Expansion of American education
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Although such principles remained the basis of America’s educational endeavour, that endeavour—like America itself—underwent a vast evolution. The once-controversial parochial schools not only continued to exist but also increasingly drew public financial support for programs or students. The currency of privatization, carrying the idea of free choice in a private-sector educational market, strengthened the bargaining position of religious as well as other private schools. The issue of equality succeeded the issue of religion as the dominant topic of American educational debate.
Conditions varied markedly among regions of the country. Definitions of equal opportunity became more sophisticated, referring increasingly to wealth, region, physical disability, race, sex, or ethnic origin, rather than simply to access. Means for dealing with inequality became more complex. From the 1950s, measures to open schools, levels, and programs to minority students changed from the passive “opportunity” conception to “affirmative action.” Measured by high school completion and college attendance figures—both generally high and continually rising in the United States—and by standardized assessment scores, gains for African American and other minority students were noteworthy from the 1970s.
Although state departments of education used equalization formulas and interdistrict incentives to reach the poorest areas under their jurisdiction, conditions remained disadvantageous and difficult to address in some areas, particularly the inner cities, where students were mostly minorities. City schools often represented extremes in the array of problems facing youth—generally drug and alcohol abuse, crime, suicide, unwanted pregnancy, and illness—and the complex situation seemed intractable. Meeting the needs of a racially and ethnically mixed population, however, turned from the problem of the cities and from an assimilationist solution toward educational means of knowing and understanding the disadvantaged groups. States mandated multicultural courses in schools and for teachers. Districts introduced bilingual instruction and provided instruction in English as a second language. Books were revised to better represent the real variety in the population. The status of women was given attention, particularly through women’s studies, through improved access to higher education (women were now a majority of U.S. college students) and to fields previously exclusive to men, and through attempts to revise sexist language in books, instruction, and research.
A persistent idea in American democracy is that everyone, regardless of condition, should have a fair chance. Such is the tenet that underlay the establishment of the free, tax-supported common school and high school. As science pointed the way, the effort to bridge the gulf between the haves and have-nots extended to those with physical and mental handicaps. Most states and many cities undertook programs to teach the handicapped, though financially the going was difficult. In 1958 Congress appropriated $1 million to help prepare teachers of mentally retarded children. Thenceforward, federal aid for the handicapped steadily increased. With the Education for All Handicapped Children Act of 1975—and with corresponding legislation in states and communities—facilities, program development, teacher preparation, and employment training for the handicapped advanced more rapidly and comprehensively than in any other period. In 1990 the act underwent revision and was renamed the Individuals with Disabilities Act (IDEA); the law was significantly updated again in 2004. Reforms aimed to place handicapped children in the least-restrictive environment and, where possible, to “mainstream” them in regular schools and classes.
At the turn of the 20th century, American youths attended an eight-year elementary school, whereupon those who continued went to a four-year high school. This “eight–four system” wholly prevailed until about 1910, when the “six–three–three system” made a modest beginning. Under the rearrangement, the pupil studied six years in the elementary school and three in the junior and senior high schools, respectively. Both systems were in use, there being almost the same number of four-year high schools and three–three junior–senior high school arrangements. There was a change at the elementary–junior high connection to include a system in which children attended an elementary school for four or five years and then a middle school for three or four years. The rapid growth of preschool provisions—with the establishment of an immense body of early-childhood teachers, day care workers, new “nannies,” producers of learning materials, and entrepreneurs—secured the place of the kindergarten as an educational step for five-year-olds and made available a wide, but mainly nonpublic, network of education for younger children.
In 1900 only a handful of the lower school’s alumni—some 500,000—advanced into the high school. Of those who took their high school diploma during this early period, some three out of every four entered college. The ratio reversed, as high school enrollments swelled 10-fold over the first 50 years of the century, with only one of every four high school graduates going on to higher learning. As even more students finished high school, demands for access to the postsecondary level increased accordingly.
