Defining education/Bailyn

3. Did Bailyn deliver?

Mid December, 1954, Clarence Faust (1901-1975), president of the Fund for the Advancement of Education hosted some American historians and educators in New York.  Faust was a specialist on Jonathan Edwards and prior to coming to the Fund in 1951, he had been a successful university administrator, having served as Dean of the College at Chicago and then Dean of Humanities and Sciences at Stanford.  The Fund for the Advancement of Education really served as an arm of the Ford Foundation, and in a few years it would become Ford's Education Division, with Faust as the vice-president in charge.  Through the 1950s, the Fund used substantial resources to help schools, colleges, and universities cope with shortages of teachers during the rapid post-War expansion, it led efforts to develop educational television, and it facilitated desegregation following Brown v. the Board of Education.  The December meeting was a bit different, however.  Faust, and O. Meredith Wilson (1910-1998), who had been secretary of the Fund and had just started as president of the University of Oregon, had invited an influential group to spend two days discussing how to strengthen scholarship on the role of education in shaping American history. 

Faust drew a significant group together.  Paul H. Buck (1899-1978), whose Road to Reunion, 1865-1900 had won the Pulitzer in 1937, chaired the meetings.  A gifted administrator, he had been Dean of the Harvard University faculty of arts and sciences from 1942 to 1953 as well as Provost of the University from 1946 to 1953, stepping down from these posts when James B. Conant left the Harvard presidency.  The group included several pillars of the American historical profession.  Arthur M. Schlesinger (1888-1965) would be a key leader in the work of the group.  He had established social history as an important field through a prolific and influential career as a powerful professor at Harvard and leader in the historical profession.  The group included the two most prominent historians of American thought, Mere Curti (1897-1996), from Wisconsin, and Ralph H. Gabriel (1890-1987) from Yale.  A few days after the meeting, Curti would deliver his presidential address on "Intellectuals and Other People" to the American Historical Association.  The fourth senior historian was Edward Chase Kirkland (1894-1975), for many years a widely recognized historian at Bowdoin, who had just finished a year as president of the American Economic History Association.  The curriculum theorist, Ralph W. Tyler (1902-1994) was also a senior member of the group, then just starting as the founding director of the Palo Alto Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, having previously been Dean of Social Sciences at the University of Chicago.

Four more scholars, a generation younger, yet highly accomplished, completed the group.  Francis Keppel (1916-1990) had become Dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Education in 1948 and had already successfully solicited substantial funds from Faust to recruit strong liberal arts graduates into the teaching profession through a reinvigorated MAT program.  An up and coming instructor, whom Keppel had recruited to strengthen the history of education at Harvard, Bernard Bailyn (1922-  ), also participated.  Bailyn was then revising his dissertation, a highly successful one sponsored by Oscar Handlin, into his first book, The New England Merchants in the Seventeenth Century.  The other two were from Columbia, Richard Hofstadter (1916-1970) and Walter P. Metzger (1922-  ).  Both were already well-published, Hofstadter especially so, with Social Darwinism in American Thought, the American Political Tradition, and The Development and Scope of Higher Education in the United States (co-authored with C. De Witt Hardy).  At the time of the meeting, Hofstadter and Metzger were together finishing up their timely history of academic freedom in American higher education.^[1]

Paul Buck described the meeting briefly in his preface to a pamphlet the Fund published in 1957, The Role of Education in American History, which solicited proposals from American historians in response to the group's concerns and announced the availability of funding for fellowships and research grants, publication subsidies, and support of conferences and summer seminars.  As Buck explained, the group spoke to their peers as leaders among academic historians and called on the profession to change the writing of American history by examining how educational processes could serve as causal factors indicating and explaining the salient characteristics of American experience.  They began with a broad understanding of education, for their purpose "was to discuss the need of studying the role of education, not in its institutional forms alone, but in terms of all the influences that have helped shape the mind and character of the rising generation."

