The New World and the Old

The European visitors had much to marvel at in the New World they visited in the second quarter of the nineteenth century. Not least among the oddities encountered was what appeared to be a new breed of children. Mrs. Trollope, among the first to report on the situation, was not at all pleased with what she found. American children seemed to her a dirty, noisy, misbehaved, undisciplined, disrespectful lot. She confided to her readers that she was not the only gentlewoman who had come to this conclusion: “I have conversed with many American ladies on the total want of discipline and subjection which I observed universally among children of all ages, and I never found any who did not both acknowledge and deplore the truth of the remark.” The “ladies” may have “deplored” their children’s behavior, but most Americans did not. In fact, what seems to have disturbed the visitors even more than the children’s lack of manners was the parents’ lack of concern. Eneas MacKenzie was amazed that children were seated and served their tea with dirty faces, uncombed hair, and “evidently untaught” dispositions. He reported that all members of the American family “from the boy of six years up to the owner ... of the house appeared independent of each other.” A British naval officer reported the following scene he claimed to have overheard in 1837: . . . “Johnny, my dear, come here,” says his mama. “I won’t,’’ cries Johnny. “You must, my love, you are all wet, and you’ll catch cold.” “I won’t,” replies Johnny. “Come, my sweet, and I’ve something for you.” “I won’t.” “Oh! Mr. — , do, pray make Johnny come in.” “Come in, Johnny,” says the father. “I won’t.” “I tell you, come in directly, sir—do you hear?” “I won’t,” replies the urchin, taking to his heels. “A sturdy republican, sir,” says his father to me, smiling at the boy’s resolute disobedience. . . . The young were, it seemed, doing no more, nor less than was expected of them. Their parents seemed pleased at their children’s independence, even to the point of condoning their disobedience.

The “Tidal Wave”Contained—Open Admissions

Through the later fifties and sixties, the California plan was adopted, with modifications, in state after state. The four-year colleges and universities were protected by a rapidly expanding network of community colleges, over 360 of which were established between 1958 and 1968. The national increase in public two-year enrollments approached 300 percent for the decade of the 1960s, close to triple that for overall higher education enrollments. In New York, two-year enrollments increased from 6 percent of total public enrollments in 1960 to nearly 50 percent in 1970. The increases in Massachusetts, New Jersey, and Connecticut were as dramatic, from 4 percent to 26 percent, 2 percent to 28 percent, and zero to 20 percent respectively. By 1976, more than one third of all college freshmen and nearly 50 percent of those in public institutions were enrolled in community colleges. Due in no small part to this rapid increase in the number and enrollment of the community colleges, higher education had come within reach of the 1947 President’s Commission recommendations: nearly one-half of the college-age population was attending some institution of higher education. As the 1973 Second Newman Report—commissioned and funded by the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare—proudly proclaimed, American higher education “by the middle 1960s began moving into . . . [an] egalitarian [period]. Increasingly the American public has assumed that everyone should have a chance at a college education.” Unfortunately for those offered that chance, the system, though opened at the bottom, remained as closed as ever on top. The new generation of students was not granted access to higher education in general but to particular institutions—the community colleges. And these colleges, though presented as transitional institutions to the four-year schools, were in fact designed to keep students away from the senior colleges. As Amitai Etzioni of Columbia University explained for the readers of the Wall Street Journal, “If we can no longer keep the floodgates closed at the admissions office, it at least seems wise to channel the general flow away from four-year colleges and toward two-year extensions of high school in the junior and community colleges.”

