The Rise of Youth Counter Culture after World War II and the Popularization of Historical Knowledge: Then and Now

Theresa Richardson, Ph.D.

Paper Presented at theHistorical Society 2012 Annual Meeting

“Popularizing Historical Knowledge: Practice, Prospects, and Perils”Columbia, South Carolina

May 31st – June 2nd

Contact InformationEducational Studies Department

Teachers College 815, Ball State UniversityMuncie, Indiana 47306tmrichardson@bsu.edu

765-285-5476

* Based on Profanations: The Baby Boom, Culture of Youth, and the New History of Education

The Rise of Youth Counter Culture after World War II and the Popularization of Historical Knowledge: Then and Now

ABSTRACT

The dynamics of the baby boom demographic transformation after World War II is examined in relationship to the changing nature of childhood and youth as a social construct. The profanations of youth culture challenged the domain assumptions of modernity and in so doing ushered in a post-modern worldview and a new interpretation of historical knowledge.

The Rise of Youth Counter Culture after World War II and the Popularization of

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Historical Knowledge: Then and Now

Take the 3,548,000 babies born in 1950. Bundle them into a batch, bounce them all over the bountiful land that is America. What do you get? Boom. The biggest…boom ever known in history.1

In the 1960s and early 1970s, nearly all aspects of the dominant culture were subject to

being challenged by members of the demographic surge after WWII known as the Baby Boom.

The challenge came in the form of a socio-cultural break with tradition known as the generation

gap;2 the political Civil Rights and Anti-War Movements;3 and the rise of radical student

movements on university campuses and in the streets.4 The “weird, innocent, turbulent” times

also elicited personal vignettes from participant writers such as Robert Stone to rock performer,

poet, and writer Patti Smith.5 One of the most recent popular attempts to come to grips with that

time of turmoil and change is Tom Brokaw’s Boom, which is a collection of interviews and a

follow up to his best seller The Greatest Generation about WWII veterans, the parents of Baby

Boomers.6 Academic researchers have also taken up the radicalism of 1960s and its place in the

history of the left in America.7 Others argue that the 1960s era illustrates that when popular

cultural myths are vocally questioned and demythologized a critical public consciousness can be

stimulated.8 The counter is that the revolution in attitudes and morals were not sudden but were a

part of the longer trajectory of changes over the twentieth century in the evolution of

modernism.9 This study examines two thesis about the importance of the Baby Boom: 1) the

history and experience of childhood and youth was permanently transformed by the Baby Boom

both in theory and practice; and 2) the political and cultural youth revolution of the 1960s,

challenged and countered the modern world view of progressive history and normal science as a

universal source of objective reality and truth, a transformation from modernism to post-

modernism occurred that changed disciplines and worldviews. It promoted a political and

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cultural ideology based on profanations against the domain assumptions that had guided

modernism. While the challenge to and acts of desecration against traditional American

progressive perspectives ended in an overt sense, the curriculum and pedagogy of what

constitutes knowledge remains an undercurrent of social thought still prominent in the post-

modern dynamics of the more conservative times that followed. The battle lines have been

continuously redrawn and reshaped and will continue to do so in the future as the baby boomers

reach retirement age and challenge what it means to be old instead of young and we continue to

ask what the next generation will invent.10

Profanations: Definition of Problems

A profanation is an act of violating sacred things, showing disrespect, or exhibiting

irreverent behavior toward beliefs taken to be honorable and above question. Profanation is also

making common and accessible that which was previously understood as beyond questioning.

The baby boom generation after World War II was popularly known for their acts of profanation

against many of the sacred myths about the character and specialness of the United States of

America. With a childhood rooted in the supposedly conforming atmosphere of the 1950s, this

cohort began to develop its own style in the 1960s that relished non-conformity at least to adult

standards. Born into relative prosperity a visible proportion of the baby boomers sought

alternatives politically and culturally. Like Wilson Sloan’s character in his novel, The Man in the

Gray Flannel Suit, they began to seek a deeper purpose than accumulating money in a context

dominated by business interests and routine.11 The rising voice of minorities contradicted the

domain myth of what it means to be American as a special people destined to embark on a

journey of endless advancement. The ideology of manifest destiny that spread the nation from