A deficiency in the work of the history profession, not schools of education, motivated the group, which "was unanimous in its conviction that, relative to its importance in the development of American society, the history of education in this country, both in the schoolroom and outside, has been shamefully neglected by American historians."  Historians paid too little attention to the effects of education in its many forms, on the main developments characterizing American history.  Buck then added a further declaration, which, on stopping to consider it, stands in tension with the first and raises perplexing questions.  Speaking on behalf of a group immensely sophisticated about history and about education, he stated that "it was also our firm belief that the imperfect knowledge of this history has affected adversely the planning of curricula, the formulation of policy, and the administration of education agencies in the present crisis of American education."  Here was an unusual claim, namely that the failure by professional historians to account to the general public for the role of education in American experience adversely affected the quality and effects of American education.^[2]

A smaller committee, drawn from the group that Faust had convened, drafted the 1957 pamphlet with the help of a new member, Richard J. Storr (1915-  ). Storr had been one of Arthur M. Schlesinger's students and had recently published his dissertation as The Beginnings of Graduate Education in America^[3].  This smaller group — Buck (chair), Faust, Hofstadter, Schlesinger, and Storr (secretary) — became the Committee on the Role of Education in American History, making decisions on the uses of monies provided by the Fund for the Advancement of Education to support work by historians on the role of education in American history.  Over the next ten years, this Committee managed these funds with careful attention to the purposes they spelled out in the pamphlet.  They identified eight "great movements in American history" in which they believed "the role of educational forces" had been significant.  A quick look at the eight movements the Committee singled out makes their commitment to American history in its entirety clearly evident.^[4]

1. The building of new communities on the frontier.  The Committee wanted historians to give a fuller account of what happened "as pioneering ended and the life of the town and countryside matured."
2. The transformation of the immigrant into an American.  The Committee invited a thorough, deep account of the process of Americanization in its many forms.  "If the American is partially a work of conscious art, we must discover how the artist whose medium is mind and character and whose tool is teaching has accomplished his purpose."
3. The fulfillment of the promise of American life.  The Committee perceived that "the concrete meaning of America as a land of opportunity" depended on whether educational forces effectively promoted equality or furthered existing inequalities.
4. The growth of distinctively American political institutions.  The Committee recognized that republicanism and democracy were historically contingent and whether they would develop and endure depended in large part on what knowledge, skills, and values Americans and their leaders acquired.  Here was a pedagogical problem of historical dimension: "The nature of true democracy and of right education is subject to controversy; but the mutual dependence of the two is an article of common faith."
5. The transformation of American society.  The Committee noted that numerous transformations in social institutions and attitudes had occurred in American experience, none more profound than the shift from a rural, agrarian society to an urban, industrial one.  Reflecting the dominance of consensus history, they asserted that "the fact that a revolution has occurred in American society without apocalyptic violence cannot be explained until the role of [educational] efforts is carefully examined."
6. The utilization of the immensely rich material resources of the nation.  The Committee commended the "penetrating insight" of economic historians into the extraordinary material development characteristic of American history, while adding that "we have much to learn about the development of the human resources which make the intensive use of the endowment of nature possible."
7. The adjustment of the foreign policy of the United States to its growing responsibilities as a world power.  The Committee reflected a realism about the all-out power conflicts between states evoked by the traumas of the twentieth century and observed that successful studies of propaganda will not suffice as a basis of national leadership "unless they are related to the use of education to produce particular responses toward other nations and to the uses of American power."
8. The growth of a distinctive American culture over a vast continental area.  The Committee called attention "to the relevance of education to the spread and advancement of American culture."  What have been the educational foundations of American cultural achievements, helping to explain both their strengths and their limitations?

Leading up to these topics, the Committee gave a short disquisition on the historical role of education.  According to Storr, writing in 1976, Arthur Schlesinger had provided the key ideas the Committee advanced.^[5]  At the 1954 meeting, Schlesinger had presented the inclusive conception of education essential to the whole effort and that conception continued to be the controlling idea of education throughout the Committee's work.  "Any person living in the United States is shaped by a flood of influences or forces sweeping in upon him from nature, government, the farm, the factory, the region, family life, the periodical press, advertising, the churches, libraries, clubs, schools, etc." 