New Studies for New Students

The traditional high school education, by unfitting its graduates “for work with their hands,” encouraging them instead to look beyond the factory for their future employment, had become more of a problem than a solution. Still, despite its faults, it remained the only viable institutional solution to the “youth” and “worker” problems. To eject working-class youth from the institutions best situated to ease them through the perils of adolescence into the responsibilities of adulthood would serve no good purpose. The task confronting the business community and the critics of the high schools was a complex one: they wanted to bring as many “plain people” as possible into the high schools and keep them there through their teens, but in such a way that their expectations for life after graduation would not be inappropriately raised. Industrial schooling appeared to be the solution. Not only would such programs direct students towards realistic and realizable futures, but they would also attract many working class students who, the experts claimed, had been frightened away by the traditional secondary school curriculum. The masses, it was said, were not entering or remaining in the high schools because the high school curriculum had not been adjusted to their special needs. The muckrakers took great delight in calling attention to what they considered the failure of the high schools to move out of the dark ages. The secondary schools' exclusive emphasis on “culture,” it was argued, might have been appropriate to an earlier era, but was most definitely not appropriate to the modern age. “Our medieval high schools: shall we educate children for the 12th or the 20th century?” asked a Saturday Evening Post article somewhat ingenuously in 1912, the conclusion having already been reached that the schools were at least eight centuries behind the times. The critics of the public high schools, especially those from the business world, accepted without question the inability of the “masses” to proceed at the same academic rate as the “classes.” The working-class children were failing because they could not keep up with their middle-class counterparts and, in fact, were totally incapable of learning the same kinds of things.

The “Youth” Problem

In the 1830s, the European visitors had been appalled by the behavior of American children—and their parents. The children were undisciplined, ill-mannered, and impudent—and their parents seemed unconcerned. A half-century later the Europeans might still complain about the children of the New World (as one Frenchman visiting the U.S. in 1892 put it, “a composite photograph of American youth would reveal ‘le plus terrible de tous les enfants terribles’ “), but they could no longer complain about the adults’ lack of concern. The youthful disrespect and unruliness that had once been smiled on as typically American had come to be considered not only unfortunate but positively harmful to the future of the republic. The antebellum reformers, teachers, preachers, and other authorities, had been critical of the behavior of children other than their own, but they had especially focused their attention on the younger children. In their considered opinion it was the earliest years that were most crucial. This was the period in which the child’s character would be formed. The twentieth-century experts were not so certain. What troubled them most was not the youngest children, but their older brothers and sisters. Though they did not deny the importance of providing the younger ones with moral training, they emphasized repeatedly it was the last stage of youth that was the most crucial. Adolescence as a stage in human development was literally invented during the first decades of the twentieth century. Though, as we shall see, educators and youth workers, lawyers and judges, magazine writers and editors, muckrakers, progressives, and reformers—lay, clerical, and professional—all contributed to the conceptualization, it was the psychologists who gave the new developmental age the patina of scientific explanation it would need to survive. G. Stanley Hall, a student of William James, president of Clark University, and the first American to invite. Sigmund Freud to lecture in this country, introduced the adolescent to the scientific and lay community in 1905 in his massive twovolume work, appropriately entitled: Adolescence: Its Psychology and Its Relations to Physiology, Anthropology, Sociology, Sex, Crime, Religion, and Education.

The Irish and the Common Schools

The reformers had set out on their crusade for common schools in the middle 1830s, a time when the American white population was still relatively homogeneous. They did not pay special attention to the immigrants because there were too few immigrants to merit special concern. Beginning with the early 1840s, all this would change. A combination of factors had in the later thirties and forties made life not only uncomfortable but impossible in Ireland. An increase in population, several successive potato crop failures, legislation in England that forbade relief to Irish emigrés, a drop in the price of Irish grain, and new laws that allowed landlords to evict previously unevictable tenants set the stage for what would become one of the largest mass migrations of modern history. The wave of Irish immigration that began in the late 1830s would not subside until the middle 1850s. During the peak years of the influx alone (1846 to 1853), nearly 1¼ million Irish men, women, and children would disembark in the New World. Where there had been neither work nor land for the Irish in their own country or elsewhere in the British Isles, there appeared to be plenty of both in the New World. The immigrants would soon discover, however, that the work was of the most menial, degraded, and underpaid variety, and the land, though abundant, cost far more than they could afford. The Irish found work in the coastal cities where they disembarked. They excavated “ditches for gas and water mains, or were taken in gangs to dig canals or prepare the track of new railroads, or served as engine crews in the omnipresent steamboats. Throughout the [antebellum] period their brawn was laying the foundation for the new material civilization of America.” Across the country the pattern was the same. The Irish filled the unskilled laborer jobs, those with the least security, requiring the least skill, and paying the lowest wages. In Newburyport, Massachusetts, foreigners accounted for almost two-thirds of the common laborers. The majority of these were Irish. In Boston, over four-fifths of the laborers enumerated in the 1850 census had been born in Ireland.

