TWENTIETH-CENTURY EDUCATIONAL REFORM IN HAWAI'I History and Reflections

Ralph K. Stueber

Recently, Manfred Henningsen, professor and chairman of the political science department at the University of Hawai'i, wrote in Ka Lto o H11w11i'i, • the campus student newspaper:

Most newcomers to these islands have no idea how viciously and recklessly the colonial mind has hovered over Hawai'i. It penetrated all relationships and was perpetuated and reinforced by the churches, the schools, business, law, the military, the news media, literature and certainly the university,1

It was against the hegemony of the dominant white· Anglo Saxon• Protestant cultural code, a manifestation of this all-pervading colonial mind of which Henningsen writes, that the social and educational reformers of Hawai'i pit themselves- and in so doing also shape themselves.

*For translations of these and all other Hawaiian wordslplace names see Glossary at end of Journal.

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The intent of Henningsen's brief but penetrating essay was to provide the reader with a political scientist's contemporary understanding of how vestiges of the colonial mind continue to influence Island life and education. It is primarily the behavior of immigrant Asians of second generation and plantation backgrounds- many of whom have since risen to power and responsibility in Island affairs­which suggests that vestiges of the colonial mind continue to operate. These "victims of the colonial mind," according to Henningsen, retain the plantation syndrome through a mentality of local entrenchment- which is a kind of we/they struggle against the enemies of the past. "Preaching to local kids the virtues of localism does not liberate them from the colonial mind," says Henningsen," ... it creates in them the mentality of being afflicted by a fatal flaw .... "

In effect, those who struggled against the white caste became entrapped in the history of that struggle. Though many are now powerful and carry responsibilities of leadership, their infusion of localism into the history of that struggle often entraps the new generation in vestiges of the colonial mind as well.

Henningsen calls upon the University of Hawai'i faculty to critically evaluate programs and disciplines to find out whether and how much they have assisted the colonial mentality. Demagoguery and conspiracy "theories" shaped by this colonial past and its consequences continue to flow into the community and, unfortunately, perpetuate this we/they mentality.

By noting that the colonial mind continues to victimize, rather than having been laid to rest among other sorry relics of the past, Henningsen calls for a break with the past. We are advised" ... to consciously overcome the plantation syndrome ... to exorcise all its mental residues. We have to overcome, and be different from, our past." I share Henningsen's general appraisal of this aspect of Island history and the need to examine how historical interpretation influences contemporary Island life-especially schooling.

This essay suggests guides to the reexamination of educational history as a factor in reform, especially as they lead to further inquiry and are grounded in new conceptual

materials that may be shaped into new analytic and explanatory tools. This essay also suggests that ideas and practices once dominant in guiding historical study and interpretation and the use of that interpretation in educational policy development are open to challenge. I will be on the lookout for the colonial mind in action historically. and for vestiges that remain with us today.

It is my view that written history 1s part of the living present. a means of providing perspective on contemporary problems and issues. New conceptual standpoints open up new possibilities for historical understanding and interpretation. From such new conceptual standpoints history can be re­written. providing new historical perspectives on contemporary challenges and dilemmas.

Within the broad framework set by Henningsen, I have approached the history of 20th century educational reform in Hawai'i with two guiding questions in mind. First, how did the forces of industrialism and corporate development specifically, and Americanization generally, influence educational reform during the Islands' territorial period, 1900 through 19597 In this analysis I draw upon aspects of the American Progressive Education Movement as it influenced educational thought and practice in Hawai'i. It appears that many of the progressive reform values and analytic and explanatory concepts became generic to almost all educational thought and practice by the time the statehood era ,opened in 1959. Progressive and liberal historical interpretations shape much of the conceptual structure of contemporary Island educational practices and ongoing historical study. This essay suggests that conceptual restructuring and

historical reinterpretation are possible and potentially enriching of educational theory and practice.

Progressive thought, its analytic and explanatory concepts about educational and social reform, shaped the growth of the educational profession in Hawai'i. Analytic and explanatory concepts are used metaphorically and scientifically as devices for penetrating the unknown. Through its literature, members of the educational profession came to employ progressive concepts routinely- even to the point of reifying such devices by taking them as part of the educational reality itself rather than as useful analytic and explanatory human devices. The blend of concrete historical events and abstract analytic and explanatory material is what I believe constitutes written history; it is, of necessity, interpretive in nature.

The educational profession, guided by progressive thought, including an interpretation of the past, has had a growing influence upon the polity of education. The polity is the established mechanism for public debate and decisionmaking, and for effecting authority and power for implementing and overseeing educational policy. This growth in authority and power of the educational profession was rationalized by its leaders in large measure on the grounds that education under the profession's care was the key to the forward march of social progress. To the Islands' reformers the vehicles of social progress were economic expansion through industrialization and Americanization. In combination, they carried the diverse peoples of Hawai'i into American history, institutions, language and culture. Much of the viciousness and recklessness of the colonial mind at work was rationalized by the leaders through this constriction of social progress.

The forward march of social progress through more and better education was a theme used by reformers in the "bloodless revolution" against the white oligarchy that took place during the post-World War II period of Hawai'i. This theme shaped the linkage of schooling with the political and economic reform ferment of the 1950s and 1960s. This reformist surge called for the rapid and further development of a democratically active public-educated, organized and articulate, as shaped by a reformed public education. This democratically active public, through the avenue of the new SOth state government, would, by this theme, reconcile the conflicting interests of capital, labor and the general welfare, and in so doing bring about social progress in this reform process. Democratic reform was defined by reformers through reference to basic American social ideals of equality, freedom and justice, and through reference to the history of the despotism the reform effort was to bring to an end. Parasitic privileges, racism, the domination and exploitation of the powerless, and cultural arrogance and insensitivity, were despotic features of the white oligarchy's interlocked corporate dynasty which democratic reformers strove to eliminate.

In the main, educational reform focused the public's educational interest within the confines of formal schooling. To speak of education of youth through age eighteen was increasingly to speak of managed learning as guided by the professional bureaucracy of the state-wide single school district system. Reform values and analytic categories regarding teaching and learning, funding and management,

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evaluation and curriculum development, and the tracking of students were congealed by reform­minded professionals into new institutional form in the reform process.

