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This review has been accessed times since February 8, 2006

Kliebard, Herbert M. (2004). The Struggle for the American Curriculum, 1893–1958 (3rd ed.). New York: RoutledgeFalmer.

Pp. xxii + 330
$29.95   ISBN 0-415-94891-6

J. P. Patterson
University of Iowa

February 8, 2006

The third edition of Herbert M. Kliebard’s Struggle for the American Curriculum, 1893–1958 is in some ways the story of two struggles. The first, well recounted by Kliebard, is the battle among several “interest groups” for control of the elementary and secondary school curriculum from the late nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries. Just below the surface, though, lurks a second, historiographical struggle between the different and somewhat competing trends in educational history that have shaped Struggle through its three editions. The two chapters new to this edition shift the book’s focus from a conventional intellectual history to a more empirical history of how, if at all, competing reform agendas affected schools. The result is a book somewhat at odds with itself, reflecting current interests in historical research but at the cost of weakening the book’s coherence.

The majority of the book is a by-now fairly standard, though informative and fluidly written, summation of the intellectual history of what many scholars (though, pointedly, not Kliebard) call the “progressive era” of education in the United States. Anyone familiar with other historical accounts of this period, such as those by Lawrence A. Cremin (1961), Edward A. Krug (1964, 1972), or Diane Ravitch (2000), will find most of the people, movements, and examples used in Struggle familiar. Familiarity doesn’t by itself diminish the value of Struggle, as Kliebard takes his own moderate, thoughtful stance, striking a balance between a generally sympathetic treatment of the ideas and motives behind the major reform efforts and a well-considered critique of the outcomes.

To set the stage, Chapter 1 briefly describes changes in the perception and the reality of society and the school at the close of the nineteenth century. Kliebard argues that, in the public’s view, changes that had begun earlier in the century, such as the growth of railroads, cities, and immigration, “seemed to reach crisis proportions in the 1890s” (p. 2). The burgeoning mass media helped foster popular anxieties. Muckraking journalists and other investigators were exposing schools as “joyless and dreary places” (p. 6). Educators’ belief that “the mind was in fact, or at least like, a muscle” that needed to be exercised though “a regime in school of monotonous drill, harsh discipline, and mindless verbatim recitation” (p. 5) was being undercut by psychologists such as William James and Edward L. Thorndike and—more importantly, Kliebard argues—by a society becoming increasingly interested in useful and practical knowledge. As the school “became an ever more critical mediating institution between the family and a puzzling and impersonal social order” (p. 1), debates flared over the school’s chief function.

Kliebard devotes the bulk of his book to describing four relatively stable and distinct “interest groups” that competed over seven decades for control of the schools through the curriculum. Humanists embraced “the systematic development of reasoning power” (p. 9) as well as the Western cultural heritage. Developmentalists “proceeded basically from the assumption that the natural order of development in the child was the most significant and scientifically defensible basis for determining what should be taught” (p. 11). Social efficiency educators wanted schools to employ the “scientific management” techniques of supervision, accountability, precise measurement, and efficiency and to differentiate education according to students’ perceived needs, abilities, and probable life courses. Social meliorists wanted to use schooling as a lever for societal progress.

The main theme of Struggle is the erosion (but not elimination) of traditional humanism, with its pedagogy of “mental discipline,” as the foundation of American schooling, and the subsequent competition between developmentalists, social efficiency educators, and social meliorists for dominance. Yet, in a harbinger of things to come, Kliebard starts to tangle his tidy narrative as early as Chapter 2, when he introduces John Dewey as a fifth “interest group,” sharing traits with the four other groups but not aligned with any of them. In so doing, Kliebard acknowledges Dewey’s complexity yet leaves the philosopher curiously isolated—somehow detached from or above the fray—and inadvertently calls into question the legitimacy of the book’s four-group structure.

The rest of Chapter 2 depicts the clash between the humanist William Torrey Harris, U.S. commissioner of education and well-regarded philosopher, and the developmentalist G. Stanley Hall. Harris opposed the work of Hall and others who “saw the schools as in need of drastic reform if they were to bring their program of studies in line with scientific findings about the nature of child life” (p. 30). Harris’s “moderate reform,” which tried to disengage a humanistic curriculum from the discredited concept of mental discipline, “put Harris in the position of swimming against the strong tide of radical change that the new leadership [in education] was demanding” (pp. 35–36). Rather than appeal to tradition or culture, Hall and other advocates of child study “could bring to bear the authority of science to the growing belief that the child’s own natural impulses could be used as a way of addressing the question of what to teach” (p. 37).