Introduction

A history of American public schooling reduced to graphs would tell a simple story of almost continuous growth. In every category, the graphs would incline upwards, recording a steady rise in the number of students in school, the time they spent there, the teachers who taught them, the schools that housed them, and the dollars expended. The upward trend would continue unbroken from the 1820s until the 1970s. We cannot, at this time, chart the downward course that has commenced (if only temporarily) in the mid-1970s. We know only that that part of the American public that votes on school bond issues and makes its opinions known to professional pollsters is no longer willing to spend as much money or place as much trust in public schooling as it once was. It is too soon to predict the future course of public schooling in America, but a good time to reconsider the past. To understand why Americans have grown disillusioned with their public schools we must look beyond the immediate present to the larger history of the United States and its public schools. The public schools of this country—elementary, secondary, and higher—were not conceived full-blown. They have a history, and it is the social history of the United States. This essay will not attempt to present that history in its entirety but will focus instead on three specific periods decisive for the social history of this society and its public schools: the decades before the Civil War, in which the elementary or “common schools” were reformed; the decades surrounding the turn of the twentieth century, in which the secondary schools “welcomed” the “children of the plain people”; and the post-World War II decades, which found the public colleges and universities “overwhelmed” by a “tidal wave” of “non-traditional” students— those traditionally excluded from higher education by sex, race, and class. In each of these periods, the quantitative expansion of the student population was matched by a qualitative transformation of the enlarged institutions.

Conclusion

The past century and a half has been a period of unparalleled expansion and reform in American public schooling. In the two decades following the 1837 accession of Horace Mann to the secretaryship of the Massachusetts Board of Education, the foundation was laid for a state-mandated, state-coordinated, tax-supported system of common schools, open to the children of every community. At the turn of the century the high schools were transformed by the entrance of the “children of the plain people.” In 1890 less than 4 percent of the nation’s fourteen-to-seventeen-year olds attended public high schools; thirty years later, the percentage approached 30 percent. In the interim, the high schools could proudly be proclaimed the new “people’s colleges.” In the post-World War II decades it was higher education that was expanded and reformed. The promise of a college education was offered first to the returning veterans and then to the majority of high school graduates. Where in 1940 under 15 percent of the eighteen-to-twenty-one-year-old population attended college, thirty years later the proportion approached 50 percent. In each period of reform, schooling systems were transformed from “elite” to “mass.” But was this “massification” a “democratization”? Did the expansion of access indicate a corresponding increase in opportunity? Let us look first at the common school crusade. This period of reform, unlike later ones, did not result in a significant increase in the proportion of children in school. There was an increase in public school enrollment, but this increase reflected more a shift of students from private and parochial schools than an influx of newly enrolled students. Those who had been excluded from schooling before the common school reform movement were not affected by its triumph. The poor and immigrant children of the factory towns and cities could not have attended school without child labor legislation and family income subsidies, neither of which were forthcoming. Girls, always expendable as far as formal schooling was concerned, remained no less so in the common schools. For blacks the period was one of diminishing opportunity.

