Showing papers in "History of Education Quarterly in 1972"

Ideas of the early sex education movement in America, 1890-1920.

Abstract: TOWARD THE END of the nineteenth century American sexual attitudes were beginning to undergo a fundamental alteration, for the dominant sexual ideology of sex as restraint was being challenged increasingly by the hitherto radical doctrine of sex as pleasure. The implications of this change in ideology extended far beyond the simple gratification of a temporal impulse to the very formation of character and the organization of society, for, as Freud wrote, the manner in which an individual responds to sexuality is often "a prototype for the whole of his other modes of reaction to life." In turn, the nature of society is significantly influenced according to whether society chooses to resolve the conflict between Eros and Ananke by the repression, renunciation, or acceptance of sexuality. (1) By the 1920s in the United States the older middle-class beliefs that sex was only for procreation and that pleasure was an unfortunate, if inescapable, side effect "attached to this function simply to ensure reproduction," were being replaced by a belief in which pleasure, independent of conception, was as equally legitimate an end of sexual activity in marriage as was procreation. If Freud's hypothesis is correct, then the study of this change in sexual attitudes may offer significant insights into the very structure of man's responses to society in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. (2)

Victorian Origins of Juvenile Delinquency: A Canadian Experience.

Abstract: THE VICTORIAN SOCIAL CONSCIENCE was troubled on many accounts, and perhaps no more so than by the plight of delinquent youngsters. Few causes cut so deeply into the delicate weave of moralism and economy out of which much nineteenth-century social policy was fashioned. The demographic and economic revolutions that transformed western European societies in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries had combined to encourage a radical redefinition and revaluation of childhood and youth. (1) Within middle-class families children assumed a more conspicuous and integrated role. Moreover, the family provided many Victorians with an archetypeemotional, organizational, and ideological-with which to interpret their experience of social change. Their anxiety about that change is well revealed by the energy and dismay with which many reformers responded to the spectacle of an unprecedented number of other people's children surviving-and thriving-unrestrained in society at large. Not surprisingly, the solution they devised was the creation of surrogate institutions for the lower classes appropriately analogous to middle-class family life. The Province of Canada in the middle of the nineteenth century comprised (in abbreviated form) the present day provinces of Ontario and Quebec. With the notable exceptions of a handful of relatively sophisticated urban centres such as Toronto and Kingston, much of the English-speaking settlement of Canada West had only recently emerged from the pioneer era. The decade of the 1840s had

Liberalism and the Quest for Orderly Change.

Abstract: Put in these terms, the new left is made responsible for the coming American fascism. The usual analysis proceeds with the notion that the attack on the liberal center from both the right and left weakens and eventually destroys democratic institutions. The process begins with the left questioning the mythologies that sustain bourgeois society thus threatening the security of those in power and ends with a repressive fascist order. In this sense, the more the left agitates, the more the fascist right can be expected to grow. There are few political and social analysts in this country who seriously doubt the possibility that given an open confrontation the fascist would win. Virtually every observer seems to predict that a socialism of the right not the left would emerge. It is interesting that in times of severe crisis, most liberals can be relied upon to move to the right rather than to the left of the political

Who Went to School

Abstract: "CALMLY, deliberately, and advisedly, I give it as my opinion that no one other anti-progressive agent exercises so pernicious and clogging an influence on the educational growth and prosperity of Canada as irregular attendance of children in school." (1) The aura of profundity and revelation with which the author of this statement surrounded his remarks surely was unnecessary; by 1861, when it appeared, virtually no one associated with schools would have disagreed. Nearly all of the writers on educational problems during the last two decades had made the same point. After all they believed, as Mr. G. A. Barber, the superintendent of schools in Toronto, put it in 1854, that "a numerous and regular attendance of scholars" was "the keystone of successful popular education." (2) If that were the case, the success of popular education remained problematical. Judge Haggarty might have substituted the name of almost any other North American city when he told a grand jury that "the streets of Toronto, like those of too many other towns, still present the miserable spectacle of idle, untaught children, male and female-a crop too rapidly ripening for the dram-shop, the brothel and the prison-and that too under the shadow of spacious and admirably kept school houses, into which all may enter free of cost." (3) To schoolmen throughout North America securing the regular and punctual attendance of all children at school was the central educational problem of the nineteenth century. In fact they wrote about attendance with such monotonous regularity that their complaints comprise a litany within educational documents whose significance, by its very frequency, it has become easy for the historian to underestimate. Despite the fact that attendance was the principal problem and preoccupation of late Victorian schoolmen, there is only one modern monograph in English on the topic. (4)

Psychologists and the War: The Meaning of Intelligence in the Alpha and Beta Tests

Abstract: “Great will be our good fortune,” Robert Yerkes, head of the U. S. Army psychology team, wrote, “if the lesson in human engineering which the war has taught is carried over directly and effectively into our civil institutions and activities.” For psychology and the schools the great experiment of World War I was the construction and standardization of the Alpha and Beta group intelligence test as a technique for differentiating men within disciplined and highly stratified social organizations. The dream shared by psychologists, social reformers, and educators of the time was the creation of an efficiently organized society by the proper allocation of manpower resources. The individual I.Q. test was impractical to use with large numbers of the American population to determine proper occupational niches. Mass testing with a group I.Q. test, it was believed, made human engineering feasible. Efficiency in the human group, claimed army test developer, H. H. Goddard, in a 1920 lecture, “is not so much a question of the absolute numbers of persons of high and low intelligence as it is whether each grade of intelligence is assigned a part, in the whole organization, that is within its capacity.” Goddard went on to suggest that man could learn from the busy bee “the perfect organization of the hive.” “Perhaps,” Goddard stated, “it would be wiser for us to emulate the bee's social organization more and his supposed industry less.”

