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Ravitch, Diane (2000). Left Back: A Century of
Failed School Reforms.
New York: Simon & Schuster.
Pp. 555
$30 (Cloth)
ISBN 0684844176
Reviewed by Herbert Zimiles
Arizona State
University
May 8, 2001
Related review
In her chronicle of twentieth century educational reform,
provocatively yet ambiguously entitled Left Back,
Diane Ravitch presents a divided self. On the one hand, the
historian in her is intent upon recounting the important
story of efforts to bring about educational reform during
the past century On the other, the book serves as a
sounding board for the advocacy of traditional education;
Ravitch is almost obsessively preoccupied with promoting
what she terms the teaching of subject matter, with mourning
its decline and advocating its restoration to the position
of primacy it once held until it was undone by the story's
scapegoat, progressive education. The book was written to
document what she regards to be the disastrous rerouting,
nothing short of the undoing, of American education, by the
progressive education movement. The ebb and flow of
objectivity is disconcerting: one moment the reader is
caught up in the fascinating history of educational reform
and in the next is sorting through tangled arguments and
innuendos that lay the blame for education's failures and
misadventures at the clumsy, misdirected feet of progressive
education. And yet, Ravitch's appetite and talent for
assembling the salient historical events and writing about
them in brisk and interesting fashion often prevails. As a
result, the book will be useful, if not appealing, even to
those who do not share her conservative perspective.
One of the devices she uses to expose the folly of her
adversaries is to provide generous quotations of their
rhetoric. But not everyone will see the exciting early
formulations of progressive educational thought in the same
dingy light as does Ravitch. To this reader many of the
passages cited by her, by Dewey, Kilpatrick and other
leaders of the movement, highlight the creativity and the
profundity of thought that guided the progressive education
movement. They underscore the extraordinary combination of
philosophical and sociopolitical analysis and psychological
sensitivity that gave rise to an ideology that was
translated into a program for educational and social reform.
In its depth and scope, and its daring readiness to change
both the goals and methods of American education as a way of
introducing greater democracy and vitality to American
society, it was a movement of unparalleled originality and
vision.
To be sure this new rhetoric attracted unbalanced as well as
stable and intelligent followers, and led to a wide range of
interpretations and implementations some of which were wild.
Ravitch delights in describing such misadventures as a way
to discredit the entire movement, but it would seem more apt
to look at the remarkable implementations that were carried
off than to dwell on its failures. Indeed, even Ravitch is
forced to concede that the Dewey School (housed at Columbia
University) that spanned an eight-year period at the turn of
the century was "very likely one of the most exciting
schools in American history." But she hastens to
attribute the school's admittedly exceptional
accomplishments to the specialness of the children who
attended, the giftedness of its teachers and the unusual
materials that were made available. It is undoubtedly true
that progressive education is at its best when implemented
under optimal circumstances with children who are ready and
capable of tasting the fruits of the freedom of exploration
and self-expression that it affords. Although it represents
a mode of education that encompasses elements that are
capable of benefitting all children, the gains that it
brings are likely to be proportional to the degree to which
the values and regimens of classroom life match those
experienced at home. It would be a mistake, however, to
believe that the implementation of progressive education is
capable of overcoming the obstacles to educational progress
that are encountered by children whose lives are filled with
experiences of oppression and deprivation.
One of the errors made by Ravitch is her naive belief that
the massive production of progressive rhetoric that appeared
in the educational journals was accompanied by corresponding
changes in the enactment of educational programs. In fact,
not all teachers agreed with or even understood the
literature disseminated by the progressive movement, and
among those who sympathized with the positions so
passionately and convincingly stated in the journals, many
found that the administration of the school in which they
worked would not support the organizational changes that
were required. This reader passed through the New York City
school system during the peak of the alleged transformation
of the schools without seeing evidence of the radical
curricular and teaching changes that Ravitch claims to have
swept the schools. The impact of progressive education has
been uneven, and has taken effect more slowly than she
suggests, but it has nevertheless been substantial.
Ravitch reminds us that the roots of the progressive
education movement were in evidence prior to the onset of
the twentieth century. She provides ample snippets of the
musings of G. Stanley Hall, the founder of the child study
movement, mainly to ridicule what she believes to be his
hyperbolic absurdities, and also to show that many of the
features of progressive thought were voiced, if not
originated, by him. Without inventing the term, Hall was
surely one of the prophets of "child-centered"
education. Among the first to think systematically and
insightfully about the psychological development of the
child, Hall could not fail to notice the mismatch between
the natural curiosities and explorations of the young child
and the abstruseness and irrelevance of the educators'
methods and agenda.. He also pointed to the wide band of
variation in ability and educational interests of children,
and the need to design programs that would take into account
and be responsive to the range of different abilities and
destinies. His attention to the existence of differences
in ability and readiness for academic learning and the
audacity he showed in questioning the utility of traditional
academic subject matter are made to appear ludicrous, and
even more unfairly, undemocratic. In Ravitch's eyes there
are no redeeming features to progressive education. The
degree to which she is almost mystically drawn to restore
and perpetuate archaic and arcane modes of education, her
unwillingness to acknowledge that there was surely great
room for improvement and rethinking of the educational
canons and the stale and oppressive pedagogical methods of
the nineteenth century, (the perpetuation of scholasticism)
is a study in blind stubbornness.