Curriculum reforms
From such experimental programs as the Dalton Plan, the Winnetka Plan, and the Gary Plan, and from the pioneering work of Francis W. Parker and notably John Dewey, which ushered in the “progressive education” of the 1920s and ’30s, American schools, curricula, and teacher training opened up in favour of flexible and cooperative methods pursued within a school seen as a learning community. The attempt to place the nature and experience of the child and the present life of the society at the centre of school activity was to last long after progressive education as a defined movement ended.
Some retrenchment occurred in the 1950s as a result of scientific challenges from the Soviet Union in a period of international political tension. Resulting criticisms of scientific education in the United States were, however, parried by educationists. America’s secondary school attuned itself more and more to preparing the young for everyday living. Consequently, though it still served prospective collegians the time-honoured academic fare, it went to great lengths to accommodate the generality of young America with courses in areas such as automobile driving, cookery, carpentry, and writing. In addition to changes in the form of earlier practical subjects, the curriculum responded to social issues by including such subjects as consumer education (or other applications of the economics of a free-enterprise society), ethnic or multicultural education, environmental education, sex and family-life education, and substance-abuse education. Interest in vocational-technical education was directed toward establishing specialized vocational schools, improving career information resources, integrating school and work experience, utilizing community resources, and meeting the needs of the labour market.
National prosperity and, even more, the cash value that a secondary diploma was supposed to bestow upon its owner enhanced the high school’s growth. So did the fact that more and more states required their young to attend school until their 16th, and sometimes even their 17th, birthday. However, economic strains, the ineffectiveness of many schools, and troubled school situations in which the safety of children and teachers was threatened led to questions about the extension of “compulsory youth” in high schools.
Criticisms were also leveled at the effects and aftereffects on education of 1960s idealism and its conflict with harsh realities. The publicized emphases on alternatives in lifestyle and on deinstitutionalization were ultimately, in their extreme form, destructive to public education. They were superseded by conservative attitudes favouring a return to the planning and management of a clearly defined curriculum. The dramatic fall in scores on the Scholastic Aptitude Test (a standardized test taken by a large number of high school graduates) between 1963 and 1982 occasioned a wave of public concern. A series of national, state, and private-agency reviews followed. The report of the National Commission on Excellence in Education, A Nation at Risk (1983), set the tone. The emphasis was now on quality of school performance and the relation of schooling to career. The main topics of concern were the curriculum, standardization of achievement, credentialing, and teacher preparation and performance. In order to clarify what was expected of teachers and students, states increasingly detailed curricula, set competency standards, mandated testing, and augmented the high school diploma by adding another credential or by using transcripts to show superior achievement. Curriculum reforms accentuated the academic basics—particularly mathematics, science, and language—as well as the “new basics,” including computers. Computers became increasingly important in education, not only as a field of study but also as reference and teaching aids. Teachers were using computers to organize and prepare course materials; children were taught to use computers at earlier ages; and more and more institutions were using computer-assisted instruction systems, which offered interactive instruction on a one-on-one basis and could be automatically modified to suit the user’s level of ability. In the 1990s the growth of the Internet significantly increased the availability and, in many areas, the quality of education.
The reports on the state of education also expressed concern for gifted children, who tended to be neglected in American education. Until psychologists and sociologists started to apply their science to the superior child, gifted children were not suspected of entertaining any particular problems. Eventually, however, augmented with federal, state, and sometimes foundation money, one city after another embarked on educational programs for the bright child. From the 1970s on, gifted children were directly recruited into special academic high schools and other local programs. American education was still aimed at broadening or raising the level of general provision, however, so neither programs for the gifted nor those for vocational education were treated as specifically as in some other countries.
