The fact is, however, that most American
schools were ungraded until the second half of the nineteenth
century, the graded school having been introduced in the United
States in 1848, when the Quincy Grammar School in Boston,
Massachusetts, opened its doors. A number of educators,
impressed with the graded schools they had seen in Germany, had
been proposing adoption of the technique in this country. The
Quincy School was the first built for that purpose; it contained
twelve rooms of equal size, four to a floor, in which a teacher
and some fifty-five children would meet for a year at a time.
The men who created the school predicted that it would set the
pattern of American schooling for another fifty years. Their
estimate was clearly conservative.
Charles Silberman, Crisis in the Classroom:
The Remaking of American Education (New York: Random House,
1970) p. 166 (emphasis added). I first read this book as a ninth
grader (who had earlier skipped sixth grade) in 1972, soon after
I had read John Holt's How Children Fail. This was heady stuff
for someone as unhappy with school as I was and undoubtedly
accounts for my lifelong interest in education reform.
Silberman goes on to quote a critic of
age-grading: It is constructed upon the assumption that a group
of minds can be marshalled and controlled in growth in exactly
the same manner that a military officer marshalls and directs
the bodily movements of a company of soldiers. In solid,
unbreakable phalanx the class is supposed to move through all
the grades, keeping in locked step. This locked step is set by
the 'average' pupil--an algebraic myth born of inanimate figures
and an addled pedagogy. The class system does injury to the
rapid and quick-thinking pupils, because these must shackle
their stride to keep pace with the mythical average. But the
class system does a greater injury to the large number who make
slower progress than the rate of the mythical average pupil . .
. They are foredoomed to failure before they begin.
This critic was writing in 1912!
The criticism of age-grading was written by
Frederick Burk, first president of what became California State
University at San Francisco, a teaching-training college. Burk
went on to write, "Could any system be more stupid in its
assumptions, more impossible in its conditions, and more
juggernautic in its operation?" But age-grading survives to this
day, despite repeated reform proposals.
Silberman comments that reform proposals of
the 1960s nominally eliminated age-graded classes but were
distorted into lock-step achievement groups.
Historian Joseph Kett, in Rites of Passage:
Adolescence in America 1790 to the Present (1977) (ISBN
0-465-07044-2), demonstrates convincingly by quoting from a vast
array of contemporary documents that the natural social life of
American children before age-segregated schooling consisted of
groups with even distribution of ages from eight to twenty-two.
In research he has done in collaboration with juvenile justice
experts, he develops the hypothesis that youth crime results
from an age-segregated youth culture.
I hope this is informative about how we got to where we are
today, if depressing.
Karl M. Bunday
bunda002@gold.tc.umn.edu
Copyright 1996 Karl M. Bunday, all rights reserved.
