A Progressive Legacy Squandered: TheCardinal PrinciplesReport Reconsidered

Abstract

In 1955, Lawrence Cremin wrote of the Cardinal Principles report, “Indeed, it does not seem amiss to argue that most of the important and influential movements in the field since 1918 have simply been footnotes to the classic itself.” During the years between the publication of the Cardinal Principles report and Cremin's remark, most of the major proposals for secondary education in the United States endorsed and elaborated the principles and practices outlined by the Commission on the Reorganization of Secondary Education (CRSE); many of these reports explicitly cited the 1918 document. Over the decade following Cremin's remark, additional reports continued this trend. During the 1950s, however, the weight of opinion about the Cardinal Principles report began to shift seismically.

BOOK REVIEW of Reconsiderations: The Struggle for the American Curriculum, 1893-1958, 3rd ed.

“…Therefore, Kliebard's insistence on the conservative/humanist aspects of the committee "misrepresent[s]" the central intention of its members (10-11; Angus and Mirel 1999, 10 Kliebard, Clarence Kingsley "engineer[ed], almost single-handedly" the report, a "progressive" document that largely reflected the social-efficiency curricular tradition (95). Wraga (2001) persuasively demonstrated not only that the Cardinal Principles report was not the sole undertaking of Kingsley but also that "it did not expressly advocate the kind of narrow, deterministic social efficiency ideology" that Kliebard suggests it did (513). Moreover, other historians have criticized Struggle for its "ethnocentrism" because Kliebard fails to explore the broader, international trends in progressive education (Brehony 2001).…”

Was There Really a Social Efficiency Doctrine? The Uses and Abuses of an Idea in Educational History

“…Franklin’s case study also demonstrated how it was middle-class parents who resisted and ultimately overturned the social efficiency reforms, complicating the idea that the social efficiency doctrine represented the imposition of middle-class values on the poor. However, in the past decade and a half, scholars such as Fallace (2008, 2009, 2011a, 2011b), Knoll (2009), Null (2004), and Wraga (2001, 2006, 2007) revealed additional problems with the idea of social efficiency.…”

“…However, this new scholarship challenges the tendency to reduce the complex ideologies of progressive education to a single doctrine, which can then be applied to lengthy, multidimensional reform documents. For example, Wraga (2001) questioned Krug’s (1964) assumption that the Cardinal Principles report was guided by the ideologies of anti-intellectualism and social control. On the basis of archival research and his close reading of the Cardinal Principles report, Wraga concludes that “progressive, even Deweyan principles far outweigh language that smacks of narrow social control ideology” (Wraga, 2011, p. 517).…”

English Education Research and Classroom Practice: New Directions for New Times

“…Rising interest in education for everyday life was apparent in such responsive documents as the NEA Commission on the Reorganization of Secondary Education's (1918) Cardinal Principles, a landmark Progressive Era formulation of democratic goals intended to guide school reform, with an emphasis on preparing diverse young people for work, citizenship, raising families, and leading happy, healthy, and ethical lives (see Wraga, 2001). These sentiments found further expression in "Reorganization of English in Secondary Schools" (Hosic, 1917), the official statement of a subcommittee composed of representatives of the NEA's Commission on the Reorganization of Secondary Education and the newly constituted NCTE.…”