Education, Society, and Economic Opportunity: A Historical Perspective on Persistent Issues.

In 1985 Maris Vinovskis published The Origins of Public High Schools, a thoroughgoing critique of Michael Katz's The Irony of Early School Reform, the signal work of left-historical criticism of U.S. education, which appeared in 1968.(1) In Origins Vinovskis proposed to demonstrate the salutary effect of "scientific inquiry" on a subfield agitated by polemicism and controversy. Owing to the "quick and quiet" acceptance of social science techniques over the previous fifteen years, historians of education, he believed, could look forward to a future which contemplated the past with detachment rather than rhetoric and reproach - the characteristic mode of engagement in the debate sparked by Katz's thesis.(2) Ten years later, however, Vinovskis sees the once-sunny prospect of a social science history of education clouded by the arrival of historians skilled in "theorizing" and "linguistic analysis." The consequence, he warns in Education, Society, and Economic Opportunity, could be an "unfortunate and unnecessary retreat from undertaking time-consuming, in-depth quantitative investigations of the past, like those that have proved so important in advancing the field of American history over the past few decades" (xii). Vinovskis's own work in this vein, largely in article form and collected between the covers of this volume, has been exemplary in many respects. Nine of the twelve chapters in the collection have been previously published and reach back to 1970 - thus his 1985 work may be seen as part of a consistent whole.

Education, Society, and Economic Opportunity is served up in two parts, but its center of gravity is located in the opening set of articles in the volume's second half, which revisit the Beverly High School controversy. Reviews of Origins by Katz and Edward Stevens, Jr., are presented with a rejoinder by Vinovskis, which allows the author once again to settle points of disagreement with Katz. What is striking about the exchange is that Katz seems to have convinced himself that Vinovskis, after a scrupulous re-examination of the famous Beverly voting data (and much more), concurs with him on all major points. In fact, however, Vinovskis shows, quite to the contrary, that Katz's conclusion that the renunciation of the high school in Beverly in 1860 was an expression of working-class revolt, is unfounded. One sympathizes with Katz's "immense sense of relief" that Vinovskis's tactical use of regressions, multiple classification analysis, cross-tabulations, and betas do not cripple his argument, so much as demonstrate the complexity and richness beneath the surface of events that led to the abolition of the town's high school. In the end, however, one is swayed by Vinovskis that Katz read too much into his snapshot of schooling, labor unrest, and party politics in 1860, even if one ultimately agrees with Katz's larger point that working-class Americans were only sporadic in their support of schooling - especially secondary schooling - during the nineteenth century.

The two essays following this exchange effectively extend Vinovskis's disagreement with Katz by reconsidering public high-school attendance before the Civil War and again in 1875. Vinovskis finds that young people during the nineteenth century were half-again as likely to have attended high school as has been previously estimated. Rather than calculating the proportion of the school-age population in attendance at high school based on enrollments at any given point, Vinovskis counts the number of different students in attendance, enabling him to determine the proportion of people ever to have attended high school. This bumps up earlier estimates of high school attendance from 12 percent to 18 percent in Massachusetts during the latter half of the nineteenth century and means (in Vinovskis's view) that high school was more popular than historians have believed. By implication he challenges the "revisionist" claim that "public schooling was imposed upon a hostile or indifferent working class by self-interested capitalists and manufacturers" - reasoning that if one-in-five people attended public high school, the apex of popular school achievement, then overall support of schooling must have been strong (xv).

Other chapters similarly aim to set the record straight on a variety of issues: Age-grading occurred more recently than historians have appreciated (during the 1920s and 1930s rather than at the turn of the century); the evanescent infant school movement in New England of the 1830s predated the arrival of kindergartens by three decades, yet kindergarten during the 1860s appeared to contemporaries an unprecedented European pedagogical innovation with little connection to infant schools; Horace Mann is famous for having first articulated the economic value of popular schooling but in fact, Mann himself pushed this particular argument because he knew that it was the most politically viable means of rallying support for public education; and mass education was not the result of industrialization but preceded it and sprang from several sources - the Protestant insistence upon the individual's ability to read and interpret the Bible, republican notions of citizenship and participatory democracy (which demanded a literate populace), the perception of schooling's efficacy in preserving moral values, and a rising belief in the economic utility of education (77). It is impossible to do justice to the subtlety of Vinovskis's observations and correctives in this short space. Indeed, the joy of reading his work lies in appreciating his attention to the minute. His methodological sophistication, sensitivity to nuance, cautious interpretation, thoroughness, and capacity to admire those whose work he criticizes betray a respect for the historian-as-craftsperson.

