Review: The Widener-Wichita Divide

Reviewed Work(s): Schoolhouse Politics. Lessons From the Sputnik Era. by Peter B. Dow
Review by: Herbert M. Kliebard
Source: Science, New Series, Vol. 256, No. 5059 (May 15, 1992), pp. 1041-1042
Published by: American Association for the Advancement of Science
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2877139
Accessed: 15-06-2022 01:01 UTC

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 w:-s BOOK REVIEWS

bined. Otherwise between 1901 and 1933 other movements such as imperialism. The commonplace in the mainstream historical
Allied scientists supplied, fairly consistently brevity of her argument leaves room for the community but have been lacking among
on average, 10% of the nominations for deeper examination of some issues. But historians of science.
Central Power scientists, who received be- these are matters of elaboration, not dis- Kathryn M. Olesko
tween 50% and 80% of their nominations agreement. Crawford's book takes a step Department of History,
from their own Central Power colleagues. toward breaking through to the large-scale Georgetown University,
When the physicists and chemists in the categories of historical analysis that are Washington, DC 20057-1058
population are separated, however, Craw-
ford demonstrates that Allied support for
Central Power chemists remained relatively
diminished during the postwar period,
whereas in physics it returned to its prewar The Widener-Wichita Divide
level (or even higher) owing to the candi-
dacy of Albert Einstein, whose pacifism
appealed to British, French, and American contributed both to the book's weaknesses
nominators, as one might have expected. Schoolhouse Politics. Lessons from the Sput- and to its strengths.
A similar bar graph for Allied nominees nik Era. PETER B. DOW. Harvard University
Dow is at his best in conveying the
during the same period shows that nomina- Press, Cambridge, MA, 1991. xiv, 299 pp., illus. intellectual excitement and optimism that
$34.95.
tions from the Central Powers diminished permeated the development of MACOS.
between 1916 and 1920. The postwar de- He begins that story with the Woods Hole
cline in Central Power and Neutral nomi- At least symbolically, the orbiting of Sput- conference held in September 1959 and
nations for Allied chemists after the war is nik on 4 October 1957 marked a new era in chaired by Bruner. Prominent psychologists
more dramatic (as is the corresponding rise rocket propulsion and space exploration. were present, as were certain leaders of
in Allied nominations for Allied chemists). Oddly enough, the same Soviet achieve- science reform projects such as the late
What Crawford finds interesting, however, ment also came to symbolize the beginning Jerrold Zacharias and the geneticist Bentley
is not the decline but the fact that Central of a new era in American education. With- Glass, as well as distinguished historians,
Power chemists voted at all for Allied in a year of that event, Congress passed the sociologists, and anthropologists. Although
chemists, which she interprets in part asNationala Defense Education Act, which there was no general agreement as to how
sign that the Nobel Prize was an "important funneled millions of dollars into the reform an elementary social studies program should
support for the resumption of intemational of education, primarily in the natural sci- be designed, and there even emerged some
scientific relations" (p. 76). ences and mathematics but later extendingrather bitter infighting among representa-
Crawford's discussions of Eastern Euro- to the social sciences and humanities. The tives of different disciplines, certain themes
pean scientists (from Austria, Hungary, and clearinghouse for the federal government's began to emerge. One was the notion of a
Czechoslovakia) make more imaginative unprecedented largess in the area of curric- "marriage of the disciplines," that is, an
use of her population base. Here she is less ulum reform was the National Science effort to isolate those commonalities within
interested in the internal dynamics of the Foundation, which had been involved in the human sciences that could serve as the
prize process than in using this Eastem education programs on a limited scale since basis for an integrated course of study in
European subpopulation as a window on the 1950. Although there are some interesting elementary school. Rather than providing
interaction between Eastern Europe (the parallels between the post-Sputnik period the distinctive perspective of a single disci-
periphery) and Germany (the center). and the present one in terms of public pline, the new social studies would intro-
Contrary to Ben-David's contention that concern for education as well as political duce children to the study of human behav-
the center and the periphery coexist as rhetoric, the curriculum reform projects of ior as a unified endeavor. A second concept
polar opposites-one productive and com- the earlier period have rarely been subject- was "post-holing," the concentrated and
petitive, the other imitative and relatively ed to systematic scrutiny, and the question intense study of a single topic rather than
unproductive and uncompetitive-Craw- of whether any "lessons" can be gleaned superficial coverage of many. In this way,
ford demonstrates a more complementary from the failure of those reforms remains something of the excitement of discovery
relationship between the two locations. unresolved. that a research scientist experiences could
Eastern Europe was peripheral, she argues, In that regard, Peter Dow's Schoolhouse be conveyed to young children.
with regard to such matters as citation Politics is a welcome inquiry into the dy- These were powerful ideas in their time,
visibility. But Eastern European scientific namics and the complexities of school re- as they remain today, but in practice the
innovations, such as the unification of form during a critical era. Rather than a former lost some of its force as the reform
branches of meteorology and geophysics full-blown examination of the policies that project proceeded and the latter encoun-
into cosmic physics and the creation of thegoverned the allocation of federal funding tered difficulty once it reached the school-
Institute for Radium Research in Vienna, and the uses to which it was put, Dow house door. As the development of MA-
although slight, she argues, were largely focuses on a single reform project in socialCOS progressed, certain other themes be-
independent of developments at the center. studies-Man: A Course of Study. Dow gan to emerge, some of which Dow notes in
Thus the center did not have a monopoly. himself was a major actor in the develop-passing but leaves largely unexamined.
This comparative analysis might well serve ment and implementation of the projectFirst, there was an ill-concealed disdain for
as a template for more contemporary studies (which, in the acronym-laden lexicon of the "educational establishment," which
of scientists in the nations that once stood that period, became widely known as had fallen into particular disrepute when
behind the Iron Curtain. MACOS), but he subordinates his own rolesome of its members openly advocated the
Some may quibble about aspects of to that of the renowned academicians whodisastrous policy of life-adjustment educa-
Crawford's book. Nationalism and interna- participated in its conceptualization, partic-
tion in the late 1940s and early '50s. Sec-
tionalism, for instance, are not quite the ularly the psychologist Jerome Bruner. ond, there was the assumption that peda-
poles she views them as; especially for the Dow's active participation in and strong gogical success can be achieved by correctly
period under discussion, they overlap in commitment to the enterprise probably applying the precepts that psychology pro-

