Our progress as a nation can be no swifter than our progress in education.
-John Fitzgerald Kennedy
The United States experienced rapid growth during the period from 1865-1920. Waves of immigrants were making their way to what they viewed as the land of opportunity. At the same time, westward expansion and the settlement of the western territories increased the need for a common system of education to join together and educate an increasingly diverse population. Compulsory attendance laws helped accelerate this process and provided the means of delivering a common school curriculum.
The gradual institutionalization of child labor laws along with increasing technology made many unskilled jobs obsolete and led to a rising unemployment for lower class youth. In the highly industrialized eastern portion of the United States, this rising unemployment led to large numbers of children with little or nothing to do other than roam the streets and by implication cause trouble. Lawmakers turned to the schools to take care of this problem and subsequently developed a curriculum that would promote the development of moral values and training for jobs.
Compulsory school attendance laws were first passed in Massachusetts in 1852 and invariably spread to other sections of the country. By 1900, thirty-two states had passed compulsory education laws and by 1930 all the states had some form of this law in place. Subsequently the numbers of children receiving an education increased dramatically.
As the number of students grew, the need also increased for a more efficient method of administration, school leaders turned to big business to provide a model of scientific management to effectively manage these resources. Using Frederick Taylor's model of "scientific management," schools began to cluster together into centralized districts and pool their existing resources. Curriculum became more standardized and increasingly the county, state, and city governments began to assert more control over the process. Superintendents were generally appointed to run each district, which in turn was governed by a local school board formed by members of the community who were elected to their position. Individual schools had principals in charge. Teachers who formerly had assumed responsibility for almost the entire educational process had their duties proscribed and divided.
Around the beginning of the 20th century in France, Alfred Binet developed a test to measure the mental abilities of retarded individuals. Based on "scientific" principles this test provided several series of tasks that helped pinpoint how intelligent a person was based on the number completed correctly. Later, Lewis Terman used Binet's test to develop his own version called the Stanford-Binet that he used in his study of gifted children. The Stanford-Binet in a revised form is still being used today.
However, too often the results of IQ tests are accepted without question. Both class and cultural values can skew the results since the tasks reflect what types of experiences and knowledge that a child acquires. For example a child living in the Equatorial Africa probably wouldn't recognize a pair of skis because in their culture, this kind of knowledge is irrelevant.Think about It: