Left Back

Traditionalists talked about mental discipline, and educational progressives wanted school to be more practical and more like everyday life, but Harris spoke of the value of "self-alienation." He believed that education should involve "a period of estrangement from the common and familiar. The pupil must be led out of his immediateness and separated in spirit from his naturalness, in order that he may be able to return from his selfestrangement to the world that lies nearest to him and consciously seize and master it." Without a period of self-alienation, the student would remain "merely instinctive and implicit." To create self-alienation, Harris suggested that the student needed to be removed from his familiar surroundings and allowed to "breathe the atmosphere of the far-off and distant world of antiquity for several years of his life." (p. 40)

It became axiomatic among professionals that modern school districts should test their students' intelligence. The U.S. Bureau of Education surveyed 215 cities in 1925 and reported that group intelligence tests were used to classify pupils into homogeneous groups by 64 percent of elementary schools, 56 percent of junior high schools, and 40 percent of high schools; the same survey found that intelligence tests were used more frequently than standardized achievement tests. The public schools employed the tests to predict which students were likely to go to college and which should be guided into vocational programs; the decision became a self-fulfilling prophecy, since only those in the college track took the courses that would prepare them for college. (p. 160)