“sea to shining sea” as in the patriotic song, “America the Beautiful,” was revisited and the

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policies and practices that politically and economically subordinated the first nations of the land,

enslaved and oppressed African Americans, routed Hispanic populations, and abused Asian labor

came to be seen as blatant contradiction to the ideals expressed in the nation’s founding

documents.12 The generation that became known for their profanations against the hypocrisies of

their forefathers sought self-determination under their own new values and standards. They

sought to speak for and with the voices of “the people,” rather than established leaders who they

saw as disingenuous and self-serving. How do young people, nurtured and cared for grow up to

declare themselves as the vanguard of a new society?13 The answer is indicative of changing

concepts of childhood and youth.

PART I

THE DEMOGRAPHICS IMPERATIVE:

AGE-COHORTS AS A CHANGING VARIABLE

Childhood is not a fixed phenomenon. As Phillipe Aries argues in Centuries of

Childhood, notions about the specialness of the stage of life after infancy didn’t exist in the

Middle Ages.14 As soon as an infant was old enough to follow directions they were expected to

contribute to the family in a productive manner. By seven years of age children, especially

children of the working classes were apprenticed and were seen as incompetent adults. The

Enlightenment with its heightened beliefs in the capacity of human beings to think and act

independently encouraged education beyond reading the scriptures or preparation for taking ones

place in the hierarchy of church leadership. Education for citizenship and for economic

attainment and success followed with industrialization, urbanization, and increased immigration

in the United States. The Common School Movement led by Horace Mann in the mid-nineteenth

century sought compulsory education legislation.15 As compulsory education was put into place

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state by state in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries a new category of life stages

was also introduced as a school-age cohort was established. The modern child was born. Social

class was a major factor determining how long a child continued in school or if they joined the

workforce after a basic or elementary education. Education beyond the elementary level was

reserved for the middle to upper classes as long as there were jobs available for working class

teenagers and adolescents. At the turn of the nineteenth to twentieth centuries G. Stanley Hall, an

educator and pioneer psychologist in the Child Study Movement, wrote about the “storm and

stress” of adolescents but this age group was not singled out for special treatment nor identified

necessarily with secondary education or high school.16 It was not until the Great Depression

when there weren’t any jobs for adults much less adolescents that young people began to stay in

school entering the formerly elite high schools in great numbers. This set up a massive change

after the war when secondary education became common and expected for all teenagers.17

Significant demographic population shifts can cause unexpected outcomes that reshape

the institutions and the nations they impact in unexpected ways. Such a situation occurred in

Western countries after World War II. Even though there is some disagreement over the

beginning and ending dates of the post-war baby boom, in the period between 1946 and 1957 an

estimated 76 million Americans were born.18 Annual births topped 4 million in 1954 and did not

drop below that until 1965. The so-called baby boomers pushed their way through the public

education system, which had to expand exponentially to accommodate them. In the 1960s and

early 1970s this group entered high school and subsequently pushed their way into the nation’s

universities in unprecedented numbers. The group was not complacent even if only a small

visible portion assumed a radical stance. Baby boom culture for the most part simply refused to

accept unquestioned the world-view of the older generation. They created a discontinuity, a

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break in age and cultural style as well as a break with the political persuasions of their parents.

Their music, style, language, and attitudes called into question and rendered former standards,

limits, and boundaries questionable and permeable.19

The experience of adolescence or teenage years, thirteen to nineteen years of age, rapidly

changed in the 1950s and 1960s. The emergence of the distinctive and significant youth culture

in this time period must be understood through an analysis of the social forces that shaped the

