EDUCATION AT THE TURN OF THE CENTURY

Reck Niebuhr

It is useful to remind ourselves that most of the "ideas" that characterize contemporary American education came to life in the last quarter of the 19th Century. We still celebrate the birth of the Research University, the Land Grant University, the Urban College and the Public Library in those years. From their creation flowed a host of secondary inventions such as agricultural extension services, vastly expanded student admissions, adult education, home economics and 4-H programs for families and youth, and a new model of the American high school. It was truly a giant step in our national life as we came to believe that education was for every citizen and that knowledge needed to be actively pursued and be useful in furthering the goals of the nation.
The driving forces for this marvelous educational giant step came from the shift from an agrarian economy to the mass industrial economy and the concomitant shift of millions of families and citizens from the farm to the city. As we view these inventions from the 1998 perspective, noting that there are 16,000 school districts with an ever declining drop out rate and the 3500 colleges and universities offering a huge range of programs, it is useful to recall that only 5% of American youth graduated high school in the year 1900 with only 1% going on to college. Indeed only 50% of our youth graduated high school in the 1940s. Some social inventions take a long time to come to full flower.
Given this turbulent turn-of-the-century economic and social environment we can better understand the birth of Scattergood Friends School. Quakers, of course, have an inherited theological commitment to the development of the individual, pursued in the unique Quaker Learning Process implemented in Quaker families and Quaker Meetings. Hence it is not surprising that Iowa Quakers, and indeed Quakers everywhere, saw the need to expand the Quaker Learning Process to include Quaker Schools and Colleges. As we read Scattergood's history it is easy to see the School as an extension of the family and Meeting-centered Quaker Learning Process with exceptionally close ties between family, Meeting and School. But without the explicit idea of an "ecology of learning" or a Quaker Learning Process these exceptionally close ties were more embedded, as most traditions are, than intentional.
It is perhaps paradoxical that, as the mammoth American education edifice has been built during the 20th Century, the outside-of-school learning settings have been neglected and declined. The distance between schools and the outside-of-school learning settings, family, community, church etc., has grown. Although not as severe we have concluded that the same dynamic is as work in Quaker education. Although there are still ties between Quaker families, Quaker Meetings and Quaker schools the closeness is not what is once was and the distances between them seems to be growing.