The first superintendent left, with a well-earned sigh of relief, to be a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. What curriculum changes have ensued, however, have not been major. Anderson’s successor, Superintendent Gerald Smith, has talked of introducing the “Fourth R, Responsibility,” but this seems largely another way of describing the established policy. The disciplining vehicle, Smith explains, is the group. The teacher strives not to discipline the child directly but to influence all the children’s attitudes so that as a group they recognize correct behavior. If a child falls out of line, he does not have to be subjected to authoritarian strictures of elders; he senses the disapproval of the group and, in that way, the school believes, learns to discipline himself as much as possible.
The child who tends to be withdrawn is given special attention. “Johnny wasn’t doing so well at school,” one mother told me. “The teacher explained to me that he was doing fine on his lessons but that his social adjustment was not as good as it might be. He would pick just one or two friends to play with, and sometimes he was happy to remain by himself.” There are many such instances, and, save for a few odd parents, most are grateful that the schools work so hard to offset tendencies to introversion and other suburban abnormalities.
Park Forest schools are not extreme in this respect, and most Park Foresters are anxious that the curriculum be recognized as middle of the road. But they do agree that there is a noticeably permissive atmosphere. They point out, for example, that the schools follow a method by which the student group is encouraged to take a strong hand in the planning of what they are to be taught. The children are not exactly put in charge, but the teacher makes a point of asking them what it is they would like to know about a particular subject, rather than unilaterally giving them what she thinks they ought to learn. As Superintendent Smith explained it: “If the topic under discussion is India, the children are asked what they would like to know about that country. Queries might range from elephants to the mysteries of bathing in the Ganges. By the time juvenile curiosities are satisfied, the children have a reasonable knowledge of India’s terrain, vegetation, animal life, religions, caste systems, and politics.”
The schools are similarly flexible in grading. To use fixed standards of performance, the authorities feel, would strait-jacket the child. As a consequence, the primaries, as in many other schools, are ungraded, and in later classes formal reports of the A-B-C-D-F or percentage type have been discarded. “It is obviously impossible,” curriculum consultant Lucille Thimblin explains, “for a teacher to reduce the many-sided aspects of a pupil’s development to an accurate numerical value.” Under the old method, she says, a bright pupil who has made little effort might get the highest mark while another child who works hard might fail to get a respectable mark. The school could get around this by simply using the two terms “satisfactory” and “unsatisfactory” and this would be helpful, Mrs. Thimblin points out, in that “this type of report does reduce the competition for scholastic leadership.” Unfortunately, however, while it would make for better adjustment, “it is very likely also to reduce some pupils’ incentive to do better work.” The solution: a check list to supplement parent-teacher conferences. In this the student’s academic progress is rated on the basis of his individual capabilities rather than against an arbitrary norm. He is also rated in terms of his social group and whether or not he meets the standards attainable for every member of the group.
There are a few parental misgivings about the elementary schools. As far as discipline is concerned, parents sometimes wonder if perhaps the school isn’t a bit too permissive. Occasionally parents talk of sending their children to Park Forest’s parochial school so they would “get some discipline”; they rarely get around to trying, but they still sigh aloud over the elementary schools’ laxness. Even parents who are satisfied with the children’s behavior are sometimes critical, for though not many may think their own children lack discipline, they are very sure that everybody else’s children do. Habitual is the complaint of their “freshness.” (“The kids here call everybody by their first names. If one of my neighbors’ children ever came up and called me Mrs. George, I think I would drop dead from surprise.”) As a few Park Foresters take pains to note, however, parents are somewhat unreasonable about this; whatever their faults, harsh parental discipline is not one of them, and they cannot fairly ask the schools to do what they won’t.
There is always a controversy of some kind going on over the elementary schools, but it is more on administration and taxes than matters scholastic.* On the whole, it seems clear, the parents are very well satisfied with the curriculum. At Park Forest, a PTA committee proudly agreed, learning is a “painless process.” “The teacher and the pupils plan together,” the committee’s report went on, “and everyone has a conscious feeling of belonging—as an individual and as a group participant. … Everything they learn is related to something they’ve experienced in their everyday life or through TV, radio, movies, or on the playground.” A few parents are still not altogether adjusted to the absence of primary grades, but this criticism usually comes from people who arrived from a town with a more traditional school, and in time evaporates. Similarly, though some feel there is a slighting of fundamentals, all are impressed with the reports from Park Forest alumni that their children are doing very well academically in their new communities because of their Park Forest schooling. If they had to choose, furthermore, most Park Foresters would hate to see the schools discard the emphasis on practical, contemporary problems. “Janet is studying marketing,” one parent told me, “and she’s only in the sixth grade. She’s studying ads and discounts—things I didn’t get until college. These kids are certainly getting a broad view of things.”
