World War II had an effect on all areas of the United States, including education. A "life adjustment" stance became regularly known in schools from the "Education for All American Youth" report (1944). Life adjustment sounds pretty intense, so what does that even mean? As Kantor puts it, "Personal and social adjustment became the great concern of post war education," providing " a new secuirty for those whose lives had been disrupted" (201). This idea was designed to assist students in their outside of school encounters. The report "unfortunately" emphasized "functional experiences in the areas of practical arts, home and family, health and physical fitness" (201-202). So like many grammer through college students may inquire and whine about having a physical fitness requirement, especially for no grade, we have the Education for All American Youth report to blame...kind of! I wonder what "practical arts" entails and wished they would have elaborated on it because the author says "unfortunately," so I would like to understand why that was a bad thing to focus on.
Life adjustment was more focused on secondary schooling, while communications courses became more influential and popular in late high school and college. What were communication courses like, I wondered, because I major in it: "the communication course was a combination of writing, reading, speaking, and listening activities" (202). To me, this is a basic understanding of the communication field today, but I also have business classes and art classes, to name a few. The war had an effect of the popularity of these courses because only after the army adopted it in its officer training programs during the war did it become an influential component of education. Communication courses changed during this time since the forties and fifties that were mostly conservative, "offering a current-traditional approach that presented communications in the service of the democratic ideals...challenged from abroad" (202).
Changes in writing in secondary schools include leads to the use of expressive and creative writing, with a renewed composition peaking its interest. The composition portion was motivated largely by the high numbers of veterans attending college.
An important feature about the 50's was that college professors insisted "that the best way to teach composition is though reading literature and writing about it"(203). What I found interesting was asking "why?" to the previous quotation, only to find out that "this was in large part a result of a sense of professional identity...following the war"(203). So did teaching literature make teachers feel confident? Why was this there main focus on the path to personal identity and how much did the war really take a teacher's identity away? Can't a teacher always learn, teach and study for themselves no matter where they are?
Anyway lit was the focus of writing classes even, because if you could read the texts it would stimulate you to write. A social issue brought up is that because of this, the teachers were possibly more served professionally over the students and their educational needs. I didn't understand why, and how students wouldn't also be helped by learning lit and turning that into writing...?
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It is interesting that writing courses in the 1950s focused on literature to help stimulate writing. I still see a lot of that in today's classrooms. It seems like literature and writing are very complimentary (sort of like peanut butter and jelly). Many of my English classes have integrated different texts in order to teach students how to respond to different critical ideas. Well-developed literary texts force students to respond with writing that is concise and organized in order to convey sound ideas.
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