Every Issue of The Monthly to your door: Subscribe Online

Respond to this Book Review
Washington Monthly Home Page

July/August 2000

Left Back: A Century of Failed School Reforms By Diane Ravitch 'Simon & Schuster Click on the title to buy the book

Left Back by Diane Ravitch traces the evolution of a striking paradox in American education: Public schools, particularly secondary schools, have long downplayed the importance of academics for a majority of students. In the late 1800s it was widely thought that after students had grasped the three Rs, schools' primary task should be to develop and discipline students' minds through the teaching of history and other traditional subjects. But only a small fraction of students--under 10 percent--stayed in school beyond the elementary grades in that era. And when compulsory schooling laws and other forces swelled secondary enrollments early in the new century, a new, utilitarian educational philosophy quickly emerged--one that exalted "practical studies" like vocational education on the grounds that the new high-school students simply couldn't handle a serious academic education. Eventually, traditional subjects per se were widely attacked. "There is no aristocracy of 'subjects,'" a national panel of educators wrote in 1944. "Mathematics and mechanics, art and agriculture, history and homemaking all are peers."

Ravitch chronicles this long-standing and deeply seeded anti-intellectualism in public education, from its turn-of-the-century origins to the "life-adjustment" movement of the 1940s and 1950s and the neo-progressivism of the 1960s and early 1970s. As she suggests, and laments throughout the book, the public education profession has been guided for nearly a century by the belief that the difficult task of teaching a wide range of students to use their minds well isn't really necessary; this implies that most students are better served by being taught to use their hands rather than their heads.

Such history brings today's "standards movement" into much sharper focus. It's one thing for state policymakers to impose demanding new academic standards on public schools; it's another to realize that public school systems were never organized to deliver a serious academic education to more than a fraction of their students. Most school leaders didn't think they should teach serious academics universally. Nor did they have enough highly-trained teachers to do the job.

The problem with Left Back is that the story of public education's long history of anti-intellectualism has been told many times already. By David Cohen in The Shopping Mall High School (1985), by Pulitzer Prize-winning authors Lawrence Cremin, in The Transformation of the School (1964), and Richard Hofstadter, in Anti-intellectualism in American Life (1970), and by Ravitch herself in The Troubled Crusade (1983). There's some fresh material in Left Back, but it's essentially a repackaging of the same history.

The last two decades, however, have been very different. Today's school reform movement, which had its beginning marked by the release of the Reagan administration's powerful report, "A Nation At Risk," in the early 1980s, rejects public education's utilitarian tradition. The leading school reformer Ted Sizer declared in 1984 that "the best vocational education" is education "in the use of one's mind." The arduous transformation of public school systems after "A Nation At Risk" into genuinely academic institutions for all kids is a story of great historical significance.

And great drama. The recent battles over new national academic standards and over the best strategies for upgrading public education's infrastructure (teaching, textbooks, tests) have been predictably intense. Unfortunately, Ravitch devotes only the last 58 pages of a 466-page book to these key topics. If only she had reversed the ratio of old material to new.