Studies

Upon watching Glenn Beck, I got to thinking about "Social Studies". I took Social Studies in school as a child. I have (still do...) refused to ever call it anything but History.
I think of how it was taught to me and for the most part, my teachers read the textbook verbatim and we defined vocabulary and took an open book test. Bo-ring! We also for whatever reason never finished the textbook, lucky to get up to WWII in class- WWI and WWI and all in-between were often smooshed into one week of speed-reading.

Anyways, to quote Ravitch, I wish to delve into social studies really quickly. No commentary, just the quote as it speaks for itself.
The CRSE, a branch of the Committee of Ten, had a chairman, also chairman of the Committee on Social Studies, Thomas Jesse Jones. Jones believed (and here comes the verbatim chunk of info from Ravitch....)
"Jones was one of the first to coin the term " social studies". This new filed was formed by the intersection of two congenial ideas; one was social efficiency, or teaching students the skills and attitudes necessary to fit into social order; the other was ' the new history," whose advocates believed that the content of history in the schools should be selected on the basis of "the pupil's own immediate interest" and "general social significance". Proponents of social studies believed that pupils could not possibly be interested in history unless it was directly related to the present."

Educational Leaders Unmasked: Dewey Part II

Dewey once wrote, "The individualistic man is a victim of an unnamed form of insanity and only the collectivist man is sane."

And how might this notion affect education? I think back to my favorite influences (sarcasm here) of Prussian education and social efficiency; social efficiency educators [were] made up of an acceptance of a collective

society and a belief that an individual should be devoted to a specialized task

in society.” (see my Social Efficiency part III post) This notion is very Dewey-esque and is arguably still a practice in education.

Wikipedia states, “Dewey goes on to acknowledge that education and schooling are instrumental in creating social change and reform. He notes that “education is a regulation of the process of coming to share in the social consciousness; and that the adjustment of individual activity on the basis of this social consciousness is the only sure method of social reconstruction” (1897) )”

I take this to mean that teachers are regulators, who must “adjust” students to fit their societal mold, as the key part in “social consciousness” (that sounds so hunky-dory and reminds me of my liberal arts education in college…social consciousness was nearly de rigueur in conversation and coursework). Does this sound like the role of a teacher to you? Perhaps it does but it is not my idea of a great teacher or desirable education. I think of teachers as “facilitators” who help mold students, yes, but not to their cog and wheel place in society but rather as a mentor, encouraging the student’s passions and interests, not societies pre-set passions assigned to them.

Learning by doing- Here’s where I favor Dewey. He was against a rigidly structured curriculum and felt that children learn best by doing, that is by experimenting, theorizing, playing with their learning. Too often we see classes heavy on lecture and/or scripted curriculum which study after study shows is not the most effective method. Think back to a lesson a teacher taught you, way back in elementary. Was it scripted curriculum, or learning by doing? I recall my favorite lesson was in 6^th grade World History. After studying ancient civilizations, we worked in groups to create our own civilization, our own artifacts and Rosetta Stone which we sprinkled in dirt outside the school grounds. The next week each group went and did an “archeological dig” and pieced together the other group’s civilization. I think Dewey would support such a lesson.

The school must be made into a social center capable of participating in the daily life of the community . . . and make up in part to the child for the decay of dogmatic and fixed methods of social discipline and for the loss of reverence and the influence of authority.”

"that to put the child in possession of his fullest talents,

education should be active rather than passive

; that to prepare the child for a democratic

society, the school should be social rather than individualist'

“Every teacher should realize he is a social servant set apart for the maintenance of the proper

social order and the securing of the right social growth. In this way the teacher is always the

prophet of the true God and the usherer in of the true kingdom of heaven.”

(just a creepy quote there...)

"the plea for the predominance of learning to read in early

school life because of the great importance attaching to literature seems to be a perversion." This echoes the Prussian idea of having education to educate the public just so much that they feel satiated. The people become more educated than they would be without completion of their compulsory schooling, and they are likely more desirable as a work force. However, they learn just enough but not enough to start to question the status quo. Reading well enough to function in life was what the Prussians encouraged; they feared a learned man that was a proficient reader because they were a threat to the “system”. Let the top 2-10% elitists, from their private education, rule and make decisions because they’re the experts and the common man is not and should be happy with his status. If this idea exists today in our schools (the supposed dumbing down of our schools would support such a theory) then it is time to put a stop to it. Man deserves to “be all that he can be” and deserves an elite education. Knowledge is power and frees us from the shackles of dependency, feudalism, and oppression. Reading is a great vehicle for change; many studies show that ones “level” of vocabulary is a great determinant in their success in life, and reading is a great exposure to, as I call them in the classroom, 50 cent words. If we don’t teach the importance of great literature to our children, our future generations, if we only teach them certain sight words that are in a blanched condenses and altered version of literary classics, then we are supporting “the man keeping us down”. Social stratification will continue to rear its ugly head.

