Talk:Defining education/Bailyn

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Contents 1 Study 1.1 Generative questions originating the article 1.2 Key points to make 1.3 Key resources to draw on 1.4 Scope and tone of coverage 2 Talk

[edit] Study

[edit] Generative questions originating the article

• What did the Committee on the Role of Education in American History want to accomplish? Why?
• Who did the Committee comprise?
• What was the chronology of the Committee's activities and what documents do we have to establish the chronology?

[edit] Key points to make

[edit] Key resources to draw on

The following chronologically lists the available documents for tracing the work of the Committee on the Role of Education in American History.

• Richard J. Storr. "The Role of Education in American History: A Memorandum for the Committee Advising the Fund for the Advancement of Education in Regards to this Subject," Harvard Education Review (46:3 August 1976) pp. 331-354.
  Shortly after its initial 1954 meeting, the convening group recruited Richard J. Storr to help develop the opening pages of The Role of Education in American History. This Memorandum gives an edited version of the memorandum Storr developed, along with an interesting, interpolated 20 years later. Unfortunately, the elisions somewhat reduce the usefulness of the document in an effort to understand precisely what the Committee was seeking to promote. As a result, they qualify the status of the Memorandum as an input chronologically prior to the publication. Nevertheless, one can see how the Committee incorporated several points, developed at greater length in the Memorandum, into the published version and omitted Storr's reflections on the historical difficulty of distinguishing between what an educator teaches and a student learns.

• Paul H. Buck, et al. The Role of Education in American History (New York: The Fund for the Advancement of Education, 1957).
  This sixteen page brochure announces the program the Committee developed to promote work that will "bring thorough knowledge of education immediately into the main stream of historical scholarship and instruction and ultimately into the thinking of the public." The document is in three parts.
  
  It opens with a 2 page Preface by Paul H. Buck, chair of the Committee briefly telling about the initial meeting, listing its participation, and explaining the subsequent steps taken in producing the brochure.
  
  There follows a 7 page discussion of the importance of reversing the neglect of education by members of departments of history. The Committee presented a provisional definition of education as a field of study, advancing a very broad definition that would get narrowed somewhat in practice. The Committee recognized that despite constraints on the autonomy of educational action, educators always had a spectrum of possibilities with respect to which they could act, exercising a shaping influence in history. It was especially important to give an account of such accomplishments and to explain how they were achieved.
  
  The Committee concluded the brochure with 6 pages in which they singled out eight "great movements of American history", calling for "intensive investigation and thoughtful interpretation of the role of educational forces" in shaping them:

1. The building of new communities on the frontier.
2. The transformation of the immigrant into an American.
3. The fulfillment of the promise of American life, i.e., giving meaning for all to America as the land of opportunity.
4. The growth of distinctively American political institutions.
5. The transformation of American society, i.e., sustaining social adaptations without apocalyptic violence.
6. The utilization of the immensely rich material resources of the nation.
7. The adjustment of the foreign policy of the United States to its growing responsibilities as a world power.
8. The growth of a distinctive American culture over a vast continental area.

• Committee on the Role of Education in American History. Education and American History (New York: The Fund for the Advancement of Education, 1965). In structure and substance this brochure is very much like the one from 1957. Changes were largely minor rewrites for clarity and flow with the addition of several paragraphs describing the main activities the Committee had sponsored. Key among these were four week-end conferences and one four-day symposium. The first conference took place at Princeton in March 1958 and dealt with the Committee's purposes and the needs of the twelve history departments with participants at the meeting, At the second, held at Williamsburg in October 1959, Bernard Bailyn presented the two essays that became Educating in the Forming of American Society." At the third, which took place at UC Berkeley in October 1961, Richard Hofstadter presented two essays that became part of Anti-Intellectualism in American Life.

• Bernard Bailyn. Educating in the Forming of American Society: Needs and Opportunities for Study (New York: W. W. Norton & Co. [1960], 1972).
• Reviews of Educating in the Forming of American Society:
  • Bereday, George Z. F. Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science. 335.The Rising Demand for International Education (1961): 241. JSTOR.
  • Cremin, Lawrence A. The Mississippi Valley Historical Review. 47.4 (1961): 678-679. JSTOR.
  • Greene, Jack P. American Quarterly. 13.3 (1961): 435-436. JSTOR.
  • Kershner, Frederick D. The William and Mary Quarterly. 18.4 (1961): 579-581. JSTOR.
  • Lord, Clifford L. The Journal of Higher Education. 32.9 (1961): 522-523. JSTOR.
  • Moehlman, Arthur Henry. The New England Quarterly. 34.3 (1961): 427-429. JSTOR.
  • Moss, Gordon. The Journal of Southern History. 27.2 (1961): 238-239. JSTOR.
  • Anonymous. British Journal of Educational Studies. 10.1 (1961): 117. JSTOR.

[edit] Scope and tone of coverage

[edit] Talk

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Such specialized inquiries did not suffice, however. As we have seen, for the Committee "the ultimate test of any given study is its relevance to American history as a whole." (p. 9) Why would a Committee acting under the auspices of the Fund for the Advancement of Education be so concerned to expand work on the history of education in order to improve the understanding of American history as a whole? To develop an answer to this question, let us look more closely at the educational ideas of the Committee members and the historical setting in which those ideas had taken shape and were being brought to bear. Here were five men, learned, in command of substantial resources, experienced in academic action. Undoubtedly their actions could be seen as socially determined, but they had a plan and purposes behind it. What might those have been?