Since the 1970s, Island leaders in government, industry and education have spoken more of stock-taking than of new reform initiatives. They initiated the process of sorting out the plus and minus elements of the early statehood and economic boom period for "progress" was seen by some critics as reducing the quality of Island life. Federal government initiatives for reform came to overshadow state initiatives as the federal educational bureaucracy grew and as federal leadership was expressed.

Shaped by findings from the analysis stemming from my first question, my second question reflects this mood of the 1970s: ls the educational reform legacy of the territorial and early statehood eras, as now essentially institutionalized in Hawai'i's public school system, an adequate basis upon which to build an understanding of contemporary educational politics and an adequate historical perspective from which to address the issues of educational need and direction as Hawai'i faces its educational future?

My preliminary findings are that the last decade provides material out of which to generate revised views about our Islands' educational heritage, views that challenge the policy of continuity with the reformist past. My findings suggest that: (1) continuity of the prevailing bureaucratic educational structure, (2) the existing educational polity, and (3) the meaning of education as essentially confined to schooling and as shaped by the particular social progress orientation of the contemporary corporate Island leadership all carry with them roots of crisis as well as roots of adaptations and correctives needed to cope with contemporary social and educational maladies and dysfunctions.

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Study shaped by my second question opened up matters both of substance and explanatory theory. Consequently, in this essay, I first present some written history, highly abbreviated and theoretically oriented, which I then couple with some major elements of contemporary Island educational politics and analytic and explanatory concepts for use in interpretation and further study.

Basic to this essay is the idea that an organized, democratically effective public is an educated-not simply a trained-public. This sets the essential mission of public education to be a civic mission. An effective public, by definition, is an inquiring public which operates through its agencies and officials of government, and in the interest of what I shall call community. Community has to do with shared-and the sharing of­symbols, traditions and aspirations, and with common or conjoint acts to preserve and create the public good. Citizen education has its roots in the schools but is not confined there. It is an enterprise of the entire populace done in the public interest.

I interpret 20th-century Island history as one in which social and educational reform policies and personalities both created and became products of corporate liberalism. I associate this ideology with the severe erosion of ethnic community and with the retarded development of community as an overall educational process for bringing forth that organized, articulate and effective public needed to create the social and natural conditions essential to the realization of the common goal. From my analysis there are impediments which, somewhat paradoxically, follow from a view of social progress and development built around technocratic corporate industrialism. My two guiding questions may now be tentatively answered as follows:

The rlutoric of social and educational reform has centered upon the creation of community in Hawai'i through creation of a modern, organized and democratically effective public. The content or re11/1ty of social and educational reform has centered increasingly upon defining and expanding the authority, privileges and power of a class of technologically and scientifically oriented corporate and bureaucratic economic, educational and political managers-some carrying the vestiges of the colonial mind. If so, we have a crisis of public leadership.

Today's dominant and modernizing Island ethos, including vestiges of the colonial mind, appears to be made up of two interlocked but definable mentalities: the first, the dominant one, inhabits an increasingly more technologically based and expert-managed hierarchical corporate structure, wedding thought and practice; the second draws from the first in defining both modernization or development and progress, and yet poses as a reforming and democratizing counter to the first, and is the weaker of the two. Reduced to its barest form, the Islands' contemporary ethos, or mind, may be seen as the lopsided duality or dialectic between the bureaucratic and corporate expert and the citizen. The corporate structure, built upon a narrow base, requires a stratified work force and so influences and shapes schooling accordingly. It is increasingly clear that the public is fractionated, insufficiently informed, alienated in some quarters and consequently apathetic. The educational polity is dominated by the professional bureaucrat and corporate expert. The corporate economy continues to utilize an occupational-ethnic linkage as a means of control. Employees, as citizens or labor union members, often feel trivialized in the face of a prefigured world in which their own concrete and daily experiences appear

to count for little, except in private life. Taking responsibility for the affirmation and renewal of the ongoing social life through citizenship presents dismal and crisis prospects to some observers. Such, I find, is the challenge of democratic reform today. As in tiny Athens, democracy in Hawai'i appears to be the practice of an established minority.

Greater emphasis is being given research by the College of Education of the University of Hawai'i. Through the recent establishment of doctoral studies in the College and through an Academic Development Plan calling for policy and community studies among other new initiatives, new lines of inquiry are both possible and expected from faculty and students alike. I presume that historical perspective has a place in educational policy and community studies. Skeletal studies like this invite both criticism of structure, and fleshing out.

The College is in transition from serving almost solely as a teacher preparation institution, and thereby a preoccupation with schooling, to an institution with a broader mission. In this regard the development of public educational leadership has never been more challenging. This transition requires knowledge about the place and meaning of education in the shaping of a human and humane community as an educated public in the surround of corporate organization and technical and development values historically rooted in Hawai'i in the process of industrialization and expansion of the colonial mind. This exploratory essay is directed toward that end and ideal.

Nineteenth-Century Background

In the broadest sense, schooling in Hawai'i-as a product of modern history-developed after the collapse of traditional Hawaiian culture in the early 19th century and was a part of

a dominating, westernizing, industrializing and modernizing cultural revolution. This early phase of modern educational development ran its course in the 19th century and comprises a tiny but significant part of the total impact of western and American imperialism in the Pacific. The annexation of Hawai'i by the United States in 1898 capped this phase of educational development.

A commission report immediately following annexation made clear to the American Congress that it was unnecessary to carry out any fundamental reform of Island educational practice. In that report are found the following conclusions and recommendations:

The present public school system of Hawai' i is very satisfactory and efficient. The conduct of the public schools and the tendency of the entire educational establishment of Hawai'i is in the highest degree advantageous to the United States. The laws of Hawai'I already provide that school attendance of all persons of school age shall be compulsory, and also that the English language shall be the universal language taught. The effect of these two enactments is the most beneficial and far­reaching in unifying the inhabitants which could be adopted. It operates to break up racial antagonism otherwise certain to increase and to unite in the schoolroom the children of the Anglo-Saxons, the Hawaiians, the Latins, and the Mongolians in the rivalry for obtaining an education. No system could be adopted which would tend to Americanize the people more thoroughly than this.2

In general attitude and value orientation, the commission report reads like many written by Americans in Hawai'i during the latter quarter of the century.