founded the Progressive Education Association which promoted the seven principles to improve elementary education (of which I can only find five); 1) Child centered; education should be active rather than passive. (I must agree).2) Children should learn the contents of the activities of the children formed their own direct experience. (I somewhat agree…such an idea can go to far as is outlined in Diane Ravitch’s Language Police.) 3) "the process of teaching the course is to develop habits of mind". (Yes, we need critical thinking but do we as teachers encourage habits of the mind, or decide what those habits should be?) 4) . Dilute the authority of the conscious view of teacher. (I do like teachers as facilitators especially in the later years i.e. high school when students have a foundational knowledge. However, it seems teachers have lost authority but it has not gone to the students but rather the bureaucrats. 5) The concept of school spirit. Progressive educators believe that students should be encouraged to cooperate with the school. (I believe students should have pride in their school; however, should they blindly cooperate and idolize the school?)

Socialism- many argue that Dewey promoted socialism; you decide in his quote here; "I do not see how any honest educational reformer in western countries can deny that the greatest practical obstacle in the way of introducing into schools that connection with social life which he regards as desirable is the great part played by personal competition and desire for private profit in our economic life. This fact almost makes it necessary that in important respects school activities should be protected from social contacts and connections, instead of being organized to create them. The Russian educational situation is enough to convert one to the idea that only in a society based upon the cooperative principle can the ideals of educational reformers be adequately carried into operation."

From http://www.asis.com/stag//starchiv/transcriptions/NWO/NWO2_Education.html (and it is a valid source; I’ve seen it backed up by research but the author says it more succinctly than I);
“Under the pretext of improving teaching methods, they changed what was taught to the American children. What did Dewey believe? In his writing and teaching, Dewey rejected fixed moral laws and eternal truths and principles. He adopted pragmatic, relativistic concepts as his guiding philosophy. Denying God, he held to the Marxist concept, that man is without a soul or free will. Man is a biological organism completely molded by his environment. Dewey believed that because man’s environment is constantly changing, man also changes constantly. Therefore, Dewey concluded, teaching children any of the absolutes of morals, government or ethics was a waste of time. On this moral philosophy, amoral philosophy, he developed his teaching formula, commonly labeled Progressive Education. Dewey published a thing called My Pedagogic Creed in 1897, and in it he saw the destruction – listen to this – the destruction of the child’s individualistic traits as the primary goal of education.” The idea of ethics verses morals, and that morals are fixed but outdated or wrong, is replaced with ethics which can change by the situation at hand. This in my opinion deteriorates one’s own moral fortitude. If morals must be taught in school (I argue against it; this is the role of the family) then shouldn’t we teach moral fortitude and not arbitrary, situational ethics? Of course Dewey stated morals and ethics should both not be taught in schools and I do agree; however some ethics and morals must be part of schools or else you’d have chaos- for example, we as teachers must reiterate what we hope is taught at home; i.e. share with others, get along with others, respect your elders, respect yourself and others…

Phrenology- Dewey believed in phrenology (as did Horace Mann) which was a pseudo-science of psychology that measured the skull. More precisely, the dimensions of one’s head and the bumps on the skull were measured and often used to promote racial superiority.

A good source that summed things up much better than I did and is well worth a visit if you want to read something that reflects my perspective: http://rebirthofreason.com/Articles/Younkins/Deweys_Pragmatism_and_the_Decline_of_Education.shtml

Social Efficiency Part III

(As always bear with the formatting and font issues. No matter what I do it won't format correctly and the more I fix it, the worse it becomes.)

Quick re-cap...what is social efficiency and what does it have to do with schools? To quote author Ann Gibson Winfield, "Reflecting the general societal trend, social efficiency educators were "imbued with the power of science" and believe that the application of business and industrial standard would eliminate waste in education." She goes on to say, " The conduits comprising the interface between eugenic ideology and education was formed through a combination of historical, political, socially Progressive and demographic influences in play during the first decades of the 20th century".