1 Sylvia Porter, “Babies Equal Boom,” New York Post May 4, 1951.2 Gerald Howard, eds. The Sixties: The Art, Attitudes, Politics, and Media of our Most Explosive Decade. New York: Marlow and Company, 1982, 1991; N. Howe and K. Strauss, “The New Generation Gap,” Atlantic Monthly. December 1992. Available online (http://www/theatlantic.com/past/docs/issues/92dec/9212genx.htm); Gunhild O. Hagestad and Peter Uhlenberg, Research on Aging. New York: Sage, 2006.3 Raymond Arsenault, Freedom Riders: 1961 and the Struggle for Racial Justice. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006; Simon Hall. Peace and Freedom: The Civil Rights and Anti-War Movements in the 1960s. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 2005; George Lewis, Massive Resistance: The White Response to the Civil Rights Movement. London: Hodder Education, 2006; Alexander Bloom and Wini Breines, “Taking It to the Streets:”A Sixties Reader. New York: Oxford, 1995.4 Alan Adelson, SDS. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1972; Michael V. Miller and Susan Gilmore, ed. Revolution at Berkeley: The Crisis in American Education. New York: Dell, 1965; also see the counter reaction by Seymour Martin Lipset, Rebellion in the University. Boston: Little, Brown, and Co., 1971; Todd Gitlin, The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage. New York: Bantam, 1987, 1993.5 Robert Stone, Prime Green: Remembering the 1960s. New York: Harper, 2007; Patti Smith, Just Kids. New York: Harper, 2010. Both of the latter were on the New York Times best seller list.6 Tom Brokaw, Boom: Talking About the Sixties. New York: Random House, 2007.7 Edward Walter, The Rise and Fall of Leftist Radicalism in America. West Port, Conn.: Praeger, 1992.8 Andres Jamison and Ron Eyerman, Seeds of the Sixties. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1995.9 Alan Petigny, The Permissive Society: America, 1941-1965. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009.10 Susan K. Fletcher, “Intergenerational Dialogue to Reduce Prejudice: A Conceptual Model,” Journal of Intergenerational Relationships, 2007; G. Stepp, “Mind the Gap,” Vision Journal, 2007; W. Bennis and R. Thomas, Geeks and Geezers: How Era, Values, and Defining Moments Shape Leaders. Cambridge: Harvard Business School Publications, 2002.11 Wilson Sloan, The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit. New York: Pocket Books, 1955 is a semi autobiographical novel on the American search for purpose in a world dominated by business. It was reissued in 2002 with a forward by Jonathan Franen.12 Manifest Destiny, the belief that the Anglo-Saxon race was destined to expand across the N. American continent in the nineteenth century, was coined by John L. O’Sullivan in the July/August issue of the United States Magazine and Democratic Review in 1845. It was used among other things to justify the Spanish-American War with Mexico in 1848. It is associated with the idea that the mission of the U.S. is to promote and defend democracy around the world as advocated by Abraham Lincoln and Woodrow Wilson. The idea clearly contributed to WW II and subsequent military operations by the U.S. abroad. The patriotic song “America the Beautiful” was written by Katharine Lee Bates and was first published as “America” in the periodical, The Congregationalist, in 1895 on the 4th of July. It was first published under the current name in 1910.13 SDS, Tom Hayden et al, “The Port Huron Statement,” written in 1960, in Alexander Bloom and Wini Breines, eds. Taking it To the Streets: A Sixties Reader. New York: Oxford, 1995, pp. 61-74.14 Philippe Aries, Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life, Trans. from French Robert Baldick. New York: Vintage, 1962. Originally published as L’enfant et la vie familiale sous L’Ancien Regime.

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context of the experiences of this particular age group. As noted, the evolving norms associated

with young people deviated from earlier generations in significant ways. The protections and

special status of modern childhood were extended even as immature bodies grew into adult

bodies. Obligations to take on adult responsibilities remained weak at least in the more affluent

classes and even working class if they remained in school, which rapidly became a universal

expectation as “dropping out” of high school became seen as a social problem. Adult privileges

such as driving a car at age sixteen and voting at age eighteen provided mobility and a measure

of real political power.

Perhaps one of the most consequential forms of impact in terms of power in a capitalist

society was as consumers. Expanding commercial interests in times where the public was eager

to acquire goods, products, and services turned to this new cohort. They were moneymakers for

large-scale business, and business interests were there to accommodate them. Parents raised in

the lean years of the Great Depression who became avid consumers of new products themselves

after the War were often willing to provide their children with the goods, services, opportunities,

and indulgences they missed during their own childhood. Even if they disapproved, parents

