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S i d e b a r
How We Got Where We Are
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This Rock
Volume 19, Number 1
 January 2008 
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As late as 1820s, the liberal arts approach was the only approach in education in most countries in the Western world. In England, this system lasted into the middle of the last century. In America, the new preparatory schools of New England and the southern coastal cities followed at first the English model. The colleges of New England and Virginia were modeled on English universities and required the same command of Latin and Greek.
But Americans (perhaps because of the desire for general equality, perhaps because of the founders’ perception that an educated populace was the only free populace), began to set up schools in every town and village that could afford a school master. On the frontier, Tennessee, Kentucky, Indiana and Ohio, the supply of college-educated schoolmasters was limited. So localities hired grammar-school-trained teachers to teach the basics—readin’, ‘ritin’, and ‘rithmetic—to their beginners. The language learned here was English, not Latin, but it was the English of the King James Bible, of Shakespeare, of the great orators and authors of the 18th century: formal, complex, sonorous, and non-conversational. Some students then went on to preparatory schools or church-run academies and minor seminaries, and then colleges; others completed only grammar school and yet were able to "read for" a profession with the local doctor, lawyer, architect, or engineer, and to become state lawmakers and U.S. Congressmen. The level of education in the grammar schools was always very high. St. Elizabeth Ann Seton, foundress of the American parochial school, was a product of blue-blood Anglicanism and a liberal arts education.
Then, in the 1800s, there arose a movement to establish schools for everybody, public schools, free schools, required-attendance schools, so that children of all levels of society would be literate and numerate to the level a free citizen needed. What did a free citizen need to be a free man and a citizen? That was a debated issue. That these schools should have a common system and curriculum, the mark of their democratic equality, seemed obvious. The older system was clearly elitist. It had no room for the less gifted and less diligent.
The educational reformers, all Protestant, turned to the new experiment in Germany that had started state schools under the Prussian Kings before the Napoleonic era. There, the old liberal arts had been modified. The Germans had designed a more "scientific," a more "efficient" way to impart the liberal arts, a way that would take into account the new shape of European society, the needs and prominence of the new middle class, of commerce, and of bureaucratic government. Of course, the Prussians were not concerned with making a "free" citizenry, but they were concerned with making a prosperous citizenry, and so the system was designed to enable a businessman to do his accounts, a lawyer to master the civil codes, and a clerk to file his dossiers. As the growing new sciences demanded, the German system gave early prominence to simple numeracy and natural philosophy. Students could be expected to learn a set body of material in a year, matriculate to the next level, repeat the process, and so be turned out on a fairly standardized model at the end of the process, all knowing the same things and qualified by a common standard, approved and certified by the State.
The American reformers looked at this new efficiency with awe. The new state-mandated public education of New York, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Michigan was structured on the German model with American content. The older, English model, alive in the one-room schools and the McGuffey readers for the rest of the century, slowly converted to the philosophy and methods of the state systems, as their success and efficiency proved convincing. By the early part of our century, teachers’ colleges and departments of education were in place to certify the products of their training for the state as teachers trained and qualified to produce a standard school graduate. The liberal arts had been reformed for mass production.
This reformed curriculum was still a liberal arts curriculum. The changes were the loss of Latin and foreign language in favor of standardized American English, the equal weight given mathematics and language studies in the early years, the standardization of history and geography studies into separate "subjects," and the invention of the now-standard subjects: reading, spelling, grammar, composition, arithmetic, geometry, history, civics, geography, and science—in which teachers were encouraged to "major" or specialize. In the older curriculum those subjects had all been taken up, but usually not distinguished as subjects in themselves but interconnected as the year progressed.
The German approach allowed teachers to work out the best methods and sequence for presenting subjects, considered independently of each other, and to standardize final examinations, the final product of the school. It allowed for the analysis and development of technologies of instruction, many of which have enriched our education. We have much to thank the reformers for, in making teaching a systematic art in itself. The goal of efficiency resonates well with both Germans and Americans. How to do it faster and easier, better and more long-lastingly, how to bring minds more fully to a common goal, is a national value.
So the system that prevailed in this country from the reforms of the last century until the 1960s represented a departure from the sequence and methods, but not the overall philosophy and intention of the old liberal arts education that had sustained European civilization for a thousand years. American schools, public and parochial, followed essentially the same plan as Charlemagne’s school that Master Alcum set up for him at Aachen in the ninth century, which was modeled on a school like St. Augustine’s school for young gentlemen in fourth-century Rome.
Until the last three decades, both public and parochial schools still began schooling with the learning of fundamental skills and basic knowledge; both public and parochial schools still emphasized the vision of diligent excellence, moral virtue, and wisdom. The purpose of education defined by Plato in the early 300s B.C. continued until this century. Both school systems demanded memorization of facts, mastery of skills, public performance, 100 percent achievement on examinations, and a life of honesty and self-control from the earliest years of schooling.
But there was in the reform, from its earliest roots, a certain anti-traditional, secularizing, even revolutionary spirit. The search for efficiency, the demand for equality, right and good though they are, carry with them a tendency of absolutism, of immediate gratification, that can bring the whole house down around us. The American educators were always trying new arrangements and new experiments to make the system either more efficient, or more equal, or just plain more interesting for the teacher to teach. That’s when the 1960s intervened. (For more on the heritage of that era’s pedagogical aims, see "Today: Not Education but Social Engineering," p. 12)
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