The End of American Childhood by Paula Fass

Author:Paula Fass [Fass, Paula]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Social History, United States, General, Education, Parent Participation, Family & Relationships, Parenting, Social Science, Sociology, Marriage & Family, Americas (North; Central; South; West Indies)
ISBN: 9780691178202
Google: u3KYDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2017-11-07T22:32:46+00:00

First grade, showing extremes in ages of pupils in a segregated African American class in Gee’s Bend, Alabama (1939). Photograph by Marion Post Wolcott. Farm Security Administration—Office of War Information Photograph Collection, Prints & Photographs Division, Library of Congress, Image # LC-DIG-ppmsca-31891. Note the mixture of ages of students in the photograph even at the end of the 1930s. This was not unusual in the underfunded and poorly staffed schools of the segregated South.

The emphasis on the psychological consequences of racism was common during the decade following the Brown decision,18 but the importance of psychology for Americans was hardly confined to the subject of race relations. During the Second World War, psychologists and psychiatrists had joined the armed forces to underwrite a new perspective on battle readiness and on how war affected soldiers’ mental and emotional well-being.19 Studies of nervousness and anxiety were soon followed by discussions of “brainwashing” during the Korean War, as prisoners of war were subjected to extreme forms of indoctrination and their psyches preyed upon and altered.

The psychological underpinnings of childrearing had become a staple of twentieth-century advice well before the 1950s. And Americans were now regularly seeking psychiatric assistance for nervous and emotional disorders. From 1940 to 1964 the number of psychiatrists increased 600 percent.20 These several sources created a predisposition toward psychological forms of understanding that flowered as psychology and psychiatry become dominant cultural perspectives in the 1950s and 1960s, when they informed legal briefs, literature, and other cultural products. Thus Robert Coles was working in very rich soil when he wrote about the psychological consequences of desegregation in the South in 1964.

In fact, Coles’s study was much more than a psychological inquiry by an extremely sensitive observer of race relations. Coles understood that psychological insight needed to be historically situated. In describing “John Washington,” a pseudonym for one of the young black youths who integrated an Atlanta school, Coles noted that John had been “strictly toilet trained.” But he understood that this was the result of specific circumstances. The Washington family had migrated from a sharecropper cabin in South Carolina to the city of Atlanta, where the rules were different (and required much stricter attention to cleanliness). John’s father was from a family of very poor sharecroppers but had returned home from the armed services with new ideas about possibilities for himself and his children. After basic training in New Jersey and a stint cooking for troops fighting in France, he did not want to return to his crude life as a “cropper.” The food he ate, the clothes he wore, and his experiences of a good bed had made him eager for a different life when he returned. This moved him to take his wife and three children, including their newborn son (the parents had married very young—he at sixteen, his wife Hattie at fourteen) to the city of Atlanta. “He wanted schooling for his children, particularly his new son. He wanted to go northward, to Philadelphia or New York,” but his wife did not want to leave at all, so they compromised on Atlanta.

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