September 12, 2023
The Progressive Education movement started in the 1920s and went into a roar during the Depression led by advocates like John Dewey. It soon joined forces in the 1930s with George Counts’ Social Reconstruction movement. But the momentum was not to last and the association between the two movements collapsed by the 1950s. After the collapse, both curriculum ideologies became less important drivers of education reform for two reasons: first, the learner-centered ideology of progressives like Dewey had struggled to find common ground with the social reconstructionists who saw schools as an opportunity to change society through the education of the individual; and second, the United States had been driven into a Cold War panic when Russia launched Sputnik into space. This panic meant that the next decades were led by an emphasis on the STEM fields.
It looks like we are very much at the same moment again. So what are the new Sputniks that might challenge the humanities and movements like social justice, and lead to a renewed doubling down on the STEM fields? The first is what the Financial Times called “the American chip moonshot,” which is the $40 billion being invested by the US for maintaining leadership in semiconductor technology and bringing sophisticated manufacturing back into Western hands. A stimulus that has all the same echoes of the space race of the Cold War, but this time in the increasing stand-off between China and the US. Colleges are gearing up for a huge push into the STEM fields and its employment benefits for the economy here at large. The second is artificial intelligence with the further challenges it brings to areas like education. We are already seeing its effects on curriculum providers: the International Baccalaureate recently indicated that as a result of ChatGPT, analytical skills may be more important than essay-writing skills.
With echoes of previous disagreements, a bitter fight has broken out in the humanities over social justice curriculum content. The battle today has focused on content rather than skills. This reflects on both sides a traditionalist approach to curriculum that is very much information—and content—driven rather than inquiry- or skills-driven, with schools telling students what to think rather than teaching them how to think. Part of the reason for this is that schools have not been able to define what skills they are associating with activism and anti-racism, how they should be assessed, and where opportunities to grow can be found. Not surprising given that the definition of antiracism (one who supports antiracist policy through their actions or expressing an antiracist idea) offered by Ibram Kendi expects teachers and students to be policy advocates, activists, and formulators is hardly practical, let alone appropriate. The result is an extra-curricular, selected content approach that relies on advisory sessions, clubs, speakers, and exposure primarily through an ancillary curriculum.
The social justice battle may be raging more in K-12 than at the college level, perhaps because the Humanities currently hold more sway in K-12. A recent article in the New Yorker may provide some insight into this:
“Humanities enrollment is down among bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral students, but it is increasing among students seeking two-year associate’s degrees. And it is increasing among high-school students taking A.P. courses. High schoolers, in fact, now take over twenty percent more humanities A.P. tests than tests in STEM every year. The loss of humanities numbers isn’t happening in the collegiate pipeline, in other words. It is happening when these students walk through the university gates.”
Humanities departments in K-12 are very likely to feel the downstream pressure of STEM importance even more acutely than in the 1950s almost as if two Sputniks (ChatGPT and the semiconductor race) are pushing up the STEM fields. As college and private K-12 education becomes more and more unaffordable, the pressure will mount to justify the Humanities’ social efficiency utility on the employment front. This quote in the New Yorker frames the dilemma for politicians:
“My big beef with the Obamas was that every sentence out of their mouth was STEM, STEM, STEM, STEM—and then the Arts, nothing in between,” Ayanna Thompson, a Shakespeare scholar who directs A.S.U.’s Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies and the RaceB4Race conference series, told me. “We never heard anything from Trump, and we’re not hearing anything from Biden, either.”
And so to return to curriculum and the social reconstruction/justice movement, the two primary ideologies driving K-12 today and for the last one hundred years, social efficiency and scholar academic, are likely to suck the air back in their direction. Just like they did in the 1950s. The best route then for both the humanities and the social reconstruction movements lies in two approaches. First, we piggyback on where the greatest growth has been at the College level, and that is in a partnership with STEM by developing interdisciplinary courses like bioethics and environmental humanities and the history of science and knowledge. For independent schools, that implies curriculum development and departmental collaboration, burdens not easily foisted on an already stretched faculty. Meaningful partnerships with Colleges and others will likely be a way forward. Second, we develop a cross-curricular skill-based path to social reconstruction and justice outcomes rather than a content path. This means making the Portraits of a Graduate and Learner Profiles more than aspirational outputs of an otherwise traditional curriculum: creating opportunity maps, skill rubrics, learner progression expectations, and more that are embedded in the real curriculum rather than the ancillary curriculum. In short, we introduce the Humanities and social justice programs to a new, more future-proof set of STEM programs.
You may also be interested in reading more articles written by Sanje Ratnavale for Intrepid Ed News.