15 Horace Mann, Lectures in Education. New York: Arno, 1969, Reprint 1855 original. Bob Pepperman Taylor, Horace Mann’s Troubling Legacy: The Education of Democratic Citizens. Lawrence, KS: University of Kansas, 2010.16 G. Stanley Hall, Adolescence. New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1904.17 Theresa Richardson, Century of the Child: The Mental Hygiene and Children’s Policy in the United States and Canada. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1989; Viviana Zelizer, Pricing the Priceless Child: The Changing Social Value of Children. New York: Basic, 1985.18 Baby Boom Population - U.S. Census Bureau - USA and by State (http://www.boomerslife.org/babyboompopulationuscensusbureaubystate.htm) (July 1, 2008).19 The papers of the White House Conferences on Children and Youth at the Dwight D. Eisenhower Library in Abelene, Kansas are a source of changing contemporary adult perspectives on the culture of youth in the Post-World War II period. Other contemporary sources include: American Education Fellowship (formerly Progressive Education Association) Magazine, Progressive Education, March 1949 to March 1957, published monthly from October to May except December. Children’s Bureau materials such as: Oettinger, K. B. 1962. “It’s Your Children’s Bureau,” Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, Social Security Administration, Children’s Bureau Publication No. 357. The voices of radical youth can be heard in Students Democratic Society, “Port Huron Statement,” 1960. Adult opposition to the youth movement is evident in J. Edgar Hoover, Report: “Communist Target – Youth” House Committee on Un-American Activities, 1960.

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could hardly isolate their offspring from the flood of products, sights, and sounds that defined

what it meant to be a modern teenager in a world that appeared theirs for the taking.

In the 1950s, adolescents emerged as a cultural, political, and economic force parents and

other adults in and out of schools had to reckon with. Adult expectations for the behavior of the

young were increasingly countered by the culture of teenagers. In the 1960s as this group

expanded schooling beyond high school in record numbers the phenomena of young adults still

unattached to the routines of adult responsibility expanded youth culture into their twenties.

Being thirty was the new end of childhood, at least by the estimate of youth itself with the slogan

“don’t trust anyone over thirty.”20 This subculture, with its disconnect from traditional adulthood

began to seriously critique the dominant culture including the consumerism that had indulged

their childhood. The advantages they experienced in growing up in relative affluence they

discovered was not necessarily the rule and commonly did not extend to not only the poor and

working classes but were systematically denied to visible minorities. They perceived a

fundamental unfairness in a country that claimed justice and liberty as well as opportunity for all.

The Counter Culture and New Left Politics

The counterculture of the World War II baby boom refers to the cultural and social

movement that emerged in the United States and England between 1954 and 1974 with its height

between 1965 and 1972. The later part of the 1960s is viewed popularly and in the literature as

associated with the radicalization of youth politics and culture associated with the New Left. The

civil rights movement, anti-war and anti-draft protests, and women’s movement characterized

the era. Campuses of major universities became unwilling hosts to protests from the Free Speech

20 Jack Weinberg, leader of the UC Berkeley Free Speech Movement used the phrase in response to a reporter’s annoying questions about subversive youth activities. It was picked up and used in popular youth culture and reflected in songs. Berkeley Daily Planet Staff, “Don’t Trust Anyone over 30, Unless its Jack Weinberg,” Berkeley Daily Planet, April 6, 2000.

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Movement at the public University of California, Berkeley to protests at the private University of

Columbia in New York City.21 New social histories and social science perspectives emerged that

justified questioning conformity and the status quo in thought and action. Functionalist and

behaviorist explanations for human behavior in the social sciences based in positivistic ideas

about the basic validity of the status quo were challenged by conflict theories of socio-economic

class and status. Conflicts of interests were also supported by critical theory in the sociology of

knowledge that stressed paradigm shifts in science with implications for the way that reality is

interpreted between different groups and cultures based on the work of Thomas Kuhn in the

philosophy of science and epistemology of knowledge.22 In the midst of a paradigm shift

themselves, students were not necessarily willing to accept the lectures and perspectives of their

professors or to simply obey mandates from the administration of the university or the

government.