The end of Chapter 2 and the whole of Chapter 3 are devoted to Dewey’s ideas about education. Kliebard here does an admirable job of encapsulating many of the high points and contrasting them with those of the humanists and developmentalists. Finding neither of those positions adequate, Dewey “urged that we see human intellectual activity, and indeed the culture as a whole, in relation to the characteristic activities in which the individual or society engages and the ability of that individual to achieve command of his or her environment” (p. 60). “For Dewey, then,” Kliebard continues, “a curriculum built around fundamental social occupations would provide the bridge that would harmonize individual and social ends—what for him was the central problem to be resolved in any educational theory” (p. 61). Such a curriculum would, without abandoning the subject matter appreciated by the humanists, respect the needs and interests of the child so favored by the developmentalists while, at the same time, making the child part of what Dewey called “a miniature community, an embryonic society” (quoted in Kliebard, p. 68) in the form of a social, democratic, and active classroom. Too radical, too demanding, and too hard to measure, Dewey’s theories “remained confined largely to the world of ideas rather than the world of practice” (p. 75).

Though no less radical, the ideas of the social efficiency educators, detailed in Chapter 4, were easier to implement and measure, in large part because they fit in with the emerging scientific paradigm in education and didn’t challenge the basic nature or structure of schooling in the way that Dewey’s did. Though socially focused, as was Dewey, these reformers sought to “fit” students to the social and occupational status quo. Efficiency, specificity, productivity, obedience—watchwords of the factory system—became influential concepts in education through the work of people such as Frederick W. Taylor. As with Dewey, “needs” were a focus, but for the social efficiency educators, the needs in question were primarily those of society, not the student per se. Buttressed by the new field of mental measurement (with its emphasis on innate intelligence as reflected by IQ) and psychology’s then-current belief that only specific training, not generalized learning, was possible, highly differentiated curricula, or “tracks,” emerged in the name of efficiency. “Precise and definite curricular objectives in advance of any educational activity” (p. 103), an attempt to lend specificity and accountability to the education process, were also a product of this mind-set. The book’s rather light attention to testing and measurement may dissatisfy some readers, as these issues are much more prominent today than they were when Struggle was first published in 1984.

Chapter 5 details some changes in schooling that resulted from the social efficiency movement. The new junior high school would help sort students by aptitude, “leaving the high school free to provide the differentiated curriculum that the social efficiency reformers so insistently demanded” (p. 106). Social studies, with its emphasis on “the development of efficient citizenship” (p. 107), helped subvert the place of the more humanist-oriented study of history. But, in Kliebard’s view, vocational education was the paragon of social efficiency. Not only were distinct vocational tracks being created for those students deemed unsuited for a more academically focused education, but also

many existing subjects, particularly at the secondary level, were becoming infused with criteria drawn from vocational education. This became evident in the increasing popularity of such courses as business mathematics and business English as legitimate substitutes for traditional forms of these subjects. In very visible ways, the whole curriculum for all but the college bound was becoming vocationalized. (p. 110)

While, “at least in principle, all children shared a common setting for their education” (p. 129), thus maintaining the schools’ patina of democratic unity, those same children were often receiving very different educations, the nature of which depended on where professional educators felt students “belonged” or would “naturally” end up in life.

Chapter 6 focuses on the project method, the popularity of which, Kliebard implies, depended in part on its appeal to educators of different theoretical orientations. Social efficiency educators could admire how a project prepared a student for future work, while developmentalists could see the project as meeting the age-appropriate needs of youth, and Dewey could view it as a tool for moving students from concrete, everyday experiences to more abstract and organized knowledge.

