Where Is Ellwood Cubberley When WeNeed Him? A Response

James W. Fraser

I am very grateful to Robert Hampel and the editors of the History ofEducation Quarterly for commissioning the four essays that start thisconversation. What a fascinating place to begin—asking historians tothink about “What I’d love to research but never will because life isshort” or “Here’s what I’d explore next if TIME were endless.” At theend of reading all four papers my conclusion is clear—I hope for verylong lives for all four authors. I want each of them to explore all of theissues that they say they would like to study if time were not an issue.Perhaps John R. Thelin is right when he quotes John D. Rockefeller,“Eternity is a long time,” but it also seems like a very a good idea if itallows Barbara Finkelstein, James Albisetti, John Thelin, and WayneUrban to continue the research that they envision.

Reading these thoughtful essays by four distinguished members ofthe History of Education Society has been fascinating. If a single themeemerges from the four articles it is that in 2013 we are—as we were inthe late 1960s—on the edge of dramatically expanding what our fieldencompasses. In the late 1960s, thanks to prodding from Bernard Bailynand Lawrence A. Cremin, the history of education took on more of thescholarly discipline of good historical research.A field that had oftenbeen an adjunct of education studies became a scholarly discipline inits own right, claiming appropriately to stand with other subdisciplinesof history. The formation of the History of Education Society at thesame time institutionalized these changes. From a study of schools,teachers, and ideas about teaching, the history of education became,in Cremin’s famous phrase, the study of “deliberate, systematic, andsustained” efforts to transmit culture; a very wide field that looked at thehistory of schools, but also families, religious communities, museums,civic organizations, and more.

At first, the emerging discipline remained, as did much historicalstudy, focused primarily on major thinkers—John Dewey got lots ofattention as did G. Stanley Hall, George Counts, or occasionally Ella

James W. Fraser is Professor of History and Education at the Steinhardt School ofCulture, Education, and Human Development, New York University. He is President-Elect of the History of Education Society.

History of Education Quarterly Vol. 53 No. 2 May 2013 Copyright C© 2013 by the History of Education Society

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Flagg Young (though for the most part the list was exceedingly whiteand male). Slowly changes in the broader field of historical scholar-ship seeped into the history of education. New more critical questionsabout dominant ideologies began to be asked about ideas and leadersin education. A focus on neglected people and groups—perhaps mostobviously the stories of women educators, but also African American,Latino, Asian, working-class white, gay and lesbian educators, oppo-sitional groups no matter their gender or race—began to become asignificant part of the story line. Our field is much richer, more schol-arly, and more interesting for all of these and many other changes.

In the essays presented here, new crosscutting themes emerge thatwill lead to major new veins of research. Three, perhaps four, stand outfor me.

The first theme is the focus of Barbara Finkelstein’s powerful es-say, “Teaching Outside the Lines: Education History for a World inMotion.” She and James C. Albisetti both want us to reconsider whogets included in the study of the history of education. Finkelstein asksus to attend to the diversity of today’s American educators. As she seeksin her work to recover “potentially lost voices and the making andunmaking of myth and memory . . . unfolding at the margins of possi-bility, the fine lines of social change, and the intersections of the pastand the future,” she looks at the lives of two contemporary Americaneducators, Omekongo and Sonia O’Connell, both the children of im-migrants. Neither Omekongo nor O’Connell is an heir of John Dewey.As people shaped by vastly different stories, experiences, and traditions,they bring a rich diversity to American education that was simply notstudied a generation ago. But they may well represent the future ofeducation and the future of our discipline as more and more peoplecome to the United States and shape this culture and its educationalideas. Finkelstein argues, “It is time, I believe, to explore and constructnarratives of education history that flow across boundaries and borders.This is no simple task.” But it is a task that if neglected in the nextgeneration will mean that we have failed to understand education as itis developing in the twenty-first century United States.

Where Finkelstein asks us to expand our look to educators whorepresent new migrants to the United States, James C. Albisetti asks usto study the world . . . and take the time to learn the languages that willallow us to do so. Albisetti asks questions like, “Why, for instance, didthe French insist for decades on single-sex elementary schools as thenorm, with men teaching boys, whereas in Italy almost all such teachingwas in the hands of women? Why did France, in contrast to almost all therest of Europe, not only tolerate, but encourage, that women teacherscontinue to work after marriage, and what use did foreigners make ofthis example in their own debates about celibacy clauses? How could a

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very high level of feminization in Russian elementary schools, especiallyin the cities, coexist with one of the most male-dominated systems ofgirls’ secondary schools?” While he focuses his own research questionson Europe, Albisetti reminds us that the U.S. educational system, likethat of France or Italy or Britain—or for that matter the educationaltraditions of Omekongo’s Dibinga family/clan in the Congo or SoniaO’Connell’s in Nicaragua and Ireland—cannot be studied in isolation.If history could ever be done in the context of a single nation, it nolonger can. And the history of American education will have to changedramatically as that lesson sinks in.

