Abstract
The New Social Studies was Born in a time of hope, a time during which Americans were inspired by President John F. Kennedy to “bear any burden … to ensure the success of liberty.” Citizens were encouraged to service by the remarkable phrase “Ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country.” They were called upon to turn back the threat of totalitarian communism, and asked to defeat “tyranny, poverty, disease, and war itself.” Kennedy’s meticulously crafted inaugural address in 1961 captured the Zeitgeist of the time. During the postwar era, a time in which the United States emerged as one of the world’s superpowers, leaders of the science and social studies reform movements operated under the belief, influenced by a vision of American omnipotence and rooted in hubris, that they could solve most any problem, if only they resolutely applied the techniques of science, research, and development.1
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Notes
Stacey Bredhoff, American Originals (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2001), 108–109.
Williams, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy (Cleveland, OH: World Publishing Company, 1959).
James R. Killian, Sputnik, Scientists, and Eisenhower: A Memoir of the First Special Assistant to the President for Science and Technology (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1977).
Bruner memo to Working Group on the Apparatus of Teaching, Woods Hole, September 1959, WH; John L. Rudolph, Scientists in the Classroom: The Cold War Reconstruction of American Science Education (New York: Palgrave, 2002).
Simpson, Universities and Empire: Money and Politics in the Social Sciences during the Cold War, ed. Christopher Simpson (New York: New Press, 1998).
David Berliner and Bruce J. Biddle, The Manufactured Crisis: Myths, Fraud, and the Attack on America’s Public Schooling (Reading, MA: Addison Wesley, 1995).
Larry Cuban, The Blackboard and the Bottom Line: Why Schools Can’t Be Businesses (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004).
David Tyack and Larry Cuban, Tinkering Toward Utopia: A Century of Public School Reform (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995).
Christopher R. Leahey, Whitewashing War: Historical Myth, Corporate Textbooks, and Possibilities for Democratic Education (New York: Teachers College Press, 2010).
Diana Hess, Controversy in the Classroom: The Democratic Power of Discussion (New York: Routledge, 2009).
See, for example, David Hicks, Stephanie van Hover, Jeremy Stoddard, and Milissa Lisanti, “From a Roar to a Murmur: Virginia’s History and Social Science Standards, 1995 to 2009,” TRSE 38, no. 1 (Winter 2010): 82–115.
David Olson, Jerome Bruner: The Cognitive Revolution in Educational Theory (New York: Continuum, 2007).
Jerome S. Bruner, In Search of Mind: Essays in Autobiography (New York: Harper and Row, 1983), 195; Bruner interview.
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© 2011 Ronald W. Evans
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Evans, R.W. (2011). Conclusion: A Time of Hope, a Time of Fear. In: The Hope for American School Reform. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230116672_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230116672_9
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