Expanded social science perspectives in academics had a cultural component. Styles of

dress, music, the arts, film, use of media, social conventions, and expectations were transformed

in ways that placed parents and their teenage to young adult children at odds, a phenomenon that

came to be known as the generation gap.23 The personal experience of these two groups differed

significantly given the very different dynamics of the economic and political events that occurred

in each of the cohort’s frame of reference. The parent’s generation experienced economic

collapse in the Great Depression. They learned to work hard and survive. They experienced a

major war. They fought and won. They worked hard after the war and they were successful. The

21 Howard, The Sixties O.P.C.I.T; Bloom and Breines, “Taking it to the Streets,”O.P.C.I.T.22 Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago, 1962.23 For this and other papers on this topic changing perceptions of children and youth were examined in the archival papers of John D. Rockefeller 3rd and his project on youth in the 1960s and 1970s housed at the Rockefeller Archive Center in Sleepy Hollow, New York. Oral histories and other contemporary publications are also available such as Henry Hampton and Steve Fayer, Voices of Freedom: An Oral History of the Civil Rights Movement from the 1950s Through the 1980s, New York: Bantam, 1990.

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lessons seemed obvious. The younger generation experienced relative prosperity and growth

with new housing, automobiles, and toys as children. They had a feeling of entitlement.

Christopher Lasch identified this cohort as living in an age of narcissism where hard work and

reward were not closely connected. Pursuing ones interests and personal freedom took precedent

over making money or success.24

In the back drop of the seeming complacency of the 1950s was the Cold War, arms race,

and threat of nuclear destruction as well as the Korean War as the United States gained ground

on the world stage as an international leader. This did not engender loyalty and patriotism but

rather skeptism, debate, and resistance. The Vietnam War and compulsory draft was not taken as

something to necessarily honor. For many it was something to fight on ideological grounds,

“make love not war.”25 Social mores also changed dramatically. Divorce, non-marriage, living

together, same sex relationships, multiple relationships, and the empowerment of women and

youth were choices to be debated and advanced. The younger generation in a post-Victorian era

experimented with gender roles and relationships including sexual behaviors given the

introduction of birth control and choices about when and where to have children.26 The older

generation still lived within the boundaries of Victorian culture and mores with traditional

gender roles and the expectations of marriage and nuclear family life.

PART II

THE INVENTION OF POST-MODERNITY

24 Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations. New York: Norton, 1978.25 “Make Love Not War” was an anti-war slogan in the 1960s popularized by Penelope and Franklen Rosemont who made buttons distributed at the Solidarity Book store in Chicago and given out at the Mother’s Day Peace March in 1965. The slogan was featured in John Lennon’s song “Mind Games,” and Bob Marley’s “No More Trouble,” in 1973. 26 David Allyn, Make Love Not War, The Sexual Revolution: An Unfettered History, New York: Routledge, 2001.

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The origins of the revolt of the baby boom generation start with a profanation about

progress and continuity. Counter to popular imagination and most public school versions of

American history, history is not progressive nor inevitable. Themes and lessons embedded in

historical narrative usually reflect the perspective of those in power who benefit by the implicit

or explicit lessons taught. The ability to control historical narratives is an important building

block of hegemonic power. While modern history as a discipline attempts to make the work of

historians additive by building on a foundation of previous work, in fact history does not follow

in any simple path of logical cause and effect.27 Therefore historical narratives are not stable in

how they are perceived or experienced unless hegemonically controlled by dominant groups.

There are revolutions, unintended consequences, shifts and turns that benefit some groups and

disadvantage others.

The politicized cohort of baby boomers unconsciously forced changes in school

organization and structure by its size. It also consciously forced changes through its ideology and

sense of political empowerment. This was first visited on traditional academic disciplines at

some of the nation’s most prestigious universities. Curriculum defined by traditional scholarship

was opened up to criticism and conflicting perspectives based in the social sciences. The social

sciences, which had typically been dominated by behaviorist or functionalist theory in the United

States, were introduced to European classics and scholars such as Karl Marx, with his critique of

capitalism and the reproduction of class inequalities. Max Weber’s analysis of the connections

between ideologies and social structure included the role of the Protestant Ethic in the formation

27 Sources on changes in forms of knowledge and social history in particular include Thomas S. Kuhn, Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago, 1962; Harold Silver, Education as History: Interpreting the Nineteenth and Twentieth Century, New York: Methuen, 1983; Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth Century Europe. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973; Thomas S. Popkewitz, Barry M. Franklin, Miguel A Pereyra, eds. Cultural History and Education: Critical Essays on Knowledge and Schooling. New York: RoutledgeFalmer, 2001.