The developmental aspects of the project took center stage in the work of the movement’s leading figure, William Heard Kilpatrick of Teachers College, who “was able to rekindle the diminishing hope that the developmentalists had once ignited—that somewhere in the child lay the key to a revitalized curriculum” (p. 135). Kilpatrick early on “expounded on the theme of using children’s purposes as the basis for organizing the curriculum, indeed proposing the child’s own ‘purposeful act’ as the ‘typical unit’ not only of school life but of the ‘worthy life’ in general” (p. 137). That developmental focus could become an end in itself. “As Kilpatrick redefined it,” Kliebard writes, “the project was now not simply a way of reorganizing the teaching of, say, science; it became, contrary to Dewey’s position, a substitute for science” (p. 141). As the project method “came to be more grandly advertised as the activity curriculum or the experience curriculum” (p. 143), the concept began attracting criticism from the likes of William C. Bagley, Boyd H. Bode, and Dewey.

With the crisis of the Great Depression came renewed interest in using schools to reform society, and Chapter 7 describes how, for a time, the social meliorist position became prominent in professional education circles. “Both social efficiency—fitting the individual into the right niche in the existing social order—and developmentalism, with its emphasis on freedom and individuality for children and adolescents,” Kliebard argues, “gave ground to the feeling that the schools had to address ongoing social and economic problems by raising up a new generation critically attuned to the defects of the social system and prepared to do something about it” (p. 157). The criticisms of the child centeredness of the Progressive Education Association by Dewey and George S. Counts helped signal a change in direction for the association and for educational reform generally; yet, as Kliebard notes, “the seeming impenetrability of the schools themselves to ideas being put forth by Counts and his allies” (p. 166), the great popularity of Harold Rugg’s progressive social studies textbooks notwithstanding, raises serious doubts about how much impact the social meliorist position had in education outside of the rarified environment of education schools and national conferences.

Chapter 8 discusses how “a blending of what were once clear-cut ideological positions into new amalgams of curriculum reform” (p. 175), or “hybridization” (p. 176), emerged along with social meliorism. Indeed, Kliebard argues, such eclecticism, with a heavy dose of social efficiency, had broad appeal in practice:

On their side, the social reconstructionists [i.e., meliorists] had the stars of the educational world and the more dramatic message, but it was the eclecticists who attracted a strong following among practicing school administrators. The school rank and file were a mixed lot politically and only sporadically responded to the vision of a new social order that the social reconstructionists were advancing Eclecticism, on the other hand, was not nearly as politically sensitive, and the public appeal of a curriculum tied directly to the needs of children as well as the duties of life made it a much safer course for school administrators to follow. (p. 186)

Eclecticism, in Kliebard’s view, calls the very notion of “progressive education” into doubt: “In fact, what was known as progressive education became analogous to a chemical mixture in which different elements were thrown together but still retained their own characteristics,” which “increasingly made it an easy target for criticism” (p. 190) from the likes of Bagley, Bode, and Dewey. At the same time, the popularity of eclecticism leads one to wonder whether the book’s four-group model is the best way to handle this subject.

Chapter 9, the first of Struggle’s new chapters, covers the years during and immediately after World War II and begins in earnest the book’s shift from intellectual history to a more data-driven approach. For the most part, the immediate postwar period witnessed a continuation of previous trends. Interest group ideologies “became increasingly more difficult to recognize, at least in their pure form” (p. 202), as more mixing took place. Educators by and large blamed wartime declines in high school attendance “not on demographic factors or wartime conditions, but on the continued prominence of academic school subjects,” leading to redoubled efforts by some for “a much more functional and work-oriented course of study” (p. 202), particularly vocational education. Reformers of elementary school curriculum often saw the child and the subject in opposition, while at the secondary level, the ambiguous concept of “core curriculum”—referring to the blending of subjects or, less often, to the replacing of subject organization with a needs-based one—weakened traditional subject divisions. Calling upon recent empirical studies of implementation, however, Kliebard writes that, “by and large, dethroning school subjects turned out to be a much more formidable task than the proponents of such change ever imagined” (p. 218)—once again suggesting a disconnect between policy talk and implementation.

