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Chapter 14 The 20th Century Reform Movements to 1950
§ 1. Historical Sources and the Educational Spectrum
I find these last three chapters of the Critique the most
difficult to write. The reason is owed to a level of uncertainty I
feel concerning the extent to which details in the history of
education in 20th century America should be reexamined here. I want
you to clearly understand that I am not saying the authors of these
histories make serious blunders in reporting facts. But historians
are people and, through lack of metaphysical grounding in a
social-natural science of history, historians are as vulnerable to
subjective judgments of taste as all the rest of us. This can color
the lens of historical reporting when the subject matter is one
that tends to be important to almost everyone in a Society.
Education is such a subject. I know a lot of people from all walks
of life and greatly diverse mini-cultural backgrounds, yet I do not
think I know one single person who is actually indifferent to or
apathetic about public education. I do know many people who are
intensely passionate about it – probably more passionate than bodes
well for its future prospects, In this study, I strived to identify
the body of objective facts but also have had to ask myself, "To
what extent must the Critical analysis of how this was done be
reported here?"
Different historians view matters from individual perspectives.
Those I regard as the most professional of its practitioners also
take advantage of the comments, criticisms, and suggestions of
other historians when they produce their historical accounts.
History is the great fact-gathering enterprise of civilization. It
is at the least the practice of a natural history if not yet a
natural science, and its role can hardly be overstated. But because
it is at present more the practice of a natural history than a
natural science, subjectivism is always present to some degree in
histories. In this treatise, I have referred to and quoted from
those histories, or those segments within a particular study of
history, that appear to me to be the most objective and the least
affected by judgment of taste and the human-natural inclination to
draw satisficing conclusions. The histories to which I refer are
summarized in the reference section at the end of this chapter.
Yet, though these represent the best efforts I have come across in
my own research, few of them are without some evidential
appearances of rhetoric warning the account might there become a
bit colored and walk a thin line between objectivity and
inclinations of partisanship. The only recourse one has to this
entirely-human state of affairs is to follow the practice required
generally in historical analysis of any topic: one must keep the
parts of it that are apparently correct, discard the parts that are
clearly erroneous, and set the rest down as matters for further
investigation.
The topic of education history has the peculiarity that nearly
all professionals who report on it are personally involved, in one
way or another, in the practice of education. It is one thing to
report on Queen Anne's War from the comfortable vantage of the 21st
century; it is another thing altogether to objectively report on a
subject matter that is also one's daily enterprise. The latter
requires an abnormally higher standard of practice than does the
former, but standards of practice are much more difficult to
establish for a natural history than for a natural science.
I am confident you have long noted that I am not without some
influence of partisanship as I write this treatise. Honest
disclosure demands of me that I state quite clearly what exactly it
is I am a partisan in the Cause of: I am a supporter of and
advocate for the Idea of the American Republic developed in the
founding days of this country, and of a Society and a nation in
which the system of governance well and faithfully serves the six
fundamental objectives of government (at all levels of government)
stated in the Preamble of the Constitution of the United States:
(1) to form a more perfect Union; (2) to establish justice; (3) to
insure domestic tranquility; (4) to provide for the common defense;
(5) to promote the general welfare; and (6) to secure the blessings
of liberty for ourselves and our posterity. That is my Cause. As
for educational "-isms," I don't give a damn about any of them.
They didn't work and are inimical to my Cause. But each
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of them did contain, at one time or another, ideas and practices
that are congruent with human Nature and with Order and Progress in
a free nation dedicated to liberty with justice for all its
citizens. We must extract from each of them those parts, and only
those parts, that are correct and beneficial to our country, then
toss what remains of the "-ism" on the trash heap of history.
One source in which there is no trace of partisanship is Johnson
(1904) and there is likely a very simple explanation for this. In
1904 the 20th century conflicts had not yet begun and Johnson was
merely reporting a history of a bygone era in American education
with visible evidence of a degree of nostalgia coupled occasionally
with fond amusement. There is also little to no evidence of
partisanship in Blake (1961). Blake's little book is a series of
historical time-lines with annotations of when some important
events occurred and people of notoriety lived. It would be
difficult to unintentionally interject partisanship in such a
format. I think it is worth noting that Blake was assistant
director for audio-visual instruction in the San Diego City Schools
and wrote his little book as a learning aid for beginning students
of education history. Alone among the collected authors here, Blake
was not a college professor did not hold a Ph.D. He was simply a
man who was interested in the history of education and made himself
a scholar of it.
Reese (2011) examines educational history and how institutional
changes reflected changes that were taking place in American
Society at the time. The presentation is impartial although not
without occasional wry comments. If Reese subscribes to an "-ism,"
it is not apparent in the book.
Angus and Mirel (1999) present a thesis that on the whole
appears to be the outcome of care-ful and professional scholarship
without ideology. Statements are backed up by statistical data and
if either author had sympathies inclined toward one or another
brand of "-ism" this is not especially evident in their book other
than for some occasional speculations regarding the motives or
psychology of particular players in the on-going conflicts in
education. These few instances lead me to speculate that the
authors are at least somewhat sympathetic to tenets of
Essentialism, but if this is so it does not harm the scholarship in
the book.
Bloom does not attempt to conceal his partisanship or the fact
that his book is a denunciation of developments in higher education
during and after the 1960s. At least this is honest partisan-ship
because the reader would have to be dull-witted to not understand
he was reading a protest. Bloom was, according to divers accounts,
not a particularly patient man, or given to sugar-coating his
statements, or one who was much concerned over whether or not
others found his style abrasive. His book enraged surviving
partisans of progressivism and reconstructionism, who retaliated by
labeling him a "perennialist" – which seems to be the strongest
denunciation in their vocabulary – and calling into question
whether he was a scholar at all. Bloom's book is clearly a
one-sided presentation, and because he too engaged in some amount
of character assassination in its pages, I don't feel sorry for him
when those he offended retaliated in kind. But saying that lessons
from the past have pertinence for the present does not make one a
"perennialist." His aim was to be provocative, and he obviously did
succeed in achieving that aim. The weakness of his book, as I see
it, is that Bloom did not offer to show us a way to follow in order
that the problems he points out could be corrected. Anyone can
denounce and criticize, and sometimes denunciation and criticism
are needed. But for criticism to be constructive, there must be
some positive follow up to the negative. Dutiful practice of
science entails: (1) not ignoring what Bloom had to say (that would
be type-α compensation); and (2) an impartial investigation of his
charges to identify real causes of problems he correctly points
out. What Bloom was attacking at root is a post-1960s trend in
education others have called "multiculturalism." If there was one
label – which there is not – that describes the faddish character
of 20th century educational reforms, this label would not be it.
Its practices abandon instruction that assistants learners in
achieving Progress in their personal Personfähigkeit for fulfilling
their Duties to the corporate Personfähigkeit of our civil
Community. More accurate practical terms, in regard to its
outcomes, would be anticulturalism or perhaps anti-intellectualism
or perhaps even outlawism; but there is nothing "cultural" about
it.
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Cubberley was a full member of the Progressive Education
Movement in the opening decades of the 20th century, and his book
is written entirely from the standpoint of progressivism. If one
knows this going in, the partisanship, presuppositions and
prejudices he exhibits, particularly toward minorities and
immigrants, can be rendered harmless. If his or any other author's
attitude irritates you, you can probably best deal with it and
maintain your objectivity if you remember that neither a Moses, nor
a St. Paul, nor an angel, nor a Buddha writes history books.
Hansen was likewise a member of the Progressive Education
Movement. In his case, the biases he occasionally exhibits are
evidenced in a few rhetorical remarks, by his persistent mis-use of
the word "democracy," and his obvious reverence for an ideal of
"liberal education." In the main, however, his scholarship is
impeccable and his reporting of facts solid. His is an excellent
work and the standard for assessing the outlooks of the Founding
Fathers in regard to the sort of public education they saw
necessitated by the novel form of Republic they had established.
His own occasional interpretations are set out as distinguishably
his own and not disguised in the form of an allegation of
historical fact. Hence they are easy to treat as his and his book
is cleared of all charges of presenting propaganda. It is perfectly
permissible for an author to have opinions and to express his
conclusions provided his reader can clearly recognize them as his
and the author does not attempt to buttress them by presenting them
as someone else's.