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of the character of capitalism in the U.S. Emile Durkheim’s work on forms of social solidarity

contributed new ideas that challenged the dominance of psycho-biological or medical models of

the relationship between individual socialization and social structural group characteristics

involved in social change. In his treatise on suicide the most personal of individual acts became a

window into forms of group solidarity.

Historiography, or the study of how history is envisioned and projected as reality,

undermined the notion that there is a single true version of what happened. Historians began to

include oppressed and formerly invisible groups in their stories about the social dynamics of

change and contradictory perspectives on the meaning of change. The history of childhood

emerged as a subject of study as separate from the age-stage developmental psychology as

grounded in ahistorical approaches to the psychobiology of the human experience. The very

study of academic history as a discipline changed from traditional great men and great events to

social histories of the common person, women, and children and their institutions in the family,

school, and workplace.

While the initial bursts of radicalism waned as the baby boom generation eventually

turned thirty and most of the cohort assumed its place in the workforce, the long-term impact of

the demographic of young people remained a bubble in the history of the nation. Many icons of

the cultural era including members of rock groups such as the Beatles and Rolling Stones remain

popular today and did not “grow up” and reject their youthful success. They invented new ways

to be adults that continues to embrace the significant aspects of the youth culture of the 1960s.

Some radicals such as former Students for a Democratic Society leader and the founder of the

radical leftist group the Weather Underground, William Ayres, became a respected and widely

published elementary education theorist who is now retired from the University of Illinois,

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Chicago. While not involved in radical politics he remains a voice for democratic participation

and social justice as a social activist.28

The baby boom generation and its leaders continue to voice a legacy embedded in the

new questions that reshaped research in the sciences and humanities as well as in education. The

attempts to return to the older model while persistent and sometimes adamant in denouncing

post-modern perspectives cannot silence the fundamental observation that there isn’t one version

of reality, one best curriculum, or one best system. When self-serving demands are imposed on

those who do not benefit from that version of reality, it reflects an imbalance in relative cultural

power. Those who are subordinated are not necessarily wrong, as those in power would have us

believe, just as those in power are not necessarily right. Further, the dynamics of hegemonic

power relationships should be subject to questioning. Ultimately, they are also vulnerable to

revolutionary transformations that can happen, even if they are not necessarily inevitable as

argued by Marx.

The Popularization of Historical Knowledge

The cultural upheaval caused by various aspects of the youth movement questioned the

very nature of how to interpret social change and the legitimacy of official forms of knowing as a

reflection of the interests of dominant groups rather than the masses or ordinary citizens and

workers. In the 1960s historians, such as Bernard Bailyn, challenged traditional historians to

reevaluate their approaches to social subjects such as the role of education in the history of the

nation.29 Bailyn’s call was taken more seriously in subdisciplines of mainline academic history as

opposed to traditional departments of history, which largely remained compartmentalized and

28 William Ayres, Fugitive Days: A Memoire. New York: Beacon, 2001; William Ayres, Ryan Alexander-Tanner, Jonathan Kozol (Foreward), To Teach: The Journey in Comics. New York: Teachers College, 2010.29 Barnard Bailyn, Education and the Forming of American Society: Needs and Opportunities for Study. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1972.

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bound by traditional sources. Social historians utilized a variety of unorthodox sources to

uncover the experiences of more elusive subjects. They were less bound to strict disciplinary

boundaries as well. The interdisciplinary approach allowed for the introduction of social theory

into historical research and analysis. History was not taken to be an objective subject that could

be separated from the perspective of the historian. Uncovering historical “truth” was not an

impersonal journey. In fact, the journey necessitated analyzing how power and knowledge

became embedded in the trajectory of the past as played out in the present including the

dynamics of power and authority.30 The new history did not have to embrace Marxism but it

followed Marx’s example of seeking to understand the interrelationships between institutions in

society rather than collect finite pieces of information within strict boundaries of time and space

that supposedly lead to an objective conclusion.

Labor history as unorthodox in its subject matter had long countered the tendency of

traditional history to aggrandize the biographies of great leaders, rulers, and kings. What had

been the domain of muckraking journalism in the Progressive Era in the critique of the super rich

was taken up by serious histories of the for profit economy as well as the non-profit sector. This

included volunteerism, the charity organization movement in the late nineteenth and early

twentieth centuries, and the critical study of modern large-scale philanthropies.