SCIENCE * VOL. 256 * 15 MAY 1992 1041

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vides combined with an identification of elements of cultural relativism) over the about the great cultural divide that exists
those key concepts and ideas within a disci-course of its development. Dow's account between the heady but contrived atmo-
pline that Bruner liked to call structure. The of this political infighting, which ulti- sphere that pervaded the curriculum labo-
supremely contextual nature of classroom mately involved congressional inquiries ratories in Cambridge and other develop-
practice was underappreciated if not ignored into NSF's competence to manage educa- ment sites on the one hand and the every-
altogether. Finally, and probably most im- tional programs, is genuinely intriguing in day realities of schooling in Wichita and
portant, there was the belief that education- its own right, but it does not serve to the rest of the country on the other. There
al reform could be achieved by being devel- explain why other curriculum reform is no reason to believe that Dow is mistaken
oped at the outset in the rarified atmosphere projects of the post-Sputnik era declined in identifying a politically conservative
of Cambridge and then simply disseminated almost as precipitously. Zacharias's nota- backlash as the immediate cause of MA-
to schools across the country, provided, of bly successful and generously financed COS's downfall, but MACOS is likely to
course, that the program was accompanied Physical Sciences Study Committee, for have suffered such a fate anyway by virtue of
by appropriate teacher training and materi- example, did not engender anything like the cultural dissonance that was almost
als. One of the participants in the MACOS the political controversy that MACOS did inevitable given the "Zacharias model" of
project characterized this problem as getting but faded just as completely. curriculum reform. By treating schools and
"from Widener to Wichita." The lessons that Dow derives from his teachers essentially as consumers of exter-
MACOS experience revolve for the most nal initiatives instead of partners in a com-
part around his self-confessed political na- mon enterprise, the curriculum reform pro-
ivete as well as that of his colleagues. In the grams of the post-Sputnik era were probably
context of the distorted and even vicious doomed from the start.
attacks that MACOS had to endure, how- Herbert M. Kliebard
ever, political naivete comes through as a Departments of Curriculum and Instruction
virtue. It is more likely that the post- and Educational Policy Studies,
Sputnik curriculum reforms failed because University of Wisconsin,
of naivete of another sort. It was a naivete Madison, WI 53706

