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HIGH-SCHOOL CURRICULUM

Disorganization

The curriculum for high schools before the 1940s was highly disorganized and variable. Student bodies of every race, cultural background, and religion defied singular, unified curricular planning. Although every state by law compelled attendance in high school through the age of sixteen, depending upon the state in which one lived, education could be rigorously academic, insufficiently academic, or fundamentally vocational. In 1941 high schools nationally offered no fewer than 274 subjects, although only 59 of these were traditional academic courses. During the New Deal, moreover, educators and New Deal administrators debated whether New Deal programs or high schools should be responsible for the nation's youth. Professional administrators were furthermore divided among those who favored a college-preparatory curriculum in high schools and those who favored vocational training. Finally, a mania for progressive education had many curriculum proponents arguing that their ideas were "progressive"—whether it had anything to do with John Dewey's rigorous philosophy of progressive education or not. The American high-school curriculum was, in other words, in a state of disarray.

Unskilled and Delinquent

The disorganization of American high schools reached a crisis level during World War II. The Naval Officers' Training Corps found that 62 percent of its candidates failed fundamental arithmetic reasoning tests and that only 23 percent had more than one and a half years of math in high school. The army reported similarly high levels of illiteracy among its inductees, rejecting millions for lack of any reading skills and spending valuable time shaping the literate and numerate skills of millions more up to speed. The war naturally enough precipitated an increase in high-school dropouts, as young men enlisted and other young men and women quit to take advantage of the high earnings in the defense industries. Authorities estimated that nearly three million teenagers left school for work. These teens formed a new adolescent consumer group, one whose mores were to some degree independent of adult influence. Moreover, as their parents joined the military or took positions in the defense plant, more and more teenagers went without supervision—and without schooling. A rise in juvenile delinquency alarmed educators and the public. In 1942 alone the rate of juvenile delinquency rose 8 percent among boys and 31 percent among girls, accompanied later by sensational incidents of teen violence, such as riots at Frank Sinatra and Harry James concerts and the zoot suit riots in Los Angeles. Unsupervised teenagers, even more than the poor academic skills of students, became a preoccupation with postwar planners. Commissioner of Education John W. Studebaker noted with alarm toward the end of the war that only seven of ten high-school students were going on to grades eleven and twelve. Concerned with juvenile delinquency and with the possible consequences of this group competing with returning veterans for jobs, Studebaker was determined to use the curriculum to reduce the number of dropouts and improve the "holding power" of high schools.

Problems

While some educators focused on improving academic skills after the war, movement toward this goal took place slowly. High schools after the war were badly understaffed and underfunded, and it was difficult to find properly trained teachers who would put up with large classrooms and low pay. Educators hoped that the federal government would fund improvements in high-school education, but funding bills were repeatedly blocked in Congress by conservatives opposed to federal interference in state education. Even state increases in teacher salaries rarely kept pace with the soaring rate of postwar inflation. As late as 1948 authorities estimated that two million schoolchildren were receiving below-standard education. Increasingly, educators searched for a curriculum which would improve skills at low cost and would keep teens in school, out of the labor market and under the supervision of adults. In the "lifestyle adjustment curriculum" educators found the solution to their many problems.

The Lifestyle Adjustment Curriculum

The lifestyle adjustment curriculum was to a great extent the brain-child of Charles A. Prosser, an educator and administrator who had worked with the National Youth Administration during the New Deal. He introduced the concept publicly at an educational conference in 1945; by 1947 the U.S. Commission for the Education of Youth had endorsed the curriculum for use in high schools. Prosser saw high schools as having three fundamental missions. For the brightest 20 percent high school was preparation for college, and for a mechanically inclined 20 percent high school provided vocational training for industry. Prosser felt that 60 percent of high-school students were poorly served by the high schools, incapable of academic success or vocational competence. For them and the other two groups he proposed a basal curriculum oriented not toward academic achievement or industrial skills but toward "individual effectiveness and happiness." Prosser's lifestyle adjustment curriculum emphasized "communication skills" rather than literature and grammar; "the simple science of everyday life" instead of physics or chemistry; "civic problems of youth" in place of history; applied arithmetic and business math instead of mathematics; and fine and practical arts designed to produce well-rounded individuals. Prosser believed his curriculum would be more economical by directing academic resources toward those students who could make use of it. Because the curriculum more directly met the needs of the 60 percent majority, and was less intellectually daunting, he argued that more students would stay in school; in other words it would increase high-school holding power. The emphasis the curriculum placed on social adjustment, moreover, would combat juvenile delinquency. Many educators agreed, and the lifestyle adjustment curriculum began to sweep through high schools.

Objections

To critics, however, the lifestyle adjustment curriculum led to intellectual torpor and caused high schools to abandon their true purpose: intellectual training through academic subjects. A history professor at the University of Illinois, Arthur Bestor, objected to the program because of its anti-intellectual qualities. He felt that all of the attention paid to problem solving was trivial and that there was little emphasis upon in depth study of mathematics, science, history, or foreign languages. Bestor damned the ephemerals he culled from the state of Illinois's pamphlet on high-school youth, which cited as important "the problem of improving one's personal appearance," "the problem of selecting a family dentist," and "the problem of developing and maintaining wholesome boy-girl relationships." A more telling critic of the curriculum was historian Richard Hofstader, who, noting the rise of a suburban consumer culture after World War II, found the key to the success of the life adjustment curriculum in the degree to which it fit the cultural values of the moment: "what it aims to do is not primarily fit [students] to become a disciplined part of the world of production and competition, ambition and vocation, creativity, and analytical thought, but rather to help them learn the ways of the world of consumption and hobbies, of enjoyment and social complaisance—in short, to adapt gracefully to passive and hedonistic style summed up in the significant term adjustment."

The Results

Because of protests against the lifestyle adjustment curriculum, it failed to achieve a total revolution in high schools, and many schools continued to give college preparation and vocational education precedence. The curriculum for high schools in fact looked much as it had at the beginning of the decade: no national unity had been brought to the school system, and instruction was variable. The low state of academics and science, so bemoaned by the military during the war, would return as an important curricular issue following the launching of the Soviet satellite Sputnik in 1957.