Social Efficiency and the New Nationalism by Joel H. Spring (an author I've found to be quite knowledgeable and unbiased) wrote...

"The common ideological bed shared by the New Nationalists and the

social efficiency educators was made up of an acceptance of a collective

society and a belief that an individual should be devoted to a specialized task

in society. The social efficiency stream in early twentieth-century American

education has recently been pointed out by Edward Krug in The Shaping

of the American High School and in Walter Drost's biography of social

efficiency educator David Snedden. Krug's thesis is that social efficiency

was a combination of education for social service and social control. The

social service aspect of social efficiency education involved the same

type of attack upon rugged individualism that Bowers found as one of

the striking characteristics ofthe social reconstructionists. It was an education

directed at training the individual for a life devoted to the good

of the collective whole"

Again the social efficiency notion of training someone for a specific task or career and nothing more. For example, a person trained to be a carpenter would only know history of carpentry (no need to know of world wars, the constitution, etc), carpentry-based math, etc. This in my eyes does not make a whole person and robs man of the freedom of knowledge. Social efficiency gets as creepy as can be here, as it begins to sound like Mao-era China when Spring says, " social efficiency was a combination of education for social service and social control". When I read that education should be about social control, I think some blood shoots from out my eyes. Education should FREE man, knowledge is power, enlightenment, freedom. If education is control then it is indoctrination as well and I stand against that. This idea goes perhaps even beyond the Prussian idea that education should teach us to bow down to the king. And yet it gets worse...a socialist mantra indeed, that education should train us to devote our lives to the collective whole. Last time I checked, America was founded by the founding fathers that promoted individualism and freedom, not kowtowing to the government for the good of the collective whole.

"The social efficiency educator at the University of

Wisconsin, Micheal V. O'Shea, told teachers in a 1909 textbook entitled

Social Development and Education, "Intense individualistic feelings and

actions must be brought under control, and cooperation must largely

take the place of original tendencies to opposition and aggression."

William C. Bagley went further than this in 1904 when he wrote in his

The Educative Process that a socially efficient man was one who was

willing to "sacrifice his own pleasure . .. when its gratification will not

directly or indirectly lead to social advancement." sociologist,

Edward A. Ross. Ross wrote his book Social Control while at Stanford

during the eighteen-nineties. Insisting

that communities held together by close face-to-face relationships were

rapidly becoming things of the past, he advocated new means by which

society could maintain social order. "Success in social organization," Ross

wrote, "implies that each man, whether watched or unwatched, sticks to his

appointed work, and interferes with no one else in his work." Ross hailed

education as a means of achieving successful social organization. Teachers

could become "an economical system of police." Education for social control

meant training student to fit into a particular slot in the social

organization. “

Here Spring identifies yet again my point of social efficiency being for social control and to teach people just what they need to know, nothing more. The “powers that be” of this era saw, as I’ve mentioned, the family and community unit breaking down and so through social control in the schools, social order could be maintained and everyone would know their proper place in the collective whole.

“ Social specialization was to be achieved through a differentiated curriculum. Courses and course material were to be selected on the basis of the social destination of

the student. Collective harmony was to be achieved through social education.

Within the school the child was to be divested of all selfish individual

interests. Group play and group work were to prepare the individual for

a collective society”

Differentiated curriculum is a buzz word in current education, but if this is its origins, I am weary. This reiterates that schools are to train people for their pre-determined roles, nothing more. And through this brainwashing…I mean “education”, we would reach a utopia of “collective harmony” and we would no longer have individualism or selfish thought. Even our play-time was to be infiltrated and turned into a socialist exercise. Prussia monitored children’s play by creating government run children’s clubs such as judendeutchland (no clue on the spelling) or “Young Germans”.

“Social efficiency education and the New Nationalism were therefore wedded

to the goals of a highly organized society in which efficiency was to be

maintained through social specialization and unselfish devotion to common

social causes. The New Nationalism as a progressive political movement did

not die with Roosevelt's defeat in 1912. As Eric Goldman has pointed out,

New Nationalist thinking became a part of Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal”

Here it is again- our pre-determined roles, promoted/mandated through our education, will make our society more efficient (easier to control). The “devotion to social causes” sounds innocuous but their social causes here are anything but, as they are all about control and a push for a utopian socialistic mantra of collectivism. For those who claim the New Deal was all about socialism, this to me aligns to that claim, as Spring suggests below;

If this is true, then the question that has to be answered is: Were the social

reconstructionists a new breed of progressive educator or were they in

the tradition of social efficiency education? Though it is true that early social

efficiency educators did not demand a completely planned society in the

manner of the social reconstructionists, it is not difficult to imagine that a

plea for social specialization and collective harmony would move in this

direction under the pressure of a depression. T his question must be answered

before we can come to a clear understanding of what progressive education

was all about.”