First consider Clarence Faust. Prior to his recruitment as the founding President of the Fund, Faust had made his mark as a gifted exponent of general education, particularly within Robert M. Hutchins' circle at the University of Chicago. In 1923, Faust graduated from North Central College in Naperville, Illinois, some 20 miles West of Chicage and then studied divinity, receiving a B.D. at the Evangelical Theological Seminary, also in Napervile. He then decided to study further at the University of Chicago, where he became an Instructor in English in 1930 while working on his Ph.D. in English. On completing it in 1935, he became an assistant professor, still in English, and then rose rapidly to associate in 1939 and full professor and Dean of the College in 1941. In that latter role he oversaw a major period of reform in the College curriculum at Chicago in which the College became largely independent from the four research-oriented Divisions, instituted a B.A. program with an almost entirley prescribed program of general education for students grades eleven through fourteen, and adopted a new Ph.B. with a substantially precribed program for students doing undergraduate work in the more traditional pattern of grade thirteen through sixteen. In 1948, Faust became Dean of Humanities at Stanford, called there by Alvin Eurich, a long-time friend and colleague, who was acting president Standford and who soon after left to become the first Chancellor of the State University of New York. Faust stayed at Stanford for three years, but was something of an outsider, despite serving as acting president very briefly on Eurich's departure. When the opportunity to head the new Fund for the Advancedment of Education, he took it.

In doing so, Faust was rejoining the Hutchins circle, for the Fund was one of three started in 1951, when Robert M. Hutchins left the Chicago chansellorship and came to the Ford Foundation as an Associate Director. Hutchins tenure at Ford was relatively short, however, as he attracted considerable attention from anti-Communist crusaders. He left Ford in 1954^[1] and became president of the Fund for the Republic, which eventually became the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions. In some ways, Faust's agenda at the Fund continued his committment at Chicage to general education as many of the educational reforms he espoused through the Fund reflected those he instituted at Chicago in collaboration with Hutchins. But there was a difference, for both Faust and Hutchins. At Chicago, their ideas about general education rested on Aristotelian philosophical commitments associated strongly with Mortimer Adler and Richard McKeon, both of whom Hutchins, at some cost, brought to Chicago. Like Adler, Hutchins believed in the pedagogical power of great books in the Western tradition, but Adler's disposition put these more exclusively in the service of a contemplative life while Hutchins became increasingly concerned with the problem of forming of judgment within the active sphere of life. [See how this was expressed in Hutchins' Education for Freedom (1943) and the 1946 report on A Free and Responsibile Press by the Commission on the Freedom of the Press, and by Faust's chapter explaining the general education reforms in the 1940s in The Idea and Practice of General Education].

He held the purse strings and responsibility for constituting the Committee. The Committee's work was a relatively small project for the Fund and somewhat anamalous. From its staart in 1951 to its end in 1967, the Fund would disburse $71.5 million in pursuit of five key purposes: equalizing educational opportunity; improving curricula in schools and colleges; clarifying the educational purpose of institutions; strengthening their management and finances; and improving teaching, with the last of these receiving nearly two thirds of the funds.^[2] In the 1950s educators were coping with the children of the baby boom and the pressures on enrollments in higher education resulting from the increasing proportion of yoouths going to college. Faust had somewhat surprisingly become a leading spokesperson for efforts to increase simultaneously efficiency and effectiveness in teaching, espousing creative uses of television in classrooms, team teaching, and novel course formats that would allow a limited supply of teachers to serve a growing student body effectively.

Members of the group firmly believed that American historians had "shamefully neglected" this question, with adverse consequences for curricula, policy, and administration "in the present crisis of American education." The group designated five members to be the Committee on the Role of Education in American History — Paul H. Buck, who served until recently as the Provost of Harvard University, Faust, three historians, Richard Hofstadter, Arthur M. Schlesinger, and Richard J. Storr. Over the next two years, they developed a short document describing the group's concern, identifying eight topics for special attention by professional historians, and announcing the availability of some funds "to stimulate study along these lines" through fellowships and research grants, publication subsidies, and support for conferences and summer seminars.^[3] Among various activities, these funds supported several two-day conferences and a four-day symposium.

at the time, a budding star among American historians, one of the very few to stay on at Harvard after his graduate work, with a good shot at earning tenure. Bailyn had published his first book in 1955, The New England Merchants in the Seventeenth Century, which won wide and favorable recognition^[4] Based on his dissertation, it explored the social implications of commercial enterprise in the seventeenth-century New England, showing how the merchants initiated significant adaptations in the ruling order of the Puritan oligarchs. A short second book had just come out, a statistical study of Massachusetts shipping at the start of the eighteenth century, demonstrating how computer analysis could amplify the usefulness of available historical sources, extracting past life from mundane documentary details ^[5]. which he revised and published as Education in the Forming of American Society.^[6] A year later, Education in the Forming of American Society showed Bailyn's flair for the converse, digesting diverse literatures and conveying clearly the currents of historical change that one could find revealed through them.

Bailyn's