A “Rising Tide” of Students: the Public Sector

Like other patriotic institutions, higher education enlisted for service in World War II and re-enlisted for the Cold War. The universities and colleges enthusiastically provided the military and private industry with trained personnel and scientific R&D and the society-at-large with the best unemployment insurance federal money could buy. The G.I.’s, over two million of them, were welcomed into the institutions of higher education, where, as we have seen, they prospered. The schools that accepted them did as well: the money the veterans brought with them enabled the institutions to survive and remain relatively solvent through what could have been a difficult period. Though the G.I. Bill had the effect of bailing out the nation’s colleges and universities, it was originally designed not to aid education as much as to deter unemployment. In this it was most effective. Between 1945 and 1948, with G.I. enrollments close to one million, the unemployment rate stayed below 4 percent. Only in 1949, with veteran enrollment on the decline, did the rate climb back above 5 percent where it remained until the outbreak of another war. Though the postwar buying spree and the diversion of veterans from unemployment lines to college campuses had forestalled a postwar depression, the specter of massive unemployment was not entirely exorcised. The Employment Act of 1946 codified what would become a chief task of the federal government throughout the postwar period: the maintenance of unemployment levels at a rate high enough to provide employers with a reserve army to draw from but not high enough to recreate depression conditions and the possibility of social explosion. Holding unemployment down to a reasonable level through the fifties and sixties was no simple task. The corporations—through automation at home and relocation overseas—displaced workers; the federal government was expected to get them back to work or at least defuse the social discontent and potential economic catastrophe they represented. The unions took little responsibility for the shrinkage in the number of workers.

One Depression Cured, Another Prevented: Planning for War and. Postwar

The depression burst upon the nation in the summer of 1929 and did not subside for a decade. Unemployment was computed officially at 8.7 percent in 1930, 15.9 percent in 1931, and 23.6 percent in 1932. It did not dip below 20 percent until 1936, and it would not go below 5 percent until 1942. As the figures demonstrate, the appearance of FDR in the White House, whatever it did for the nation’s “spirit,” did not solve the problem of unemployment. FDR’s first attempt at a cure for the country’s economic ills was the same as Hoover’s—balancing the budget—and similarly unsuccessful. Balancing the budget by reducing spending was the exact opposite of what J. M. Keynes, the English economist, had prescribed for the depressed economy. Keynes argued that in a depression public spending had to be increased, not decreased, to put people back to work. The nature of their jobs was not as important as the salaries they earned. It was their paychecks that would start the economy going again as they used them to buy goods and services, pumping money into the depressed economy. As Keynes himself put it: . . . If the Treasury were to fill old bottles with banknotes, bury them at suitable depths in disused coal-mines which are then filled up to the surface with town rubbish, and leave it to private enterprise on well-tried principles of laissez-faire to dig the notes up again . . . there need be no more unemployment and, with the help of the repercussions, the real income of the community, and its capital wealth also, would probably become a good deal greater than it actually is. . . . What Keynesian logic could not accomplish, the German and Japanese threat to the “free world” and its “free economy” could. “In the Second World War the equivalent of the . . . buried bottles full of money were the tanks, the bombers, and the aircraft carriers.” They did the job, as Keynes had predicted. In the course of the war, the nation spent itself out of the depression.

Reforming the High Schools

The reformed boards, their superintendents, and their professional staffs had their work cut out for them. As we have seen, the city and some rural school systems had never been able to catch up with the expanding school-age population. Overcrowding was particularly a problem in the urban areas of the Northeast and the Midwest. In New York City alone, “at the turn of the century 1,100 willing children were refused admission to any school for lack of space.” The situation was as bad in other city school systems. The overcrowding was no doubt contributory to the high rate of failure and growing percentage of overage students in the city schools—over 40 percent of the total in the Boston, Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, New York, and Minneapolis systems, according to Colin Greer. One might have expected that the major thrust of reform at the turn of the century would be these urban schools. But this was not the case. As the nineteenth century gave way to the twentieth, the major concern of the public school reformers was not the overcrowded elementary schools, but the relatively underattended high schools. Though the elementary schools were not doing their job as well as might be hoped, they were at least keeping upwards of 70 percent of the school-age population off the streets and under proper supervision through their most tender years. The same could not be said of the secondary schools. As late as 1890, more than 90 percent of the fourteen-to-seventeen-year-olds (those potentially dangerous adolescents) were free of any institutional supervision. Here was a potential “social problem” much more dangerous than overcrowding and failure in the elementary grades. The progressive reformers and their colleagues had succeeded through the closing decades of the nineteenth century in drawing attention to the “youth” and “class” problems. The problems, as they themselves had pointed out, were interconnected. Problem adolescents were not going to become model wageworkers; they were much more likely to become problem workers. The solution proposed to the youth and class problems was an institutional one.