Week 7: Histories of Schooling in the U.S.

            This week’s blog topic concerning schooling in the U.S. touched on myriad concerns, including controversy on how American schooling has been transformed since the late 1800s, how it should continue to evolve, and questions of how America’s program of public education has impacted students socially. In this writing, I hope to address two films, As American as Public School: 1900-1950 and Student Threats of Violence, and the piece “Social Capital and Adolescent Violent Behavior: Correlates of Fighting and Weapon Use among Secondary School Students” by Darlene R.Wright and Kevin M. Fitzpatrick.

            First, through the documentary film, As American as Public School: 1900-1950, we see a framing of American schooling that has changed dramatically since the early 1900s—somewhat due to the inception of John Dewey’s Progressivism. It was extremely interesting to hear that  schools began to transition from not very conducive to a child’s growth and well-being; but began to offering classes like home economics and wood shop during the time, while also beginning to incorporate ‘amenities’ like swimming pools and zoos—as in the example of Emerson school in Gary, Indiana. And although we can readily admit to the fact that most schools no longer have their own zoos or offer classes like ‘animal husbandry’, it seems that in some ways contemporary public schooling has tried to hold on to the idea that elective classes like music and art enhance a child’s education—or the “work, study, play” approach (As American as Public School: 1900-1950 2000).

Additionally, the film highlighted the ever-present fact that there continues to be a tug of war between progressive education and traditionalist programs of education. Retrospectively, it was a positive thing that schools had taken on a Progressive curriculum to do “everything the parents were not doing”, especially in light of the fact that most families were poor and could not offer their children some of the things they could only get at school like a bath and meals (As American as Public School: 1900-1950 2000). But to an extent, Progressive education had evolved to touch every aspect of a student’s life—which included socializing them and their parents in certain ways. Is this a bad thing, though? In some ways, it might be seen as a negative thing. For instance, American schooling had played up the idea of patriotism, while deemphasizing and sometimes even reprimanding children for speaking a language other than English. In this way, schools way in on the political debate about immigration, and seemingly influence their students to take sides (I am reminded, in the film, of the group of children seen destroying their German textbooks).  Similarly, because of the volume of immigrant students, schools started to adopt a program that rewarded the students who demonstrated their gifted abilities through standardized testing, while seemingly dismissing other students to career paths such as carpenters and homemakers. In many ways, these aforementioned points are still heavily debated today, should American schools remain English only? Is standardized testing really the best means of appreciating a child’s level of intelligence?

My next point has to do with another controversial subject pertaining to public schooling: school violence—which is something the second film, Student Threats of Violence, and Wright’s and Fitzpatrick’s “Social Capital and Adolescent Violent Behavior: Correlates of Fighting and Weapon Use among Secondary School Students” address. One of the overarching questions of each of the films and writings was this: how does school create an impact on youth and socialization? And more specifically for the latterly mentioned, what correlations exist between school and youth violence? In Student Threats of Violence, Dr. Dewey Cornell expressly mentions that school violence is misperceived in the U.S.: it remains much lower than most Americans believe it to be; Cornell nonetheless attempts to offer a model of dealing with school violence that remedies the problem—which he believes is not widespread school violence, but a program of ‘zero tolerance’. In the article, Wright and Fitzpatrick are under the view that youth violence is a very pressing issue; and they come at their research on the basis of socialization and building social capital. Social capital according to Wright and Fitzpatrick is “resources embedded in social relationships and ties that can be used for expressive purposes such as the maintenance of physical health”, in other words, social capital is the mode by which meaningful relationships provide for many aspects of a person’s well-being (Wright& Fitzpatrick 2006). For example, social capital may manifest itself in schools through attaching feelings of pride to academic achievement, closeness with peers and teachers, etc. In their paper Wright and Fitzpatrick offer an argument which expresses that socialization and the building of social capital among child-parent familial relationships, as well as neighborhood-community relationships, school affiliation, and religious affiliation all impacted children positively when it came to lower incidents of violence.

To continue our discussion of Wright and Fitzpatrick, I found it interesting to read that, on their results, low income did not have either a negative or a positive correlation with incidences of violence among youth—it seems that this finding almost goes directly against Dr. Cornell’s findings on economic status, where he reasons that parents who make more money in their primary job don’t have to seek out two and three jobs—affectively allowing them to spend more time with their children after they get home from school. I seem to agree with Dr. Cornell on this one, and believe that economic status might have some bearing on a child’s access to social capital. The only stipulation here though is how much the factor of low income is attached to how many jobs the parent holds—and more importantly, something that Wright and Fitzpatrick do not fully explore, what is the connection between low income and child-parent relationships? Should there be one, as Dr. Cornell explains it? Overall, I agree with Wright and Fitzpatrick’s hypotheses pertaining to socialization and social capital, but I believe that further research might make the argument more lucid. 

Works Cited

Films for the Humanities and Sciences."As American as Public School: 1900-1950"
2000. Online video clip. Arizona Universities Library Consortium. FMG Video On
Demand. Retrieved March 7, 2011. http://digital.films.com/play/P7J4SF.

ResearchChannel (Producer) (2008, February 21). Student Threats of Violence.
[Youtube video]. Retrieved March 7, 2011 from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cXiK0A43Xk4

Wright, & Fitzpatrick (2006). Social capital and adolescent violent behavior:
Correlates of fighting and weapon use among secondary school students. Social Forces, 84(3), 1435-1453.