Chapter 10, the second of the two new chapters, continues the book’s shift toward discussing the degree to which reform agendas were implemented in schools—specifically, “how the major secondary school subjects fared” (p. 223) by midcentury. Latin, often a target of antiacademic reformers, declined in enrollment and course offerings, though “modern foreign languages”—presumably more functional or practical—“did not benefit materially” (p. 224). Traditional mathematical subjects, such as algebra, were increasingly replaced by nonacademic mathematics courses and by alternatives to mathematics altogether, though the years during and after World War II saw a renewed push for mathematics education on social efficiency grounds related to military and defense needs. In the push for merging subjects and unifying the sciences, biology and general science gained ground, while “certain once-popular specialized sciences,” such as physiology and botany, “lost ground” (p. 229). In English, “what was once a collection of separate subjects” such as rhetoric and English literature “became fused together, although imperfectly” (p. 232). Indeed, Kliebard argues, “to a large extent, they still existed as separate and distinct studies loosely combined under one subject label” (p. 232), as was also true for general science. A fight emerged between “the defenders of history and proponents of a broad and directly functional social studies” (p. 236); ultimately, “social studies overwhelmingly became the preferred term for the subject, but the actual content remained predominantly historical” (p. 242)—though, as Kliebard notes, data are sketchy about what subjects fell under the rubric of social studies at midcentury.

More broadly, there was “the question of whether the subject, any subject, should remain the fundamental building block of the curriculum” (p. 245). Despite the ongoing clamor for radical structural reform, Kliebard points out that basic organizational elements of schools, such as the Carnegie unit, acted as a brake on change, as did the continued resistance of defenders of the subject as a way of systematically and logically organizing and conveying knowledge. “Calling attention to structures such as these,” Kliebard asserts, “should serve to remind reformers that winning the rhetorical battle is not even half a victory” (p. 246)—a somewhat ironic lesson given that much of Kliebard’s book, and intellectual history generally, emphasizes such rhetorical battles.

Chapter 11’s discussion of life adjustment education in the late 1940s and 1950s ends the main text and, though not new to this edition, bears stronger traces of the influence of empirical research than do the book’s other returning chapters. The antecedents of life adjustment, with its goal of “a curriculum attuned to the actual life functions of youth in preparation for adulthood” (p. 252), go back to earlier efforts to reform schools along social efficiency lines. The main difference here was degree rather than kind: in the words of longtime vocational education advocate Charles A. Prosser, life adjustment education was aimed at the “60 percent” of students presumed to be unsuited for either academic preparation for college (20 percent) or skilled vocational training (the remaining 20 percent). Life adjustment became quickly and widely popular among educators and government officials, although (or perhaps because) it was an amorphous concept. “Partial measures that schools took to align themselves with the main thrust of life adjustment education” (p. 258) were more common than total transformations. Popular among educators, “mental hygiene” films on such topics as overcoming shyness, getting a date, getting along with one’s family, and going to the prom were emblematic of the utilitarian thrust of life adjustment.

As a movement, life adjustment was short lived, partly because “it turned out to be the prod that awoke a slumbering giant” (p. 260) in the form of critics from outside the colleges of education, whose most powerful weapon came in the form of “a frontal attack on the intellectual respectability of what passed for public education in America” (p. 261). Under the assault of intellectuals, cast in the shadow of Sputnik, and undermined by the perceived need to catch up educationally with the Soviets, life adjustment, with its grand plans for reform, fell into disrepute. “By and large,” Kliebard writes, “there was an effort to raise the intellectual level for all”; yet “ the other interest groups . . . were not exactly vanquished” (p. 269). While the subject organization of schools would persist, struggles would continue over the content under subject headings such as “English” and “mathematics.”

In its present form, The Struggle for the American Curriculum is a book rather at odds with itself. As a historical study, its four-interest-group model has some explanatory power, yet, as Kliebard himself acknowledges, the boundaries between the groups break down the later in time one goes. Even in the early going, though, Dewey’s place outside the four groups raises doubts about the comprehensiveness of the model. As a piece of historical writing, Struggle is in some ways struggling with itself. While laudable, Kliebard’s effort to integrate new chapters about the implementation of reform (or lack thereof) into what is otherwise a traditional intellectual history creates some unintended dissonance for the reader. As Kliebard’s new chapters raise doubts about the real school-level success of reforms, readers may begin to harbor doubts of their own about the value of the earlier chapters’ focus on the ideas of elite reformers.