Potter's book is likewise a textbook case of professional
practice. He examines the history of American education from many
different perspectives and identifies whose perspectives they are.
In some ways, his book is more of a textbook aimed at illustrating
for students how to practice the use of history than it is a
traditional history book. He devotes a 17-page prologue to
precisely that subject. I have been able to identify very few
presuppositions of importance embedded in the main text. The only
mild concerns I have are: (1) it is unclear if Potter merely
presents Brameld's taxonomy or if he subscribes to it; and (2) he
does not distinguish between what is philosophy of education vs.
what is philosophizing about education – and here my concern is
that he apparently takes it for granted that these are one and the
same or nearly the same thing.
Pulliam & Patten (2007) is a college textbook for future
teachers rather than a 'pure' history of American education. As
such, by the nature of its objective the authors find it necessary
to set out what they regard as the most instructive examples, and
they necessarily must present the subject-matter in its
standardized current form. The need for selection and summary means
that a higher degree of author preference must go into the
composition of the book, and this cannot be done otherwise than
through a mental process of judgmentation in which the role of
judgments of taste is prominent. The book exhibits an unfavorable
regard for essentialism and speaks for modern progressivism. One
must keep in mind that disciplinary paradigmatic teaching and not
history per se is the objective of this book. Its statements are
easily cross-checked; doing so is necessary.
If the book has a weakness, this is found in the second chapter,
which presents the 'educational philosophy' paradigm, critiqued in
chapter 13, as a given. This, however, is congruent with what
teachers of a discipline are expected to do, namely to teach that
discipline. The teacher-training discipline purchases its
understanding of philosophy from an outside vendor, specifically, a
philosophy department. If the product purchased is flawed, it is
the responsibility of the vendor to correct this. No discipline
operating with public funds is granted a license to exist as an
island universe cut off from all the other disciplines, or to take
public money and do as it pleases with it, least of all philosophy
or teacher-training. Public funding is not a hog trough.
Ravitch (2000) examines education history from the perspective
of educational reforms, policies, reformers, and programs. Because
of the tone of Ravitch's rhetoric, e.g. pages 16-18, and her
occasional use of statistics that are somewhat misleading, I regard
the book as a not-impartial treatment of the subject. Its
presentation seems to favor an essentialist viewpoint.
Consequently, it must also be used with precautions and
crosschecks. Ravitch counterbalances Pulliam & Patten.
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Figure 14.1: The socio-practical spectrum of public
instructional education in comparison with the socio-
political spectrum and Brameld's taxonomy of education
theories.
Some writers of education history, e.g. Cubberley, write from
the perspective of the discipline of educators-of-educators, i.e.,
from the perspective of people engaged in the development of
education theory. Others, e.g. Reese or Angus & Mirel, write
from the perspective of history as a discipline, i.e., from the
perspective of professional history-reporting. The latter group
tends to be less tied than the former to theoretical constructs
such as Brameld's taxonomy. Professional education theorists tend
to employ or embed theoretical constructs in their historical
accounts to a significantly more notable degree. Professional
historians, by contrast, tend to view education history in a manner
that more directly ties the character of the institution to the
socio-political spectrum of opinions and views found in the broader
Society. The difference in perspective leads to differences in how
the same historical events are interpreted.
Figure 14.1 illustrates this in regard to the socio-practical
spectrum of public instructional education vs. the spectrum of
education theory. Brameld's taxonomy distinguished four classes of
"educational beliefs"; these "belief classes" correspond to the
four most popular "-isms" favored by the 20th century educators. In
contrast, although Reese and others do not attempt to present a
formal taxonomy, study of the histories written from the pure
historian's perspective tends to show a five-fold set of logical
divisions closely aligned to the socio-political spectrum of
opinions. The difference between Brameld's four-fold logical
taxonomy of "beliefs" and the five-fold logical division of
education institution from the perspective of the practical
character of the institution is both significant and important. In
Brameld's taxonomy, the restorative-transmissive half of the
spectrum and the moderative-innovative half are mutually negative
with respect to each other. What I mean by this is that, e.g., the
Brameld transmissive "belief system" and the Brameld moderative
"belief system" are such that effects of efforts by one group of
believers act so as to cancel the effects of efforts by the other
group. The relationship between the two groups is inherently one of
real opposition (Entgegensetzung) and the resultant of efforts by
the two groups has the Quality of real antagonism (Widerstreit).
There is no common ground here and reform efforts by opposing
"belief groups" cannot yield a stable equilibrium but, rather, can
only lead to cancellation of each other's efforts and a chronic
state of social disturbance (lack of social equilibrium). Here is
the classic Toynbee symptom of social breakdown. It is a direct
consequence of reforms grounded in ontology-centered theoretical
suppositions and the adult moral realism characteristic of the
behaviors of the major 20th century "belief groups" or "-isms."
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Basing reform on the now-traditional education speculations and
theories tends to leave the overarching consideration of the real
interests of the civil Community (to whom the instituted public
education system belongs) out of the specific aims of the opposing
groups. When the reforms are viewed from the perspective of
practical divisions of the institution's character, what is made
evident through this perspective is that there are five
non-antagonistic possibilities for the institution, each one of
which corresponds to the character of present social needs. What I
mean by this is the following. In times of domestic tranquility and
the absence of Toynbee challenges, the education institution is in
an equilibrium condition with: (1) moderate changes occasionally
taking place to assimilate new social conditions; and (2) moderate
innovations occasionally being put into practice to accommodate
social perturbations. When assimilation and accommodation are thus
in balance with each other, the outcome is an institutional
equilibrium suitable for preserving Order in the Society but still
plastic enough to allow for its gradual Progress. In figure 14.1
this is what is denoted as "liberal education." This technical term
requires further explanation because the phrase "liberal education"
was so heavily embroiled in propaganda campaigns during the 20th
century that it became associated in many people's minds with
strictly political connotations that distort its role in the civil
objectives of the institution of public instructional
education.
In Critical applied metaphysics liberal education means
institution of a system of education designed with the purpose of
developing personal tastes and tenets of cooperation in such a way
as a civil Community deems desirable. The adjective 'liberal' used
in this terminology descends from the Latin liberalis: of or
pertaining to a free man. This has nothing to do with any political
ideology or even with specific educational curricula. Its
pertinence and meaning is tied instead directly to understanding
the terms and conditions of a Society's social contract. This is a
very different connotation from the usual dictionary one, i.e., "a
general extensive education not necessarily preparing the student
for any specific profession." Hutchins almost got, but did not
entirely get, the practical connotation of 'liberal education'
stated correctly when he wrote,
The aim of liberal education is human excellence, both private
and public . . . Its object is the excellence of man as man and man
as citizen. It regards man as an end, not as a means; and it
regards the ends of life, not the means to it. For this reason it
is the education of free men. . . .
Liberal education seeks to clarify the basic problems and to
understand the way in which one problem bears upon another. It
strives for a grasp of methods by which solutions can be reached
and the formulation of standards for testing solutions can be
proposed. [Hutchins (1952), pg. 3]
Where Hutchins erred was in making the identification of liberal
education dependent upon the presence of specific elements in a
curriculum. He contended there was a time in American history when
"liberal education was the education of the Founding Fathers."
Historical evidence contradicts this when one seeks and fails to
find when curricular elements Hutchins identifies as "the method of
liberal education" were present in the American institution of
education. His view of 'liberal education' was object-oriented –
which is to say it was ontology-centered – but the Object of
liberal education is a practical Object and its objective
significance is epistemological, not ontological. Liberal education
is not defined by, e.g., books but, rather, by what Hutchins called
its "aim"; the aim provides specifications for the books; the books
do not specify the aim.
In a scientific practice of educating, the contingent nature of
human experience and the basic satisficing character of human
decision-making and reasoning will always from time to time lead to
either excesses in educational practices or deficiencies in the
effectiveness of practices that challenge the institution beyond
its normal range of equilibrium. When (not if) this occurs, the
restoration of civil equilibrium will sometimes require restorative
efforts to roll back discovered excesses (restorative education),
and will sometimes require new innovations in curricula and
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methods (innovative education). The left-most and right-most
ends of the socio-practical ed-ucation spectrum recognize that
counter-revolutionary measures (repeal of innovative excesses) and
revolutionary measures (the invention of radically new methods and
curricula) are occasionally necessary to ensure the overall
maintenance of Order and the overall achievement of Progress in the
Personfähigkeit of a Society in the presence of Toynbee challenges.