Essentially, such reports pictured Hawai'i as a frontier, or succession of frontiers, of American interests in trade, religious proselytizing, whaling, and in sugarcane growing, which was a form of military-like agriculture. It was around these drives and interests that Hawai'i's elite had built the economic, religious and education institutions now, in 1898, judged by the United States government ready to be taken into political union. If a frontier meant anything in the American mind it meant expansion.

On the frontier of knowledge there was some scant evidence that racial characteristics were being discounted by some scholars as the determiners of intellect and educability. In place of race, a minority of scholars In Hawai'i saw the formative influences of social. cultural, and educational environments as prime in their shaping influence on society, especially upon the young. This radical thought touched down briefly on school policymakers late in the century but did not surface again until the 1920s. The primitive adult, according to 19th-century anthropology, had a mind approximately that of the modern western child. This belief did not change until well into the 20th century, and, applied to Hawaiians by annexationists, rationalized their presumed protective custody.

This American frontier was more than a funnel for the opportune use of manpower from abroad and more than a safety valve for the pressures of stifled opportunities at home. "Go west, young man" had been an American symbol from the beginning. The frontier served, too, as a "gate of passage" through which one might escape the discomforts of self-reflection; it was a shield against conscience while actions could be legitimized. Early American Protestant missionaries knew there was "no God west of the Horn."

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Frontier imagery was essentially expansionistic where often the "solution" to social and moral problems lay in the creation of greater wealth and power.

The white man's cultural arrogance was all-pervading. In the wake of European and American commercial aggressiveness and demonstrations of nationalistic pride and rudeness came the "civilizing mission" in the form of churches, medicine and schooling. That mission, too, was permeated by the belief that western-style society, thought and culture was, somehow, superior to that of non-westerners. Usually for their own good, westerners believed, non-westerners in Hawai'i were expected to undergo cultural conversion-even if imposed under a mandate of God and nation. Some were eager and successful in doing so.

The conversion of Hawaiians to the Christian faith and their ready acquisition of literacy in their own language are part of a series of remarkable cultural transformations making up the Islands' cultural history. As the shadow of American influences lengthened and became larger and clearer by mid-19th century, Hawaiians followed their nli'i class into the future by progressively rejecting their own language as the medium of instruction. Thereafter, any variation from the elite's norm in thinking and speaking was viewed by the white, self-appointed elite as simply a poor facsimile of that of the haole.J The power of the haole elite was exercised and legitimized through reference to hnole social and cultural standards, not the standards of non­westerners. Any deviation from that standard could be and was readily used by the elite to "explain" Hawaiian and other ethnic groups' low standing in the economic and educational world. The "deviant" was expected to look to himself for the causes of his failure! Schools developed from this mind-set were

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judged by the commission cited above "in the highest degree advantageous to the United States." Here was the root of the later usage of the term "culturally disadvantaged" and the subtle inculcation of inferiority.

While modern education seeks a balance between (1) achievement that society expects from the products of its schools and (2) the adaptation of the system to the learning capabilities, interests and talents of students (and parents), in Hawai'i, both cultural arrogance and economic values biased the system in the direction of serving the goals of the white elite. Perhaps the American missionaries schooled the nli'i, in part, to its own interests initially, but, in any event, Hawaiians generally were looked upon and educated by the missionaries as a class apart from the white elite.

But the American tradition is a mixed one; in Hawai'i, another part of that tradition came to stand against the unbridled drive for profits, the excesses of the contract labor system, the excesses of government by special interest, and racism. The gentler side of the American heritage found its major outlet through education and other humanitarian efforts. Reformism in education drew heavily from the Enlightenment faith in rationality, rather than force, and the historic ideals of equality, justice and freedom. Class1st education and its expansion and reform during the 20th century evolved out of the conflicts, controversies, and contradictions of these two American traditions: cultural arrogance and economic gain, on the one hand; a struggle for community in the sense of citizenship, of brotherhood, equity and toleration, on the other.

First Years of Territorial Education

By the turn of the century, there was little trace left of a sensitivity to the cultural tragedy that had befallen the Hawaiians. Overall, it does not appear that the Chinese, Japanese,

Portuguese, Korean, Puerto Rican or even Filipino immigrants underwent the cultural pulverization suffered by the Hawaiians as a class . Neither did these immigrants suffer the consequent ambivalence-ridden cultural dependency as a class . "Mongolian" and "Latin" responses to American-style schooling, though varied, were drawn from a sense of ethnic strength and pride.

The advice of the Congressional commission of 1696 to Island educators was to not make any fundamental changes in the Islands' educational system. This advice was followed by educational policymakers during the first two decades of the century. This, in essential detail, was the picture: the local population remained essentially rural and the children of plantation workers and most Hawaiians attended "non­select"4 government schools to complete what today would be called elementary schooling. In Honolulu and in other smaller urban centers a wide variety of small private schools and parochial schools at the elementary level operated side by side with the government schools. These small private schools were "select" schools in the later usage of that term. With the exception of McKinley High School, all secondary education was under private auspices. The Kamehameha Schools were for select Hawaiian and part­Hawaiian youth. Mid-Pacific Institute catered to a heavily Oriental clientele, as did St. Andrew's Priory and 'lolani. St. Louis College was the capstone of Catholic education and, like the other private secondary schools, was a joint religious­educational effort. As it had been since its founding in 1641, Punahou remained "the key-stone in the arch" of white-Anglo Saxon-Protestant enterprise.

The expansionist sugar industry claimed its variety of progressive reformers who drew out their own image of the future from the

possibilities of industrial discipline, efficiency and management. Schooling "properly" considered was an acceptable and increasingly necessary adjunct to industrial growth. The "Americanizers," as a reform group, stressed standards of citizenship and morality, and "good" English, as well as industrial technique and economic productivity, and even saw democracy as a distant possibility. These reform orientations differed markedly on whether education itself could or should become a growth industry as other frontiers closed.

The Impact of the US Bureau Survey

With technological, commercial and urban growth, the value of secondary education for the emerging {but very small) multi­ethnic {but predominantly white) middle class became evident; yet, at the end of the second decade, only two to three percent of all high school-aged Island youth were enrolled in school.

