| Resistance to the 1954 United States
Supreme Court decision terminating segregation placed the schools in the middle
of a bitter and sometimes violent dispute. By 1965, when a measure of genuine
integration had become a reality in many school districts, tile schools again
found themselves in the eye of a stormy controversy. This time the question was
not which children were going to what schools but what kind of education society
should provide for the students. The goal of high academic performance, which
had been revived by criticisms and reforms of the 1950s and early 1960s, began
to be challenged by demands for more liberal and free schooling. Many university and some high-school students from all ethnic groups and classes had been growing more and more frustrated--some of them desperately so--over what they felt was a cruel and senseless war in Vietnam and a cruel, discriminatory, competitive, loveless society at home. They demanded curriculum reform, improved teaching methods, and greater stress and action on such problems as overpopulation, pollution, international strife, deadly weaponry, and discrimination. Pressure for reform came not only from students but also from many educators. While students and educators alike spoke of the greater need for what was taught, opinions as to what was relevant varied greatly. The blacks wanted new textbooks in which their people were recognized and fairly represented, and some of them wanted courses in black studies. They, and many white educators, also objected to culturally biased intelligence and aptitude tests and to academic college entrance standards and examinations. Such tests, they said, did not take into account the diverse backgrounds of students who belonged to ethnic minorities and whose culture was therefore different from that of the white middle-class student. Whites and blacks alike also wanted a curriculum that touched more closely on contemporary social problems and teaching methods that recognized their existence as individual human beings rather than as faceless robots competing for grades. Alarmed by the helplessness and hopelessness of the urban ghetto schools, educators began to insist on curricula and teaching methods flexible enough to provide for differences in students' social and ethnic backgrounds. Moreover, for educational reformers the urban ghetto school became a symbol of a general failure of American education to accomplish the goal of individual development. Also reminiscent of those decades were the child-centered schools that sprang up in the later 1960s as alternatives to and examples for tile traditional schools. The clash between the academically and the humanistically oriented schools of thought, therefore, was in many ways one more encounter in the continuing battle between conservative and liberals. |