How the Cold War Space Race Led into U.S. Students Doing a Lot of Homework
Middle-schoolers who trudge home daily with a 50-pound backpack and hours of prep could have had an easier time in 1901. That is when the anti-homework motion was in its peak and also the state of California really banned all assignments for grades under high school.
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Not only was prep a waste of the time, innovative educators thought, but it had been detrimental to children’s wellbeing.
By 1948, just 8% of American high school students reported studying for at least two hours every evening. Homework may have stayed in the instructional doghouse if not to the coming of the Cold War, and especially, the Soviet Union’s launching of Sputnik at 1957.
“This elicited widespread fear that we’re undone by our colleges,” states Steven Schlossman, a historian at Carnegie Mellon University. “How is it that the Soviets had gotten faster? They need to have better schools which are training their children to become scientists onto a greater degree. America had to incorporate schools to our considering national defense policy.”
Throughout the late 19th century, with the advent of waves of immigrants, officials had started altering public schooling policies to best serve the fast-changing face of America.
Until then, Schlossman says schoolwork revolved about recitation, memorization, and drill. Children were anticipated to” state their courses,” which meant memorizing long passages of background texts and texts, drilling math issues, and reciting everything out loud in class. All that memorization and recitation supposed hours of exercise at home each evening. However, as America and its own pupils became more varied, the rigidity of rote memorization appeared inadequate.
If colleges were planning to supply equal education opportunities for many pupils, they had to get it done scientifically, and also the top educational minds of their afternoon were fascinated with all the emerging areas of education and child development.
Popular turn-of-the-century women’s magazines such as The Ladies Home Journal published studies demonstrating that tagging of punctuation words did not improve children’s overall spelling capability, and its own editors encouraged more” natural” patterns of child learning and development.
It did not take long with this increasingly vocal movement of child psychologists and worried moms to spot public enemy number one.
“The very first thing that needed to be altered in education was that this conservative direction of doing assignments, that was antithetical to children’s natural expansion qualities,” states Schlossman. ”’
That is why the California legislature voted 1901 to abolish all assignments for students 14 and younger, a movement followed by dozens of big cities and school districts throughout the nation.
The anti-homework debate of the progressive education movement further claimed that hours of prep conducted kids of outside play considered crucial to healthy physical and psychological development.
“For the faculty kid and the high school kid,” reasoned a1930s research, homework was nothing less than” legalized criminality.” The Child Health Association equated assignments with child labor in 1930, asserting that both clinics were” main reasons for the high death and morbidity rates from tuberculosis and heart disease among teenagers.”
From the 1940s, nightly assignments levels had fallen to all-time highs.
More Americans End High School Throughout the Great Depression
But then came World War II and yet another group of demographic and social shifts that would demand changes in American public schooling. Starting with the Great Depression when jobs were scarce, more American children began remaining in school through high school, and together with all the post-secondary baby boom, unprecedented numbers of pupils entered the country’s school programs with expectations of attaining high school and outside.
But then came World War II and yet another group of demographic and social shifts that would demand changes in American public schooling. Starting with the Great Depression when jobs were scarce, more American children began remaining in school through high school, and together with all the post-secondary baby boom, unprecedented numbers of pupils entered the country’s school programs with expectations of attaining high school and outside.
“High school was currently for everyone,” states Schlossman. “This is actually important. The concept of a high-school schooling for a ladder for achievement takes origin in post-World War II period.”
Before Cold War anxieties escalated in the 1950s, there was an increasing belief among teachers the high-school curriculum had an update. Standards teaching approaches rethought and had to be increased. If more children planned on going into school, homework would need to be a part of this equation.
However, no single occasion rocketed homework straight back to the national conversation like the launch of Sputnik 1, humanity’s first artificial satellite to reach Earth’s orbit. The answer from the U.S. government was swift.
A report by the House of Representatives supporting passage of this NDEA study:”It’s no exaggeration to state that America’s advancement in several areas of endeavor in recent years ahead–actually, the very success of our free nation –may rely in large part upon the instruction we provide to our young individuals now.”
Funding in the NDEA helped create demanding new high school curriculums, such as what became called the”new math” Leading professors, scientists and instructional psychologists awakened to make a brand new American public education mandate which would later be known as the”academic excellence” movement. And prep was centre and front.
As the academic excellence motion encouraged a deeper and much more hands-on approach to science and mathematics in the classroom, homework in any way levels needed to become more than memorization and dumb drills. It had to encourage imaginative problem-solving and analytical thinking.
The NDEA investment had outcomes.
The Sputnik trainings bulge did not last long. Even the counterculture movement of the late 1960s encouraged pupils to question authority, and nothing sticks to”the man” rather like skipping your assignments. By 1972, the proportion of high-schoolers performing at least two hours of homework a day fell back under 10 percent.
There was another effort from the early 1980s to reestablish homework as part of a second-wave academic excellence motion beneath the Reagan administration. A report known as A Nation at Risk cautioned in Cold-War provisions of the possible fallout from a failed education program.
Schlossman states this instant academic superiority push did little to move the needle considerably on assignments, flattening out at approximately 12% of high-schoolers clocking at least two hours every day from the mid-1980s.
“The prep motion of the 1980s was cast as a personality reform movement, like a moral enterprise,” states Schlossman.
While this was up from an average of 6.6 hours 2012, it stayed a simpler lift that what pupils took on through the heady days of the Cold War.
How the Cold War Space Race Led into U.S. Students Doing a Lot of Homework