There followed an artful solution to the problem of distinguishing educational history from intellectual and cultural history, a problem that comes into play whenever a historian adopts a conception of education as inclusive as this one the Committee adopted.  "Education in the broadest sense" comprised all sorts of influences and forces.   Within this assemblage, educational action was sometimes incidental and sometimes deliberate.  And within the comprehensive process, deliberate education had a special role as a multiplier and modulator.  The whole set of forces, intentional and accidental, put ideas into operation among a people, but the intentional part had a crucial reciprocal influence on all of it, shaping what ideas people could accidentally appropriate and how they might absord or tansform it.  As a consequence, "the student of education seeks to find out how systematic instruction and information affect the reception of those ideas and so contribute to their efficacy."^[6]  Thus the full historical effect of educational activity would aggregate both the incidental and the deliberate dissemination of ideas with the latter, deliberate educating, amplifying and modulating the action of the former, incidental educating.  Cultural history would describe the various components of the culture; educational history would explain how people worked with these general components, finding themselves possessing the interests and skills to activate them or lacking the abilities to do so.

Members of the Committee were all skilled historians with an appreciation of the craft.  They noted that the importance of documents would slant inquiry into the role of education towards institutions and activities that might generate a documentary record.  Thus a locus of documentation would most likely be an institution, large or small, and it would be in tension with the enveloping society, of which it was a part, in the fashion of text and context.  Reciprocal influence between society and the institution would be taking place.  Consequently, the Committee observed, the historian could examine the tension between education and society from either of two directions, the effects of society on education or the influence of education on society.  They noted that the effects of society on education have been studied far more fully than the effects of education on society and consequently indicated their disposition "to give particular encouragement to scholars who wish to examine education  as a creative force in United States history."^[7]

At this point, the Committee noted a problem that would come to the fore in the decade of the 70s with the second wave of revisionism in educational history: are the determining effects exerted by society on education so powerful that education cannot act as an independent agent having effects from its side on the encompassing society.  The Committee recognized, of course, that educational influences are largely socially determined and therefore work significantly to reproduce existing social realities.  Yet educational forces had "a modicum of power to act on their own," enabling effects to build over time into "a shift of several degrees in [the social] course."^[8]  For the Committee, historians needed to search out in nuanced ways the limited elements of educational agency that diverse historical subjects might exercise.  Thus they called for work on educational leaders, different educational institutions and forces, teachers and other sources of instruction and guidance, curricula and less formal pedagogical programs, and policy processes including the routinizing of programs through bureaucracies.  Many detailed inquiries needed to uncover the ways in which educational forces acted independently through individuals and institutions to the degree they could do so in the midst of powerful constraints.

Over the next ten years the Committee used its influence and funds to promote such inquiry.  In 1958, representatives of a dozen or so history departments met at Princeton to discuss how they might advance the Committee's goals.  A second conference, October 16-17, 1959, at Williamsburg, Virginia, seemed directed ostensibly to a limited group of specialists on colonial American history.  Two years later, a third two-day conference took place at Berkeley, where Richard Hofstadter presented two essays on anti-intellectualism and education, which became part of his study of Anti-Intellectualism in American Life.  A fourth meeting was held at the University of Minnesota to talk about education for immigrant groups.  Finally, an extended invitational conference took place on Cape Cod at which historians presented papers on 19th-century education.^[9]

Of these meetings, the second two-day conference had the most evident effect.  A select group of twenty colonial historians gathered for the third in an ongoing series on "Needs and Opportunities", sponsored by the Institute of Early American History and Culture at Williamsburg, to consider two papers presented by Bernard Bailyn about the historiography of colonial education.^[10]  His first essay sketched a hypothetical history interpreting how less predictable, more expansive conditions on the colonies elicited changes in the English heritage.  Frontier conditions stimulated newly settled colonists to turn away from the educational practices they had brought with them on crossing the Atlantic.  Hence, the educational uses of family and household as the site of apprenticeship and the local community, particularly its church, were changed and weakened in order to build up more formal, officially supported educational institutions.  The conjugal unit of the family persisted, but its extension over time and space became more tenuous; intergenerational authority weakened; and its sufficiency as the primary educative agent diminished.  The same forces weakened apprenticeship structures and turned those that survived more exclusively towards a vocational quid pro quo between a labor hungry master and a skill hungry journeyman.  The new land opened careers to talent and energy in ways that broke the old-world inheritance of vocations: Smith became a name, not an ascribed function.  Yet the transfer of culture from one generation to another could not be taken for granted, especially in a world where the pressure of nature was imperious and the mark of culture on the environment contingent and tenuous.  In response, education became "an act of will."^[11]  The role of schools and colleges became amplified while support for them, and control over their goals and policies, came to depend on willed community action in the form of taxes or recurrent gifts, not the more passive earnings of endowed land, characteristic in England.  The Revolution confirmed, but did not alter this essential transformation of the medieval heritage in education, "which was not unique to America, but like much else of the modern world, it appeared here first."^[12]

