Published in 1957, Constraint and Variety in American Education is not exactly a new release–nor was it apparently a particularly major work, as it didn’t make its author Riesman’s Wikipedia page. I would have skipped it myself, but for the strange and striking Gorey-designed cover. It fits, though, this strange, striking little book. Riesman adapts three lectures he delivered at the University of Nebraska in 1956 into this quickly-paced book, attempting to characterize the forces which move and route American educators and their institutions, both from inside and from without.
Despite writing from the ‘50s and about the ‘50s, there’s a lot of trenchant and relevant stuff in here. This is owed in part to Riesman’s tremendous attention to the paradigms and motivations that inform the groups he observes, and in larger part to his unwillingness to let it stand at that. Paradigms don’t ariseexnihilo and motivations rarely form a consistent set–so Riesman tries as well to get at the practical concerns and historical facts that occasion these positions. The resulting analysis is a bit hardier with respect to time than I think it might otherwise be.
(An aside: One of the few moments that places Constraint soundly in the ‘50s is a head-turning one: His obvious attempts at equanimity while describing the new fad for ‘going steady’ amongst the school-age set, which he thinks offers “more constraint than freedom.” You do you, kids.)
It is also more broad than I expected the work to be. Rarely did it seem that some influential factor was ignored simply for being outside the purview of his interest, from social ties within the academy to fiduciary ties between the largest corporations and universities–and all along, attending to the implications that these ties have for defining what American education does.
“Education succeeds in emancipating a large proportion of its graduates from provincial roots, only to tie them the more firmly to the big and more subtly constricting orbits of corporate, academic, suburban, and military organization”
Riesman avoids releasing too much invective or searching for villains among his characters. Some of why perhaps bakes out of his discussion on how the local media and politicians–the McCarthyites writ small–have been able to force out teachers and curricula they found unacceptable:
“The closer the word is to a blow, the greater its impact in the short run and the harm is done; in many controversies over the schools, there is no long run, little distance between the partisans, and few constitutional barriers to impetuosity.”
Yet, the text approaches a lot of what it finds to be poorly-founded or overly motivated by the practically political with an obvious suspicion, leading towards disdain–part of what keeps it a fun read. Consider his take on the sort of discussions that would soon lead to the New Math movement:
“In current talk about the shortage of math and science and teachers, reference is made to the greater output of technicians in the Soviet Union. The reference is often made by people more interested in math than they are in the Cold War, and one trouble with employing such arguments, in which one’s own motives are submerged, is that one never knows in the end whom they convince: each rhetorician may assume some other group requires these extrinsic and essentially philistine and manipulative arguments and may end up by confusing himself–and if the Soviet Union should start training poets in place of metallurgists where would he be?”
As you can perhaps tell, Riesman writes in that still-slightly-baroque mode of the midcentury, full of dependent clauses and peppered with references to contemporary high culture. Riesman is luckily skilled at it, at least to my ear for the unspoken–but it’s easy for me to imagine the style turning off some readers (perhaps more at the time than now).
While much of what Riesman writes applies throughout American education, his attention is clearly fixed primarily on higher education, and to a lesser extent the high school. Little attention is paid to the younger grades–aside from a few asides as to the strangely secure and limiting position of the kindergarten teacher–which unfortunately forecloses on much attention to how the student comes to change through the system.
Spend an afternoon with Riesman’s keen eye for the sine qua non of the impositions on American education and the paths it tries taking forward. Then when I start lifting some of his turns of phrase, you’ll be in on the secret! (The closer the word to a blow. Dang.)