Yet there is a way to address both problems, and Kliebard himself, in his historiographical afterword to Struggle, points to it. By way of explaining why he declines to use the term “progressive education,” Kliebard cites the case of manual training, a widely popular educational innovation during the early part of the book’s focal period. Manual training involved instructing students in tool use and mechanics:

Around that particular curriculum innovation there clustered a variety of reformers who saw in manual training quite different virtues. There were those like Calvin Woodward who saw in it a way of preserving the dignity of work in school programs; there were [David] Snedden and Frank Leavitt who despaired of ever accommodating the new school population without a highly differentiated curriculum; and there were those like Dewey who saw in manual training an opportunity to dissolve the artificial barriers that existed between traditional academic studies and the world outside the school. (p. 282)

In using this example, Kliebard explicitly endorses the work of Peter G. Filene, who, in a 1970 attack on the idea of a coherent “Progressive movement,” found, in Kliebard’s words, that “efforts to define progressivism (‘writ large’) in terms of ideological convictions and programs (e.g., women’s suffrage) seem to founder on the rocks of inconsistency even when geographical differences (e.g., progressives from the South) are factored in” (p. 280). Indeed, Kliebard argues later, “it may be, in other words, the very fluidity of progressivism that is its most abiding and defensible feature” (p. 282). In place of a unified movement, Kliebard borrows from Filene (and others) the notion of “shifting coalitions around different issues” (p. 280). He also builds on Daniel T. Rodgers’s conception of “social languages” of antimonopolism, human sociability, and social efficiency as, in Rodgers’s words, “ideational glue” allowing members of different coalitions to recognize each other as “progressive” (p. 284). To these, Kliebard adds romanticism and democracy as concepts reformers could evoke to help bring people together for different “progressive” causes.

The main text of Struggle, however, seems to work against the idea of fluid coalitions endorsed by Filene and by Kliebard himself. The very notion of a four-group model implies, if unintentionally, the notion of predictable, stable elements, perhaps even “wings,” of progressivism, which Kliebard, citing Jeffrey Mirel, rejects (p. 285). Apart from the notion of “hybridization” introduced late into the text, the only obvious evidence of “shifting” is in the person of John Dewey, whose seemingly anomalous position in the text—as a person without a “side”—can perhaps best be explained as an example of the “shifting” concept that the rest of the book should have illustrated. Instead, quite possibly for the praiseworthy goal of greater conceptual clarity, Struggle inadvertently falls into the trap of suggesting that there was, in fact, a “progressive movement”—conflicted, perhaps self-contradictory, but a movement nonetheless. A book that more fully and consistently illustrated how coalitions made up of seemingly incompatible members could nonetheless unite around broad reform concepts (such as manual training) would, it seems likely, have been more true to the intent Kliebard outlines in the afterword to Struggle. Moreover, a text focusing on “ideational glue” could lend new vitality to the book’s focus on intellectual history, regardless of whether the ideas of elites were implemented in anything like pure form.

In the end, there is much to like in Struggle, even as it fails to carry through completely on its intentions and suffers from some incoherence. Apart from graceful writing, the book offers a well-balanced take on an important period of American educational history, and those just beginning to learn about “progressive education” will likely benefit the most from the overview the book provides. Though incompletely integrated into the text, the book’s new chapters offer an important window on recent scholarship concerning the translation of educational policy and reform talk into practice, and they serve as a useful, if somewhat jarring, counterpoint to the book’s overall focus on intellectual history. To borrow a term Kliebard uses, the third edition of Struggle is itself something of a “hybrid,” yet one that retains great value.

References

Cremin, L. A. (1961). The transformation of the school: Progressivism in American education, 1876–1957. New York: Knopf.

Krug, E. A. (1964). The shaping of the American high school, 1880–1920. New York: Harper and Row.

Krug, E. A. (1972). The shaping of the American high school, 1920–1941. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.

Ravitch, D. (2000). Left back: A century of failed school reforms. New York: Simon and Schuster.

About the reviewer

J. P. Patterson is a PhD student in social foundations of education at the University of Iowa. His main emphasis is history of education, with minor emphases in philosophy of education and policy studies. His research interests focus on social history and religion in education, and his current work deals with religion in the lives and work of nineteenth-century teachers.

Copyright is retained by the first or sole author, who grants right of first publication to the Education Review.

Editors: Gene V Glass, Kate Corby, Gustavo Fischman

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