Social Efficiency Part II

For simplicities sake, instead of a complex multi-source literature review or article on social efficiency, I will just tackle a book/article or two per post. At some point in life I will combine all the ideas into a coherent single unit of writing but for now...some article/book reviews, my editorial opinion on them.

Education and the Cult of Efficiency: A Study of the Social Forces That Have Shaped the Administration of the Public Schools. by Callahan, Raymond ...

"These two developments, and the vulnerability of the school administrator, contributed to the conditions in American society which explain the tremendous impact of Frederick Taylor and his system of scientific management, and the continuing influence of the business-industrial ideology upon American society and education after 1911. "

This kind of "proves" my connection of the efficiency movement to social efficiency in schools as mentioned briefly in my post on Social Efficiency Part 1.

"It was inevitable that these business values would greatly influence the public schools at the turn of the century, but the extent of this influence was furthered by certain aspects of the great reform crusade. This movement was primarily an attempt to cope with the problems which were a product of rapid industrialization: the consolidation of industry and the concentration of wealth; the ruthless exploitation of the country’s natural resources; the corruption and inefficiency in government; the tremendous growth of cities; the flood of immigrants who added to the complexity of the social and political problems in the urban areas; and finally, the fear among the middle class that America would react to these problems in an extreme or radical way (this reaction had of course been predicted by Karl Marx and had been realized, to an extent, in the growth of various forms of socialism in America)."

This again is social efficiency- with a new world of industry and corruption and many social ills the Progressive Era sought to fix, social efficiency was part of "the fix". The irony here is, the evil industrialists (according to some progressives) were the problem, and yet it seems they were also the solution, along with government control (but not supposedly inefficiency...if these progressives have any influence today, I don't see it in government since it is quite inefficient but that's another story...). The flood of immigrants was seen as a problem especially by the eugenicists (who were often proponents of Progressivism and Efficiency) who saw that they would cause racial impurity and social ills because they were inferior peoples intellectually, socially, etc and needed control. Some even proposed not just immigration sanctions but segregation and sterilization. Social efficiency would "fix" the immigrants by putting them in their place...whatever that might mean. Then quoting Marxism, the elite feared a middle class uprising. I then think, of you mold education just so, similar to the Prussian model, you can tweak the system just so, and the middle classes will be dumbed down into subservience.

"The business influence was exerted upon education in several ways: through newspapers, journals, and hooks; through speeches at educational meetings; and, more directly, through actions of school boards. It was exerted by laymen, by professional journalists, by businessmen or industrialists either individually or in groups (e.g., the National Association of Manufacturers), and finally by educators themselves. Whatever its source, the influence was exerted in the form of suggestions or demands that the schools be organized and operated in a more businesslike way and that more emphasis be placed upon a practical and immediately useful education. "

I am not exactly arguing against the influence of business in education. The deep down and dirty truth is, when people leave the safety net of schools, they go into the "real world" and end up working for businesses. Therefore businesses know what they want and we should as educators provide that. (However, I argue we provide more than just laborers, but thinkers, innovators, etc...) When does cause me hesitation as to the influence of business in education is the removal of local control, teacher freedom, bottom-up management that comes about through the implementation of business influences such as textbook and testing companies that now run our schools as if they know better. And when the author said "a practical and immediately useful education" he meant something more than that, as that sounds all fine and dandy. He and others of his movement wanted to train people just for an exact career and nothing outside of that. I argue this robs our people of free thought, will-power, freedom to do and think what they want. Knowledge is power!

"Year by year after 1900, the pressure for a more utilitarian education continued. By 1907, school superintendents were being praised by the President of the Commercial National Bank in Chicago for their contribution to America’s great material progress. As a guest speaker at their annual convention, he told them this progress was “a result of getting away, to an extent, from the mere scholastic education, and developing the practical side, making the school the place to learn how to manufacture."

Schools were not praised or encouraged to teach complex thought- the "scholastic education" as that was left to the elite private schools. Just like Prussia, our schools were to teach "how to manufacture", that is, how to do simple tasks for simple people, the common man's labors and nothing more.