Rather than Brameld's spectrum of theories-in-conflict, it is the
practical spectrum of the institution of public instructional
education that provides a proper Critical standard for evaluating
the institution. This is, consequently, the idea of the standard by
which the 20th century reforms are critiqued in this chapter. When
the standard is not met, I'm not going to soft-pedal reporting the
shortcomings.
§ 2. Overview of the 20th Century Reform Timeline
The turmoil of the 20th century conflicts in public
instructional education was so increasingly chaotic as the century
progressed that it becomes a challenge to present a general picture
of this period in American history. Furthermore, the educational
reforms over which the battles were fought cannot be considered
separately and in isolation from the economic history of the
century. That is why this treatise devoted so much space to the
economic picture of America in the 20th century: to see where
reform took us. Figure 14.2 presents approximate timelines when the
divers movements took place. The century can be roughly divided
into three major logical sections.
Figure 14.2: Approximate timeline for education reform movements
in the 20th century. Starting and ending dates are approximate.
Dashed lines denote: (1) non-organized continuations of reform
efforts
following the breakdown of recognized major formal reform
movements; (2) counter-reactions opposing one or more of the
former; or (3) movements by citizen factions reflecting an onset of
Toynbee proletariat
formation. Some of these non-organized movements are carried out
by persons sympathetic to the PAPE of a predecessor movement.
Others enlist persons who are responding to personal equilibrium
disturbances
with maxims grounded in pseudo-metaphysics prejudices. In all
cases these reform proposals contain little else than ad hoc quack
remedies favored by ad hoc political factions. These are abetted
temporarily by organized political Party politicians. The latter
seek to exploit factional prejudices and the anti-bonding
relationships between factions as means of serving non-educational
interests of their particular political
Party. In all cases, dashed-line movements are characterized
chiefly by propaganda campaigning.
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I compiled figure 14.2's timeline from the histories contained
in the references described in the previous section. These sources
contain a great mass of detailed data on events and those most
directly involved in them. Although in some particulars these
historians see some events from slightly different perspectives and
draw slightly different inferences in regard to causative factors,
on the whole they are remarkably homogeneous in their reporting of
observed events. This is, of course, what one expects to find when
historical research has been carried out carefully and with a high
degree of scholarly competence and impartiality.
In this treatise I do not attempt to repeat details already
competently reported. They are amply provided in the sources cited.
Any useful recapitulation I might attempt in this treatise would
merely add several more chapters and accomplish little else than
redundant reporting of the detailed history already provided and
accessible for your own review. What I do intend to provide in this
treatise is a non-redundant Critical assessment of events as this
must be scientifically carried out in a unified context of human
Nature, mental physics, and the American social contract. When I
think plain-speaking is essential for future reform, I state my
findings bluntly.
The three major logical divisions in the 20th century timeline
are: (1) the period covering epochs M1 through M3 (chapters 10-11),
which I call "the rulership of academic educologists"; (2) a period
of challenge approximately placed from around 1946 to 1968; and (3)
a period of break-down from around 1968 to the present day. You
will note that period 2 closely corresponds in time to epoch M4
(chapter 11) and the breakdown period closely corresponds to epoch
M5.
Within the body of the timeline are seven interlocked thematic
factors contributing to overall civic breakdown in the institution
of American public instructional education. These factors are: (1)
a reformation of American higher education from 1890 to 1910 that
prepared the groundwork for subsequent disastrous innovations; (2)
PAPE fanaticism by professional administrators and educologists
that led to perversions of the purpose of institutionalized public
instructional educa-tion; (3) establishment of uncivil curricula in
the public schools; (4) counter-reactions by members of the public;
(5) uncivic rulership by political party factions at state and
national levels; (6) ad hoc speculative policy development without
efforts to establish a social-natural scientific basis for
instructional education practices and policies; and (7)
Taylorism.
§ 3. Higher Education
It is probably more accurate to regard the period from 1890 to
1910 as the second phase of a revolution in higher education (with
its first phase beginning in 1865) than it is to regard it as a
second revolution. If so, this mirrors the point of view that the
industrial revolution in America was a second phase of what the
earlier Economy revolution had begun. Veysey called the period from
1890 to 1910 a "turning point" for higher education rather than a
"revolution" in higher education. He wrote,
The two most important types of academic conflict in the late
nineteenth century were over the basic purpose of the new
university and over the kind and degree of control to be exerted by
the institution's leadership. The first of these issues was
dominant from the Civil War until about 1890. . . . Arguments
tended to center upon definitions of the proper nature and function
of the university and were maintained in fairly abstract terms.
Then, beginning in the nineties, the emphasis of the dispute
shifted to a concern over academic administration, as factions
appeared in response to the tightening executive policies of the
institution. The battles which determined the fundamental direction
of American higher education were fought first along the lines of
competing academic goals, then over questions of academic command.
[Veysey (1965), pg. viii]
Prior to the higher education reformations of the Gilded Age,
American higher education was
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regarded by educators and governing boards of college trustees
as primarily an institution for moral Order in Society and as an
institution for training up the next generation of elites destined
to exercise benevolent rule over their fellow citizens. This was
rather literally a shepherd-and-the-sheep mindset because it
presumed the benevolence of the ruling elite would flow from
religious convictions college education was to develop and hone –
specifically, from Protestant Christian religious convictions. The
unquestioned presupposition of rulership was utterly at odds with
the principle of civic liberty in self determination that had
grounded the American Ideal of a free Republic. There is a
difference between the reform paradigm and what Jefferson wrote
that the objects of higher education applicable to all students in
every particular should be, namely,
To form the statesmen, legislators and judges, on whom public
prosperity and individual happiness are so much to depend; To
expound the principles and structures of government, the laws which
regulate the intercourse of nations, those formed municipally for
our own government, and a sound spirit of legislation, which,
banishing all arbitrary and unnecessary restraint on individual
action, shall leave us free to do whatever does not violate the
equal rights of another; To harmonize and promote the interests of
agriculture, manufactures and commerce, and by well informed views
of political economy to give a free scope to the public industry;
To develop the reasoning faculties of our youth, enlarge their
minds, cultivate their morals, and instill into them the precepts
of virtue and order; To enlighten them with mathematical and
physical sciences, which advance the arts, and administer to the
health, the subsistence, and comforts of human life; And generally,
to form them to habits of reflection and correct action, rendering
them examples of virtue to others, and of happiness within
themselves. [Jefferson (1818), pp. 334-335]
Although it was no longer accurate to say higher education was
preparation for the ministry, as it was in the 18th century, it is
nonetheless accurate to say a PAPE that can be called Protestant
Perennialism dominated the attitudes of professors and
administrators for the first half of the 19th century. Hutchins
called 1900 to 1925 the era of "the classical dissectors and
drillmasters" [Hutchins (1952), pp. 27-29], but he erred in
thinking that there was ever an earlier period in American higher
education when this label would not somehow have been applicable.
The education he described as that of the Founding Fathers never
was part of any formal institution of higher schooling. The
admirable traits he ascribes to it and credits to the Great Books
was real enough, but it was the product of educational
Self-development activities, not formal schooling. His label does,
however, aptly describe higher education prior to 1865 and, to a
lesser degree, a fraction of it still extant from 1890 to 1910. It
is not, however, either fair or accurate to say it applied to
educators like Royce. It is not surprising, then, that higher
education was not looked upon with favor by the majority of
American citizens. To the extent it can be correctly said that a
single PAPE ever exercised sole domination of the institution of
American higher education, this can be said of the period prior to
1865.
The first phase of the higher education revolution from 1865 to
1890 took as its theme an idea of utility. Of Jefferson's six
objects of higher education, Protestant Perennialism failed to
provide for the second through fifth Jeffersonian objects. It was
argued the reforms of the first phase addressed all these
omissions, but in fact they promoted only the third and fifth
objects, mainly through the innovation of the elective system
(whereby a student had choices in the subject matter he undertook
to study) and the promotion of education in the technical arts
(natural science and engineering). The second phase, 1890 to 1910,
undertook to establish a reorganization of higher education. It was
the product of this undertaking that turned the institution into a
non-civil agency. Because professors from the agencies of higher
education played a dominant role in all later reforms, this
misorganization and failing to meet the last two objects were
partial causes of the failure of the other education reforms in
primary and secondary public instructional education.
