A Decade of Doubt

From Charles Eliot’s Faith to “Progressive” Doubt

Steven Wilson opens his new book The Lost Decade: Returning to the Fight for Better Schools in America with turn of the century Harvard President Charles W. Eliot’s timeless condemnation, “We Americans, habitually underestimate the capacity of pupils at almost every stage of education.”  As Wilson explains, Eliot offered a simple remedy: a rigorous education in math, science, literature, and more—an education that prepared students for the “duties of life,” and not just those of their predicted vocation. To deprive a student of an education in, say, economics, on the assumption that they are not bound for Wall Street is but a self-fulfilling prophecy. This was painfully obvious to Eliot—but not to his peers. 

His counterpart at Clark University, Stanley Hall, and the father of “progressive education”, John Dewey, rebutted that most children are “incapable” and only endowed with a “practical impulse and disposition.” The ideas of Hall, Dewey, and their disciples were swiftly applied to the children of the working class. Hall urged that, given these students’ circumstances, we “overcome the fetishism of the alphabet, of the multiplication table, of grammar” (Educational Problems, 1911)—after all, what good is literacy and multiplication in the assembly line? 

But Hall and his colleagues had it backwards, the better question is: what good is the assembly line to the literate? America graduated legions of “incapables”, not because 80 percent of Americans are inherently unfit for academics (the belief of post-WWII reformers), but because we subjected them to an education built on that assumption. This academically demeaning approach to education subverts the very concept of democratic opportunity that we, Americans, exalt. By the early 1980s, 40 percent of minority youth were functionally illiterate, yet 40 percent of school offerings were “non-academic”—it’s no small wonder that we struggle with social mobility. This discovery elicited uproar in 1983, with the publication of A Nation at Risk—but, soon enough, our indignation subsided. 

 

The New Doubt—Social-Justice Schooling and Its Fallout

Indeed, the fallacy of student “incapability” has, of late, been revived and rebranded by new management: the social justice movement in education. “Trauma based education” has enthralled educators nationwide—their sermons on trauma and oppression have stifled any trace of Eliot’s vision. At Roses in Concrete, a now-defunct school in Oakland, CA, teachers described their principal “as being more like a social worker than a school principal”. Ironically, studies show that children are psychologically resilient and almost invariably recover from trauma—telling them otherwise may actually damage their esteem. 

Meanwhile, academic engagement and success demonstrably boost self-esteem. Substituting academic rigor for pity has failed America before—but here we are. Antelope Valley College’s DEI glossary asserts that white privilege is maintained “under the guise of standards”, yet the dismantling of academic standards has only impeded the education of minority youth. At the aforementioned “Roses in Concrete”, a self-proclaimed “liberator” school, only 6 percent of students are proficient in math. Is this what liberation looks like? One Massachusetts district went as far as to forbid children from skipping with real ropes to avoid loss of self-esteem from “tripping”. Similarly, Dr. Catherine Denial, a professor at Knox College, prohibited her students from writing in assignments—why make students “jump through hoops,” she asked. 

The answer is simple: jumping through Dr. Denial’s proverbial hoops—and Massachusetts’ literal ones—is how students learn. America’s “No Excuses” charter schools, institutions who enforce high standards and maintain order, prove this point every day. By 11th grade, students in Chicago’s Noble Charter Schools, who are 98 percent Black and Latino and arrive with lower-than-average test scores, had higher ACT scores than any public high school in Chicago. Students are not too “traumatized” nor too “oppressed” to learn, they are not incapable—provided that we do not educate them as if they are. 

Nowhere is this more obvious than in Massachusetts, whose 1993 reform act and its unparalleled standards saw the state leapfrog from 35th to 1st place in SAT scores. Yet, this past decade, Massachusetts elected to replace its rigorous standards with the comparatively weaker Common Core—and students paid a steep price. From 2013 to 2019, reading and math scores fell, and continued to fall, for the first time in two decades. Black and Latino students were hit especially hard. 

 

NAEP Reading and Math Scores demonstrate the widespread learning loss of 2010s—with Massachusetts (blue) experiencing particularly large losses in light of the adoption of the Common Core.

Over a century ago, Charles Eliot knew all too well that it is precisely these students who are most in need of rigorous, comprehensive, and so-called “No Excuses” schooling—not watered-down curricula and low expectations. By failing to believe in students’ capabilities, and to set standards accordingly, we have condemned many to illiteracy and generally dire educational outcomes—in sum, incapability. 

This need not be the case, and for a brief moment, in Massachusetts and other educational hotspots, it wasn’t. But, as Wilson laments in The Lost Decade, if there is one thing the American education system has lost—or rather, re-lost—in this decade, it is a belief in its students. 

 

Sam Davis is a Roger Perry Education Intern with the Pioneer Institute. He is a rising sophomore at the University of Chicago, with a double major in Political Science and Philosophy.