"Along with these demands to make the academic program practical went an intensive campaign to introduce and extend vocational education in the public schools. Although the adoption of the German system with its early differentiation between academic students and vocational students was avoided, the drive for vocational education was quite successful."

See...here's Prussia rearing her evil head. The author claims yes, we adopted the vocational education of Prussia but not her tracking system; however, I disagree as we had and still have GATE, special ed, etc. and encourage our children to take just what they need to graduate, or, extra course work for college prep.

"Some fourteen million immigrants had come to America between 1865 and 1900. After 1900, they came at a rate of about one million a year. The majority of these people remained in the eastern cities, where their children were entered — with increasing frequency because of the improvements in child labor laws and compulsory school attendance legislation — in the public schools. Coming predominantly from the poorest socioeconomic groups in southern and eastern Europe, these uprooted, non–English-speaking children from semiliterate families with diverse cultural backgrounds constituted an educational problem unparalleled in human history...Into this difficult and potentially explosive situation an American educator — not a businessman or muckraking journalist — threw an incendiary bomb in the form of an allegedly scientific study of retardation and elimination, published in 1909, Laggards in Our Schools. The author, Leonard Ayres, said, that “for every child who is making more than normally rapid progress there are from eight to ten children making abnormally slow progress.”he held the schools responsible, charging that their programs were “fitted not to the slow child or to the average child but to the unusually bright one.”

This is the immigration issue again, that these immigrants were "retarding" our schools and social efficiency would cure this, especially since these children had to attend school because of the compulsory school law. Ayres here says something surprising, that the schools were too advanced for these students of retarded status; this makes sense upon reflection because it promotes a common school for the common man, dumbing down education.

Education Leaders Unmasked: Elwood Cubberley part 2

Changing Conceptions of Education in America

By Ellwood Cubberley 1909

(Any typos are those of the transcriber not myself. Ignore formatting/font issues, but my words are always in Times New Roman 12 font, not italicized, as seen here.)

"the home altogether too often is unintelli- gent or neglectful in the handling of children, and not infrequently it has abdicated entirely and has turned over to the public school the whole matter of the training and education of the young.”

As you will see later in this post, Cubberley is promoting state takeover of children, not complaining that children are the burden of schools or what have you. Remember that Cubberley is a “pioneer” for administration, ( and who runs the school? The administration) and was Dean at Stanford, a very influential school and position. Keep this in mind as you read on… Cubberley is still referenced in teaching colleges today.

Factory life has also made it undesirable that children should labor. The result is that a boy or girl in our modern life has so little real home life, so much unprofitable leisure, and ac-quires so much through the eyes and the ears anc learns so little by actual doing, that the problem of providing a proper environment and of utiliz- ing this excess leisure time in profitable training has become one of the most serious as well as one of the most difficult problems now before us. The school, begun at first as a means of impart- ing to children the common rudiments of learn- ing, has gradually been transformed into one of the most important institutions of democracy and has been called upon to offer some practi- cable solution of the situation created. This has caused us to look at education in a new and a larger light.

I often reference John Taylor Gatto in my writings and recall reading in his book The Underground History of American Education, something along the lines of the fact that American compulsory education was a way to control people, to remove them from their own intellectual pursuits or musings or evne non-intellectual leisures and to guide young minds in a certain direction. I found this far-fetched but with Cubberley’s quote here, I begin to confirm such indications. Cubberley sees school as the end-all do-all of society, the shaper of democracy and our future, more than as a place of intellectual stimulation. Schools are to replace our failing home lives, and to replace our leisure time with profitable training.

The idea that free education was a right, and that universal education was a necessity, began to be urged and to find acceptance. The landgrants of Congress to the new states for the benefit of common schools greatly stimulated the movement. The published reports of those who

had visited Pestalozzi's school in Switzerland, and had examined the new state school system in Prussia, were extensively read. The moral and economic advantages of schools were set forth 'at length in resolutions, speeches, pamphlets," magazines, and books.

Free education did not come about easily. Americans were hesitant to pay taxes towards school, finding it to be one’s own decision to pursue and pay for (when it was not free). I often wonder if Americans had suspicions of the free compulsory school model, perhaps “nothing comes free” rang true in their minds, and for good reason. (Read my Prussian post http://3rseduc.blogspot.com/2011/03/to-prussia-with-love-or-prussians-are.html for more info). Here Cubberley admits our education is modeled after the Prussian state school system.

