Education- life skills or college bound?

As I slowly read Left Back by Diane Ravitch, I see this polarity between a pratical, life skills, vocational education and an elitist, college bound, rigor for all education. What if I want both?

I think it is absolutely immoral to marginalize and track students and place the "dummies" in "dummy" classes. How dare we deny people knowledge of the world, at an intellectual level for deep comprehension and a drive to change. Although I'm biting my own words when I think back to my high school days, "why do I have to learn Algebra II? I'll never use it". Okay so I still have yet to use it. But that leads me to my other point.

We should have some life skills and vocational training. As mentioned, I've yet to use Algebra II. So perhaps a business math, statistics, logic, etc type math course would have been more appropriate, and no less challenging. And we do need life skills training. I left high school not knowing how to apply for a job, balance a check book, understand credit card interest and debt, make calls to companies or employers or what have you, pay taxes, or understand the voter pamphlets. I had to learn it on my own and felt pretty idiotic, and "jipped" by my education system, for having to do so. And I know some students, and adults who for example cannot divide a fraction or identify the conjunction in a sentence but the offer something else to the world. They're great mechanics, artists, musicians, etc. They would have benefited from training aimed more towards their interest.

But...I think all students should be offered an elitist college level education. I think some courses are a must, like writing, reading, history, government to name a few. You need to know how the world works to work in it. You need to know how it all connects as well. Dummy classes don't offer this.

And education should be somewhat student centered. Many people, researchers, authors, etc on "my side" of education reform think student-centered education is a bunch of hooey. It can be. If a teacher becomes a facilitator and just says "here's some books and computers kids, do what you want" and a student turns in their senior project written like this "i wanna b a architect. They make good money. You have to go to collage for many years but it helps u succeed and you can design buildings like the empire state building or bridges or stadiums for sports or even school and you can b famous for the buildings you made that would be cool." is not what I'm talking about, but have seen. I know of a school in Brazil, "Graded" which is student centered but at a college level, where students pursue their own passions within a framework, with direct guidance. It's like montessori meets ivy league. This is what I'm talking about.

My short post has turned lengthy and I am beginning to lose focus in my ramblings so that is all for now. Off to apply for jobs; however, I still have not received conformation on my job status as all are ignoring my communications.

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.