The year 1920 was a turning point in the history of Island schooling and comparable to the beginning of American missionary work exactly a century earlier. They had come under independent, private and voluntary auspices. Now, a century later, it was a federal agency-the US Bureau of Education-that created a fundamental pivot in ZOth­century Island education with the publication of the Bureau's Survty of Education in Hawa1'i. Progressive educators on the US mainland had made Bureau Survtys a part of their school reform efforts. Through the instigation of the reform-minded College Club of Hawai' i, such a survey of Island schooling was authorized by territorial governor Pinkham. The major forces prompting reform were;

], The fear of the "Japanese Menace." This fear had been heightened as a consequence of World War I and strike action by workers on the plantations.

Children born on Hawai'i 's soil after annexation were US citizens by birth. This meant that in the future there would be a large bloc of ~Japanese'' voters. 2. There was an urgency to Americanize immigrant children and need of a rationale for giving first priority to government teaching jobs to those judged "American" in outlook, speech, manner and loyalty, and for barring from teaching in any school those who were not American citizens.

The US Bureau survey commissioners recommended that;

1. Island industrialists accommodate their sugar and pineapple operations to the use of lsland· born labor rather than depend upon the continued importation of "coolie" labor. 2. Free, public, universal and compulsory intermediate and secondary schooling be institutnl by the territorial government. J, The foreign language schools, essentially, Oriental. be brought under the direct control and supervision of the Department of Public Instruction. 4. The public schools be modified by the Department of Public Instruction, as secondary schooling is expanded, from essentially formal ;icademic institutions to institutions given to the socialization of the "whole child." S. That the public school system, as it is expanded at the secondary level, retain its earlier system of "select" schools segregated on the basis of spoken English. 6. That the Normal School be upgraded by the territory to a collegiate level institution.

It is clear from the report that the commissioners viewed schooling as the prrdominanl educating and socializing agency. Progressives viewed the school as the only educating and socializing agency. This assumption became the reality.

To accommodate to a domestic labor supply meant that Island industrialists, in time, would have to face a stabilized and organized labor force. Reformers argued that progress in that direction would cut the main root of the colonial-like economic system and allow for the development of a first-class American community. Linking this new concept of manpower with education, the Survty noted with hope:

When, in the islands, education shall have fully functioned in the lives of both those who serve by employing and directing others and those who serve through toiling with their hands, then all will be working as free men. Then ;ill will be doing that which they can do best, and doing best at tha t which they undert;ike. Then, too, there will disappear from the minds of the men of Hawai'i the thought that the great enterprises of the islands are dependent for success upon successive waves of cheap, ignorant, illiterate, alien laborers who stick at their jobs only through fear of want and through inability to do anything else. In short, when education shall have accomplished its true purpose there will be conferred upon man, whatever his occupation, an enlarged individuality, a wider range of thought and action, a higher and more permanent peace. And when this consumption shall have been ;ichieved no longer can the public schools of Hawai'i be justly charged with educating the young of the islands aw;iy from those occupations which require toil with the hands and making them relatively inefficient, "white-collared folk.''$

Free, compulsory and universal public secondary education was as emphatically defended by the Survey Commission as an Americanization instrument as it was a manpower training instrument. The expansion of secondary schooling would, it believed, give rise to that youth pt~r

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group so necessary and effective at prying youth of alien parentage away from the value orientation of their parents, and in learning Enlgish. By forming a common identity across ethnic lines schooling had the potential of shaping a domestic laboring class identity, at least to the point of recognizing how the plantation enterprise played off one immigrant ethnic group against another.

The foreign language schools, especially those of the Japanese.were viewed by Island Americanizers as direct and deliberate anti­Americanization institutes. The industrial leaders earlier saw little harm to their own designs coming from these schools, but the Americanizers saw the young Orientals' deviation from American norms as a product of these schools. As a base for consolidating the Japanese community in its struggle for economic and social gains, these schools became the focal point of intense conflict between the white elite and the Japanese. Ethnic communal life was viewed by reformers as reactionary and, thus, a barrier to progressive development and modernization. A public life is more broadly perceived than an ethnic life but need the former be at the expense of the latter? Americanizers cast the question in zero-sum terms; to advance the public life required the elimination of ethnic life and loyalties. Apparently two repertoires of behavior were considered by reformers to be impossible or undesirable. Americanizers expected ethnic traditions to yield to the forces of modernization.

In re-orienting the government schools to become agencies of socialization, American morality and industrial skills and techniques became curricular content alongside the academic responsibility for intellectual development. In the main, public secondary education was to leave the province of college

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preparation to the private secondary schools. This required no re­orientation in private school education.

If the government's role in schooling was to be expanded as recommended by the survey commissioners, the support of taxpayers would have to be won by reformers. The small but growing Honolulu-based middle class supported private schools through tuition payments. The English Standard schools attracted this important new class into support of public education by insuring that the language and school progress of its children would be safeguarded through segregation.

The white elite had a long­standing practice of educating its own children free from direct contact with lower-class immigrant and Hawaiian children; in large measure because the elite never subscribed to the democratic tenet that leadership is derived from the consent of the led. The English Standard schools, although select public schools, were not considered a threat by the elite to its own standing. The advocacy of "high standards," as advanced by the supporters of segregation, served to mask the haolt motive for stratifying public sector schooling, maintaining the attitude of cultural and linguistic domination over the large immigrant class. The Japanese press debated whether or not the Standard schools constituted such a means to domination as part of the overall haolt domination and self-appointed right to rule.

At the time of the US Bureau of Education Sunity, the greater proportion of the teachers for the government schools and many of the private elementary schools were trained at the Territorial Normal School. Island girls, predominantly non-haolt, upon completion of elementary schooling went directly to the Normal School-rather than continuing through high school. There they spent two to four years in training before being certified as elementary school teachers.

The impact of the Sunity quickened the process of converting teacher preparation from a pre-collegiate to a collegiate program by supporting the idea of combining the Normal School with the College of Hawai'i to form the University of Hawai'i. The long­range effects of this conversion were not only to supply the elementary schools with more broadly prepared teachers but to change the control over teacher preparation. This new arrangement opened the door to professionally minded, English speaking, and aspiring-to-the-middle class Islanders. From this point forward the academic demands of the University meant that the prospective teacher had to have the financial and intellectual resources to complete high school and two to four years of collegiate work. By the mid-1930s a five-year collegiate program had been instituted in Teachers College-which replaced the Normal School. Capitalizing upon the impulse to professionalize, the low market demand for teachers, and the limited avenues to white-collar status, teaching became a vocation guided by an element of reformist zeal, middle-class desires, and emergent professional standards.