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Figure 14.3: Number of 4-year colleges, enrollment (in
thousands), and enrollment as percent of 18- to 24-year olds from
1880 to 2010. C = number of 4-year colleges; E = enrollments in
thousands; P = enrollment as percent of 18- to 24-year-olds.
Sources: Bureau of the Census (1976), H 689-693, 700, 706; U.S.
Census
Bureau (2011) tables 7, 278.
It can be accurately said that the first phase of the higher
education reform, the utility phase, was successful. In 1880 only
1.6% of 18- to 24-year-old Americans went on to college. Just as
the second phase of reform was getting underway, college attendance
began a boom period that lasted from 1890 to 1980 (with a brief
interruption due to World War II). Figure 14.3 graphs the number of
4-year colleges, enrollments, and enrollments as a percent of 18-
to 24-year-olds in the 20th century. One should bear in mind that,
of the total number of American higher education institutes, only a
minority consists of large universities (i.e., higher education
institutes comprised of multiple special colleges). The rest
consists of smaller universities and small colleges, some public
and some private. The large universities stand in relationship to
the smaller universities and colleges in much the same relationship
that large cities bear to the rest of the smaller urban and rural
communities. Most of the innovations in the reorganization of
higher education came from the large universities, and the smaller
institutes for the most part copied what the larger schools did
either all or in part. To put this in perspective, in Fall 2009
there were 296 institutes of higher education with enrollments of
10,000 students or more out of 1813 institutes total (these figures
exclude specialized institutes and 2-year institutes). Of these
large institutes, 270 were public institutes of higher education.
The largest institutes accounted for 19.4% of the total number of
institutes. They accounted for 65.6% of total higher education
enrollments [Snyder and Dillow (2011), table 244].
Reliable equivalent figures from the beginning of the 20th
century are not easily found and might not be available at all, but
it is beyond reasonable doubt that the number of trend-setting
universities was a very small percentage of the institutes in
existence at that time. The institutes most prominently involved
were Harvard, Columbia, Johns Hopkins, Clark, Cornell, Michigan,
Chicago, and Wisconsin. Other institutes with some notable presence
in the reformation included Yale, Princeton, Stanford, and
California. Although it is by no means true that all the leadership
for innovative reform in American higher education came from
university and college presidents, there were five university
presidents who greatly influenced the course of events from 1868 to
1910: Charles W. Eliot at Harvard (president from 1869 to 1909),
Andrew D. White at Cornell (1868-1884), Daniel C. Gilman at Johns
Hopkins (1877-1901), Stanley G. Hall at Clark (1889
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forward), and James B. Angell at Michigan (1871-1909).
Veysey wrote,
By 1910 the structure of the American university had assumed its
stable twentieth century form. . . . Few new ideas have been
advanced on the purpose of higher education since 1900, and there
have also been few deviations in its basic pattern of organization.
. . .
Looking back, it could be seen that the decade of the nineties
witnessed the firm development of the American academic model in
almost every crucial detail. Again and again the first widespread
occurrence of a particular academic practice may be traced to those
years, usually after preliminary pioneering by one or two
institutions during the [eighteen] seventies and eighties. The
precedents that came into wide adoption in the [eighteen] nineties
proved all but irrevocable.
One may well pause to ponder this rapid stylization of
institutional relationships. Before 1890 there had been room for
decided choice about paths of action; there had been academic
programs which differed markedly from one another. . . . During the
nineties in a very real sense the American academic establishment
lost its freedom. To succeed in building a major university, one
now had to conform to the standard structural pattern in all basic
respects . . . A competitive market for money, students, faculty,
and prestige dictated the avoidance of pronounced eccentricities.
Henceforth initiative had to display itself within the lines laid
down by the given system. [Veysey (1965), pp. 338-340]
Toynbee's term for a Society answering to a description like
this was an arrested civilization:
Once a civilization is born, and provided it is not nipped in
the bud, as has been the fate of what we have called the abortive
civilizations, may not its growth be expected as a matter of
course? . . . The answer is that some do not [grow]. In addition to
the two classes already noticed, developed civilizations and
abortive civilizations, there is a third, which we must call
arrested civilizations. It is the existence of civilizations which
have been kept alive but failed to grow that compels us to study
the problem of growth . . .
All these arrested civilizations have been immobilized in
consequence of having achieved a tour de force. They are responses
to challenges of an order of severity on the very border-line
between the degree that affords stimulus to further development and
the degree that entails defeat. [Toynbee (1946), pp. 164-5]
Two characteristics, common to all these arrested societies,
stand out conspicuously – caste and specialization; and both these
phenomena can be embraced in a single formula: the individual
living creatures which each of these societies embraces are not all
of a single type but are distributed among two or three markedly
different categories. [ibid., pg. 181]
The characteristics of caste and specialization are both highly
descriptive of an American institute of higher education. In one
sense, caste was always present even if originally it was only
presented as a caste of faculty and a caste of students. The caste
system has diversified since then and is now additionally
represented by an administration caste and college- and
profession-based castes, notably those called the humanities, the
social sciences, the physical-natural sciences, engineering,
business, education (the descendent of the normal schools), and
'the professions' of law, medicine, dentistry, and veterinary
medicine. In addition, there is a caste system in the various
academic ranks and designations, e.g.: professor vs. associate
professor vs. assistant professor vs. instructor; teaching faculty
vs. research faculty; regular faculty vs. graduate faculty; tenured
and tenure-track faculty vs. non-tenure-track faculty; etc. The
multiplication of castes is traceable directly to specialization in
the institution of higher education.
Specialization developed from 1890 to 1910, and it was this
development that most directly
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led to American institutes of higher education becoming arrested
mini-Societies. It is obvious that higher education mini-Societies,
individually and collectively, managed to achieve a state of Order
for themselves. The institutes are still here more than a century
later and are, at least for now, sustaining themselves. But they
did not become agencies of Progress either for themselves or for
the greater Community whose property they are. An arrested
institution cannot make itself an agent of Progress for the
Community it is established to serve. But, because of the
Enterprise protein structure of a Society's corporate tangible
Personfähigkeit, it can became an agent of arrested development in
the greater Society of which it is a part, and this is the case for
the 20th century American institution of higher education.
It is possible for an arrested civilization to long endure. The
premier example of this is found in the case of the BaMbuti
Pygmies, who may well be the oldest civilization on earth. But it
is more often the case that arrested civilizations become fallen
civilizations. Toynbee documented five specific arrested
civilizations in his study of history. Of these, four no longer
exist.
To understand how it came to pass that American higher education
became arrested, and how it likewise came to exert a dominate role
in the development of the internecine PAPE conflicts of 20th
century public instructional education speculation, there are five
interlocking contributing factors that must be examined. These are:
(1) the 'utility' movement; (2) administrative feudalism governing
through the bankrupt practice of Taylorism; (3) curriculum; (4) the
over-specialization of faculty; and (5) the silo effect of
departmentalization within colleges and universities [Veysey
(1965), Thelin (2004)].
§ 3.1 The Utility Movement in Higher Education
'Utility education' is Veysey's aptly chosen name for an
academic reform movement variously known to its supporters by the
names 'practical,' 'useful,' 'service,' or 'vocational' education.
The variety of labels by which the movement was known to its own
supporters serves as a warning that its basic idea was ill-defined
and, consequently, served as more of a slogan than as a plan or an
objective. Veysey used "utility" as the common name for the
collective of diverse attitudes that came together just after the
Civil War of 1861-65 to change American higher education.
The word 'utility' as so used has only a tenuous connection with
the moral philosophy known as utilitarianism, with its Epicurean
underpinnings, promoted by philosophers such as John Stuart Mill.
At least this is so with regard to the education reformers; the
name is aptly used in the latter context when referenced to the
attitudes of the college students. This deontological disconnect
between the moralities of educators and education reformers and
those of the student body did not begin in 1865. There was also
such a deontological disconnect between student mini-Society and
faculty mini-Society before the post-Civil War reform era began.
Even so, this disconnect had a largely unrecognized importance
during both phases of higher education reform. Whenever debate
occurs over what education "should" be or what the "right" kind of
education is, there are always moral presuppositions standing
behind the particulars of reform proposals because words like
'should,' 'ought to,' and 'right' always ultimately refer to
objective maxims of mores and folkways. As these are almost always
conceived in ontology-centered prejudice and they present only the
personal and peculiar effects of individuals' moral codes, the
disconnect is ignored only at peril to the success of reformers who
ignore or fail to notice it, or to appreciate it de-ontologically.
