Education and the Cult of Efficiency: A Study of the Social Forces That Have Shaped the Administration of the Public Schools

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

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Mental Testing and Tracking for the Social Adjustment of an Urban Underclass, 1920-1930

Journal of Education ◽

10.1177/002205748616800203 ◽

1986 ◽

Vol 168 (2) ◽

pp. 9-30 ◽

Cited By ~ 3

Author(s):

William B. Thomas

Keyword(s):

New York ◽

Special Education ◽

Public Schools ◽

Social Control ◽

Interest Groups ◽

Social Adjustment ◽

Black Children ◽

The Public ◽

The Social ◽

Mental Testing

This essay examines the mechanisms used by the public school for socially adjusting an underclass of Italian, Polish, and southern black children who immigrated to Buffalo, New York, in the 1920s. It describes in some detail the activities and goals associated with the institutionalization of mental testing and tracking programs in those public schools serving these young members of an underclass. This essay suggests that as a tool of social control, testing and tracking into special education classes may have discriminated against the unassimilated newcomers who teachers and administrators feared were destined for a life of crime. Finally, the essay illustrates the reactions of interest groups to the school's tracking program, in order to show that members of and advocates for this underclass did not all passively accept the school's treatment of these pupils.

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Choosing private compulsory schools: A means for class distinctions or responsible parenting?

Research in Comparative and International Education ◽

10.1177/1745499920921098 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 15 (2) ◽

pp. 97-115 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Auður Magndís Auðardóttir ◽

Sonja Kosunen

Keyword(s):

Public Schools ◽

Private Education ◽

Private Schools ◽

Moral Dilemma ◽

Geographical Location ◽

Public And Private ◽

The Public ◽

The Social ◽

Compulsory Schools ◽

Good Behaviour

This study aims to explore the social and ethnic background of pupils admitted to private schools at the compulsory level in Iceland so as to identify possible social class segregation between public and private schools. Additionally, we examine how parents reason their choice of private education for their children. Bourdieu’s concepts of capital, symbolic power and distinction are used to think through our findings. Data consist of descriptive statistics and interviews with parents. Our findings show that many of the private schools attract privileged parents, but that this is contingent upon the schools’ geographical location. Parental discourse links good behaviour and ambition with the private schools, while simultaneously labelling the public schools as failing. Parents who align with the intellectual fraction show signs of experiencing a moral dilemma over their choice. Overall, our findings suggest that to some extent, private schools serve as a tool for educational distinction.

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Public School Elites in Early-Victorian England: The Boys at Harrow and Merchant Taylors' Schools from 1825 to 1850

Journal of British Studies ◽

10.1086/385791 ◽

1982 ◽

Vol 21 (2) ◽

pp. 87-117 ◽

Cited By ~ 3

Author(s):

Edward A. Allen

Keyword(s):

Public Schools ◽

Public School ◽

Middle Class ◽

Victorian England ◽

Middle Classes ◽

The Public ◽

Social Elite ◽

The Social ◽

The Creation ◽

The One

Historians agree that the public schools played a central role in the creation of Victorian society and that in particular they were seminal in the construction of that “mid-Victorian compromise” which made the mid-century an era of “balance,” “equipoise,” and accommodation. There is further agreement that the cadre of boys produced by the newly reformed public schools became that mid-Victorian governing and social elite which was at once larger, more broadly based, more professional and, to many, more talented than the one which preceded it. The importance of the public schools in this regard was, as Asa Briggs affirms, twofold. They assimilated the “representatives of old families with the sons of the new middle classes,” thereby creating the “social amalgam” which, in Briggs' view, “cemented old and new ruling groups which had previously remained apart.” Secondly, the singular expression of that amalgamation was an elite type, the “Christian Gentleman”—the result of an “education in character” administered under the influence of Dr. Arnold. Arnold was able to do this because he “reconciled the serious classes” (that is, the commercial middle class) “to the public schools,” sharing as he did “their faith in progress, goodness, and their own vocation.” At first, the schools “attracted primarily the sons of the nobility, gentry and professional classes.” Later, it was the “sons of the leaders of industry” who were, like earlier generations of boys, amalgamated with “the sons of men of different traditions” in a broadened “conception of a gentleman.”

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