Mass secondary education became a reality in Hawai'i by the end of the 1930s. The form it had taken was an accommodation to industrial and Americanization interests and a highly stratified social structure. Machines gradually replaced much of the hand work on the plantations, slowing the flow of Filipinos into the remai11,ing unskilled jobs vacated by Orientals. Grudgingly, Hawai'i's industrialists accustomed themselves to a domestic labor force and to the costs of mass education-but with important conditions attached.

Vocational and manual training programs became central features of the reformed curriculum. School leaders cooperated in making schools "efficient and business-like.'' This · meant that curricular tracking and vocational counseling directed

youngsters toward "practical" and "realistic" life pursuits. The industrial community directed a steady stream of propaganda against what it called "genteel culture" and the over-emphasis on academics and white-collar learning. A special target was the pedagogical theorists who did not understand or appreciate the hard realities of the industrial world. The spendable wealth of the planter aristocracy was 25·fold greater than that of the average laborer-such was the nature of the "hard realities."

The groundwork was thus laid for mass schooling to serve in major part, as an agency for industrial recruitment, selection and certification. In effect, the government schools processed and graded talents and skills for vocational slots in the stratified society. At the eve of World War II, mass schooling had become the government's central agency for controlling the flow and range of aspiration of the youth of Hawai'i. lndustrially·oriented reformers had created a system of upward mobility, thus relieving lower-class discontent without disturbing the stratified social order.

The Hawaiians became passive spectators to the affairs between the haolt and the Oriental. Shoved one way by the haolt in his course toward securing and maintaining domination over the Islands by keeping the Japanese in their place, and shoved another way by the immigrants in their attempt to do more with their lives than possible under plantation conditions, the Hawaiians disconnected past and present and looked for solace in a lost past!

There appears to be a reversal of the priorities-economic and then civic-by which the haolt controlled 20th century mass education in Hawai' i when contrasted with the

development of mainland American education. On the mainland, the civic priority stood above the economic as a means of insuring the values of the Revolution and of democracy, however restricted its coverage. Then later, economic needs became primary, followed by the Progressive Era in education when democratic and industrial priorities clashed, resulting in the transformation of the school system to include the comprehensive high school. In Hawai'i the agents of economic and industrial priorities overshadowed the agents of civic and democratic priorities simply because the dominant economic institutions maintained their hegemony. Both government and schools were dominated by these economic institutions.

In his book, Hawai'i Pono, author Lawrence Fuchs attributed the development of a democratic spirit or aspiration in the young to the schools, primarily the public schools and especially McKinley High School. These schools of the 1920s and 1930s in due time, according to Fuchs, played a key part in the creation of social policies designed to soften the class lines and class antagonisms, to temper racial mistrust and bridge the confining ethnic outlooks so prevalent in pre­war Hawai' i. Fuchs found the schools to be seed-beds of democracy, especially when guided by progressive educators. The notion that schools could build a new social order was, and remains, a popular one in progressive and liberal circles.

The Educational Aftermath of World War II

World War II brought with it the immediate imposition of martial law. Together, the war and martial law had a staggering impact on the local populace. The "melting pot" image was revealed to be a military/ industrial image as war forged citizenship with the intensity of the battlefield. The crisis of war brought into the open the despotism that the

elite had exercised over the immigrant population for decades. Now the elite turned its despotism to the purpose of war. This despotism was particularly felt by those of Japanese ancestry-born and educated as Americans. For three long years martial law mocked the belief that public education had successfully assimilated the peoples of Hawai'i and created, in these Islands, American democratic, social, political and cultural patterns. Suspects returned home from war as heros. A kind of final vindication came in 1946 when the Supreme Court ruled that martial law, as imposed by the industrial leaders of Hawai'i, in conjunction with the military, was a clear violation of the United States Constitution.

Long-term grievances on the part of the predominantly working class people of Hawai'i were crystallized by the war years. These grieval)ces, skillfully utilized by such leaders as Jack Hall in labor organization and John Burns in politics, served to unionize and politicize the labor force and citizenry·at·large. These union/political reform efforts were multiracial in nature-heavily seasoned by egalitarian and humanitarian values. A social revolution was set in motion by these leaders out of which emerged the highly centralized, urbanized, industrial/governmental/educational corporate complex Hawai'i is today.

Egalitarian and humanitarian values, propelled by memories of indignities and exclusion, moved policymakers for education to a heightened belief that the "New HawaiT' sought the maximization of tvtry individual's potential and the maximization of social mobility. Education, as the liberator of people's minds, and economic mobility, as a requirement of the modern industrial state, became hallmarks of the new ideology: a meritocratic ideal, in which the "best" and the "most intelligent"-without distinctions

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made for race, sex, creed and social class-would rise to the responsibilities and demands of leadership in social. economic and political spheres. A new and dynamic ability hierarchy, by this ideal. replaced the old, pre-war, near­absolute social and racial hierarchical order. Education became the key component in this heady ideal-a means to a new society to be constructed out of a liberation of human intelligence. Schooling, reformers believed, was government's most important function and support increased markedly.

The war leaders quickly shut down the foreign language schools and their properties were confiscated and contributed to the war effort; many of the educators in the Japanese language schools were rounded up by the military government and sent to concentration camps on the mainland. Postwar efforts to regain the prewar momentum of this class of schools failed mainly because Orientals themselves were either opposed to, or disinterested in, their continued existence. As a group, second-generation Orientals no longer saw the need for the cultural bridging function these schools had performed earlier. Assimilation into mainstream American values and behavior was the order of the day; any evidence of "oriental exclusiveness" was to be avoided. Those of Japanese ancestry, especially, could ill-afford steps that might be considered evidence by others that assimilation was being resisted. A new social unity was in the making, set to new authority, politics and power.

More non-Caucasians than Caucasians enrolled in the English Standard schools during and immediately after the war. The system's initial reason for being now stood as a reminder of prewar favoritism and elitism. Through the strategy of disallowing first-graders to enter the system after 1948 while allowing those children already m

12

the system to continue a so-called standard education through graduation, the system was quietly phased out while preventing a mass defection to the private schools. The accompaniment to this strategy was the premise that all public schools would, at the same time, "be brought up to American standard" in manner of speech and in manner of academic performance. How educators were to achieve this likeness was as much a matter of faith as of concrete proposals.

