The world is on fire, and the youth of the world must be equipped to combat the conflagration. Teacher's College, Harold Rugg, argued this to the world conference on the educational fellowship in 1932. The same year, his colleague George S. Counts, stunned an annual progressive education association convention with his clarion call for social reconstruction through the schools. Our great faith in education maybe warranted, he told educators, but only if quote, teachers abandoned much of their easy optimism, subject the concept of education to the most rigorous scrutiny, and be prepared to deal much more fundamentally, realistically, positively with the American social situation, unquote. Who was George Counts? What was his clarion call to teachers? Who took up the banner Counts and his allies unfurled in the schools? Counts served as a professor at Teacher's College, Columbia University for 30 years. An education sociologist and social activist, Counts was a well-known national figure in labor politics. He was president of the American Federation of Teachers, and New York State chair or the American Labor Party. He was also editor of The Journal, the social frontier. And he is best remembered as the author of the 1932 pamphlet, Dare The School Build A New Social Order, a compilation of three of Counts' speeches. George Counts was fed up with the progressive education movement, which he correctly judged to be controlled by a cautery of child-centered pedagogs, in a tiny group of elite private schools allied with liberal, middle-class parents. What social purpose could pandering to the impulses and desires of children accomplish? If progressive education were to be truly progressive, toward what kind of society did it think it was progressing? Since the child-centered progressives had no real theory of social welfare, except, perhaps, anarchy or extreme individualism, their efforts would only support the status quo, where quote, almost everywhere it is in the grip of conservative forces. And is serving the cause of perpetuating ideas and institutions suited to an age that is gone, unquote. What should educators do? Quote, our major concern, consequently, should be to make certain that every progressive school will use whatever power it may possess in opposing and checking the forces of social conservatism and reaction. Counts called for teachers to boldly assert the vision of a new social order. To plant that vision in the heads of students. To direct their learning in ways that would contribute to positively changing the society. In a word, teachers should become activists. Counts should not shy away from indoctrination in youth. He and his allies at Teacher's College envisioned teachers as the primary levers of social reconstruction. Quote, instead of shunning power, the profession should rather seek power, and then strive to use that power fully and wisely, in the interest of the great masses of the people. Should progressive education not take up this charge, it will simply be, quote, like a baby shaking a rattle. Utterly content with action, provided it is sufficiently vigorous and noisy. Much ado about nothing. >> Who took up Counts' charge? The education historian John Aparillo argues that teachers in the New York City teacher's union in alliance with Black residents in racially isolated Harlem set out to build a new social order. All the northern states, including New York, had outlawed state segregated public schools by the late 19th Century. Their other school districts use gerrymandering and other tactics outside of public view to minimize racial integration. In 1934, one New York reporter, newspaper reported a total of 250 black teachers in a city force of 35,000. Almost all of them were shunted into Harlem schools. New York Board of Education policies kept Harlem's all black schools over-crowded, under-resourced, understaffed, and administered by white principals. Only one public institution mixed blacks and whites. That was Wadley High School for Girls in lower Harlem, where black girls were tracked into low-end vocational courses, such as domestic science and unofficially barred from the college preparatory track. Activist teachers in the union, most from leftist-leaning working class backgrounds took to the streets to protest these conditions, and the broader field of racial inequity. Civil rights was a political platform in the teacher's union. >> Hm. It's important to understand that the teachers' union of the 1930s was not a labor union in today's legalistic contractual terms. >> Though relatively powerful, it was only one of many professional associations of teachers in New York City. Not until the 1960s would there be one unified union for city teachers, the United Federation of Teachers, or UFT, which would have extensive collective bargaining rights for its members. At the time the chief competition for the teachers' union, on the eve of World War II, was the Teachers' Guild. Founded in 1934, this organization comprised socialist teachers who had bolted from the teachers' union because of the ladder's affiliation with the U.S. communist party. The union represented George Counts's view that teachers should be the vanguard of the new social order. Guild members subscribed to the view that teachers should be involved in larger movements of social change, but not as the vanguard. Most city teachers rejected both unions as too radical. Not only were they afraid to challenge the status quo, city teachers may have also wanted to distinguish themselves as professionals and not laborers, with whom they associated unions. Probably the great impact of the Social Reconstructionist was in the field of textbook publication, specifically the vastly popular, 14 volume textbook series, Man and His Changing Society, published by the teacher's college professor, Harold Rugg, between 1929 and 1938. Rugg's textbook series, which thoughtfully revealed the social inequalities of America's free enterprise system to junior high school students, lost its toehold in the American curriculum soon after the last volume appeared on the education market. Man and His Changing Society was swept up in an anti-communist furor unleashed by powerful right wing business leaders and their anti-intellectual allies. In a spate of periodicals controlled by the rich and powerful, Rugg's textbooks were viciously libeled as Bolshevik polemics, full of lies and distortions. After 1940, the textbooks vanished in the nation's school, schools. The so-called teacher's college crowd at Colombia was largely silenced. We turn in our next two episodes to the community school idea, a school reform strategy that reached fruition in the 1930s to calling ideas John Dewey had proposed in his 1902 essay at the University of Chicago, the school of social center. [MUSIC]
