Expansion (1945 - 1965)
Educational Wastelands
After dominating educational thinking for close to 50 years, progressive education disappeared in the post-World War II years. Critics of progressive education argued that "Life Adjustment Education" (the latest permutation of progressive education) denied the majority of students the benefits of academic studies. Many critics characterized Life Adjustment Education as being trivial and anti-intellectual.
To critics of progressive education, the technological and space age of the 1950s and 1960s demanded that education identify intellectual talent and prepare young people to contribute to society. Education was also to transmit certain intellectual and cultural values.
One of the most vocal critics of progressive education was Arthur Bestor, a university professor of history. Bestor wrote Educational Wastelands in 1953 as a statement on and critique of educational practices, including progressive education. Critics like Bestor saw in progressive education an educational wasteland where academic and cultural learning took a back seat to social skills.
In Educational Wastelands, Bestor made three specific criticisms of progressive education. First, progressive education denied students the opportunity of an academic curriculum and education. Second, it did not prepare students for higher education, and therefore colleges and universities had to deal with unprepared students. Third, it did not provide society with young citizens versed in the academic knowledge and skills necessary for participation in our society. Bestor also believed that teacher preparation should not be in the hands of educationists but content specialists.
For Bestor and others, there were two solutions to the educational problem: Make education more academically rigorous by teaching the intellectual and cultural skills necessary for economic and political participation; and train better teachers, preferably people trained by subject matter experts and not educators in schools and colleges of education.
With the launching of the Soviet satellite Sputnik in 1957, concerns about improving education and finding talented youth to meet the technological needs of society took center stage. In 1958, the U.S. Congress passed the National Defense Education Act (NDEA) as a means to address these concerns.
The NDEA earmarked federal money for mathematics and science programs. It provided money for guidance programs in secondary schools so that talent could be identified and guided toward the appropriate educational and vocational opportunities. The NDEA also encouraged subject-matter specialists to help revise the secondary curriculum so that it would be sufficiently rigorous.
As a result, basic education and academic subjects returned to the forefront of the curriculum, and the guidance of youth, through identifying talent and guiding them into appropriate academic programs, became especially important.
