Mothers of Conservatism by Nickerson Michelle M.;

Author:Nickerson, Michelle M.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2012-02-03T16:00:00+00:00

Progressive education drew the first activist attacks on psychology in Southern California. Critics argued that liberal educators borrowed psychological tools from their social scientist comrades to execute their brainwashing strategy. Willard Goslin’s critics in Pasadena, Louise Padelford and Catherine Hallberg, charged in their Fortnight article that his administration deployed “group dynamics” in meetings with teachers and parents to promote their subversive pedagogical agenda.7 As an area of study developed by social psychologists, group dynamics became a basis for therapy and facilitation of productive meetings. The technique made conservative critics suspicious. In “The Case Against Pasadena,” Padelford and Hallberg accuse the Goslin administration of using group dynamics for sinister purposes in their teacher-training sessions with the well-known progressive educator William Heard Kilpatrick. The women argued that progressives deployed group dynamics to push adoption of a “whole child” teaching philosophy, a holistic pedagogy that addressed the social, mental, and physical well-being of the child. “There are other well-qualified institutions, such as churches, Scouts and similar character-building groups, not to mention the family, which are vitally concerned with helping to develop the complete man.”8

Padelford and Hallberg might have correctly perceived why group dynamics appealed to Willard Goslin, though misassigned menace to his motivations. Kurt Lewin, a social psychologist at MIT, first coined the term “group dynamics” when drawing from industrial workplace studies of the interwar years to prepare American soldiers for their transition to peacetime.9 Out of Lewin’s work grew a body of literature that shaped the thinking of race progressives, attracted to its rigorous investigations of “intercultural” and “intergroup relations.” As Mary Allen’s attacks on “intercultural” dances in Education or Indoctrination revealed, such language put conservatives on guard. Education historian Diane Ravitch also notes that progressive educators used group dynamics techniques to cope with resistance to curricular revisions. Reformers found it effective to organize teachers into small groups that would debate proposed changes, but ultimately reach a consensus to which all participants in the meeting would have to abide. Often, however, leaders had worked out those decisions before the groups even convened. According to Ravitch, group dynamics thus served as a means for “engineering consent” in many instances, adding that some teachers who refused to go along with the consensus of their curriculum revision group found themselves without a job.10 Many conservative activists, thus, came to see “group dynamics” as something more than a technique abused by administrators and desegregationists. Women, in particular, perceived a deeply sinister process in operation that demanded the skills, time, and organizations that they, as housewives, could commit to exposing—especially when it meant protecting the family.

The Los Angeles School Board members Edith Stafford and Ruth Cole charged organizers of the White House Conference on Education of using group dynamics to manipulate its participants in 1955. They contended that the government invited delegates at the taxpayers’ expense to force a show of consensus on behalf of the Eisenhower administration to push Congressional support for educational subsidies. They argued that 2,000 people meeting in 180 groups could hardly “solve”

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.