Let's look now at the Tenth Amendment to the US Constitution and its significance for education. Ratified in 1791 as part of the Bill of Rights, the amendment says, quite simply, quote. The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it, to the states, are reserved to the states, respectively, or to the people. Unquote. As education is not a power constitutionally delegated to the federal government, it is reserved to the states. Or to the people. This explains why the US has no national ministry of education and no federally mandated national standards or curriculum. The federal government does have the authority to authorize educational programs and to provide funding to the states for implementation. Albeit with purse strings attached. The states or their delegates, the school districts, have to comply with federal guidelines if they want federal funds. Federal funds provide the incentive for compliance. No compliance, no funding. This simple algorithm applies as well to the federally-sponsored curriculum projects that were developed by teams of scholars in the first two decades of the Cold War. >> The Cold War and the space race with the Soviet Union spurred an intense period of curriculum reform in US schools. Between 1950 and 1970 the federal government funneled millions of dollars into the development of discipline centered curriculum projects that were targeted at the best and brightest US students. The major agencies for directing these funds were the National Science Foundation, and the US Office of Education. The major impetus for these new programs was the nation's alleged laggardness, vis a vis, the Soviet Union in science and technology. By undermining the nation's schools, critics charged progressive education had done immeasurable harm to our national security. The threat was made palpable when the Soviet's launched the Sputnik space communication satellite in 1957. When our own rockets, one after another, either blew up on the launching pad or spun crazily out of control, panic ensued in the halls of Congress and the Pentagon. Here was irreparable proof, or so US officialdom thought, of the failure of American education to produce high quality mathematicians, scientists, engineers, and technicians to match the Soviets. >> In 1958 responding to Sputnik Congress passed the National Defense Education Act which pumped Federal dollars into foreign language training, area studies, and low interest loans for talented students en-route to colleges and universities. Also that year, the National Academy of Sciences invited a group of world class mathematicians, biologists, and psychologists, to a conference at Woods Hole on Cape Cod, in Massachusetts. Led by the cognitive scientist, Jerome Bruner, of Harvard, the Woods Hole Conference produced the theoretical rationale for teaching the structure of a discipline at increasingly sophisticated levels in elementary and high schools. The compact book that Bruno wrote as the official report of the Woods Hole conference, is titled "The Process of An Education." Stamped heavily with Bruner's own views, the book is famous for it's audacious pronouncements, for example, quote, we begin with hypothesis that any subject can be taught effectively in some intellectually honest form to any child at any stage of development. Any idea can be represented honestly in the thought forms of children of school age. And these first representations can later be made more powerful and precise the more easily by virtue of this early learning, unquote. The process of education envisioned a spiral curriculum that would introduce the key concepts, principles, and generalizations of the discipline to maturing children at increasing levels of complexity appropriate to their stage of development. The key pedagogical tool would be discovery learning. That is activities that would have students solve intellectual problems relevant to the discipline being studied. >> The process of education gave a prestigious, scholarly imprimatur to the so-called new curricula of the 1950s and 1960s. The new math. The new sciences. The new social studies, for example. Whose purpose was to educate high flying college bound students, to emulate scholars at the forefront of a discipline. To be, to become miniature scholars, so to speak. In developmentally appropriate ways students were to learn the major concepts, principles, generalizations, and unique mode of inquiry of each discipline being studied. A spate of elaborate curriculum programs, prepackaged and purportedly teacher proof, were rushed to market. The new programs often bore the names of the curriculum development teams that designed them. The School Mathematics Study Group, or SMSG, for example, involved university mathematicians and select teachers in the design of four subject levels of SMSG math. There were the Biological Sciences Curriculum Study or BSCS Biology. The Physical Sciences Study Committee or PSSC Physics. An alphabet soup that was very confusing to the general public. >> The new curricula were for the most part a bust. Notwithstanding the high quality of some of the programs. The curriculum developers virtually ignored teachers, assuming that prepackaged materials would be putty in teachers' hands. The fact is, that teachers found the teacher guides and curriculum prescriptions to be too abstract and too alien to how and what they were accustomed to teaching. Students, used to a pedagogical diet of facts, were baffled by all those concepts. Generalizations, principles. Not to mention discovery learning, which teachers weren't inclined to facilitate anyway. Some curricula such as the new social studies, an approach that emphasized analysis of primary documents rarely made it off the storage shelves in high schools. It was all a matter of very bad planning and follow through on the part of the developers. >> It wasn't just teachers who rejected the new curriculum. One meticulously designed, imaginative, anthropology curriculum, MACOS. Man, a course of study, created a national furor. A curriculum developed and tested with teachers by a planning team of Harvard and MIT researchers proved offensive to converse, conservative political sensibilities. Jerome Bruner, the avatar of discovery learning, had a heavy hand in this key aspect of MACOS. MACOS posed three big questions to children. First, what is human about human beings. How did they get that way? How can they be made more so? To answer these questions, children watched two sets of silent films, one demonstrating the survivalist arts and ancient rituals of the Netsilik Eskimos of Northern Canada. And one tracking baboons in their African habitats. With the help of other imaginative materials, such as replicas, archaeological objects, and simulated diaries, children were expected to interpret and compare the two cultures. >> The endgame was that children would see the commonalities of animal and human existence, as well as what differentiates humans from other animals. MACOS was steeped in Darwinian evolutionary theory, and for that reason, powerful religiously motivated forces rose up to try to strike it down. A battle over MACOs ensued in the US Congress in 1976. Where MACOs survived an internal investigation by the National Science Foundation and continued to receive federal funding. But the controversy tainted MACOS. And more and more school districts declined to use it. MACOs was also widely perceived as academically elitist. After all, only the wealthiest districts could afford the expensive program. In part, MACOS was a casualty of a fundamentally unnecessary struggle in public education between excellence and equity. Equity, a pressing concern of the civil rights movement, won tentative victories in the 1970s but lost ground in the 80s. For some, this federal retreat from the new curricula after the mid-1970s was counted as one of those victories. In our next episode, we look at two teacher activists who worked outside the mainstream of American education reform. Teachers whose activism fed into and out of the civil rights movement. [MUSIC]
