Paula Fass' Outside In

Paula Fass' Outside In

In Outside In, Paula Fass asserts that the form and function American education has been determined by the equilibrium between two predominate goals and ideals of education— to create a unified society with common values and beliefs (ecclesiastical objective) and to nurture the individual potential of each student by observing the individual needs and desires that students bring to public instruction (liberal objective). . The author aims to illuminate the tension that exists today between these two objectives by exploring how American education served “the other” throughout the first half of the twentieth century.

Fass’s definition of the “other” includes those groups “outside the power networks that organized school systems and ran school organizations”(9). Outside In focuses on four groups in particular—immigrants, blacks, women, and Catholics. The experience each group brings a unique perspective to the evolving state of American education during this time period.

Fass places most emphasis on the role of immigration and industrialization in the development of the aspirations, tensions and paradoxes of American education. In many ways, the problem of the immigrant at the turn of the 20th century gave birth to the ecclesiastical and liberal objectives of education. Before the development of the industrial age, an individual’s employment provided an important socializing experience. Industrialization greatly expanded employment opportunities, but the work was often brute manual labor with little educational value. Fass summarizes the reformist opinion of the time to be that “industrial labor failed to fit an older framework of socialization and did not serve as a force for social cohesion”(18)....

... middle of paper ...

...sts discovered when they tried to cater to the individual needs of immigrants, to emphasize one objective is to sacrifice the other. The plight of blacks and women in the first part of the 20th century suggests that even the noblest of philosophies are not guaranteed to serve individuals in practice. Further, federal intervention into education, such as with the No Child Left Behind Act, should give educators pause to question what educational oversights would cause the federal government to intervene in its historical role as protector of the overlooked and unnoticed. Finally, the success of Catholic schools in the 1950’s and 1960’s is suggestive of the value of a standard, academic curriculum, but one must remember that Catholic schools enjoy the luxury of choosing the students they educate.

Works Cited:

Fass, Paula. Outside In New York: Oxford Press, 1989