Federal involvement in local education
Although the U.S. Constitution has delegated educational authority to the states, which in turn passed on the responsibility for the daily administration of schools to local districts, there is no lack of federal counsel and assistance. Actually, national educational aid is older than the Constitution, having been initiated in 1787 in the form of land grants. Seventy-five years later the Morrill Act disbursed many thousands of acres to enable the states to promote a “liberal and practical education.” Soon thereafter the government created the federal Department of Education under the Department of the Interior and in 1953 established the Office of Education in the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. As the independent Department of Education from 1980, this agency took a vigorous role in stating national positions and in researching questions of overall interest. Its findings proved influential in both state and local reforms.
Education funding was shared among local districts, states, and the federal government. Beginning with the Smith–Lever Act of 1914, Congress legislated measure upon measure to develop vocational education in schools below the college plane. A new trail was opened in 1944, when the lawgivers financed the first “GI Bill of Rights” to enable veterans to continue their education in school or college.
During the 1960s, school difficulties experienced by children from disadvantaged families were traced to lack of opportunities for normal cognitive growth in the early years. The federal government attempted to correct the problem and by the mid-1960s was giving unprecedented funding toward compensatory education programs for disadvantaged preschool children. Compensatory intervention techniques included providing intensive instruction and attempting to restructure home and living conditions. The Economic Opportunity Act of 1964 provided for the establishment of the Head Start program, a total program designed to prepare children for success in public schools. It included medical, dental, social service, nutritional, and psychological care. Head Start grew steadily following its inception, spawning similar programs, including one based in the home and one for elementary-school-age children. In the 1970s, child-development centres began pilot programs for children aged four and younger. Other general trends of the late 1970s included extending public schools downward to include kindergarten, nursery school, child-development centres, and infant programs; organizing to accommodate culturally different or exceptional children; including educational purposes in day care; extending the hours and curriculum of kindergartens; emphasizing the early-childhood teacher’s role in guiding child development; “mainstreaming” handicapped children; and giving parents a voice in policy decisions. Early-childhood philosophy infiltrated the regular grades of the elementary school. Articulation or interface programs allowed preschool children to work together with first graders, sharing instruction. Extended to higher grades, the early-childhood learning methods promoted self-pacing, flexibility, and cooperation.
Changes in higher education
The pedagogical experimentalism that marked America’s elementary learning during the century’s first quarter was less robust in the high school and feebler still in the college. The first venture of any consequence into collegiate progressivism was undertaken in 1921 at Antioch College in Ohio. Antioch required its students to divide their time between the study of the traditional subjects and the extramural world, for which, every five weeks or so, they forsook the classroom to work at a full-time job. In 1932 Bennington College for women, in Vermont, strode boldly toward progressive ends. Putting a high value on student freedom, self-expression, and creative work, it staffed its faculty largely with successful artists, writers, musicians, and other creative persons, rather than Ph.D.’s. It also granted students a large say in making the rules under which they lived.
Such developments in America’s higher learning incited gusty blasts from Robert M. Hutchins, president and then chancellor of the University of Chicago from 1929 to 1951. He recommended a mandatory study of grammar, rhetoric, logic, mathematics, and Aristotelian metaphysics. One consummation of the Hutchins prescription was the study of some 100 “great books,” wherein resided the unalterable first principles that Hutchins insisted were the same for all people, always and everywhere.
The vocationalism that Hutchins deplored was taken to task by several others but with quite different results—notably by Harvard University in its report on General Education in a Free Society (1945). Declaring against the high school’s heavy vocational leaning, it urged the adoption of a general curriculum in English, science, mathematics, and social science.
In the great expansion of higher education between about 1955 and 1975, when expansionist ideas about curriculum and governance prevailed, colleges became at times almost ungovernable. New colleges and new programs made the higher-education landscape so blurred that prospective students and admissions officers in other countries needed large, coded volumes to characterize individual institutions. The college curriculum, like that of the high school, was altered in response to vocal demands made by groups and had expanded in areas representing realities of contemporary social life. Internal reviews, undergraduate curriculum reforms, and the high standards set by some universities demonstrated to some observers that quality education was being maintained in the university. Other critics, however, felt that grade inflation, the multiplication of graduate programs, and increasing economic strains had led to a decline in quality. Financial problems and conservative reactions to the more extreme reforms led some universities to place a strong emphasis on management.