The legislature, through its fiscal power, took the initiative for educational policy development by placing the board of education in a subordinate role as the move for more popular government surged forward. New programs and greatly increased support of public schools were accompanied by much rhetoric and considerable substance m academic achievement and comprehensiveness of school experiences. Stimulated by the Cold War and the zeal to overcome the existing social and economic inequities through education, the schools became a panacea. An individual who did not achieve success had only himself to blame since the opportunities were now available; such was the nature of the belief subtly nurtured by the elite, industrial. political and educational managers. Americans have since come to challenge the power of this belief.

There was another side of the postwar reform movement and that was meeting the real and great demand on the University of Hawai'i, in conjunction with the professional community, the government and private corporations, for highly trained personnel. Here is where the finer points in the argument over the nature of democracy and/or meritocracy lay. Egalitarianism and humanitarianism, when coupled with a drive for academic excellence and

social mobility, left many questions unanswered. Economic growth postponed the tensions between provisions on the part of the government for an "equal" education, especially between the historically privileged private sector and the public sector, and provisions for the "best" education. In many respects, social stratification and exclusiveness in the New Hawai'i became every bit as evident as was the case in prewar days-but the basis of stratification and exclusiveness was different and education much more emphatically was believed by the new leadership in Hawai' i to be the stratifier. Career lines multiplied; multinational corporate opportunities became abundant by earlier standards; knowledge in the service of new corporate and professional developments commanded a good price for the holder. The civic mission of the school got lost in the shuffle!

New avenues to success and a larger piece of the growing economic pie placed teaching as a career option in a lesser light than it had been in prewar days. The economic and social constrictions of prewar days made the avenue to teaching a highly selective and highly preferred one to follow. It was not until the mid-1960s that teacher education was reorganized and expanded as a result of pressure from the Legislature and guidance of the University administration. This was done in order to better prepare the beginning teacher for the new demands the Democractic party leadership placed upon the schools. The rush to college, the ladder to social and economic success, was, perhaps, the major new influence on the public schools. Time was when the marketplace afforded the means for sorting out successes, failures, and grades in between. Education came to replace the marketplace in that respect, but once entered, the marketplace was still the ultimate judge.

The prestige private schools became almost exclusively col\ege­preparatory institutions as the postwar social transformation took place. Preparing young people to go to college and to meet the academic test once admitted is, perhaps, an expression of educational philosophy. But what it expresses is that the purposes and goals of education and the institutional structure of schools are essentially matters to be settled by policymakers in higher education. The University of Hawai' i, in time, expanded and made it possible­academically and financially-for virtually anyone to go to college. It is now increasingly the college-level educator who must deal with questions about social structure and education. By their selection of colleges and universities, graduates of the prestige private schools, especially, made clear the struggle the University of Hawai' i would have to make to become first class.

Most of the teachers and administrators in the Islands' schools are products of the postwar college boom. Only those over fifty years of age would have attended elementary and high school before World War II. Those forty or under are products of postwar schooling caught up, as it was, in reform. It is not surprising that those born in Hawai'i and who have succeeded in the new society generally praise the system that allowed them to succeed and defend the meritocratic ideal of which they offer themselves as evidence. But schooling since the mid-1960s has increasingly come under attack. What David Tyack says of American schools, in general. also applies to Hawai'i:

If earlier reforms are today the subjed of attack, it is in part because substantial segments of the society no longer believe in centralism as an effective response to human need, no longer trust in professionalism,

no longer accept the inevitability or justice of the distribution of power and wealth along existing class and racial lines, and no longer think that technological change implies progress.•

The postwar reform zeal appears to have run its course. Whether or not Hawai' i has ever been without a two-class educational system is debatable but the nature of that argument now rests with policymakers for higher education much more so than had been the case in prewar Hawai' i. In some respects, education has become a state within a state.

Government support for schooling appears to have been proportional to the State's interest in this increasingly specialized and differentiated youth socialization function. The test of public confidence and accountability lay ahead.

Reflections on Some Elements of Contemporary Educational Politics

Education, these days, is not the subject for those who require quiet and dignified expressions of agreement and harmony. Compared to today's adversarial and litigious educational climate, the Hawaiian Kingdom's Common School Era of the latter half of the 19th century seems to the nostalgic a great achievement of popular consensus. Against today's educational uncertainties the Progressive Era appears to have the ingredients now worth celebrating. McKinley High School remains a power symbol to Islanders-a fact attested to by the frequency of political rallies held on the grounds. Today's educational climate does not warrant the public's confidence that popular consensus and the removal of the roadblocks to educational improvement through a nPw professional/political coalition are just around the corner. We find little consensus in our time to match the consensus Protestant Republicanism once wove around the 19th-century common school or the

consensus industrial progressives once wove around the extension of secondary education.

The liberalism which evolved through challenging the white elite caste and its Social Darwinist ideology and which guided reform leaders through the thicket of educational. social and cultural issues of the 1950s and 1960s, appears to have lost its intellectual power, its moral stamina, and, according to many critics, its legitimacy to lead. One outspoken critic noted that many former reform leaders now in high places had chosen the course of self interest and had gotten fat financially-and between the ears­leaving a too-trusting public in doubt about surmounting today's problems.

The pu~lic's recourse to the extensive re-privitization of schooling is a real possibility as a vision of school in the future drawn from the happier vision of the past has come to lack public credibility. Contemporary educational politics appears to place little reliance upon the inertia of the past to carry us ahead and this political process is opening new possibilities for the future by generating new perspectives on the past.

From the standpoint of Hawai' i's 20th-century progressive/liberal educational and social reformist history there is no more urgent question facing Island educational policymakers than one raised by Lawrence Fuchs. Having chronicled, in 1961, the struggle for human dignity, social equality and political democracy and, in a minor way, equality of educational opportunity as a major corollary, Fuchs asked a decade later:

What can be done lo prevent Hawai'i from developing a two· class education system again in which the well-to-do people who mainly come from Haole and Oriental backgrounds send their children to private schools or to schools in the public school system which are favored, and in

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which poor people in the Islands, mainly Hawaiians, Samoan•, Portuguese and poorer Haoles who are in a small minority and the poorer Orientals who are also in a small minority. send their kids to neglected public schools- schools which are simply not getting leadership and inspiration and drive and competence because the well- to­do constituents are not investing energy and supporting them better.'