At the end of his interpretative essay, Bailyn turned from his exploration of how conditions in the colonies transformed the educational presumptions brought from England to indicate, through a paragraph each, the two most important ways in which the transformation of education in America shaped "the development of American society," the ostensible subject of the book.  First, it served as a powerful accelerator of social change, releasing "the restless energies and ambitions of groups and individuals," the very forces stimulated by the American environment to turn education in its willful, non-traditional directions in the first place.  Second, the transformation "contributed much to the forming of national character."^[13]  The new education broke the household cocoon, made authority acquired, not ascripted, and turned the individual towards self-reliance  — the pedagogical grounds of "typical American individualism, optimism, and enterprise."^[14]  Bailyn delivered these dicta as ungrounded assertions, thereby finessing the really difficult task of showing how pedagogical tendencies actually take hold in the character formation of individuals and then spread to a sufficient proportion of a people to mark their collective character.  He identified the role of education, but he did not explain the pedagogical processes by which it wrought this role.  And in his bibliographic essay, which was immensely rich in the discussion of historical particulars about educational agencies at work in the colonial origins and experience, Bailyn paid little attention to sources or literature pertaining to how educational actions operated as causal determinants of general historical developments.

Yet the Committee on the Role of Education in American History had hoped to elicit answers to precisely those pedagogical processes pertaining to the way education actually shaped historical experience.  They wanted clarification of how educational activities served as agencies determining American history, not how American historical experience served as agencies shaping educational activities.  Taken by itself, Bailyn's discussion of educational agencies in colonial America would appear as a highly competent specialist work, one indicating many opportunities for research showing how conditions in a sparsely settled land shaped educational practices adapted originally to very different conditions of life.  But one can imagine Arthur Schlesinger, Sr., harrumphing that Bailyn framed his hypothetical history exactly as he, Schlesinger, had done in "What Then Is the American, This New Man?", his 1942 Presidential Address to the American Historical Association^[15]  What had Bailyn added?  The Committee had made clear the importance of examining "education as a creative force in United States history," yet the substantive strength of Bailyn's essays was in showing the effects of social changes under novel circumstances on the educational arrangements brought to the colonies.

Possibly disappointed, the Committee members may equally have been a bit surprised.  Despite its brevity, Education in the Forming of American Society included more than a review of the professional historians' treatment of colonial education — a devastating critique of the existing literature in the history of education as it had been developed and used in schools of education.  Whatever the response at Williamsburg to this part of his presentation, it caught the attention of scholars in education.  Bailyn opened his interpretative essay by observing that unlike the prior topics, colonial science and early relations with indigenous peoples, which were suffering from neglect, his topic, the early history of American education had become part of "the patristic literature of a powerful academic ecclesia" securely ensconced in schools of education since the 1890s.^[16]  It was inbred, isolated, and anachronistic.  Bailyn critiqued the histories of education written from the 1890s into the 1920s in the formative period for use in university-based schools of education, boosting compulsory mass schooling.  As educational missionaries, the authors condescended to the past, seeing it as the present writ small, blinding themselves and their readers to the unexpected.  Obsessed with the development of public school systems, their purposes caused thought to short-circuit; they could see in the past only primitive intimations of the present and as a result they could only chronicle continuities, unable to perceive, let alone explain interesting change.  Bailyn's target was ripe and his anathema provided a short, dry book with a powerful, attention-getting hook.  The effects on the history of education changed its writing and uses  substantially, perhaps for the better, perhaps for the worse.

