[Ohiogift] Down Memory Lane

[Will Fitzhugh]

Cardinal Principles:


Still alive and well in American high school education,
especially when it comes to assigning complete nonfiction
(e.g. history) books and serious research papers....


Will Fitzhugh


"Moreover, the child was now conceived not as a mind to be developed but as a citizen to be trained by the schools....The commission drew up a set of educational objectives in which neither the development of intellectual capacity nor the mastery of secondary academic subject matter was even mentioned."


from Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, by Richard Hofstadter
New York: Vintage Books, 1962, pages 332-335


		The slight concession made by the Committee of Ten to new schools of thought was hardly enough to allay discontent. It had not been able to foresee the extraordinary growth of the high-school population which would soon occur or the increasing heterogeneity of the student body. It quickly became evident that the curricular views of the Committee of Ten were losing ground. By 1908, when the N.E.A was fast growing in size and influence, it adopted a resolution repudiating the notion that public high schools should be chiefly “fitting schools” for colleges (which, to be sure, had not been the contention of the Committee of Ten), urging that the high schools “be adapted to the general needs, both intellectual and industrial, of their students,” and suggesting that colleges and universities too should adapt their courses to such needs. The balance was tipping: the high schools were no longer to be expected to suit the colleges; instead, the colleges ought to try to resemble or accommodate the high schools.


		In 1911, a new committee of the N.E.A., the Committee of Nine on the Articulation of High School and College, submitted another report, which shows that a revolution in educational thought was well on its way. The change in personnel was itself revealing. Gone were the eminent college presidents and distinguished professors of the 1893 report; gone, too, were the headmasters of elite secondary schools. The chairman of the Committee of Nine was a teacher at the Manual Training High School of Brooklyn, and no authority on any basic academic subject matter was on his committee, which consisted of school superintendents, commissioners, and principals, together with one professor of education and one dean of college faculties. Whereas the Committee of Ten had been a group of university men attempting to design curricula for the secondary schools, the new Committee of Nine was a group of men from public secondary schools, putting pressure through the N.E.A on the colleges: “The requirement of four years of work in any particular subject, as a condition of admission to a higher institution, unless that subject be one that may properly be required of all high schools students, is illogical and should, in the judgment of this committee, be immediately discontinued.”


		The task of the high school, the Committee of Nine argued, “was to lay the foundations of good citizenship and to help in the wise choice of a vocation,” but it should also develop unique and special gifts, which was “quite as important as the development of the common elements of culture.” The schools were urged to exploit the dominant interests “that each boy and girl has at the time.” The committee questioned the notion that liberal education should precede the vocational: “An organic conception of education demands the early introduction of training for individual usefulness, thereby blending the liberal and the vocational…” It urged much greater attention to the role of mechanical arts, agriculture, and “household science” as rational elements in the education of all boys and girls. Because of the traditional conception of college preparation, the public high schools were:


“responsible for leading tens of thousands of boys and girls away from the pursuits for which they are adapted and in which they are needed, to other pursuits for which they are not adapted and in which they are not needed. By means of exclusively bookish curricula false ideals of culture are developed. A chasm is created between the producers of material wealth and the distributors and consumers thereof.”


		By 1918 the “liberation” of secondary education from college ideals and university control seems to have been consummated, at least on the level of theory, even if not yet in the nation’s high school curricula. In that year the N.E.A.’s Commission on the Reorganization of Secondary Education formulated the goals of American schools in a document about which Professor Edgar B. Wesley has remarked that “probably no publication in the history of education ever surpassed this little five-cent thirty-two page booklet in importance.” This statement, Cardinal Principles of Secondary Education, was given a kind of official endorsement by the United States Bureau of Education, which printed and distributed an edition of 130,000 copies. It became the occasion of a nation-wide discussion of educational policy, and some teacher-training institutions regarded it so highly that they required their pupils to memorize essential portions (thus violating a central canon of the new educational doctrines).


		The new commission pointed out that more than two thirds of those who entered the four-year high school did not graduate and that, among those who did, a very large proportion did not go to college. The needs of these pupils must not be neglected. The old concept of general intellectual discipline as an aim of education must be re-examined. Individual differences in capacities and attitudes needed more attention. New laws of learning must be brought to bear to test subject matter and teaching methods; these could no longer be judged “primarily in terms of the demands of any subject as a logically-organized science.” In short, the inner structure of various disciplines was to be demoted as an educational criterion and supplanted by greater deference to the laws of learning, then presumably being discovered.


		Moreover, the child was now conceived not as a mind to be developed but as a citizen to be trained by the schools. The new educators believed that one should not be content to expect good citizenship as a result of having more informed and intellectually competent citizens but that one must directly teach citizenship and democracy and civic virtues. The commission drew up a set of educational objectives in which neither the development of intellectual capacity nor the mastery of secondary academic subject matter was even mentioned. It was the business of the schools, the commission said, to serve democracy by developing in each pupil the powers that would enable him to act as a citizen. “It follows, therefore, that worthy home-membership, vocation, and citizenship demand attention as three of the leading objectives.” The commission went on: “This Commission, therefore, regards the following as the main objectives of education: 1. Health. 2. Command of fundamental processes. (It became clear in context that this meant elementary skills in the three R’s, in which the commission, no doubt quite rightly, felt that continued instruction was now needed at the secondary level.) 3. Worthy home-membership. 4. Vocation. 5. Citizenship. 6. Worthy use of leisure. 7. Ethical character.”



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“Teach by Example”
Will Fitzhugh [founder]
The Concord Review [1987]
Ralph Waldo Emerson Prizes [1995]
National Writing Board [1998]
TCR Institute [2002]
730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24
Sudbury, Massachusetts 01776-3371 USA
978-443-0022; 800-331-5007
www.tcr.org; fitzhugh at tcr.org
Varsity Academics®
www.tcr.org/blog









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