Left Back and Ordinary Resurrections

Dear Chris,

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Like you (if I'm reading you correctly), I found it weirdly comforting that the debate over education, with all its faddery and reformist mumbo-jumbo and conservative counter-reformation, has changed so little over time. It's astonishing to read about the pitched battles of the mid-'30s over whether high school should include exposure to a canon of Great Books; you could pass it off as a late-century debate over E.D. Hirsch Jr.'s cultural literacy campaign without changing a word.

It's impossible to come away from Left Back feeling anything but the basic justice of Ravitch's case that the common theme running through all the waves of 20^th-century reform was the progressives' strange inversion of the democratic ideal. Left Back can be read as a long history of what George W. Bush, in one of his rare felicitous phrases, calls "the soft bigotry of low expectations."

(Some things, though, do change. One of my favorite passages is a 1917 quote from classicist Paul Shorey, arguing that without a solid grounding in an academic curriculum, children would be consigned to "a world of nothing but ragtime, chewing gum, chocolate sundaes, the wit of the colored Sunday supplements, best sellers, uncensored films, continuous vaudeville ..." If only!)

But I found the reading of Left Back a bit more laborious than you did. I agree that Ravitch is admirably restrained (Can't you just feel her working not to gloat through the more ridiculous chapters of her targets' errors?). But I found the compendiousness of it a little trying, since Ravitch is essentially tracing the same fruitless argument as it took place over and over again.

Like you, I wish she'd spent more time trying to make reformers' motives more intelligible to us: I thought she almost went out of her way to avoid this. Clearly their delusions had different engines in different times, and while she notes the different results (the emphasis on preparing kids for work in factories during the Progressive era, for example, vs. the emphasis on lowering their expectations during the Depression), she does almost nothing to explain the vigor of the reforming impulse. It's not enough that she avoids imputing nasty motivations, when, absent any real understanding of the reformers' zeal, we're left to see them as hopelessly misguided.

Equally, I thought she was grudging in conceding that progressive educators had some good ideas. "Without question, the activity movement changed elementary education for the better," she writes on Page 252--an admission that jolted me out of my chair, considering all that had gone before. (The activity movement, a product of the '20s and '30s, made the unzany argument that children learn best when actively engaged in projects and experiments that give them direct experience with what they're studying.) The danger of the activity movement, Ravitch makes clear, lay in the hands of teachers who severed it from the learning of real content. In practice, "Far from being an easier way to educate children ... an activity program demanded more space, more equipment, more planning, more resources, more supplies, and better-educated teachers than a conventional program did."

And this is the rub, it turns out, with almost all the elements of progressive reform that Ravitch briefly praises. It's one thing to say that all "child-centered" education is rubbish; another to say that it is an exacting art that has only worked well in private schools of the kind John Dewey founded, with hand-picked teachers and upper-middle-class children whose parents support the curriculum. While Ravitch dutifully reports the latter version, in which she admits that the Dewey School and the Lincoln School at Teachers' College approached educational nirvana, all of her emphases suggest the former. I came away thinking that Ravitch is a pragmatist who feels that the best ideas of the progressives are so hard to implement that they have no relevance to public education. But this is in itself a defeatist argument, isn't it, especially when it's made so indirectly as to imply it isn't even worth discussing?

(In the spirit of full disclosure, I should probably report that my children go to a progressive private school of the kind Ravitch is dismissing as irrelevant to her discussion, in which child-centeredness, as it is excruciatingly called, is married to rigor. This, at least, is our fond hope. After meetings at all the schools we considered, my husband would say wistfully, "But will our children ever find out who Miles Standish was?")

At any rate, Page 462 of a 467-page book seems quite late for Ravitch to be acknowledging that both progressive and traditional education "have had their virtues and defects, depending on circumstances."

Finally, let's talk at some point this week about whether Ravitch's prescription for character education, which includes teaching children "the importance of honesty, personal responsibility, intellectual curiosity, industry, kindness, empathy, and courage," is really different in spirit from all the misguided utopian social indoctrination she accuses progressives of inflicting on the schools. How is "a conscious effort to build shared values and ideals among [the] citizenry" (good) different from the reformist impulse to use schools as a tool of social transformation (bad)?

And let's talk Kozol if we must. But I warn you, he brings out the sadist in me.

Best,

Marjorie

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This week, our Book Clubbers discuss Diane Ravitch's Left Back and Jonathan Kozol's Ordinary Resurrections. Ravitch's book critiques a century's worth of school reforms, arguing that reform has dumbed schools down instead of strengthening them. Kozol's book is an extended look at one group of children in the South Bronx and their "little miracles of stubbornly persistent innocence." Click here to buy Ravitch's book, here to buy Kozol's, and here for an explanation of Slate's new and improved Book Club format. Click here to read this discussion from the beginning.

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