Life adjustment education was a dominant educational policy trend that emphasized adolescents' personal growth needs as quite beyond and distinct from their intellectual development. Between the 1930s and 1950s, life adjustment education entered the nation's comprehensive high schools as a curricular hybrid, a compromise of sorts between social efficiency and child-centered education. Unlike Social Reconstructionism, which aimed at transforming the social order, life adjustment education aimed to adjust young people to the status quo. Blatantly, any intellectual this approach was a legislative principles enumerated in the 1918 NEA Cardinal Principles of Secondary Education report. What exactly was life adjustment education? How was it a compromise or hybrid of any ideologically opposed positions in what the historian Herbert Kliebard calls The Struggle for the American Curriculum. >> Life adjustment courses focused on the personal and social problems of youth, on their lives and immediate needs. In the 1930s, utilitarian courses virtually devoid of serious academic content with titles such as Community Life Problems, Problems in American Life, and Personal Service, marked the ascendancy of the comprehensive high school as a custodial institution according to the historians David Angus and Jeffrey Mirel. Life adjustment courses were predicated on the assumption that most high school age students were incapable of rigorous academic study. As a hybrid, life adjustment education attracted soulful efficiency ideologues, because it augured to appeal to lower track students, it would be needed in the industrial economy, as unskilled and semi-skilled workers. It also attracted child-centered progressives who saw life adjustment education as addressing the needs, interests, and capabilities of young people. Both camps regarded this approach as a means of keeping youth in school and of addressing basic human living skills after the inhumane horror of World War II. >> In 1947, Charles Prosser, the National Spokesperson for Vocational Education and lobbyist for life adjustment education, presented a turning point resolution at the first national conference on life adjustment education. Prosser argued that a college preparatory curriculum was appropriate for only 20% of American youth. Another 20% were fitted for skilled occupation training. 60% of all American youth, however, were incapable of either kind of education. Their probable career options were limited to unskilled or semi-skilled occupations. For 60% of American youth, life adjustment education was needed. This group would occupy the high school's general track. The U.S. Office of Education adopted and distributed Prosser's resolution to states, school districts, and educational organizations. It was widely hailed by social efficiency advocates. It unleashed a nationwide life adjustment education movement, which drew the active support of many states. The most insidious effect of this movement was the downgrading of the American high schools academic program. Students in the general track, and increasingly, the vocational track, were soon enrolling in watered-down academic course with titles such as Arithmetic for Daily Living, Business English, and Communication Skills. Students in the college-prep track were not immune to what informed critics perceived to be general debasement of academic learning. Many junior and senior high schools introduced core courses for all students in basic living or social living. >> By the early 1950s, a fierce backlash against life adjustment education was underway. This backlash swelled into a broader assault on progressive education and education professors. Trenchant polemics such as Albert Lynd's Quackery in the Public Schools appealed broadly to academic and lay audiences alike. The most influential criticism was authored by Arthur Bestor, Jr., a University of Illinois history professor. No stranger to progressive education, Bestor had graduated from the Lincoln School of Teachers College in the mid 1920s, and later joined the Teachers College faculty at Columbia. Bestor felt that they hybridized social efficiency/child-centered progressivism, represented by life adjustment education, was a betrayal of the Lincoln School ideal which he held dear. His book, Educational Wastelands, published in 1953, excoriated the anti-intellectualism rampant in the American high school. Bestor wrote, quote, one can search history and biography in vain for evidence that men or women have ever accomplished anything original, creative, or significant by virtue of narrowly conceived vocational training or of educational programs that aimed merely at life adjustment. The West was not settled by men and women who had taken courses in how to be a pioneer. I for one do not believe that the American people have lost all common sense and native wit, so that now they have to be taught in school to blow their noses and button their pants, unquote. >> Bestor blames John Dewey's philosophy for spawning life adjustment education. Dewey is commonly regarded as having inspirited programs that he neither envisioned nor would've endorsed. Dewey's critics have reinforced this perception. Particularly, the eminent Colombia historian, Richard Hofstadter, who, writing a decade after Bestor, blamed the ills of progressive education squarely on Dewey's flawed prose style. Quote, it is commonly said that Dewey was misunderstood. And it is repeatedly pointed out that in time he had to protest against some of the educational practices carried on in his name. Perhaps his intent was widely, even regularly violated, but Dewey was hard to read and interpret. He wrote a prose of terrible vagueness and plasticity, which William James once classified as damnable, you might say god damnable. His style is suggestive of the cannonading of distant armies, and one concludes that something portentous is going on at a remote and inaccessible distance. But one can not determine just what it is. That his style is perhaps symptomatically, at its worst in Dewey's most important educational writings, suggest that his great influence as in educational spokesman may have been derived in some part from the very inaccessibility of his exact writings, unquote. Bestor and Hofstadter won, Dewey lost. In our next episode, we turn to another source of tax on progressive education in the 1950s, this one in the form of McCarthyism. [MUSIC]