Vinovskis is above all a critic; yet he is the kindliest of critics and lavish in acknowledging his debt to those who have preceded him in asking the questions that claim his attention. By the same token, however, his innate circumspection seems to limit the interpretive mileage he gets out of his research, leaving to his reader the task of grasping the implications of his findings. As a consequence big questions often linger. To take just one example from the many issues he raises in this volume: if young people were more likely to attend high school during the nineteenth century than previously believed, should we then also infer that secondary schooling was integrated into the life course at a much earlier point than historians have acknowledged? If so, then the diminution of young people's participation in the family economy, which was initiated by extended schooling, was also set into motion earlier than has been recognized. And does it matter how one defines "high school" in 1860 - or 1875? In Vinovskis's enumerations all high-school experiences were created equal. Yet the most characteristic feature of secondary schooling during the last century was its tremendous variability. The definition of a high school until the 1880s ranged from a few advanced courses offered to a handful of students in a city school's "upper rooms," to Boston's distinguished English Classical School.(3) Finally, by declining to tell us why having some high-school instruction was significant at a time when it led to nowhere in particular, one can only assume that he believes that more schooling is simply always better than less schooling. Vinovskis remains a traditionalist among historians of education, for he sides with those who contend that public schooling has progressively created a literate citizenry fit to participate in the democratic process and that education has been directly linked to the United States' tremendous economic productivity on the one hand and individual upward social mobility on the other.

If there is a unifying theme among the otherwise loosely related articles in Education, Society, and Economic Opportunity, it is its subtext; Vinovskis has devoted a sizable chunk of his research over the last twenty-five years to refuting the overreaching assertions of so-called "revisionist" historians. Indeed, in almost every article presented here there is some reference to revisionist educational history. Yet thirty years after historians began their sometimes harsh reassessment of schooling in North America, the term "revisionist" has an odd ring to it. The fact that historians of education continue to employ the term in so self-referential a fashion - as though there is no consciousness of the entire enterprise of historical scholarship as a process of continual reevaluation and revision - suggests that there has been little inclination within the field to reconcile what amounts to a philosophical difference of opinion. Vinovskis intimates that this division can be overcome by a careful examination of the facts - by being more scientific. But he takes it as an article of faith that the "revisionists" will, with time and rigor, be proven wrong. Yet both traditionalists and "revisionists" cultivate an overly simplistic picture of schooling's past: One portrays education in the U.S. as the engine of democracy, economic growth, and upward social mobility, while the other casts public schooling as a cynical mechanism for reproducing the class structure by "instill[ing] in future workers the respect for law and authority necessary in . . . [a] capitalist economy" (75). Perhaps this bifurcation explains, in part, why educational history remains so strangely disconnected from much of the rest of the profession.(4) Surely a more integrated view, which encompasses both pictures of the past at once and accepts the notion of paradox and contradiction in historical time (schooling promoted individual upward social mobility and was imposed against the will of large groups of people), would disclose richer insights into the workings of the past and yield more to historians outside the narrow corridors of the history of education.

Vinovskis has the stature and the intellectual temperament to move this tiresome quarrel beyond its present short-circuited state. At the outset of Education, Society, and Economic Opportunity, he says that one of the major purposes of the book is "to encourage further research on topics that have not yet been thoroughly analyzed" (xiii). But it strikes this reader that he is too significant a figure to be content with such a modest aim. These essays display a rare and impressive range of expertise; and while one is grateful to have them in a single volume, when read together they produce the feeling that what should have been attempted in this book was a new synthesis of the history of education that finally abandons the search for the golden age of public schooling and confronts the heroic complexity of one of the major institutions of American life.

Stephen Lassonde Yale University

ENDNOTES

1. Maris A. Vinovskis, The Origins of Public High Schools: A Reexamination of the Beverly High School Controversy (Madison, 1985); Michael B. Katz, The Irony of Early School Reform: Educational Innovation in Mid-Nineteenth Century Massachusetts (Cambridge, MA, 1968).

2. The Origins of Public High Schools, 5, 9-10.

3. See William J. Reese, The Origins of the American High School (New Haven, 1995).

4. See Laurence Veysey's superb commentary on the history of education as a subfield in "The History of Education," Reviews in American History 10:4 (December 1982): 281-91.