My Back Pages

Social Learning in a Free Society

David Snyder

"In periods of rapid change and threats to accustomed ways of life, human beings are likely to seek ready-made scapegoats and shortcuts to salvation. These times have underlined this point . . . A tide of concern and criticism of American education, unprecedented in recent generations, has lately been channeled into calls for greater rigor, more selectivity, more science and mathematics, mass-production methods."

Sound familiar? If the quote above seems like it's ripped from the education headlines, consider that between the ellipses is a recounting of "an almost frantic clamor to turn out scientists and engineers in the Russian way" in "post-Sputnik" days. The article, "Social Learning in a Free Society," by New York University professor H. Harry Giles, was published in Educational Leadership in October 1958.

Read the article: Social Learning in a Free Society (PDF)

As we consider curricular reforms for the 21st century, it's perhaps a cause for both despair and relief that we've been through this before—or, at least, a recent generation has. As calls for narrowing the curriculum and going "back to basics" grew in the Cold War era, Giles called for "more encouragement of searching curiosity, creativeness, the humane quality of living."

In a smaller, interconnected world, he argues, schools need to focus on critical thinking, diversity, and tolerance and integrate them into the core content areas for the United States to successfully educate students and prepare them for what is to come.

Although some of the particulars have changed since 1958, this debate between the back-to-basics crowd and those who seek to educate the whole child is essentially the same today. If anything, the increasing interconnectedness of the world makes Giles's recommendations all the more compelling.

In "My Back Pages," we look at important issues through the historical lens of the Educational Leadership archives. ASCD members have access to EL issues from 1943 to the present by signing in at www.ascd.org.

David Snyder is a reference librarian in ASCD's Information Resource Center.