Education for the Neglected: Ragged Schools in Nineteenth-Century England

Abstract: The ragged school movement in England spanned the period from 1840 to 1870, but the number of years during which the schools were being founded and expanded is deceptively brief in terms of their contribution to the care of the neglected juvenile. Of the three types of institutions conceived for the children of the destitute and delinquent classes — reformatory, industrial, and ragged schools — only the last proved to be a temporary phenomenon and failed to secure permanent government recognition. Their aim was nothing less than the civilization and conversion of an entire segment of the urban poor, a task too large for the resources of private charity. The schools were intended for a class of juveniles as yet unreached by any other institution, an urban group brought into existence by the rapid and unplanned growth of England's larger cities. They were the children of costermongers, pig-feeders, rag dealers, part-time dock workers, in fact of all those whose work was menial, irregular, and ill-paid. Also included in this category were the offspring of those who laid claim to no job whatsoever, the lowest mendicants and tramps, and persons who get their living by theft, who altogether neglect their children; the children of hawkers, pigeon-dealers, dog-fanciers, and other men of that class. A great proportion of the children are those of worthless and drunken parents, and many others are the children of parents, who, from their poverty, are too poor to pay even a penny a week for schooling.

Professions in Process: Changing Relations Between Historians and Educators, 1896-1911.

Abstract: IN 1884 "A SMALL BAND of zealous young scholars fresh from German seminars" organized the American Historical Association "to propagate and give new direction to 'American history and history in America.'" (1) In one sense, these self-conscious professionals institutionalized a fundamental element of nineteenth-century thought; they shared with many Americans a deep commitment to historicism and its two central tenets: the belief that all human life is in a process of continual growth and transformation and the related conviction that facts and events can be explained only by reference to earlier facts and events. (2) In a century in which change and process were bywords, "the historical method" was a highly respected thought tool. "To know a thing properly," as William Torrey Harris expressed it, "we must study it in its history." (3) The study of history satisfied an almost compelling psychic need of nineteenth-century Americans to reexperience time, to analyze it, to capture it conceptually, and thereby in a personal way to control it. They found great psychological comfort in tracing a modern institution or trend to its very roots. It should be no surprise, then, that a profound sense of the continuity of human

Patterns of School Attendance in Toronto, 1844-1878: Some Spatial Considerations

Abstract: WITH THE INTRODUCTION of free schools into Canada West in 1850, school attendance became, as it had for American educators, both the greatest obstacle to the successful implementation of the new system and the greatest justification for its future growth. Once the education of all school-age children became the primary goal of educational reform, the days of the district common school in the city were numbered. The district system had encouraged patterns of attendance attuned to the interests of the family and not those of the state. Schoolmen accused this more informal education of inefficiency and discrimination against the poorer classes and also objected to the large numbers of parents who kept their children out of school. (1) To its proponents, the extension of free schooling would not only ensure a higher rate of attendance, but would also serve to assimilate the "famine Irish" who had flocked to the cities of Canada West in the late 1840s, and whose mere physical presence mid-nineteenthcentury educators perceived as a direct threat to social order. To men like Dr. Egerton Ryerson, the Chief Superintendent of Education in Canada West, it was therefore doubly important to make operative as soon as possible the forces of social levelling, acculturation to work values, and diminution of crime inherent in universal primary education. Free schools would make new arrivals into Canadians through moral suasion if possible, through coercion if necessary. The immi-

Education and the Metaphor of the Family: The Upper Canadian Example.

Abstract: THE CONDITION of the family was a subject that much preoccupied school promoters in Upper Canada. Like educators in other times and places they blamed the weaknesses of the family for many social ills; at the same time they put forth an idealized portrait of domestic relations as a major hope for social progress. Besides the usual vague complaints and exaggerated hopes, they also had some very specific anxieties about the family, among them two that were clearly associated with the spread of formal schooling and that occurred in many parts of the United States as well as in Canada. The first was the recurring suspicion that some kinds of schools, especially those controlled increasingly by the state, were gradually undermining family authority. (1) The second, which is the subject of this essay, was intimately related to the first and concerned the education of children and adolescents away from home. How could schools and colleges replace the authority, affection, and advice normally provided by families, for these absentees from the domestic fireside? The need to send some children to school away from home posed an increasingly serious problem. The obvious answer to some educators was that despite their size, schools ought to imitate families. Indeed it is fairly clear that without the ability to see the schools and colleges that they founded as substitute families or households, many

Renaissance Influences and Religious Reforms in Russia : Western and Post-Byzantine Impacts on Culture and Education (16th-17th Centuries)