Historians in the field of education embraced social history as legitimating their inquiry

into the origin and character of public education. In the first decades of the twentieth century

Ellwood Patterson Cubberly, a pioneer educational administrator who founded the School of

Education at Stanford University used a historiographical approach to education in order to argue

that education is the primary tool for continued American progress. He advocated an

30 Harold Silver, Education as History: Interpreting the Nineteenth and Twentieth Century. Fwd David Tyack. London, New York: Methuen, 1983; Harold Silver and Pamela Silver, An Education War on Poverty” American and British Policy Making, 1960-1980. Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006.

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instrumentalist approach to education that included increased standardization and efficiency, a

hierarchy of administrative practices, routine empirical testing and research. This approach

dominated school policy for over forty years until challenged in the 1960s and still reflects a

dominant paradigm apparent today in NCLB.31 Cubberly’s celebrationist use of history was

criticized in the 1960s as anachronistic and evangelistic arguing that his autocratic approaches to

public policy were sexist, racist, class biased, and limited rather than extended public

understanding of educational policy.32 Rather than celebrationist histories of the progress of

school expansion and administration such as told by Cubberly, educational historians in the

1960s examined the origins of educational policy and which groups benefited from schooling as

configured for the traditional dominant groups of White Anglo-Saxon Protestant founders of

New England. David Tyack, in The One Best System, examined how urban education in the

United States came to conform to an ideal type in spite of the fact that states are responsible for

initiating and enforcing compulsory schooling.33 In today’s volatile politics the one best system

model of public education is both promoted and under fire. The standards movement in NCLB

forces national uniformity through funding and mandated annual yearly progress on tests. The

charter school movement and vouchers offer options out of publicly controlled schooling.

Schooling remains in a cross fire of political and economic interests, where very different

versions of the significance and outcome of different policies are debated.

The history of curriculum and what is taught in school came under revision and scrutiny

in the multicultural education movement originating in the 1970s. Other historians such as

31 Ellwood P. Cubberly, Public Education in the United States. Cambridge, MA: Riverside Press: 1919; Ellwood P. Cubberly, The History of Education. Cambridge, MA: Riverside Press, 1920; Cubberly, Ellwood P. Public School Administration. Cambridge, MA: Riverside Press.32 Lawrence Cremin, The Wonderful World of Ellwood Patterson Cubberly. New York: Columbia University, 1965; Joseph W. Newman, “Ellwood P. Cubberly: Architect of the New Educational Hierarchy,” Teaching Education 4 (2) 1992: 161-168.33 David B. Tyack, The One Best System: A History of Urban Education. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974.

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Howard Zinn and Ronald Takaki began a trend to write American history from the perspective of

those left out of traditional histories. This included the immigrants who populated this “distant

shore” from their homeland.34 Educational historians took up the role of schooling in

socialization and in the Americanization process. As science challenged the veracity of the

nineteenth century contention that human beings are divided into separate races with the white

race as superior, new histories emerged to describe how the invention of race occurred in the

United States as well as the experiences of different ethnic groups as they gave up their culture in

order to become “white.”35

There was also another kind of gap beyond the generation gap, that of consciousness. As

noted, there was a popular and academic intellectual break with the idea of “normal” science as

the path to reality and universal truth.36 The increasing awareness of paradigm shifts in scientific

circles influenced the growing social sciences where different social classes and cultures, like

youth, manifested the idea that groups in different places in the organization of societies

experience different realities and many of their needs were not being met or even recognized.

Traditional history, which was seen as additive and cumulative in a singular path to truth, came

under question, as did the value of traditional paths to adulthood.37 The interpretation of history

as the story of the rich and powerful was countered by the voices of youth previously only

notable for their absence. New voices from other cultures and approaches to reality were

experimented with including Eastern religions, and “mind expanding” drugs both new such as

34 Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States: 1492 to the Present. New York: Harper Collins, 2003; Ronald Takaki, A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America. Boston: Little and Brown & Co. 1993. There were also angry responses from traditional historians such as Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society. New York: W. W. Norton & Co. 1992. Barnard Bailyn, Education and the Forming of American Society: Needs and Opportunities for Study. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1972;35 Theodore W. Allen, The Invention of the White Race. New York: Verso, 1994.36 Thomas S. Kuhn, Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago, 1962.37 Harold Silver, Education as History: Interpreting the Nineteenth and Twentieth Century, New York: Methuen, 1983.