Bode was one of the very few who did notice it and had some
appreciation of its effect, a point to which I return in volume III
of The Idea of Public Education.
What could over-generously be called 'the utility PAPE' affected
more than higher education alone. We see it represented in figure
14.2 by the trade school, vocational education, and business
education movements. It appeared also in the junior high and high
schools. But it was in higher education where the movement had its
deepest antisocial impacts. Veysey wrote,
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During the ten years after 1865, almost every visible change in
the pattern of American higher education lay in the direction of
concessions to the utilitarian type of demand for reform. This was
the period when important numbers of utility-minded leaders first
achieved respectable positions. . . . The initial academic
revolution, if such it was, constituted far more of a voluntary
accommodation than it did an armed invasion from below.
Soon faced with competition from other types of academic
reformers, the advocates of utility gained two conspicuous havens
within the new university framework. First, they frequently became
administrative leaders. For the administrator, useful service was a
notion broad enough to encompass the variety of unrelated studies
which was actually appearing; also, in the newly energetic state
universities, emphasis on public service was enforced by the
peculiar position of the president in relation to the legislature
and other non-academic pressure groups. Then, secondly, at the
faculty level belief in the primary importance of utility
characterized most of the professors in the new applied sciences
and a majority of the social scientists. As was noted in the
instance of philosophy, symptoms of this outlook eventually made
small but significant penetrations within the humanities. The
combined weight of all these academic men . . . assured that this
sort of demand would never lack an adequate hearing. [Veysey
(1965), pp. 60-61]
What I would like you to especially note here is Veysey's use of
the word "accommodation." The utility movement did not unite the
academic, political, and business mini-Communities, much less unite
them in common cause with the general public or, especially, with
the students. It is quite possible for one mini-Community to
accommodate others without assimilating with them. This is easily
accomplished through type-α compensation behavior, which in this
case takes on the appearances of that which is described by the
proverbial phrase "live and let live." Students come and go,
staying for only a few brief years; administrative officials
likewise come and go, often with little greater longevity than a
student's college tenure. Faculty members, on the other hand, come
and stay for often a very long time. Accommodation for this reason
tends to be made to favor the divers faculty mini-Communities more
than anyone else.
This sort of tenuous attitude of mutual accommodation does not
produce the unity of a higher education system. It is more aptly
described as a convention of traffic laws made for the more
convenient and safe passage of independent travelers on the same
highway making their own ways to their own divers private
destinations. Compensation behaviors of this sort can and do
expediently serve to provide for the short-term satisfactions of
diverse mini-Communities, and all people are satisficing decision
makers. As a side effect, it also places the college dean and the
university president and their staffs in the position of attempting
to maintain peace and tranquility by what can be likened to herding
cats. Because cats are not easily herded, this lays a sufficient
subjective groundwork for the emergence of administrative
feudalism.
It was a major problem for utility that accommodation was not
what any of the utilitarian re-formers had in mind as an objective.
Some were committed to "the good of society"; a few to "the good of
the students"; others to "serving the public"; others to "the good
of" science or art or culture. Other idealistic godheads also
existed within the reformers' collective. Accommodation, though,
serves none of these aims. As soon as one or more mini-Communities
conceived that their aims were not being served to their
satisfaction, they would take action to correct this and the
tenuous peace and tranquility of type-α compensation would be upset
by a new disturbance.
As for the mini-Community of students, their foundational aims –
the Duties-to-themselves and the Duties-to-others underpinning the
students' divers reasons for becoming students – did not have a
representative seated at the negotiating table. This attitude on
the part of the reformers is called paternalism, and it amounts in
practical terms to regarding and treating young adults as if they
were children who required the benevolent protection of an
institutionalized Duty of in loco parentis. No reformer asked a
student why he was studying engineering or chemistry or
literature.
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The reformers merely presumed they already knew the reason, and
so the aims of the reformers never took into account actual aims of
the students, nor did they give consideration to the reconciliation
of these aims with those of the Society to whom the institution of
public higher education belongs. Unintentional violations of the
social contract were therefore inevitable even among the educator
mini-Communities. So it came to pass that in 1987 Bloom could
write,
In looking at [the student] we are forced to reflect on what he
should learn if he is to be called educated; we must speculate on
what the human potential to be fulfilled is. In the specialties we
can avoid such speculation, and avoidance of them is one of
specialization's charms. But here it is a simple duty. What are we
to teach this person? . . . It is childishness to say, as some do,
that everyone must be allowed to develop freely, that it is
authoritarian to impose a point of view on the student. In that
case, why have a university? If the response is "to provide an
atmosphere for learning," we come back to our original questions at
the second remove. Which atmosphere? Choices and reflections on the
reasons for those choices are unavoidable. The university has to
stand for something. . . .
The university now offers no distinctive visage to the young
person. He finds a demo-cracy of the disciplines – which are there
either because they are autochthonous or because they wandered in
recently to perform some job that was demanded of the university.
This democracy is really an anarchy because there are no recognized
rules for citizenship and no legitimate titles to rule. In short
there is no vision, nor is there a set of competing visions, of
what an educated human being is. The question has disappeared, for
to pose it would be a threat to the peace. . . . The student gets
no intimation that great mysteries might be revealed to him, that
new and higher motives of action might be discovered within him,
that a different and more human way of life can be harmoniously
constructed by what he is going to learn. [Bloom (1987), pp.
336-337]
Bloom is wrong about one thing here: there are multiple contrary
visions of what an educated human being is, each held with
sincerity and good intention. The issue is not want of vision; it
is surfeit of contradiction among the manifold visions of educators
and citizens regarding "what an educated human being is." I
encounter manifold diversity in precisely this in nearly every
inter-collegiate and university-level committee or panel I serve
on. They are frequently held with such a fierce passion as would by
its example make a saint feel ashamed of his own comparative lack
of devotion to Christ. Type-α compensation behavior via
accommodation resulted in lack of unity in understanding what
"utility in education" meant. This could point reform towards only
one destination – the "democratic anarchy" that Bloom passionately
denounced.
§ 3.2 Feudalism and Taylorism in Higher Education
The utility movement from 1870 to 1890 changed the academic face
of American colleges, but it was not until the second phase of the
higher education reformation that the American university came into
being. Thelin tells us,
Between 1880 and 1890 only a handful of institutions in the
United States had legitimate claim to being a "real university."
Apart from Johns Hopkins, Cornell, Harvard, Clark, and Columbia,
the list of serious contenders was slim. . . . All this changed
dramatically over the next three decades. A landmark event occurred
in 1900, when the presidents of fourteen institutions met to form
the Association of American Universities1 . . .
Growth and success characterized the era of the
"university-builders" between 1880 and 1910. The wealth and energy
of the period made for an exciting time in higher education. It
1 Harvard, Johns Hopkins, Columbia, University of Chicago,
University of California, Clark, Cornell, Catholic University,
University of Michigan, Stanford, University of Wisconsin,
Princeton, Yale, and University of Pennsylvania.
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was not, however, a smooth evolution. Accounts of the
university-builders – a mix of donors and presidents – indicate
that the risks and rivalries that defined American business
competition of the era were replicated on the American campus. The
similarities prompted Thorstein Veblen2 to coin the satirical term
"captains of erudition," echoing the popular phrase "captains of
industry," to characterize the university-builders' approach to
academic affairs. Among the university-builders there was distrust,
contempt, chicanery, and sabotage. . . .