ĺt is in the high school, however, that the new suburbia’s philosophy gets its most significant expression. The philosophy is by no means unique to Park Forest. High-school superintendent Eric Baber speaks very much like many superintendents elsewhere, and his writings do not show unorthodoxy but, rather, a deep grasp of contemporary educational literature. What makes Park Forest’s high school unique is that, where in traditional communities what has been called the “life adjustment” curriculum has been introduced a bit at a time, at Park Forest it has been the foundation. The new $1,600,000 “learning laboratory” is not only one of the most modern in the country; in spirit as well as brick it is the embodiment of the suburban temper.
Five years ago, when the school was still in the planning stage, Baber told parents that the trouble with U.S. education is that it is concentrated far too much on the intellectual aspect of education. Even teachers’ colleges, he observed sadly, still require plane geometry for admission. Except for a small coterie, he asked, of what value to most people are the traditional academic disciplines? “The so-called ‘bright student’ is often one of the dumbest or least apt when he gets away from his textbooks and memory work,” Baber told a teachers’ workshop. “This is evidenced by the fact that many $20,000-to-$100,000-a-year jobs in business, sales, sports, radio … are held by persons with I.Q.s of less than ninety.”
Baber is not actually against intelligence. He believes it should be channeled toward real-life, vocational needs more than to the academic requirements of the colleges. Since Park Forest, unlike many towns, is predominantly college-educated, most students will be going on to college anyway; thus the “two-school,” vocational versus academic problems might not seem particularly pertinent. A large share of the school plant nevertheless was designed with great attention to the vocational, and so was the curriculum.
Of the total of seventy subjects originally offered, only one half were in traditional academic subjects—and the latter, furthermore, were by no means ivory tower. Of seven offerings in English available to juniors and seniors, the one devoted to grammar, rhetoric, and composition was a one-semester “refresher course … for students who feel the need for additional preparation.” Of more appeal to teen-agers would be the fu
ll-year courses in journalism and in speech (for which, in the “communication laboratory,” facilities are available for practical things like radio and TV debating).
The seventy formal subject offerings by no means exhausted the life-adjustment curriculum. Baber felt that the schools must assume more responsibility for the total growth of the child. Conceivably, this could be left to other agencies—to the family, or the church, or society itself, for example. Nevertheless, through such media as courses in family group living (twelfth-grade elective) and “doing” sessions in actual situations, the school tackled it. “Ours is an age of group action,” Baber says.*
Partly because so many parents are college-educated, park Forest would not seem to be ideal soil for the full development of the life-adjustment curriculum. When the curriculum was first being planned several years ago, a questionnaire was sent to parents, and somewhat to Baber’s surprise, over half of the parents checked French, Spanish—and Latin, of all things—as desirable electives. Most, furthermore, showed a disinterest in vocational courses of the craft type.
As elsewhere, of course, colleges have also been a stumbling block. Most colleges, Baber regrets, still require specified academic credits for admission, and this has been a brake on further enrichment. Core courses like Unified Studies offer some flexibility: if a student lacks a credit in English, for example, Unified Studies can be translated as English; if he needs history credit, as history. But this only mitigates, and like many another educator, Baber feels that the colleges continue to lag behind secondary education in acceptance of modern trends.
Another cloud has developed. While the school board and the majority of parents have been well satisfied with the school, what is usually referred to as a “vocal minority” has materialized. In 1955 a special curriculum advisory committee was formed. The laymen, each under the impression that he might be a lone dissenter, were surprised to find that they shared the same misgivings. After a survey they drew up quite a caustic report, the gist of which was that while Baber deserved tribute for the formidable job he had done, much too large a share of the school’s energies were devoted to what was essentially extracurricular. The ideal of education might be Mark Hopkins on one end of a log and a student on the other, the initial report tartly observed, but it isn’t Mark Hopkins and an administrative assistant and a guidance counselor and a psychologist and a curriculum consultant in between.
The final report was somewhat more tempered, but its conclusions were inescapably combative. “We believe in hard work per se, and, therefore, until educators discover some harder work, we believe in such courses as Latin and algebra as ‘disciplines.’ We do not believe that all knowledge must have an immediate or even, indeed, an eventual ‘use.’ … There is a tendency to design courses of study so that students will not be able to fail. This is completely unrealistic so far as life is concerned. Real life includes failures as well as success, and failure can be a challenge to make greater efforts to succeed.”
Because the critics have been responsible ones, their work has had some effect. Baber has taken it all in good humor and while he still feels there are things more important than academic studies and memory learning, the pamphlets the school has been lately turning out could easily mislead the bystander into thinking the school has slipped back into medievalism. (“There are no substitutes for subject-matter information,” one pamphlet declares.) The school points to the larger number of students in academic courses than in vocational ones, albeit with repressed enthusiasm; it also speaks of its increasing interest in the gifted student and the desire to accelerate such students by special classes.