Abstract: It is perhaps axiomatic that we cherish more stereotypes about a society and its history the more distant from our own it seems to be. Russia is not so remote from the Euro-American tradition that its experience has been totally different from our own, and yet it has long been held to hover between the "East" and the "West" (whatever they are) with a lingering ambiguity we seem unable to resolve. Chief among the stereotypes perpetuated about Russian history is that Russia persisted in a "medieval" isolation until Peter the Great "Westernized" it at the beginning of the eighteenth century. But this convenient truth, as transmitted by our general textbooks and our survey courses, is a gross oversimplification. The present book provides one of the most striking demonstrations of just how unreliable this oversimplification really is. Professor Medlin of the University of Michigan faculty is best known for his book, Moscow and East Rome (1952); Mr. Patrinelis, an archivist at the Academy of Athens, has published on post-Byzantine Greece and on intercultural relations between the Greek and Russian world. Together they have assembled a remarkable range of material that is not elsewhere presented in such a compact synthesis. What they offer is a picture of Russia's cultural dilemma during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Russia is to be understood here not only as the Muscovite Czardom alone but also the Ukraine, Ruthenia, and various related Slavic areas that were not a part of the Muscovite realm proper at this time but looked to Moscow for some degree of Orthodox leadership or support. The dilemma of these regions lay in their need to chart a course between the essentially backward-looking world of Greek Orthodoxy (i.e., the formerly Byzantine world by then under the rule of the Ottoman Empire) and the essentially forward-looking world of the Latin West. Caught between these two poles and recognizing that they were thus caught Russians faced a complex of decisions. To what extent were they to be guided by Greeks in purging from their religious life regional variants of their own that diverged from the wider Orthodox tradition? To what extent should they accept guidance and new ideas or institutional forms from either Protestant or Roman Catholic centers in the West? To what extent could they refine their own sense of mission and identity without

Colonial Colleges and English Dissenting Academies: A Study in Transatlantic Culture

Abstract: STUDENTS OF early American culture often seek its sources in the experiences of England's religious and political dissenters. One example is the thesis that England's dissenting academies stimulated Colonial colleges to become, as John Brubacher and Willis Rudy express it, "broader and more modern in outlook." (1) Thomas Jefferson Wertenbaker calls the academies' influence "a matter of profound moment in the history of American education," while Richard Hofstadter, Lawrence Cremin, Brooke Hindle, and Francis Broderick emphasize the academies' "direct and strong" impact on college curricula. (2) Usually this influence is defined in terms of promoting the study of modern science and mathematics, although the academies also added new subjects like English composition, English literature, modern languages, and modern history, modified traditional subjects like Latin and ethics, and adopted new teaching methods like free discussion and the use of the vernacular. (3) The case for the academies' impact is plausible but not tenable. Its proponents have failed to examine carefully either the intellectual perspectives of colonial educators or the extent of their direct ties to the academies. The experience of Samuel Johnson exemplifies the pitfalls of pinpointing a source of influence like the academies. Shortly after Johnson became president of the newly founded College of New York in 1754, he and the trustees instituted a four-year curriculum that devoted almost two full years to science and mathematics. (4) What kinds of educational contacts might have shaped Johnson's

A Bibliography for Historians of Education

Abstract: The Alabama Review 24 (January 1971) "The Teacher of Helen Keller," by W. Silas Vance, pp. 51-62. American Heritage 23 (June 1972) "A Capital Education," photographs by Frances Benjamin Johnston, pp. 26-35. American Quarterly 23 (December 1971) "Family and Fertility on the Indiana Frontier, 1820," by John Modell, pp. 615-34; "Religion and Reform in the Early Republic: The Role of Youth," by Lois W. Banner, pp. 677-95. The Georgia Historical Quarterly 55 (Fall 1971) "The Georgia Penitentiary at Milledgeville 1817-1874," by James C. Bonner, pp. 303-28.

Agricultural Education in Nineteenth-Century Ontario: An Idea in Search of an Institution.

Abstract: IN 1870 JOHN CARLING, Ontario's Commissioner of Public Works and Agriculture, repeated one of the most persistent ideas of the nineteenth century: what this country needed, he said, was some kind of agricultural education in "the science of farming." (1) There were several reasons for Carling's concern for systematic agricultural education. One of the most significant was the rising prestige of science. Even clergymen were asserting that the nineteenth century was "eminently the age of science," (2) and there was ample evidence to support such a claim. An obvious illustration was the number of institutes and societies formed to celebrate the scientific spirit. One of the oldest of these, the Canadian Institute, was established in 1848 to provide a forum for the discussion of all branches of the natural sciences, and before many years had passed societies dedicated to the study of virtually every aspect of natural history and the natural sciences sprang up in all the provinces. (3) At this time also the practical and natural sciences were entering the country's universities. But science was not to be contained by the walls of erudite institutes nor her application reserved for the study of natural phenomena; her spirit imbued many of the intellectual disciplines with her characteristics, real or imagined. The scientific method was infused into literature to produce the literary genres of realism and naturalism, and a science-inspired theory of causation,