YllEI

Absences from the White House

A school in Wichita. [Courtesy of Sheri Canfield]

the decade following PSAC's creation, con-

Indeed, Dow uses that as the title of Cardinal Choices. Presidential Science Advis- troversy over the Vietnam war and the
ing from the Atomic Bomb to SDI. GREGG
one of the chapters in his book, but that struggle over the antiballistic missile led
HERKEN. Oxford University Press, New York,
chapter is mainly an account of how the Lyndon Johnson and then Richard Nixon
1992. xiv, 317 pp. $24.95. A Twenteth Century
teacher training programs for MACOS largely to tum their backs on PSAC and the
Fund Book.
were developed, how they were evaluated, presidents' scientists. Relations between
and the difficulties the Educational Devel- the White House and the scientific commu-
opment Center, as it came to be called, To what extent have American scientists nity reached their low point in 1973 with
encountered in attracting a commercial
Thes deae_vr_auswreapriu been appropriately involved in advising the Nixon's abolition of both PSAC and the
publisher for the mater-ials that were de- nation's leaders concerning what C. P. office of science adviser. Since then, despite
veloped. Though these elements of the Snow called the "cardinal choices" of gov- numerous proposals for reestablishing a
story carry their own significance and are ernment, those "choices that in the broad- PSAC-like entity for the chief executive,
of some interest, Dow fails to provide a est sense determine whether we live or only partial and insubstantial actions have
rigorous analysis of what has come to be die"? Gregg Herken, newly of the Smith- been taken to improve the way in which
called the "top-dow-n" model of curricu- sonian Institution and author of two previ- science advice reaches the president. In-
lum reform, andWiht.[oreyof
lar fuctiooin this is the book'sthSathoploica
princi- ous booksChar-ild
on related topics, here offers us deed, beginning with the creation of the
pal weakness. Although Dow repeatedly impressive evidence that, when crucial Office of Technology Assessment by the
makes a point of calling MACOS a coop- technical issues have arisen during the last Congress in the early 1970s, the process
erative endeavor between academic schol- 50 years, the contribution of scientists to itself has become increasingly fragmented
tacter thatnn rgrm o MACOS asmd(nldn
ars and teachers, that cooperation consist-executive decision-making has often been among competing branches of government.
ed essentially of using carefully selected inadequate. For reasons of institutional Building from extensive interviewing of
teachers to test certain ideas advanced by weakness and presidential ignorance or the scientists involved and from a careful
academic scholars in the crucible of spe- bias, representatives of the mainstream in combing of declassified records, Herken
cially designed classrooms. American science have frequently been un- weaves his story of the science-government
Despite some initial success, MACOS, able to reach the political leadership when relationship from the Roosevelt era to the
according to Dow's account, was sabo- that leadership needed them most. present, focusing primarily on presidential
taged by a combination of right-wing cit- Some presidents have done better than policy with regard to nuclear weapons but
izens' groups and congressional suspicion others. Dwight Eisenhower in particular in later years on environmental and other
that federal funds were being used to should be given credit for having estab- issues as well. Despite the present-day fame
convey subversive ideas, or at least values lished the post of national science adviser of the initial Albert Einstein-Leo Szilard
contrary to those of mainstream America. and the President's Science Advisory Com- letter to FDR in 1939 about the possibility
mittee (PSAC) in 1957, thereby creating of constructing an atomic bomb, the lack of
the first formal and systematic channel be-a dependable means of communication at
tween scientists and the Oval Office. Yet in that time made it surprisingly difficult for

1042 SCIENCE * VOL. 256 * 15 MAY 1992

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