Probably the most significant change in higher education was the establishment and expansion of the junior college, which was conceived early in the century by William Rainey Harper, the first president of the University of Chicago. He proposed to separate the four-year college into an upper and a lower half, the one designated as the “university college” and the other as the “academic college.” The junior college was sometimes private but commonly public. It began as a two-year school, offering early college work or extensions to secondary education. It later expanded to include upper vocational schools (including a wide range of technical and clerical occupations), community colleges (offering vocational, school completion, and leisure or interest courses), and pre- or early-college institutions. Junior colleges recruited from a wide population range and tended to be vigorous innovators. Many maintained close relationships with their communities. Colleges limited to the undergraduate level, especially in articulated state systems, might not differ much from well-developed junior colleges.
Professional organizations
American educators began to organize as early as 1743, when the American Philosophical Society was founded, and continued to do so in increasing numbers. Not a few of their organizations, such as the American Historical Association, the Modern Language Association of America, and the American Home Economics Association, were for the advancement of some specialty. Others were more concerned with the interests of the general educational practitioner. Of these, the National Education Association (NEA) was the oldest. Founded in 1857, it undertook “to elevate the character and advance the interest of the teaching profession.” Despite its high mission, it had little influence until the 1870s, when it began to grow and prosper. With headquarters in Washington, D.C., the NEA conducted its enormous enterprise through a brigade of commissions and councils. A youngster by comparison, the American Federation of Teachers, an affiliate of the AFL-CIO, was formed in 1916. Through collective bargaining and teachers’ strikes, it successfully obtained for teachers better wages, pensions, sick leaves, academic freedom, and other benefits. The distinction between a union and a professional organization became neither as clear nor as important an issue as it was in earlier days.
Such bodies as the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education, the American Association of University Professors, the American Educational Research Association, the National Commission on Teacher Education and Professional Standards, and the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education laboured industriously and even with a fair success to bring order and dignity to the teaching profession. Nevertheless, teaching became an increasingly arduous profession in the United States. Even the security formerly associated with the profession was in question as waves of teacher shortages and surpluses generated frantic responses by educational authorities. Educational reviews addressed teaching inadequacies by encouraging prospective teachers to earn degrees in other subjects before beginning studies in the field of education. They recommended establishing proficiency tests, regular staff-development activities, certification stages, and workable teacher-evaluation and dismissal procedures. They insisted on the necessity for the reform and evaluation of training programs, and some questioned the institutional context of teacher training.
Adolphe Erich Meyer Robert Frederic LawsonCanada
Although a Canadian nation had been formed by the end of the 19th century, separate political, economic, and geographic influences continued through the 20th century to restrain unified educational development. The historical principle of maintaining minority rights resulted in a truly pluralistic cultural concept, recognized to some extent in religious and linguistic concessions in schools. Each provincial system developed unilaterally, thus producing separately centralized educational units; and, even within a province, the evolving principle of local responsibility and the sparseness of settlement in many areas of Canada challenged the effectiveness of simple control principles. Different production emphases and differential advantages of territorial acquisition after confederation in 1867 created basic inequalities among the provinces, with a corresponding effect on schools. Finally, European principles of education were slow to be reconciled with those evolving out of the North American environment. Canadian educational development was consequently marked by eclectic, pragmatic actions rather than by philosophically or politically unified decisions.
It was nevertheless possible, because of a common national experience and because of the communication stimulated by national development, to describe education in national terms. Educational movements afoot in the early 20th century and associated with “progressive education” (such as child study, kindergarten development, and curriculum integration) had a relatively mild impact on traditional practices and forms. Instruction in the Canadian school remained essentially teacher-centred, with a strong emphasis on obedience and conformity.