One factor contributing to the emergence of many universities
during these decades was industry – the discretionary wealth
generated by American corporations and enterprises in the late
nineteenth century. . . . Beyond the philanthropy made possible by
business fortunes, industrial organization provided models for
academic structure. Foremost among these influences was the
approximation on the campus of a corporate model of hierarchy and
offices for faculty and staff. Second was the growing numerical
presence of industrial leaders as trustees on university boards,
eventually leading to the rhetorical slogan, "Why can't a college
be run like a business?" [Thelin (2004), pp. 110-113]
Given the profit performance comparisons between corporations
and proprietorships presented in previous chapters and the fact
that people who use this slogan usually mean "managed like a
corporation," it is better to ask, "Why are businesses run like
businesses are?" Thelin continues,
"Science" as it was invoked in American institutions –
government, business, and education – was less a value system at
odds with religion than an organizational ethos that prized order
and efficiency. Whether reforming public schools, businesses, or
higher education, the Progressives had confidence that their
reliance on expertise and analysis could promote the "one best
system" in American institutions. For an endeavor or an
organization to be "scientific" meant that it was disciplined,
ordered, and systematic – in other words, that it adhered to the
principles of "scientific management." [ibid., pg. 114]
Thelin's use of the word "science" here, even if it is allowed
that he is attempting to describe how that word was misused by
university administrators and trustees, is equivocal. It is very
important to mark the distinction between "science" – as in
physics, chemistry, etc. – and "scientific management" (otherwise
known as Taylorism), which was and is a pseudo-science. It is an
historical fact that "science" is often abused by propagandists
seeking to cloak something that is not science in the
respectability that actual science often commands. This takes
place, for example, when Aquinas claims theology is a science
because "divine revelation" is to be regarded as a scientific fact,
or when present day fundamentalists employ the term "creation
science" to dress a religious dogma up as something it is not. This
sort of thing has been going on for a very long time indeed. Plato
contemptuously called the practice "flattery" in Gorgias, and this
seems to me an apt label. Not all Progressives mistook Taylorism
for science, but many clearly did.
Veysey provides a clearer account of changes that took hold in
the character of the behaviors and attitudes of chief officials at
the new universities from 1890 to 1910. First,
Students, benefactors, alumni, and trustees all constituted
concrete sources of business-minded influence upon the university.
Equally important were the ways in which the internal structure of
the academic establishment came to suggest a "businesslike" tone in
its arrangements. . . . In this context it was entirely to be
expected that academic administrators should be admiringly compared
with the actual "captains of industry." The
2 Veblen was a maverick professor who succeeded in gaining some
public notoriety for his witty writings on the topics of "the
leisure class" and "conspicuous consumption." By all accounts he
was a poor teacher, a womanizer whose escapades were considered
scandalous, and a constant thorn in the side of university
presidents. He was fired from several leading universities and
ended his career with a succession of visiting professor
appointments arranged through former graduate students who had
become professors.
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selection of a university president was admittedly analogous to
the choice of a business executive. Furthermore, any organization
requires internal discipline, and in an age of enterprise it was
understandable that university presidents often viewed "their"
professors as "hired men." "University custom tends to hold the
department executive responsible for his associates, after the
fashion of business corporations," noted David Starr Jordan3 in
1907. The administrator also compared his role with that of a
general organizing an army, or with the coxswain in a racing shell.
More strikingly, Andrew D. White4 declared: "I lay much stress on
good physical health as well as intellectual strength [in choosing
a faculty]. I want no sickly young professors, if I can avoid
them." Such words suggest a plantation owner in the antebellum
South anxious to secure prime field hands. . . . Like shrewd
businessmen, university presidents and trustees sought to pay their
faculty as little as the "market price" demanded; both Eliot5 and
Gilman6 were more parsimonious in this respect than the financial
condition of their institutions required. [Veysey (1965), pp.
351-352]
As if university presidents are not also "hired men."
Personally, I would not hire most business executives, including
most of the pseudo-business-executives hired to be university
presidents, to manage a lemonade stand. It is a mark of the power
of propaganda that Veysey refers to the latter half of the 19th
century as "an age of enterprise" but means only the phenomenon of
industrial enterprise (as represented by Carnegie, Rockefeller, et
al.). The most fresh-faced apprentice learning his future trade in
a Philadelphia shoe shop of 1700 was engaged in personal enterprise
no less than was J.P. Morgan when he brokered the founding of the
U.S. Steel Corporation early in the 20th century. From the day
colonists first set foot in Virginia, there has never been an era
in America that was not an "age of enterprise." It is pompous
aggrandizement to say Carnegie was an entrepreneur but a teenager
working the drive-through window at a local fast food restaurant is
not. One can, however, speak of an age of uncivic enterprise. No
public institute habituated to uncivic practices can well and
faithfully fulfill the civil Duties for which it was established.
The behaviors are incompatible with fulfilling the expectation.
Veysey continues with
It was no special sign of dollar-madness when stationery was
changed to read "President's Office" rather than the older form of
"President's Rooms," or when the professor's "study" likewise
underwent this change in terminology. Sometimes, however, there
were symptoms of a deeper change in attitude. In 1900 a college
president who chose anonymity wrote an article in the Atlantic
Monthly zealously pleading for the freedom of any "other" business
executive. He chafed at the irritation of not being able to
discharge faculty malcontents without being challenged. Deplorable
waste would continue, this man argued, "until the business of
education is regarded in a business light, is cared for by business
methods."
It is easy to see why academic institutions came in many ways to
resemble businesses; it is more interesting, possibly, to observe
the ways in which they did not. At all the major universities a
sense of informal limitations developed beyond which the exercise
of power from "above" was considered unjust, according to criteria
that were never clearly stated. These limitations prevented the
university from becoming a department store. Trustees themselves,
ironically enough, could lack the business acumen to invest
endowments wisely. And professors did not hold "office hours"
forty-eight hours a week.7 They did like to bargain for more money,
but there was a point beyond which many of them could not be
3 then-president of Stanford University; prior to 1891 he was
president of Indiana University 4 president of Cornell University 5
president of Harvard University 6 president of Johns Hopkins
University 7 The average work week for postal employees was 48
hours per week from 1890 through 1920. In other occupations in the
year 1890 it ranged from 62 hours per week for payroll employees in
manufacturing industries to 51 hours per week in the building
trades. The 40 hour week work did not begin to take hold until 1946
and in the 1960s there were many wage-earner entrepreneurs whose
standard work week was 48 hours (eight hours per day, six days per
week). [Bureau of the Census (1965), D 589-600]
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bought in this fashion. Leland Stanford and William R. Harper
both discovered this fact as they offered prospective employees
larger and larger sums, only to be met in a number of cases by firm
refusals. Here was the most concrete indication that educational
entrepreneurs could not have everything their own way. Much
opposition, intellectual as well as self-protective, existed when
the Taylorite "efficiency" craze began to seek academic targets
just after 1910. . . . Even Andrew S. Draper of Illinois, the
arch-example of worldliness among university executives, was forced
to admit: "Of course the university cannot become a business
corporation with a business corporation's ordinary implications. .
. . The distinguishing ear-marks of an American university are its
moral purpose, its scientific aim, its unselfish public service,
its inspirations to all men in all noble things, and its
incorruptibility by commercialism." . . . The distinction which
Draper emphasized was echoed by most other university presidents:
business means but not business ends. . . . That the leadership of
the university tended to identify itself with business aspects
rather more than did the lower ranks of the faculty was not as
ominous as it seemed, for the consequent misrepresentation of the
academic center of gravity gave the public an important and
necessary feeling of reassurance. . . . This did not mean that,
from the point of view of a clearly articulated academic role,
danger was lacking in the situation. The misrepresented center of
gravity could acutely threaten to become the real one. [ibid., pp.
352-354]
Personally, I'm far from convinced it was either important,
necessary, or not-reprehensible to mislead the public. I do agree
it was important and wise to inform the public that a fundamental
change had happened, that the old church-centered,
minister-preparing, sinecure-like character of the pre-Civil War
college institution had been overthrown, and that reforms were
being attempted so as to make colleges and universities better
serve the general public.
Frederick W. Taylor did not invent a science of "scientific
management." He presented a few platitudes over-generalized from a
set of experiments with low-skilled jobs, and he presented a quack
pseudo-psychology. Publication in 1911 of Scientific Management
provided a cover of respectability for uncivic practices,
contributed to exaltation of these practices, and helped to spread
the influence of a gospel of managerial incompetence far and wide.
Taylorism was already being practiced in the steel industry long
before Taylor's book hit the bookstores and his name came to be
associated with the practices. A single excerpt from his book
serves to unmask the underlying state-of-nature outlawism that
permeates every fiber of Taylorism:
Now one of the very first requirements for a man who is fit to
handle pig iron is . . . that he shall be so stupid and so
phlegmatic that he more nearly resembles in his mental makeup the
ox than any other type. . . . he must consequently be trained by a
man more intelligent than himself [Taylor (1911), pg. 25].
