America goes through recurrent cycles of educational seriousness and silliness.
For example, progressive education was in fashion in the 1950s. In Vladimir Nabokov’s 1955 novel Lolita, snobbish European pedophile Humbert Humbert is only marginally impressed by the sales pitch of Mrs. Pratt, the headmistress of the Beardsley School:
“We are not so much concerned, Mr. Humbird, with having our students become bookworms or be able to reel off all the capitals of Europe which nobody knows anyway, or learn by heart the dates of forgotten battles. What we are concerned with is the adjustment of the child to group life. This is why we stress the four D’s: Dramatics, Dance, Debating and Dating. We are confronted by certain facts. Your delightful Dolly will presently enter an age group - where dates, dating, date dress, date book, date etiquette, mean as much to her as, say, business, business connections, business success, mean to you, or as much as [smiling] the happiness of my girls means to me. Dorothy Humbird is already involved in a whole system of social life which consists, whether we like it or not, of hot-dog stands, corner drugstores, malts and cokes, movies, square-dancing, blanket parties on beaches, and even hair-fixing parties! Naturally at Beardsley School we disapprove of some of these activities; and we rechannel others into more constructive directions. But we do try to turn our backs on the fog and squarely face the sunshine. To put it briefly, while adopting certain teaching techniques, we are more interested in communication than in composition. That is, with due respect to Shakespeare and others, we want our girls to communicate freely with the live world around them rather than plunge into musty old books. We are still groping perhaps, but we grope intelligently, like a gynecologist feeling a tumor. We think, Dr. Humburg, in organismal and organizational terms. We have done away with the mass of irrelevant topics that have traditionally been presented to young girls, leaving no place, in former days, for the knowledges and the skills, and the attitudes they will need in managing their lives and - as the cynic might add - the lives of their husbands. …
Dr. Hummer, do you realize that for the modern pre-adolescent child, medieval dates are of less vital value than weekend ones [twinkle]?
But on October 4, 1957, the Soviet Sputnik satellite terrified Americans, who resolved that they ought to make sure the next generation learned some math and science.
Sci-fi author Robert A. Heinlein, who followed Nabokov’s career closely, likewise satirized 1950s schooling, but from a STEM point-of-view, in his 1958 young adult novel Have Space Suit—Will Travel:
You see stories about boys, poor-but-honest, who go to the top because they’re smarter than anyone in the county, maybe the state. But they’re not talking about me. I was in the top quarter of my graduating class but they do not give scholarships to M.I.T. for that — not from Centerville High. I am stating a fact; our high school isn’t very good. It’s great to go to — we’re league champions in basketball and our square-dance team is state runner-up and we have a swell sock hop every Wednesday. Lots of school spirit.
But not much studying.
The emphasis is on what our principal, Mr. Hanley, calls “preparation for life” rather than on trigonometry. Maybe it does prepare you for life; it certainly doesn’t prepare you for CalTech.
I didn’t find this out myself. Sophomore year I brought home a questionnaire cooked up by our group project in “Family Living” in social studies. One question read: “How is your family council organized?”
At dinner I said, “Dad, how is our family council organized?”
Mother said, “Don’t disturb your father, dear.”
Dad said, “Eh? Let me see that.”
He read it, then told me to fetch my textbooks. I had not brought them home, so he sent me to school to get them. Fortunately the building was open—rehearsals for the Fall Blow-Out. Dad rarely gave orders but when he did he expected results.
I had a swell course that semester — social study, commercial arithmetic, applied English (the class had picked “slogan writing” which was fun), handicrafts (we were building sets for the Blow-Out), and gym … All in all, I was doing well in school and knew it.
Dad read all my textbooks that night; he is a fast reader. In social study I reported that our family was an informal democracy; it got by — the class was arguing whether the chairmanship of a council should rotate or be elective, and whether a grandparent living in the home was eligible. We decided that a grandparent was a member but should not be chairman, then we formed committees to draw up a constitution for an ideal family organization, which we would present to our families as the project’s findings.
Dad was around school a good bit the next few days, which worried me — when parents get overactive they are always up to something.
The following Saturday evening Dad called me into his study. He had a stack of textbooks on his desk and a chart of Centerville High School’s curriculum, from American Folk Dancing to Life Sciences. Marked on it was my course, not only for that semester but for junior and senior years the way my faculty advisor and I had planned it.
… “Why, Dad, Center is a swell school.” I remembered things they had told us in P.T.A. Auxiliary. “It’s run along the latest, most scientific lines, approved by psychologists, and-”
“-and paying excellent salaries,” he interrupted, “for a staff highly trained in modern pedagogy. Study projects emphasize practical human problems to orient the child in democratic social living, to fit him for the vital, meaningful tests of adult life in our complex modern culture. Excuse me, son; I’ve talked with Mr. Hanley. Mr. Hanley is sincere — and to achieve these noble purposes we are spending more per student than is any other state save California and New York.”
“Well … what’s wrong with that?”
“What’s a dangling participle?”
I didn’t answer. He went on, “Why did Van Buren fail of re-election? How do you extract the cube root of eighty-seven?”
Van Buren had been a president; that was all I remembered. But I could answer the other one. “If you want a cube root, you look in a table in the back of the book.”
… “Son, Centerville High is a delightful place, well equipped, smoothly administered, beautifully kept. Not a ‘blackboard jungle,’ oh, no!-I think you kids love the place. You should. But this-” Dad slapped the curriculum chart angrily. “Twaddle! Beetle tracking! Occupational therapy for morons!”
So, America got serious about education for awhile.
But then came the Sixties, which mostly happened in the Seventies. By the early Seventies, junior high school for my class increasingly consisted of sitting in a circle on the floor and listening to Abbey Road and Crosby, Stills & Nash and then discussing with the teacher how it made us feel.
Which tended to be: Groovy!
In 1981, the Reagan Administration set up a National Commission on Excellence in Education to look into trends in K-12 schools. The Mormon chancellor of the U. of California, David Pierpont Gardner, picked worthies like Yale president A. Bartlett Giamatti (actor Paul’s dad, the future commissioner of baseball) and Nobel physicist Glenn T. Seaborg.
The Commission’s 1983 report A Nation At Risk was widely seen as a wake-up call to America to get more serious about schooling after the dopey and doped-up 1970s.
I don’t know that that many of its specific recommendations were adopted. But the report did set off a vibe shift toward seriousness.
The 2000s saw an interesting hybrid of seriousness and silliness: there was a fair amount of emphasis on make schooling better, especially among tech zillionaires. But the goal tended to be that quintessential embodiment of silliness: to finally Close the Gap in test scores among the races.
During the early 2010s, the seriousness vanished but the silliness remained as education got woker. Obviously, Closing the Gap was impossible, so why work so hard?
Covid exacerbated slacking and added massive grade inflation, and then, combining covid with George Floyd, colleges had an excuse to abolish admission testing.
The post-Woke / second Trump Era vibe shift has brought back a certain amount of seriousness: MIT was the first to reinstate admission testing, and Harvard is going to toughen grading.
But, we can’t just bring back testing, we’ve got to fix it.
By testing I mean both standardized testing like the SAT and LSAT, and informal classroom testing like next week’s 4th grade spelling test.
There are two big problems with testing, one new and one several decades old.
Paywall here.
