The First Time ‘Everything Changed’
2007; SAGE Publishing; Volume: 89; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1177/003172170708900208
ISSN1940-6487
Autores Tópico(s)Teacher Education and Leadership Studies
ResumoMr. Bracey looks back at an event the Fifties that seemed to change everything for the U.S. as a whole and for U.S. education particular. Working his way forward to the present day, he makes it clear that the time when everything changed also marked the point at which things started staying the same. BY SUNDAY, October 6, 1957, most Americans had concluded that the beep, beep, beep from that thing called Sputnik, a manmade satellite that the Russians had supposedly sent into orbit on Friday, was not a hoax, not an electronic Potemkin Village, a product of what we would today call special effects. Initially, the idea that Russian technology could surpass ours was unthinkable. And our brains' repression of Sputnik's reality was abetted by the implications that the putative orb carried: if they can send this thing over our heads, they can also attach an atomic bomb and drop it our laps. Soon they will be dropping bombs on us from space like kids dropping rocks from freeway overpasses, said Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson. (1) Writer Tom Wolfe described it this way: Nothing less than control of the heavens was at stake. It was Armageddon, the final and decisive battle of the forces of good and evil. (2) According to journalist Paul Dickson, ministers spoke of the Second Coming, and at least one said, wouldn't be surprised if He appeared today. (3) THE CONDITION OF EDUCATION, 1957 Once the world realized that Sputnik was not a swindle, people had to explain how a technologically backward nation such as the Soviet Union could have accomplished such a feat. Maybe the Russians had spies and accomplices the West. Maybe our fat and lazy materialism had done us in. Maybe. But with remarkable alacrity a dominant theory emerged: the Russians beat us into space because they had better schools. In some cases school critics blamed themselves for allowing progressive educators generally and the advocates for education particular to fool the American people into believing that education can safely be left to the 'professional' educators ... The mood of America has changed ... I doubt we can again be silenced. (4) The speaker here was Adm. Hyman Rickover, an ardent advocate for a more traditional education. At that moment, the progressive movement was tatters. It was badly fragmented and had taken major hits from Rickover and from Albert Lynd's Quackery the Public Schools, Robert Hutchins' Conflict Education, Mortimer Smith's Diminished Mind, Rudolf Flesch's Why Johnny Can't Read, and, especially, Arthur Bestor's Educational Wastelands: The Retreat from Learning Public U.S. News & World Report ran an interview with Bestor late 1956 under the title Are Less Educated than 50 Years Ago. (5) After Sputnik, it brought him back for What Went Wrong with U.S. Schools. (6) Bestor eschewed two common descriptors of life adjustment education--flapdoodle and gobbledygook--and said simply that, in the light of Sputnik, 'lifeadjustment education' turns out to have been something perilously close to 'death adjustment' for our nation and our children ... We have wasted an appalling part of the time of our young people on trivialities. The Russians have had sense enough not to do so. That's why the first satellite bears the label 'Made Russia.' No doubt Bestor believed what he said. Many people believed it. But it was utter nonsense. The U.S. could have beaten the Russians by over a year. Dwight David Eisenhower chose not to. WERNHER VON BRAUN SPEAKS Various public explanations for the Sputnik debacle came from no less a figure than former Nazi and rocket expert Wernher von Braun: The main reason is that the United States had no ballistic missile program worth mentioning between 1945 and 1951. These six years, during which the Russians obviously laid the groundwork for their large rocket program, are irretrievably lost. …
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