The net effect of the administrative changes that took place
from 1890 to 1910 was institution of an uncivic feudal system as
the method of managing the leadership dynamic within the 20th
century university and college. It established a system of
enterprise management, conforming to governance by the
monarchy/oligarchy form of governance, that has been perpetuated to
this day. It does not abolish feudalism when one merely changes who
shall be the lord, the varlet, and the serf. I think it ironic that
administration and management in both public education and business
should have come to be governed by the same antisocial form of
governance that the American Revolution fought to abolish. If it
were not for the power of folkway, I would think it peculiar that a
great majority of Americans accept without question the
inconsistency of having sanctioned elements of moral outlawism
instituted into American Society as a casual matter of
normalcy.
§ 3.3 Curriculum and Departmentalism in Higher Education
Probably the most distinguishing feature of higher education
reform was the birth of the elective system, pioneered at Harvard
by Eliot and by White at Cornell. This shift to "utility" in
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higher education brought with it a multiplication of new subject
matters and courses that broadened university offerings well beyond
the traditional "classics" that had characterized pre-Civil War
colleges. Younger new faculty members developed many more courses
than a student could possibly take in four years. This led to the
replacement of the old "prescribed curriculum" – in which the
college dictated to the student what courses he was required to
take – to a system in which he was allowed to choose which subject
matters he wished to study. This, too, was mislabeled "democracy"
in education and was when higher education abandoned its Duty to
the social dimension of PIE. By the mid-1880s educators were
judging that excessive liberality in course election was producing
too little focus necessary for students' educations. Potter
noted,
With the leadership of the land-grant colleges and the technical
institutes and the pressure of business interests, colleges began
to expand their curricular offerings, though often with great
reluctance and against faculty resistance. As new subjects were
added, old ones lost their privileged positions. . . .
This expanded curriculum created the problem of which subjects
the students would take. In 1884 the eighty Harvard faculty members
taught "about four hundred and twenty-five hours of public
instruction a week without any repetitions." In four years an
undergraduate could not take more than a tenth of what was then
being offered. . . .
At Indiana University, President David Starr Jordan introduced a
plan of specialization within electives. In 1886 he instituted the
"major subject" system, requiring students in their junior and
senior years to choose a specialty or major. A "major professor"
was appointed to counsel the student in planning his program so
that there would be some coherence in the courses taken and yet be
"best fitted to his [the student's] tastes and capacity." In
addition, students might have minors or elective studies. Some form
of compromise between free election and required subjects was the
rule among the American universities at the turn of the century.
[Potter (1967), pp. 303-305]
The Indiana innovation marked the beginning of the advising
system that is still found in colleges and universities today. It
marked the beginning of the "major" as the specialized course of
study, ubiquitous in higher education today, and the advisor as a
helmsman for curricular navigation.
Perhaps because of the laissez faire and ad hoc way in which new
courses and new subject matters were introduced at the innovating
universities, it is difficult to identify any uniformly applicable
taxonomy of subject matters characteristic of the reformed
institution of higher education. The usual divisions are: the
physical-natural sciences and mathematics; engineering; the social
sciences; the humanities (which generally included study of
classics as a subset); agri-culture; and education. From various
comments by Potter, Veysey, Thelin, and from statistics published
by the Census Bureau and the National Center for Education
Statistics (NCES), the following rough taxonomy, representing the
now-traditional classification, can be sketched:
the technical arts: the basic physical-natural sciences
(chemistry, physics, the biological sciences); mathematics;
engineering; psychology; and the special technical arts (earth
sciences, basic medical sciences, medical science, and the
agricultural sciences);
the social sciences: sociology; economics; history; law;
anthropology; political science; and other topical subject-matters
(e.g. business, a pseudo-science);
the humanities: the classics; English language and literature;
foreign languages and literature; philosophy; music; fine and
commercial art; architecture (organizationally placed at some
schools under 'engineering'); and theater arts.
Awkwardly appended to this is higher education's version of the
normal school, i.e., the colleges of education that were
established at some institutes of higher education. Like
engineering, colleges of education were at first largely regarded
by other disciplines – when they were regarded at all – as
"tradesman-like" and, consequently, were regarded by
traditionally-minded
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"scholars" with the suspicion that perhaps they didn't really
belong in "the modern university" at all. It was principally
through the sometimes autocratic direction of utility-minded
university presidents that these two areas of study were included
in the "university community." Both were at first "poor cousins" in
relationship to "the more important" academic disciplines.
Engineering, by weight of its enrollment growth and ability to
attract large amounts of external research funding after World War
II, eventually shoved its way into the "academic mainstream" of the
university. Today it exists in a state of armistice with the other
colleges, more tolerated than accepted by the traditional
physical-natural sciences and humanities disciplines.
The college of education, on the other hand, never did quite
succeed in being assimilated into this "mainstream" to the same
degree, resulting in the not-inaccurate quip that 120th Street in
New York City (which separates Teachers College from the rest of
Columbia University) is "the widest street in the world" [Mirel
(2011)]. This academic discrimination is so pervasive and
institutionalized that Census Bureau abstracts often do not place
college of education data in the same series with data on other
higher education statistics. Both Veysey and Thelin have barely a
word to say about the colleges of education. Professors in other
colleges rarely have so much as one credit of college study in
teaching or curriculum development in their backgrounds. Your
author has only three, which I acquired from a teaching practicum
as a college senior majoring in engineering. Some acquire their
knowledge of teaching and curriculum development through such
educational Self-development activities as tutoring, experience
from working as laboratory instructors, and/or participation in
developing employee continuing education and/or training programs
in private-sector industry. Many have nothing more than the "on the
job training" they unavoidably experience when they begin their
teaching careers. Many a college student has paid a dear price for
being made a guinea pig of this informal institution of
professorial OJT.
Adding to basic taxonomy difficulties, from the 1890s forward
many of the subject areas were busily engaged in redefining
themselves. Veysey remarked,
But once the existence of a newer educational ideal ["utility"]
had become firmly established, the air of institutional unity
quickly began to evaporate. At most universities each subject came
to be regarded as just as "good" as any other. In theory a
professor of agriculture was as respectable as a professor of
Greek; therefore their purposes were entitled to equal
consideration by the university president who stood over both of
them. Toleration would ultimately emerge from this situation;
everyone would leave everyone else alone unless a particular
jurisdictional quarrel arose. The university went several ways at
once. It crystallized into a collection of divergent minds, usually
ignoring each other, commonly talking past one another, and
periodically enjoying the illusion of a dialogue on "safe" issues.
. . .
On the usual campus could be found pockets of excitement over
research, islands of devotion to culture, and segments of adherence
to the aim of vocational service – all existing together. . . .
Therefore, it should always be kept in mind that nearly every major
American university was too diverse a place to be identified with
any one academic philosophy. . . .
There is also another entire dimension to this complexity, the
one furnished by the individual departments of learning which were
coming into being in the eighties and nineties. . . . Many academic
disciplines housed professors of strongly clashing educational
views. To be sure, a fair number of departments became clearly
identified with a single academic outlook of a larger sort:
research in the case of the natural sciences, or culture in that of
the fine arts. But in these terms some of the most important
academic departments instead became intramural battlegrounds. . . .
Departments of English were split between partisans of culture and
devotees of philological research. Sociology, itself in the process
of breaking away from economics during the nineties, had endless
trouble defining its relationship both to social utility and
empirical research. Economics was divided between
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the upholders of the old classical theories . . . and believers
in utility, research, or a combination of the two. . . . These are
just a few examples of the extremely complex state of affairs that
developed within the new institutions of learning. [Veysey (1965),
pp. 58-59]
The emergence of specialized departments, each dedicated to some
specialized field of study, contributed to the development of
fragmented silos of knowledge that, over time, became ever more
isolated from one another. I say more about this in the next
section. As both professors and students pursued their own areas of
interest in increasing depth, correspondingly less exposure to
other subject-matters resulted. It is difficult to say whether the
departments created the colleges or the colleges created the
departments. There were clearly significant degrees of
co-determination that took place in establishing the
now-traditional structure of administrators placed over colleges
and colleges placed over departments. Hardly anything else was to
be expected from a hierarchal business model of corporate
organization, a form that was itself copied from the Roman legion.
In any case, there could hardly have been a development more
inimical to counteracting the divers sources of mini-Community
granulation and competition in American Society overall, nor to the
practicality of developing an empirical science of education. No
one should be surprised that a sort of education alchemy rather
than a science of education evolved out of departmentalism.