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Timothy Leary’s LSD, and old such as eating hallucinogenic mushrooms or smoking marijuana.

The counter culture and youth movement rose as a voice that came out as an echo of that which

had been repressed. Not all young people participated in this radicalization of consciousness, but

there was a global presence that attracted not only media attention but a visible presence. New

medias such as television had in fact contributed to a heightened recognition of the disconnect

between ideals and realities, traditional forms of physical experience and new forms of

heightened experiences that had in some cases negative consequences even if they produced new

ways of thinking about experiencing reality.

CONCLUSION

After WW II a demographic budge attributable to the baby boom permanently changed

the character of growing up by making visible the teenage years identified with high school and

increasingly college. The relative isolation of youth from work in institutions that catered to

them produced a youth culture that was distinctive. In the 1960s young people, often from the

middle and upper classes, in the growing college and university cohorts became advocates and

activists in their own behalf and in behalf of numerous causes that perplexed many adults at the

time but also, it is argued here, had a significant long-term effect on society and the way social

change is documented and interpreted. The past is actually not static but subject to

reinterpretation. Therefore, the study of the past is not a static field of inquiry, as traditional

historians would have us think. As Hayden White has described, the deep structure of the

historical imagination has changed in its narrative discourse, in the forms of data, and theoretical

concepts used in explanation. Noticeably this first occurred during the Enlightenment and

continued in the emergence of different kinds of “realism” in the nineteenth century.38 The

38 Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth Century Europe. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973.

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invention of “modern” history in the nineteenth century using a method imitating the sciences

was seriously challenged in the mid-twentieth century in the shift to post-modernism. At least

part of that challenge came from young people and the reaction of adults to the paradigmatic

shifts in popular ways to interpret society past and present. It has been argued that the ways that

we tell history reflect changing views on social reality that are cultural and ultimately concerned

with new venues used for the transmission of knowledge in new media and new forms of

personal and collective communication.39 The transformation into a post-modern era of rapid

change and increasing diversity continues to shape the experience of youth. It also continues to

challenge historians.

It has been argued in this paper that the changes that occurred in this time period ushered

in a new worldview with a pace and intensity that eventually pushed the modern era of the

twentieth century into a post-modern era. Underlying the profanations of the young against

authority figures are the fundamental contradictions of modernism as a product of the

Enlightenment and the unresolved tensions in the U.S. between political versus economic ideals

that existed from the earliest colonies in Virginia and Massachusetts, which became embedded in

the documents of the American Revolution and ideas associated with manifest destiny. The

contradictions continue to be played out in the present in domestic policy and increasingly on a

global world stage. Throughout the history of the United States there have been tensions between

our professed ideals in terms of political freedom and governance by the people; and, economic

growth and prosperity in response to the demands of a capitalist economy that grew from

mercantile capitalism associated with colonialism and imperialism, to industrial capitalism in the

nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries and most recently the post-industrial high tech

39 Thomas S. Popkewitz, Barry M. Franklin, Miguel A Pereyra, eds. Cultural History and Education: Critical Essays on Knowledge and Schooling. New York: RoutledgeFalmer, 2001.

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capitalism prevalent today. The perceived dominant purpose of public education has also swayed

with the times between the poles of engaging and preparing an informed citizenry for

participation in a democratic republic as opposed to schooling for a compliant workforce and

army of consumers manipulated by a capitalist class associated with major corporations and

financial institutions as well as government.40 Situated at the end of a period of heightened

patriotism during WW II and return to domesticity in the 1950s the demographic bulge not only

imposed a new meaning on life stages but also on the nature of reality and consciousness. The

politicalization of the baby boomers was a baptism by fire for the nation with global

implications.

Endnotes

40 James D. Anderson, Work, Youth and Schooling: Historical Perspectives on Vocationalism in American Education. Edited by Harvey Kantor and David B. Tyack. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1982.

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