Canadian educational reforms
The major change in school structure occurred at the secondary level. The standard eight-year elementary program was first extended by continuation classes or schools alongside exclusive secondary schools, producing an uneven, overlapping postelementary structure. In the 1930s an expanded school population, reaching into the secondary grades, led to decisive action on compulsory attendance and to standardization of high school provisions. Junior high schools were introduced in some provinces as a transitional level between elementary and secondary schooling, while some provinces simply developed junior and senior stages of a total secondary program. The two extremes in secondary development were probably represented by Quebec and the west. In the French-speaking schools of Quebec, the secondary system consisted of private classical colleges leading to a baccalauréat on the one side and terminal courses in special schools or institutes on the other. Only after 1956 were public high schools with a variety of courses established. The administration of the system was unified under a ministry of education in 1964, although with continuing provision for local school boards of a distinctly Roman Catholic or Protestant nature. In the western provinces, large regional schools and composite high schools were developed extensively, Alberta having proceeded apace in this direction. British Columbia, following the Chant Commission Report in 1960, reorganized its secondary program to include five core streams, only one of which was academic-technical.
In general, the secondary curriculum was modified by expanding the catalog of optional subjects and by reorganizing to include new courses of study. Secondary schools in Canada were now mainly comprehensive and enrolled about 85 percent of the age group. After extensive provincial reviews in the 1980s, emphasis was returned to academic standards and newly placed on the relation of education to work, in response to the economic needs both of society and of the individual. This new emphasis included teaching specific job skills and industrial information, coordinating vocational and academic studies in school programs, and cooperating with industry through work-study programs. Alternatives to the basic choice between university preparation and a general terminal course appeared.
In response to the requirements of an expanded school population in the first half of the century and to the later demand for increased access—particularly for women, native peoples, immigrants, and low-income groups—changes to structure, curriculum, and methods occurred regularly from the 1960s. Many revisions originated with developments in the United States but took a particularly Canadian form. The first wave of reforms emphasized openness (open-area schools and classrooms, curriculum choice), comprehensiveness (composite high schools, consolidated rural schools, group work, and peer cooperation), and continuity up the school ladder (although with an abundance of alternatives). From the late 1970s, reforms shifted toward renewed emphasis on basic learning, selection of students, moral and social values, increased administrative control, and assessment procedures for school, system, and aggregate student performance.
The educational scene showed characteristics of both periods of reform. Some of the notable innovations included the provision of preschool classes in most elementary schools or systems; the use in early elementary grades of new educational methods developed at the preschool level; a concentrated attempt to decrease newly discovered functional illiteracy at all levels, including the adult level; the rapid introduction of electronic learning programs and instructional assistance; and direct concern with values instruction, usually secular and oriented to both personal and social issues. Both the attempt to reconcile individual educational requirements with the demands of mass systems and the emphasis on essential subject matter led to a search for new techniques of selecting and transmitting knowledge in schools.
The most demanding issues of the second half of the century reached beyond the traditional time and scope of public schooling: early-childhood education, adult education, private schooling, postsecondary education, and bilingual multicultural provisions. Whether as a reflection of concern over the direction of public schools, of an increasingly pluralistic society, or of affluence among parents, private school attendance rose steadily. It was still a small proportion of the school-age group in Canada, but the increase in interest as well as in attendance put pressure on provincial governments for funding. Most provinces now offered limited grants to authorized private schools, though at a level far below public school financing.
Consistent with Canada’s claim to multicultural social development and bolstered by the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, multicultural and bilingual emphases made perhaps the strongest single impact on schooling. French-language instruction, both as a mother tongue and as a second language, expanded in traditionally English-speaking areas. Restrictions were placed on English-language schooling in Quebec as the French-language population struggled for cultural survival in North America. Court challenges against required Christian religious exercises and religious instruction in elementary schools were successful. Demands were made to give attention to other languages as languages of instruction and to revise the exclusively Western bias of curriculum content.