A new conception of free public education

as a birthright of the child on the one hand, and as an exercise of the state's inherent right to self-preservation and improvement on the other, had taken the place of the earlier conception of schools as merely a cooperative effort, based on economy, and for the instruction of youth merely in the rudiments of learning. The large immigra-

tion of illiterate Irish and clannish Germans which set in in the late forties gave particular emphasis to this point of view.

Here Cubberley is a little racist, showing his dark eugenic-friendly side of which you will read more of. He didn’t seek to educate the illiterate Irish or clannish Germans out of empathy but rather to try and either get them to conform to the racially superior Northern European societal norms of America, or to train them for menial labor.

The overwhelming success of the Prussian armies in the War of 1870 with France called new attention to the importance of public education. "The

Prussian schoolmaster has triumphed/' was as- serted on all sides.

Here again, in case one doubts my claims of our Prussian-modeled system, Cubberley cites the wonders of the Prussian education system.

In the early [eighteen]seventies, the kindergarten idea came to America from Germany, and was soon recog- nized as a valuable addition. In the eighties, the Herbartian conception of education, with its emphasis on proper psychological procedure and on character-building as the aim of education, began to reshape our educational theory.

One may think that this quote is benign but kindergarten is a Prussian concept. Recall the earlier quote about the home no longer being the rightful place for a child; the concept of “get them while they’re young and impressionable” prevails here. Also, I must ask, should education be a psychological function? If we are using psychological procedures in schools, that sounds to me like me are psychologically manipulating or shaping young minds instead of letting them shape themselves with some guidance. This sounds like a lighter shade of brainwashing to me. Character building has a similar function, to train children how to act because obviously the parents, church, community are not doing good enough of a job (or perhaps they are doing a job gone unchecked). I may be out on a limb here, but Mao Tse Tung re-educated the wealthy and had quite a character-building repertoire.

The new interest in school hygiene and the physical welfare of the child indicates a new and a commendable desire to care for the bodies as well as the heads of our children. The great educational lessons to be learned from a study of the educational, political, and industrial

progress of the German Empire during the past forty years are at last beginning to take root with us. Above all, the new and extensive interest in industrial and vocational training is especially significant of the changing conception of the function of the school and the classes in society which the school is in future expected to serve.

When I read John Taylor Gatto’s The Underground History of American Education, I came across Cubberley’s name and this quote which shocked me; from his 1905 Columbia dissertation, “[schools were to be factories] "in which raw products, children, are to be shaped and formed into finished products... manufactured like nails, and the specifications for manufacturing will come from government and industry." This quote and Cubberley’s quote above confirm to me what Gatto is trying to tell the reader: the founders of our educational system saw our children as products, not people, as slaves to the state and the corporations, to be trained to bend to the will of these powers, to indoctrinate.

school curriculum bids fair, too, to experi- ence many modifications during the next one or two decades, and chiefly along a line that will lead toward preparation for increased social efficiency.

Social efficiency related to eugenics movement and the Progressive movement’s Efficiency Movement which “played a central role in the Progressive Era in the United States, where it flourished 1890-1932.^[4] Adherents argued that all aspects of the economy, society and government were riddled with waste and inefficiency. Everything would be better if experts identified the problems and fixed them” (wikipedia). Eugenics was a scientific approach to improving social efficiency, seeking to solve the ills of poverty, alcoholism, feeble-mindedness, etc often through not just education but sterilization. Therefore, when curriculum is designed for social efficiency, it makes one leery. Wikipedia states, in regards to curriculum theory- specifically the social efficiency theory of Franklin Bobbitt, Edward Ross, Cubberley and others, “these theorists believed that society could be controlled. Students would be scientifically evaluated (such as IQ tests), and educated towards their predicted role in society”. Yes, it has been stated: education according to Cubberly (among others) is to manage society. I further this idea below,

Our city schools will soon be forced to give up the exceedingly democratic idea that all are equal, and that our society is devoid of classes, as a few cities have already in large part done, and to be-

gin a specialization of educational effort along many new lines in an attempt better to adapt the school to the needs of these many classes in the city life. City, town, and country schools alike have, in the past, directed most of their training to satisfying the needs of the children of the well- to-do classes, and those headed for business life

or the professions. More recently, most of the larger cities have provided some form of work leading to preparation for the executive positions in technical pursuits.

