LEFT BACK: A Century of Failed School Reforms.

• Author: Toch, Thomas
• Position: Review

LEFT BACK: A Century of Failed School Reforms by Diane Ravitch Simon & Schuster, $27.00

LEFT BACK DIANE RAVITCH traces the evolution of a striking paradox in American education: Public schools, particularly secondary schools, have long downplayed the importance of academics for a majority of students. In the late 1800s it was widely thought that after students had grasped the three Rs, schools' primary task should be to develop and discipline students' minds through the teaching of history and other traditional subjects. But only a small fraction of students--under 10 percent--stayed in school beyond the elementary grades in that era. And when compulsory schooling laws and other forces swelled secondary enrollments early in the new century, a new, utilitarian educational philosophy quickly emerged--one that exalted "practical studies" like vocational education on the grounds that the new high-school students simply couldn't handle a serious academic education. Eventually, traditional subjects per se were widely attacked. "There is no aristocracy of `subjects,'" a national panel of educators wrote in 1944. "Mathematics and mechanics, art and agriculture, history and homemaking all are peers."

Ravitch chronicles this long-standing and deeply seeded anti-intellectualism in public education, from its turn-of-the-century origins to the "life-adjustment" movement of the 1940s and 1950s and the neo-progressivism of the 1960s and early 1970s. As she suggests, and laments throughout the book, the public education profession has been guided for nearly a century by the belief that the difficult task of teaching a wide range of students to use their minds well isn't really necessary; this implies that most students are better served by being taught to use their hands rather than their heads.

Such history brings today's "standards movement" into much sharper focus. It's one thing for state policymakers to impose demanding new academic standards on public schools; it's another to realize that public school systems were never organized to deliver a serious...