The academic Community was not, of course, wholly ignorant of
the problem of integration. The 1880-1910 period of higher
education reform occurred against a backdrop of general moral
customs and national folkways representative of America and
distinguishable from European influences. Divers efforts were made
to devise "core curricula" covering matters it was agreed all
college students should be exposed to (I will not say "educated
in"). But there is perhaps no other single area of higher education
subject-matter that has been more ravaged by conflicting PAPEs
within the universities. This, too, is a predictable consequence of
the silo effect of specialization and departmentalization because
anything meriting being called a core education is ipso facto an
interdisciplinary form of education. That form of education was
never achieved anywhere within the institution of 20th century
American public instructional education. It is not being achieved
now by the few and toothless gropings for reform being called "the
interdisciplinary movement" today. Any program or proposal that
actually moves in the direction of a true inter-disciplinary system
of education is immediately confronted by alliances of specialized
silos, competing deans, and higher education administrators
responding to disturbance of the Taylorite institutional management
structure that actual interdisciplinarity provokes.
§ 3.4 Over-specialization
Disciplinary specialization was at once both the greatest
benefit and the most antisocial factor to emerge from the 1880-1910
higher education reforms. Its practical benefits to
physical-natural sciences, crafts and applied technologies have
been assumed since before the time of Plato. Plato was the great
champion of the division of labor two millennia before Adam Smith
was born. It reflects the not-unreasonable supposition that if we
need to know more about something, that deeper knowledge will be
most quickly obtained by those with the greatest degree of
expertise about that something. It also reflects a presupposition
that depth of knowledge can be obtained only at the expense of
breadth of knowledge – something that in fact is untrue.
One should challenge both suppositions because both presuppose
the ultimate understanding of any specific thing is understanding
that converges to a single point concept, as if knowledge of any
subject is like a lonely mountain that rises to a single peak. Upon
what is this presupposition based? In no branch of science have we
ever discovered that understanding of any phenomenon is like a
lonely mountain. All fecund knowledge, if it is to be fecund,
requires not only depth of topical knowledge – let us say, for
example, knowledge of fluorine chemistry – but also breadth of
knowledge – how knowledge of fluorine is applicable to, say, making
Teflon. In its turn, the
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fecundity in knowing how fluorine is used to make Teflon
presupposes knowledge of some problem for which Teflon is found to
be a solution. The perfect specialist, like the perfect generalist,
is an ideal – an image or projection – of someone never actually
encountered in any sphere of living enterprise. Just as it is true
that an ideal generalist "is a guy who knows less and less about
more and more until eventually he knows nothing about everything,"
so too an ideal specialist "is a guy who knows more and more about
less and less until eventually he knows everything about nothing."
That specialization (or generalization) is an unalloyed good is
nothing but a Platonic fantasy. Specialization is beneficial up to
some degree and thereafter becomes a disbenefit and a handicap.
Generalization is beneficial up to some degree and thereafter
likewise becomes a disbenefit and a handicap. But higher education
reform saw only the near term benefit and, except in the protests
of a few 'old guard' classicists, failed to see beyond that. As is
usual in cases where a general movement is fueled by enthusiasm,
there was a lunge toward false promise in an ideal that lies
forever beyond the horizon of possible human experience.
As academic departments of specialized knowledge were formed, it
was presumed that this division of labor tactic walked arm in arm
with practicality – the mantra of the utility movement. A new
emphasis on research was likewise seen as a vehicle in which both
could ride ahead into a glorious future. Veysey wrote,
In two important ways . . . the growth of research produced
basic changes in the nature of American higher education.
Responsibility for the first change, a tendency toward ever
increasing specialization of knowledge, it shared with the movement
toward practicality. The second, liberation of the intellect for
its own sake, resulted more exclusively from the climate of
abstract investigation, although intellect was eventually to owe a
certain degree of its increasing acceptance to advocates of liberal
culture.
The dominant characteristic of the new American universities was
their ability to shelter specialized departments of knowledge. To
the extent that these departments represented vocational
aspirations, the desire for a practical version of higher learning
had set the tendency toward specialization in motion. Few of the
new departments, however, avoided all claim to be advancing
knowledge through investigations or experiments, and many of the
natural and social sciences soon came to justify their existence in
terms of the research they conducted. That a scientific outlook
would bring with it an inexorable drift toward specialization of
effort should have seemed natural to any observer versed in Western
traditions. . . .
In consequence, the old-time professor who was
jack-of-all-disciplines rapidly disappeared from all but the
bypassed small colleges. "Smattering is dissipation of energy,"
declared G. Stanley Hall in 1882. . . . The most pronounced effect
of the increasing emphasis on specialized research was a tendency
among scientifically minded professors to ignore the undergraduate
college and to place a low value upon their function as teachers. A
few bold voices were heard to say that the college ought to be
abolished altogether and replaced by an extension of the secondary
school [high school]. Others were content to see the college merely
languish. [Veysey (1965), pp. 142-144]
Such job-centric attitudes are antisocial in basic character.
These are attitudes that at once cut the ground for public higher
education from under the university itself. There is no public
interest and no justification under the social contract for members
of the general public to support the private intellectual interests
of individual professors with public money. Yet the move to adopt a
system of over-specialization, and to neglect instructional
education, was precisely the direction American higher education
took between 1880 and 1910. By the 1950s, the public backlash
against the sinecures it established began to be felt.
The lopsidedness with which specialization was embraced is
reflected in the distribution of Ph.D. degrees granted from 1920 to
1970. Throughout this period, an average of 54.99% of all
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Ph.D. degrees awarded by U.S. higher education were accounted
for by just ten of the technical arts: physics, chemistry, earth
science, mathematics, engineering, basic medical sciences, medical
science, agricultural science, the biological sciences, and
psychology. The standard deviation in this statistic is 2.250% and
the range is from a low of 49.5% in 1946 to a high of 60.3% in 1923
[Bureau of the Census (1976), Series H 766-787]. Physics,
chemistry, the biological sciences, and mathematics alone accounted
for between 22.16% (1969) and 36.63% (1924) all of Ph.D. degrees
granted. Figure 14.4 graphs the percentage of Ph.D. degrees granted
in these ten principal technical arts and selected subsets of these
from 1920 to 1970.
Especially in the early 20th century, by far the most common
destination for a person who had just obtained a Ph.D. degree was a
college or university where he would become a professor. For many
years in the early 20th century, the graduate school at Johns
Hopkins (the first in the nation) was the sole domestic supplier of
professors to other colleges and universities. (The rest obtained
their degrees in Europe). That a great preponderance of new Ph.D.s
were trained in only a few narrow specialties carried with it the
effect of developing a sort of tunnel vision in collegiate
education. This might have been a predictable consequence of
specialization in higher education, but it was not predicted by its
advocates. These advocates, among whom Harvard's President Eliot
was the foremost leader, subscribed to a belief in what became
known as the "open inquiry model" of education, which held that a
liberalized form of mental discipline in one specialized subject
area would stimulate the learner to learn about other areas as well
[Eliot (1869, 1901)].
This premise is highly questionable on its own merits, but in
any case the faith the promoters of specialization displayed was
naïve in assuming the ability of a person to expand the breadth of
his knowledge implied he would do so. To my knowledge, no
comprehensive scientific study has ever been made inquiring into
the motivators of personal choice in selecting a specialty, but
there are at least four factors known to influence such a choice:
(1) the Desire of the learner to acquire a marketable job skill
highly demanded in the employment market; (2) the intellectual
interest the person has in a particular subject-matter (as a means
of satisfying the drive to perfect his own intellectual
Personfähigkeit); (3) the effects of counsel and urgings by the
person's friends and parents; and (4) his private moral regard by
which he views his possible choices.
Figure 14.4: Percentages of Ph.D. degrees granted in selected
fields from 1920 to 1970. KEY: TA = the ten principal technical
arts (physics, chemistry, earth science, mathematics, engineering,
basic medical
sciences, medical sciences, agricultural science, the biological
sciences, and psychology); PCMB = physics, chemistry, mathematics,
and biological sciences; E = engineering; M = mathematics. Source:
Bureau of the
Census (1976) Series H 766-787.
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These are factors that admix private maxims of Duty with factors
from the individual's social environmen