The second theme in these essays is that we need to pay atten-tion to numbers; we should understand and use statistics. I am not astatistician, but I have long wondered why our field did not pursue datamore diligently. From Michael Katz’s finding that the majority of poorand working class people in Beverly, Massachusetts did not want thathigh school in the nineteenth century (in spite of what generations ofreformers said about education as the great avenue of upward mobil-ity) to James Axtell’s debunking of conclusions about the golden ageof old-style colleges, numbers have enriched our field for decades. AsJohn Thelin warns, this work can be “painful and slow.” Yet, whenThelin “took the enrollment roster of entering freshmen at a collegeand then tracked each student, name-by-name, over four or five or sixyears,” around 1910, he found that most generalizations about enroll-ment at some of the nation’s most carefully studied colleges—Harvard,Amherst, Brown, William & Mary, Transylvania, and University ofKentucky—were simply wrong. We need many more of the kinds ofstudies Thelin describes.

Wayne Urban also highlights the importance of quantitative work.He notes that we are not the first historians to think about this sort ofthing. Michael Katz, James Axtell, John Rury, and Maris Vinovskis havelong enriched our field with the use of data. And where Thelin countscollege catalogs and directories, Urban has “even found some docu-ments that would have facilitated such an analysis of Atlanta teachersin the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, personnel direc-tories identifying all the teachers by name, school where they worked,and particular position held.” Certainly more time to pursue those doc-uments would, as Urban claims, add a rich subtext to the importantcontribution he has already made to our understanding of the long his-tory of the nation’s teacher unions. It would be terrific if Thelin andUrban would stick around to do much more “painful and slow” workof producing such data.

Wayne Urban also uses his essay to raise another, perhaps twomore, very intriguing issues. What happens when we move from na-tional stories to local ones? Just as Albisetti asks us to look at comparative

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stories of the development of educational institutions in France, Italy,Britain, and the Netherlands, Urban asks us to look at the developmentof educational institutions, in his case teacher unions, in Florida, Geor-gia, and Alabama. My own research on the Progressive movement inBoston, Massachusetts has convinced me that Urban is right—nationalstories only go so far. When we go local we learn the rich variety ofsuccess, failure, false starts, and new ideas that is part of the history ofAmerican education.

Finally, Urban adds yet another fascinating note. What if he—andall of us—paid more attention to our own education and our own story?In a sense his article brings us full circle. Just as Finkelstein asks us toget specific, by studying the education of representatives of some of thenation’s newest arrivals, so Urban asks us to get specific by asking wherewe fit in the story.

There is enough in these essays to keep these scholars and othersbusy for a very long time. It is a wonderful thing for the editors of theHistory of Education Quarterly to consider granting them, or any of us,such a wonderful gift as endless time to pursue these avenues.

Reading these essays has also led me to think about other questions. . . not only the obvious one, “So if I too could live forever, or closer toit, what would I work on in some more distant future?” Though I do likethat idea a lot, there is also a more farfetched one: if the editors of theHistory of Education Quarterly have made forever an option, can I bringback some long departed historians and get them—in the immediatecase him—to do some new research and comment on some new issues?

The historian who I want to bring back right now is the too easilymaligned Ellwood Patterson Cubberley. As a young beginning histo-rian of education I was nurtured on my mentor Lawrence A. Cremin’smasterful and amusing The Wonderful World of Ellwood Patterson Cub-berley (1965), a book that along with Bernard Bailyn’s Education in theForming of American Society (1960) helped create our current field. Likemy mentor and my generation of historians, I became convinced of theimportance of shedding Cubberley’s whiggish and inaccurately progres-sive version of the history of education for something much broader andmore sophisticated (and I am very glad I did). I was also convinced thatCubberley’s focus on the concerns of aspiring teachers was a terriblemistake and that we historians of education needed to move far awayfrom such preoccupations. (And that, I now think, was a terrible mis-take.) So what, I want to ask old Professor Cubberley, should we donow? Where indeed, should those of us granted a truly long tenure bythe editors of the History of Education Quarterly focus our efforts?

Perhaps Professor Cubberley has some things to offer about thefuture as well as the past of our field. After all, Cubberley must havebeen doing something right:

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� Cubberley died in 1941. According to research that LesterGoodchild has conducted for the History of EducationSociety, in the 1940s and 1950s 85% of students preparing toteach took at least one course in the History of Education.

