What Was Education Like Before Sputnik?
After World War II, debate about the quality of American education escalated. Individuals such as Admiral Hyman Rickover, and most notably Arthur Bestor, became critics of John Dewey s ideas and the rhetoric of progressive education, especially the theme of life-adjustment. The dominant theme of the critics was BACK–back to fundamentals, back to basics, back to drill and memorization, and back to facts. Bestor called for a return to past practices and argued for a restoration of learning as the theme for reform (Cremin, 1961; Ravitch, 1983). Several observations are worth noting about the criticism of progressive ideas and emergence of Sputnik-spurred programs. First, such educational criticism was not new, for example, in the late 1800s critics said that students were being spoon-fed, the curriculum was too easy, and music and art took too much time from fundamentals. Second, some of what critics such as Bestor wrote included a serious distortion of facts. Further, the critics seldom