Upon reading Ravitch, one is reminded that the clash between
educational progressives and conservatives has to do not
only with their political attitudes and social values but
with large differences in their awareness of and attention
to the role of the psychological domain. The twentieth
century will be remembered as the era of the onset of
psychological awareness, the time when the rationale and the
methods for psychotherapy and other forms of psychological
intervention were devised. During part of that time period,
at any given moment more than half of all hospitalized
patients in the United States suffered from psychological
disorders rather than physical illness or disability. And
yet, issues of psychological comfort and psychological
well-being are hardly mentioned by Ravitch; the progressives'
concern with such matters is treated with derision. The
idea that traditional schools constituted oppressive
environments by virtue of their authoritarian social
structure and their intimidating social climate are made to
seem far-fetched or unimportant. The call for infusing
classroom life with meaningfulness and relevance is
similarly dismissed as little more than a diversionary frill
and a rhetorical gesture.
The ease with which Ravitch brushes aside such matters gives
rise to the suggestion that one of the reasons for the
factional differences in theory and practice that divide
American educators is that there exists a bimodal
distribution of psychological sensitivity. It would seem
that many people have so habituated to the social
stratification of society, to the exploitation of the weak
by the strong and the pervasiveness of inequity, that they
are not offended by the authoritarianism of traditional
education. Having themselves adopted a "grin and bear
it" mentality, they further believe that it is natural
for students to assimilate and internalize the meanings and
the values held by their teachers, however alien, confusing
and impractical they may seem to be. Since some students
succeed in making such identifications and go on to achieve
academic success, it is somehow (incorrectly) assumed that
it is a pathway that is open to all. Ravitch seems
indifferent, even contemptuous of concerns about the
psychological context of schooling. That she has little
interest and meager knowledge about matters pertaining to
psychological well-being is further evidenced by the fact that
she incorrectly describes Carl Rogers, the leader of the
non-directive ("client-centered") therapy movement, as a
psychoanalyst.
When Ravitch points to the small proportion of students who
succeeded in graduating from high school more than a hundred
years ago and then observes the steady rise in such numbers
over the years, she seems unaware of the role played by
changes in the social climate of the school effected by
progressive methods and thought. Teacher-student
relationships have become more friendly and relaxed and
educational discourse more meaningful as a result of the
influence of progressive education. School has become a
less forbidding, less unfathomable part of the child's life
experience.
Instead of crediting progressive education with bringing
about a massive improvement in the child's quality of life
in school and in the meaningfulness and understandability of
the instructional process, Ravitch tendentiously charges it
with elitism. She accuses progressive education of imposing
arbitrary limits on the educational progress of some
students by offering alternative, vocational education
pathways and by championing psychological testing methods
that gave rise to systems of student tracking. It may well
be that G. Stanley Hall and the early psychologists who were
interested in children's development regarded the then new
methods of psychological testing as part of a new wave of
scientific psychology that would guide the design and
management of the new education, but disenchantment with the
crudity of information derived from testing, and as a
consequence, staunch opposition to educational testing, is
most visible in progressive educational circles.
In the end, as she does throughout her book, without
explanation and reasonable justification or evidence for her
conviction—a conviction that flies in the face of
experience and rationality—Ravitch calls for a return to
the scholastic mode of education of the distant past as the
most effective route to educating all children. What this
historian labels in her subtitle as "a century of
failed school reforms" is much better described as one
hundred years of immensely expanded educational services
that were delivered to increasingly larger sectors of
society. Ravitch refers to the soaring numbers of children
in school, but fails to acknowledge that whereas high
schools of a hundred years ago were mainly open to only the
most privileged children and only a handful of them were
expected to graduate, today there are strenuous efforts to
reduce the high school drop-out rate to zero. Not only are
the schools of today called upon to serve vastly larger
numbers of children, they are expected to deliver many more
services and to reach children with a much wider range of
ability and cultural background. In the face of these facts
that are shouting at us, it seems mischievous and
irresponsible to speak of the schools as failing and to
refer to the failure of educational reform. What is
overlooked in the continuing fierce debate about how best to
educate all the children is that not all of the children are
ready to be educated—because of the undermining experience
of alienation and poverty, the lack of emotional and
cognitive support their families are capable of providing,
and the distracting influence of social change and family
instability.
About the Reviewer
Herbert Zimiles is Professor in the Division of
Psychology in Education of the College of Education at
Arizona State University. He earned a Ph.D. in Experimental
Psychology at the University of Rochester in 1956. Zimiles,
a developmental psychologist,
served as Director of Research at the Bank Street College
of Education from 1956 to 1986.
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