If we remove the notion that we are all equal, we can more easily segregate the populous. Cubberley prescribes to the notion that our society should marginalize people and when you combine this notion with that of standardized achievement testing, you have the recipe for ability, class, or ethnicity based schooling, proving the eugenic “science” that “less thans” are exactly that, because we create a society where they can be nothing but “less thans”. Cubberley also admits here that certain schools of his time have already implemented a social efficiency curriculum, where children are pre-destined for greatness or not-so-greatness and the educational institutions ensure the progression of these pre-assigned roles. Cubberly bashes the notion of an academically challenging education for all as once existed, and promotes ability-based learning/role training. http://ezinearticles.com/?Social-Efficiency-versus-Democratic-Equality&id=175582 explores social efficiency further, and argues that schools often implement the social efficienct model for minority students- no wonder we have an achievement gap!

Instead of a study of school methods and management only, the work has

changed into a phase of political science, — that of a study of means of improving the state and of advancing the public welfare. Nearly all of our universities and colleges now have such chairs or

departments, and the state universities and our more democratic private institutions are now or- ganizing professional schools for the training of teachers and educational leaders for the state.

Cubberley is stating that teacher colleges ensure that their professors and department chairs practice the social efficiency model of education; if teacher colleges encourage these practices, that means the teachers they train further this model.

Each year the child is coming to belong more and more to the state,

and less and less to the parent. In all that relates to proper care, kindness, education, and advan- tages, the child belongs to the parent; but when neglect, abuse, and the deprivation of the child of any natural right takes place, the child belongs to the state. The right to reasonably good treatment, proper care, an education, pro- tection from vice, and protection from labor be- yond his strength and years, the state will soon guarantee. The plea in defense that " the child is my child " will not be accepted much longer by society. Our future welfare is too thoroughly in the keeping of the child to permit of such a policy.

This quote is demonstrating the will of Cubberly and like minds to control the child, to remove the power of parenting from the parents and replace it with that of the school. One must wonder if programs such as the school lunch program, school health screenings, and other school welfare programs exist purely to help those in need or if they exist as a way to have the school “keep the child” and promote state welfare under the social efficiency model- leaving parenting to the scientifically-trained experts (teacher-college trained teachers) and way from those who are not the experts (parents).

through all the complicated machinery of the school, some way must be found to awaken a social consciousness as opposed to class consciousness, to bring out the important social and civic les-

sons, to point out our social and civic needs, and to teach our young people how to live better and to make better use of their leisure time.Read- ing, Writing, Arithmetic, Grammar, Geography, and History, the staples of the elementary cur- riculum, are really of little value except as they are closely related with the needs and problems

of our social, civic, and industrial life.

Cubberly argues that school is to awaken a social consciousness, to be conscious of the greater good and welfare of the collective instead of one’s own needs or desires. Schools must teach children what to do with their lives and how to do it because only the experts know what’s good for you. Core curriculum is not important per se, but it must be framed around the idea of social responsibility and pre-determined societal roles as determined by the “experts”.

If our schools are to become more effective social institutions, our teachers must become more effective social workers.

Again, the notion that schools and the properly trained teacher are to encourage social welfare. When the term “social worker” is used, I think of the worker helping people that need “intervention” and that’s the point.

The overeducated man is scarcely possible if an education adapted to his needs and station in life is given him. The work of public education is with us, too, to a large de- gree, a piece of religious work. To engage in it is to enlist in the nation's service. Its call is for those who would dedicate themselves in a noble way. Those who would serve must be of the world, with red blood in their veins ; they must

know the world, its needs, and its problems ; they must have largeness of vision, and the courage to do and to dare ; and they must train the youth with whom they come in contact for useful and efficient action.

Mirroring the Prussian system, everyone gets a free compulsory education but only is trained and educated to a point, so not to be “too educated”. Too much education could challenge the status quo and educating someone of the lower class would be seen as a waste of time and effort because science proves they are less-than. Cubberley encourages a tracking system in education, where roles are determined and never challenged. He calls upon teachers with such emotionally charged buzz words as “blood in their veins”, “dare”, “vision”, “useful”, and “action”; the propagandized words seek to further the agenda under the utopian pretext of passion and a desire to solve the world’s problems.

Changing Conceptions of Education in America can be found at http://www.archive.org/stream/changingconcepti00cubbuoft/changingconcepti00cubbuoft_djvu.txt