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Promises and limitations of youth activism in the 1960s: the case of the National Teacher Corps
Abstract
The National Teacher Corps (NTC) was created in 1965 to improve the education of “disadvantaged” students by upgrading the quality of their teachers. Specifically, the initiative sought to deploy bright, young liberal arts graduates as teaching “interns” in public schools attended by low‐income students of color. This essay explores the attempts of some participants to carry out a mission of social reform through this government‐sponsored program that operated within local public schools across the country. In situating the NTC on a historical map of social activism, the article expands the field’s understandings of youth‐driven, anti‐poverty activities in the 1960s, illuminating both the promise and limitations that shaped possibilities for social change at the time.
To examine how analyses and visions of American society shape the appeal of progressive pedagogy, this article focuses on the evolution of political and educational ideas among African-American civil rights activists who created alternative schools for Black children in the 1960s and 1970s. Activists developed, abandoned, recreated, and again abandoned open-ended, progressive approaches to the study of social and political life. The curricular shifts mirrored sea changes in the broader African-American freedom struggle. Rarely have Americans demanded with such insistence that education serve democratic purposes. The article concludes that support for progressive pedagogy depends on the expectation that students will be able to participate fully in the promise of civic life. The history of the freedom and liberation schools developed by Black activists suggests that no curricular project can fundamentally transform knowledge and its distribution if it is not part of a process of transforming social relations as well.
Educators and policymakers increasingly pursue programs that aim to strengthen democracy through civic education, service learning, and other pedagogies. Their underlying beliefs, however, differ. This article calls attention to the spectrum of ideas about what good citizenship is and what good citizens do that are embodied in democratic education programs. It offers analyses of a 2-year study of educational programs in the United States that aimed to promote democracy. Drawing on democratic theory and on findings from their study, the authors detail three conceptions of the “good” citizen—personally responsible, participatory, and justice oriented—that underscore political implications of education for democracy. The article demonstrates that the narrow and often ideologically conservative conception of citizenship embedded in many current efforts at teaching for democracy reflects not arbitrary choices but, rather, political choices with political consequences.
This article draws on oral history narratives to examine the beliefs and expectations that brought a group of young people
to the field of teaching in the 1960s through the National Teacher Corps (NTC). The oral histories address the identities,
politics, aims, and backgrounds of a dozen NTC participants. By situating the voices of these young people within a larger
social and historical context, the article uses oral history testimony to reconsider existing accounts of social reform movements
and teaching in the 1960s and early 1970s. Specifically, the oral histories allow Teacher Corps participants to emerge as
individuals who represent an important if largely unexplored population that took part in 1960s movements toward greater equality
and social justice and who embraced the unique perspective that teaching in ordinary schools serving poor and minority students
could offer meaningful opportunities for grassroots, social reform activity.
Nowhere in the educational world are teacher preparation and teacher induction more thoughtfully and carefully articulated than in the program sponsored by the Teacher Corps. The Corps does focus on developing teachers for a particular kind of environment, but what it is learning in this setting is translatable to other conditions under which teachers make their initial contacts with their profession.
On 30 December 1963, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee's (SNCC) executive committee approved Bob Moses' proposal for a summer voter registration project involving hundreds of white volunteers. Initially intended to highlight the brutality inherent in Mississippi's culture and to register large numbers of disfranchised black voters, the plans expanded to include more long term and holistic methods of addressing civil rights that encompassed what SNCC and its sister organizations in Mississippi called “educational and social” programmes. As freedom schools co-ordinator Liz Fusco asserted, this represented an acceptance that what could be done in Mississippi, could be deeper, more fundamental, more far-reaching, more revolutionary than voter registration alone … [It was] a decision to enter into every phase of the lives of the people of Mississippi … a decision to set the people free for politics in the only way that people really can become free, and that is totally. Freedom schools were central to SNCC's programme. Both institutions emphasized that knowledge of one's culture was crucial to the individual. In the case of the freedom schools, students would be encouraged to think freely and develop their own ideas about a free society. Charles Cobb, who conceived the idea of the freedom schools, envisaged the schools to be places “where the students could freely ask questions about all those things, political as well as academic, which troubled and excited them.”
“What is our image going to be—conventional educators or innovators, milque-toasts or activists?” In posing this question, federal staff members responsible for developing the National Teacher Corps (NTC), a Great Society teacher reform initiative, articulated both their assumptions about and aspirations for teaching in the 1960s. According to the reformers’ thinking, existing teachers lacked the qualities of innovation, dedication, and social and political engagement required to teach students in America's low-income communities. In response, they called for a new breed of teacher, with attributes and characteristics distinct from those of conventional educators, as well as a new approach to teacher training. The Corps’ strategy for producing this new breed of educator involved recruiting bright, liberal arts graduates to be teaching interns in underserved classrooms and engaging them in an alternative preparation that emphasized familiarizing candidates with their prospective students’ communities and the culture of poverty. In attracting “better” people and devising more effective training for the challenges of teaching in low-income schools, the Corps exploited both the Zeitgeist of the times and a deeply entrenched historical critique of teachers and teacher education, seeking nothing less than the rehabilitation of the teaching profession itself.
One of the most popular and enduring legacies of President Lyndon B. Johnson's Great Society programs, Project Head Start continues to support young children of low-income families-close to one million annually-by providing a range of developmental and educational services. Yet as Head Start reaches its fortieth anniversary, debates over the function and scope of this federal program persist. Although the program's importance is unquestioned across party lines, the direction of its futureâwhether toward a greater focus on school readiness and literacy or the continuation of a holistic approach-remains a point of contention. Policymakers proposing to reform Head Start often invoke its origins to justify their position, but until now no comprehensive political history of the program has existed. Maris A. Vinovskis here provides an in-depth look at the nation's largest and best knownâyet politically challengedâearly education program. The Birth of Head Start sets the record straight on the program's intended aims, documenting key decisions made during its formative years. While previous accounts of Head Start have neglected the contributions of important participants such as federal education officials and members of Congress, Vinovskis's history is the first to consider the relationship between politics and policymaking and how this interaction has shaped the program. This thorough and incisive book will be essential for policymakers and legislators interested in prekindergarten education and will inform future discussions on early intervention services for disadvantaged children.
Thesis (Ph. D.)--Ohio State University, 1973. Includes bibliographical references (p. 291-296). Photocopy.
UMI number 3028149. Thesis (Ph. D.) - Stanford University, 2001. Includes bibliographical references. Photocopy; Ann Arbor, Mich. ; UMI Dissertation Services ; 2002.
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