Liberal reformers won their major battles with the white-Anglo Saxon· Protestant oligarchy and came to provide a leadership alternative to that shaped by an ideology of racial superiority, ethnocentrism and social caste. Through control of the economy, essentially, the oligarchy kept itself in power and bathed in prestige through an establishment consisting of a network of families, friends, private schools, prestigious mainland college and university connections, exclusive athletic and social clubs, segregated neighborhoods, high-status churches and the Republican Party. Here for all to see was evidence of the importance and effectiveness of a community supporting power of action in the wider society. The immigrants, most of them poor, built their own communities but had neither resources nor organization with which to challenge the powerful h11olt network. Consequently, Island life was caste-divided between the patrician Protestant/Republican rich and the rest before post-World War II reform. Believing that education had done much to prepare the climate and leadership for reform, little wonder Fuchs worried about the apparent or real failure of education to maintain the liberating functions among the poor and powerless. Could it be that his faith in the power of schooling is misplaced.

Until after World War II, progressives had effected only indirtcl reform through their successes in

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establishing mass public secondary schooling and in leading the emerging middle class into public sector education, though segregated. Dimt reform of the economic and political base of the leadership followed in action what education had achieved in theory.

The progressive and liberal successes, however, have not led to quiet and dignified expressions of educational agreement issued by this new leadership class once they had subdued the evils of the white oligarchy. Instead, the retelling of the story of these evils and their conquest by the reformers has come to be rather standard and inconsequential rhetoric when held against present realities. Worse yet, many victims of the oligarchy­having risen to power- have not liberated themselves from the past and use this rhetoric in victimizing the new generation of "locals."

Over the last decade or so, the television medium and the press, local and national, have bombarded us with facts and events suggesting as truth that our prized and now amply supported public school system is in a state of decline, or near total disarray. Witness: the debasement of the curriculum and especially of the once-prized high school diploma; the shallowness of intellectual and moral rigor and standards (curriculum tracking which often followed racial or ethnic lines, and the confusion that acting legally was necessarily to act intelligently or civilly); widespread administrative self-serving careerism and teacher incompetence or burn-out; shocking level of student crime, vandalism and drug abuse, not to mention teenage pregnancies and venereal diseases; the breakdown of and disrespect for legitimate authority; and, alternately, complacency or arrogance on the part of central office educational bureaucrats. Increasingly coupled

with such reports were findings of real and impending taxpayers' revolt and of sweeping and severe measures of "accountability." Has our unique state system let us down7

In the face of such a bombardment, it is little wonder that the past often became a romantic idyll, a time and place where once educational order and harmony existed, inside and around the school. Did not the progressive educational trust once earn the public's confidence by demonstrating that through professionalism and scientifically and psychologically based management, education could be kept safely above politics? Was not teaching, once a highly prized and respected lifework, sought for by the brightest and ablest of Hawai'i7

In what strange way did such a fine legacy usher in a highly politicized educational climate to include: teacher unionization and the nation's first statewide teacher strike; a strong surge of ethnic educational politics rising out of the alleged melting pot; and the politics of open access through court order and single issue reforms for women, the handicapped, the homosexual, and others previously discriminated against or excluded from their fair share of educational resources and influence in the body politic? One gets the impression that being "above politics" must have meant "outside the public eye," or that the public eye had not been very discerning. Schools have come to have publics rather than a public. To ha\7e a public requires a respected leadership and a vision of community drawn from that public's critical appraisal of its traditions and social, political and ethical aspirations for the future. The education of a public now competes with the education of competing publics. Wherein lies the general welfare and the common good? The current polity for public education cast in these conflicting terms is simply inadequate.

The fact, ot course, is that public education in a democracy is a form of politics; if not, it has little regard for the political issues and values of a democracy. What is unusual is today's ready acknowledgement of the political nature of education and the intensity of the political struggle over the allocation of resources and values. The stresses and strains upon the existing polity of education exceed the educational polity's ability to cope, diffused and undisciplined as the existing polity is. Many progressives, like many of today's bureaucrats, rose "above politics" as a means of rising above the public's regard- however articulate or inarticulate, organized or unorganized that public may have been. The consensus and victory days for the education establishment are, at least for now, over; but, according to American educational historians Tyack and Hansot, there is virtue in what has recently come about:

Some people think that the eruption of conflict ... has produced a net loss in public education. We do not believe this is the case. Protest movements have illuminated and partly remedied injustices. If our generation has to face the consequences of many generations of racism and sexism, that is not the fault of those protesters who brought the debt to attention. If teachers had to organize and become militant to gain decent salaries and some balance of power within school bureaucracies, the prize was worth the struggle. If school officials were often blind, to the constitutional rights of students, and legislatures deaf to the appeals to equalize school finance, recourse to the courts was justified. In a healthy democracy, values and interests are always in tension; no public institution, least of all common schools, can really be above politics.•

In the main, media and press exposure of educational issues and areas of mindlessness, plus the open engagement in educational politics, provides a necessary and valuable start in educational citizenship; one certainly more lively and real than that found in too many classrooms. Perhaps our common faith in the venerable institution of the school, the institution some historians have referred to as America's near equivalent of an established church, has to be shaken periodically. Schooling continues to be an important means of maintaining an identity with our Island society and a belief in some primary values. If we as people are to find community through commitment to this secular religion, the means by which to provide the new generation with self reliance and the capacity with which to shape their own individual and collective futures, it is well to re· examine the task of the school during these times of uncertainty.

According to renowned historian Henry Steele Commager, American schools have been required by society to do an impossible task, i.e., to prepare their charges:

to face squarely and courageously every social issue; to come to grips with life in all its stark realities; to establish an organic relationship with the community; to develop a realistic and comprehensive theory of welfare; and to fashion a compelling and challenging vision of human destiny.'