� Then the History of Education Society was founded and in thenext half century that number dropped from 85% to somewherebetween 50% and 10% of students who are preparing to teachtaking History of Education courses.

� Let me be clear. I am not blaming the Society for this dropand I am not defending Cubberley’s view of history as progresstoward a “glorious present” that Bernard Bailyn and Creminrightly critiqued. The progressive approach to history is justplain bad history and not useful, even if 85% of future teachersget it.

� But I do think we historians of education need to take ourown role in the shrinking place of the History of Education inteacher preparation programs very seriously . . . maybe evenenter into the process of changing the current situation with abit of humility.

We historians of education have, I fear, spent far too much of ourtime rushing to History Departments for intellectual respectability andrunning away from the Education Departments where this disciplinebegan because they represented not only a poor approach to history butalso because they represented low status in the university. And as weran from teacher education, it is not too surprising that the faculty weleft behind came to resent us and, in our absence, to write us out of thecurriculum.

On many campuses, and in national debates, far too few historianshave been present as the teacher education faculty wrestled with long-term critique (much of it justified) or with the opportunities that thiscritique provided to rethink and redesign programs, though there havehappily been important exceptions. But as the Holmes and Nation Pre-pared Reports of the 1980s, the Teachers for a New Era efforts of morerecent times, and a whole host of other developments have radicallychanged teacher education, even I dare say improved it significantly,we historians have not been as engaged a voice as we should have been.

At the beginning of their thoughtful book Ed School (1988), Geral-dine Clifford and James Guthrie provide a sobering note for our 2013reflections. They write:

“Our thesis is that schools of education, particularly those lo-cated on the campuses of prestigious research universities, have be-come ensnarled improvidently in the academic and political cultures oftheir institutions and have neglected their professional allegiances . . . .

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The more forcefully they have rowed toward the shores of scholarlyresearch, the more distant they have become from the public schoolsthe public schools they are duty bound to serve.”1

And, I could argue, no one has rowed harder than historians ofeducation.

We do not have to give up our commitment to first-rate history torow in the opposite direction, but we do have some rowing to do. Letme suggest that we proceed with a bit of humility. And let me also raisefour questions that I think we historians of education need to answerbefore we can successfully address the situation that our discipline is intoday:

1. What is the place of the history of education, indeed of theHumanities in general, in twenty-first-century teacher educa-tion that has become much more clinically focused with in-tense concern for learning in school settings and even moresignificantly with a focus on measurable outcomes for students.Today’s teacher educators ask—and are asked by almost everyoutside authority in legislatures, foundations, and accreditingagencies—not only “What do your graduates know and whatare they able to do?” but also, “How can this knowledge and skillbe measured in the academic achievement of the students thatthey then teach?” Now we can bemoan that situation, thoughI think that is a mistake, but we must also enter the discussionand find ways of demonstrating that our work is indeed relevantto excellence in teaching and professional life.

2. In talking to students, how do we avoid the “castor oil” approachto history of education, indeed to all foundations courses forfuture teachers? (You know, take our course, it is good for you.We promise.) We need clear answers to the obvious questionsof why should students who are preparing to be teachers—preparing in the face of extreme time pressure—want a historycourse?

3. How are students supposed to integrate practical professionaleducation and history? If we teach a great course in the his-tory of education and someone else supervises a great studentteaching experience, do we just leave it to the student to in-tegrate history and practice (which probably means they willnot) or are there steps we can take to connect our work to thevery specific questions and experiences that students are having

1Geraldine J. Clifford and James W. Guthrie, Ed School: A Brief for ProfessionalEducation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988).

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in classrooms and that are, inevitably, at the forefront of theirconcerns as they think about taking up their own responsibilitiesas teachers?

4. Finally (forgive me, this is a Cubberley question), how do weinspire future teachers—not inspire as in the false Rah! Rah!that was Cubberley’s approach—but how do we use history tofoster a serious sense of agency in them, a sense that they cannot only succeed in schools as they are but be part of an effortto make schools better than they are today? If history is a studyof change over time, then part of our role, I think, is to helpour students—who plan to be teachers—not only understandour history in a sophisticated way, but also understand that theschools in which they find themselves can change in the futureand that they can be change agents.

I suspect Professor Cubberley would have his own thoughts onthese questions but in any case, I hope that those of us who are herenow can find new and creative ways to reinsert our work into a centralplace in the teacher preparation curriculum of the twenty-first century.And I hope some of us can stick around long enough to implement ourplans.