Doubtless Bailyn's unexpected critique elicited in ensuing years much serious scholarship in the history of education.  But it did so by deflecting effort away from what the Committee on the Role of Education in American History had sought to support.  Sol Cohen has developed the very interesting possibility that Bailyn's critique, as it became amplified by Cremin and others, really aimed to bring to a head a power struggle then current in schools of education, securing the influence of scholars there who wanted to regulate research in education by applying academic, disciplinary norms rather than those of professional, field-oriented practice.  Such a purpose suited Keppel's purposes at Harvard.  And Cremin's at Columbia (of the eight reviews of Bailyn's essay that JSTOR retrieves, four just happen to be by Cremin and his colleagues at TC).  Certainly Bailyn's critique hastened the decline of the social foundations movement, large composite courses for all students in schools of education that had flourished from the 1930s into the 50s.  Further, publication of Bailyn's essays, followed closely by Cremin's Transformation of the School: Progressivism in American Education, 1876-1956, consolidated the prestige of disciplinary based scholarship at Teachers College and other schools of education.  Cohen correctly judged that while the call Bailyn and the Committee were issuing had some influence among professional historians, they "had more influence . . . among historians of education on faculties at teachers colleges and schools of education."^[17]

Victory in this power struggle, played out in the name of contrasting intellectual visions, carried within it the grounds for its own collapse.  First, Bailyn's critique had very little effect in actually shifting the institutional base.  It instead actually left the history of education and related social science inquiries into education still situated primarily in schools of education, where their institutional rationale remained to be justified through their functionality in the work of the professional school.  Within schools of education, the enhanced academic prestige won by the new historians was largely cosmetic.  But that was useful in the early 60s, for the perennial pressure on schools of education to raise academic standards had been particularly high in the aftermath of Sputnik and both enrollments and research funding were relatively flush, lowering the pressures on academic units in schools of education to justify their costs against income.  In these circumstances, power came easily to those with academic prestige and it did not seem particularly important to plan strategies for keeping that power should the favorable circumstances change.  Consequently, no one paid much attention to the second seed of future collapse, a more subtle one, namely that Bailyn's critique did little to change the role and function within the professional schools of education served by the knowledge that historians and other social scientists generated about education.

Bailyn stigmatized the way historians in schools of education had played to their audience.  In his view, history written by and for members of a profession other than the historical profession would be bad history.  There was not much one could do about it other than have history written by and for members of the historical profession and he did not say much about why members of the educational profession should support such history when the pressures began to pinch.  Here one might hoist Bailyn upon his own petard, for he displayed a singular lack of curiosity about why educators in schools of education at the turn of the 20th century had come to write the peculiar kind of history that he showed them to have written.  Interviewing Bailyn in 1994, Edward Connery Lathem asked Bailyn whether he thought professionals could write good history about their profession and Bailyn hearkened back to Education in the Forming of American Society and suggested that the temptation to foreshorten history in a search for the antecedents of the present was nearly irresistible.  Better leave it to academic historians interested in the past for its own sake.^[18]

We come here to a crux of the matter.  What is the relationship between historical inquiry and a sound causal interpretation of what educates?  We have seen how Cremin felt a need to turn to other forms of inquiry in order to arrive at a clear theory of education and we have noted that he used that theory, in a rather opaque way, primarily to identify diverse examples of educative activity and to describe what they did.  In a similar way, Bailyn seems to evidence similar proclivities.  He identified a strong susceptibility among educators writing the history of their field to produce anachronistic inquiries into a past understood as the present writ small.  But he seemed uninterested in why they did that and incurious whether they might have done otherwise.  Revisiting the matter years later he suggested that such foibles are merely natural, for "they seem impelled," allowing only that a few, on becoming highly sensitized to the danger might "try to correct for it."^[19]  Neither Cremin nor Bailyn, it would seem, would claim history, in particular the history of education, to be an independent source of positive knowledge about how education can and should take place.  Their definitions of education generate descriptive agendas.  Let us put the question that Bailyn left unasked: is there a historical explanation why the historians of education in schools of education wrote the sorts of foreshortened, anachronistic histories that they chose to write?  To say simply that they were impelled to do it is a mystification, not an explanation.  Might they have done otherwise and if so why did they do what they did?