Justifiably, Baber also points with pride to his strong academic teaching staff. The challenge of teaching in a new community like Park Forest has attracted an unusually able group, and on statistics alone the school is well over-average in the number of M.S.s and Ph.D.s. In view of the salaries they are paid, indeed, they would seem a good bit better than the taxpayers deserve. Their average salary, $4,500, is less than the income of the lowest-salaried junior executives who enter the community, and where the latter can expect to double their salaries in ten or fifteen years, the teachers will be lucky to inch up a hundred or so a year. As was pointedly observed in the biographical sketches recently printed in the papers of the teachers, a majority perform outside work to make ends meet.*
Essentially, however, the school has been kept to the original vision, and little of the emphasis on the practical has been sacrificed. “Family Living,” for example, has been built into one of the key offerings, and the school is proud that boys as well as girls take it. (“All aspects of family group life are open to study. Units of study include money management, everyday social relationships, care of the sick, nutrition and food management, clothing and housing the family, and preparation for marriage. Home and community resources are used. The accent is on ‘shared responsibility’ in building a successful, happy home.”) The testing program is extensive. In addition to a battery of achievement tests, such as the Iowa tests, and intelligence tests, the school has given students the Kuder Vocational Preference Record, the Bell Adjustment Inventory, and the California Personal Adjustment Test.
Part of the concentration in the academic column of the curriculum is due to the large number of students enrolled in Unified Studies, and for this reason some of the laymen feel that they still have plenty of work cut out for them. They are not yet satisfied as to what the studies unify. Here is part of a description written by the school for a local paper:
How can I improve my study habits? Is going steady a good idea? How can I pick a career? Why does Park Forest call its governing body a board of trustees, when Chicago Heights has a mayor and aldermen? Why does my family expect so much of me?
If you stepped into a Unified Studies classroom at Rich High you might hear students discussing any one of these or other problems of a personal, group, or community nature. You might find John Scott, Village Manager, or Colonel Plavsic, Director of Public Safety, discussing the government of Park Forest or the problem of juvenile delinquency.
If laymen cavil, the school can count on the moral support of professional educators elsewhere. The school’s way of reporting grades is a case in point. Some parents are disturbed because the reports seem to give as much weight to “co-operating with the group” as they do to academic marks. (Grades on examinations are only one of sixteen sub-grades.) Precisely because of this weighting, however, the Park Forest report system has been cited as one of the most advanced in the country by Dr. Ruth Strang of Teachers College, Columbia.
Dr. Strang is well aware of the difficulties a school’s concern with total growth can provoke from some parents. “If the parents’ philosophy is one that emphasizes rugged individualism and competition,” she says, with scarcely concealed disapproval, “a report that emphasizes development as a co-operative social person may not have much meaning for the parent.” But such a report can also help educate parents. Criticism notwithstanding, Dr. Strang argues, the reports should clearly reflect the underlying philosophy of the school—and in this respect, certainly, Park Forest parents have no cause for complaint.*
It is possible, if not very probable, that there will be shifts in the future. Significantly, the few critics are from what is regarded as the progressive element in Park Forest, and they are poles apart from the right-wing reactionaries who have muddied the issue in some communities. But they remain very much a minority, and at present writing it must be concluded that the philosophy of the elementary and high schools is a fair reflection of the community. If any debate has developed, it is because Baber has been so eminently fair in making his position explicit.
The majority do not see any basic philosophic differences. Differences of degree, yes—they don’t want the school to be too progressive, too practical—but on the basic concept of social utility they have no argument to make. If one wishes to quarrel with the philosophy, he must address himself to the people themselves. The educat
ors may be in the vanguard, but they are going with, not against, the grain of their society.
For what is it that the parents want most emphasized by the school? At Park Forest they were asked just such a question, and when they wrote the answer in their own words, one note was found more often than any other. The primary job of the high school, they wrote, should be to teach students how to be citizens and how to get along with other people.
* A notable fracas was over the school’s use of tests to screen kindergarten applicants. Parents whose children flunked were outraged, and when Superintendent Smith’s contract came up for renewal in early 1956 many parents were on hand to protest. The board voted to retain Smith but the proceedings were unusually acrimonious—even for Park Forest. From the Park Forest Reporter, February 2: “An unruly crowd of nearly 180 jammed the Sauk Trail multi-purpose room to hear the verdict … rules of order were violated left and right as spectators voiced opinions … [board member] Glassner’s prepared speech was two-pronged and included a tabulated ‘score’ of Smith’s administrative successes and failures … even more bitter was his indictment of his fellow board members during which he accused former President Albertz of breach of faith … Joseph Egan’s immediate criticism was of the ‘betrayal’ of private conversations held with members of the board and employees of the school district.” Participation, as I noted earlier, has not died out at Park Forest.
* Lest I seem to be applying the word vocational unfairly, let me note that Dr. Baber is equable about it. From a letter to the writer from Dr. Baber: “In general, I believe you have given a reasonably accurate description of the high-school situation. The frequent use of the word vocational as applied to our educational program is acceptable if broadly defined as useful or functional. … We emphasize general education and the development of understandings, skills, and critical thinking directly related to current problems of social living. If I were to attempt to define the bases of our educational program I believe it would be in terms of three fundamental concepts: (1) the philosophy of experimentalism, compromised somewhat by the pressures of tradition, (2) an organismic (or Gestalt) psychology, and (3) democratic educational leadership.”
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