Commager concludes that our children are society's victims to the extent that we focus on this task almost solely in schooling. Such disproportionate allocation of responsibilities to the schools, Commager argues, removes other major agencies and agents of society from their proportionate responsibility; therein lies the evil and victimization. If we in Hawai'i have puffed up the schools and their agents with responsibilities of such great magnitude, it is fortunate that Commager reminds us of our

nation's long and deep regard for the Athenian ideal of Paidtia: It being the major purpose of society, not just schools, to educate and train the young in all areas-intellectual, moral. and physical. It is to misplace this historic ideal and social perspective, and thus to misplace our regard for our youth, to place education so singularly in a differentiated institution the specific function of which appears to be the managed instruction necessary to the uncritical reproduction of the social order and power structure.

From a perspective somewhat at odds with Commager's, our contemporary educational politics, its stresses and strains, are part of the great and recent success our Island society has had in providing open access to public schools and the University system. This perspective indicates that public schools have, overall, operated from a fundamenjal belief in the principle of equal moral worth. While always an uphill struggle, recent immigrant youth are not denied access and informed treatment. Our minorities, having no other means than the public schools, have not failed to take advantage of school opportunities when given informed treatment. Women and girls have shed the mantle of domesticity and strongly influenced educational direction and access. The handicapped and those in need of special education have now far better educational opportunities than formerly. However, rather than serve as cause for a common celebration these real and solid achievements as of now also appear to contribute to a sense of social unease; as if educational success may not, after all, make much difference in the world at large. Where lies the source of this unease and alienation? Perhaps there are attitudinal factors related to middle class exclusiveness and anxiety that contribute to this feeling of unease in the face of such solid achievements.

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The American middle class had anxiety aplenty when poor immigrant whites were herded into the 19th-century common schools through compulsory attendance laws. In Hawai'i, middle-class whites never attended public schools in common with other ethnic groups until a third of the way into the 20th­century, and then only through the provision of the segregated English Standard schools or in segregated classes in "non-standard" elementary schools. Middle-class anxiety was at the base of the segregated school system, but that middle class, too, could best understand some aspects of needed Island educational reform and they often proved well-informed leaders; though their commitment, generally, was to public education, their class anxiety and attitudes of exclusiveness was equally strong. The white oligarchy caste model offered precious little attraction.

More recently, middle-class anxiety arose when elementary schools took on the less-competitive and individualistic character of the progressive classroom. This child­centered classroom climate raised fears that future high school academics for their children would be adversely affected by this "permissive" elementary school climate. The assurance of accessibility to high schools as schools essentially for middle class, or middle-class conscious students, reduced middle-class anxiety over progressivism in the elementary schools of prewar Hawai'i. However, with the tide of youth that swelled the high schools without class distinctions during the recent postwar period that anxiety reappeared; middle-class flight to the suburbs reflected educational exclusiveness. Accessibility to postsecondary schooling lessened some of the anxiety generated by the movement into the high school of a new clientele as well as the movement of some child-centered

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aspects of educational theory into the high school. As the level of departure from school into the world was first raised from elementary to secondary, and then secondary to postsecondary, an uneasy accommodation by the competitive and career-oriented middle-class youth and parents to student­centered education was possible. Private prestige schools, of course, provided a recourse for those whose interest in the welfare of their own child's future exceeded their commitment to the ideal purpose of public education; the creation of a democratic public through critically reappraising its unifying traditions and aspirations while accommodating individual preferences and need.

Today the equalization of access to postsecondary education creates anxiety over both potential competition and the level of academic standards as work toward the bachelor's degree increasingly becomes the stepping stone into the graduate school and then, finally, out into a secure career future. Perhaps it is the role of the middle class to be anxious, not only for itself but for all others as well. The erosion of a sense of community may be contributory to middle-class anxiety. The middle class, especially, holds the view that competition and enlightened self-interest are what count. Lower and upper classes seem less afflicted. We need to look more deeply into our modernist mentality, especially with regard to self-interest and the role of community in the public interest.

We are emerging from a dtvtlopmtnl era when most social theorists believed that a straight line was the shortest distance between two points in intellectual and moral matters as in mathematical and engineering matters. We can now look back upon a plethora of social engineering activity involving schooling as the presumed mediating and meliorating agency to a host of social. political, and economic dilemmas. New political and professional leadership

again cast the school in the role of indirect reformer of circumstances emanating from more powerful and consequential institutions. A portion of this social engineering belief reflected a linear view of the school's role in social change and development not unlike the model of social change through commercial and industrial development. The schools increasingly came to have a one-to-one relationship to the economy and the national marketplace in this vision. Awareness of the use by educational planners of the industrial technological metaphor as guide to language and action in our schools, as laid out in the Progressive Era, helps us better understand the kind of job-slot curricular conglomerate one finds in today's secondary schools and community colleges. This metaphor has also helped produce a linear interpretation of educational history in which progress in industrial technological terms was invariably linked to progress in educational terms. There has been a strong tinge of technological determinism at work in this social vision, past and future. The human dimension of the control over one's own circumstances often gets lost in the maze of abstractions: needs assessments, design criteria, planning activity, task objectives and strategy goals.

Simply put, this linear view of history and progressive era social development and change has an educational core in which schooling or managed education can be a straight line to climbing the ladder of succes$ through a career in the ever more hierarchically structured and technologically based corporate and market economy. Guiding and motivating the schooling process in this view are a variety of managers drawing heavily upon technological values and thought and the

inducement of increasingly disproportionate educational resources allocated to the succeeding student on the basis of deserving intelligence and prior achievement. In this view, education can-and does easily-become a commodity or utility assembled through increments of performances and competencies acquired in the schooling process.

"Back-to-basics" is a current educational fundamentalist movement designed to produce both accountability to the public and to pare down the obligations of the schools to their publics. But the purpose of education, the role of the teacher, and society's challenges go hand in hand, and the work of the school cannot be readily and simplistically reduced to a list of so­called basics to be drilled mechanically and cunningly into the heads and minds of children. Accountability mostly follows from the bureaucratic mind. Related to the back-to-basics movement is competency-based education, which also reflects the stubborn fact that schools are ultimately assessed in direct reference to the needs of our major political and economic institutions. The task of developing critical intelligence and the command of cultural resources for human enrichment is corrupted when schooling becomes merely a training adjunct to these dominant institutions and the social views and values of their leaders, however highly sophisticated and specialized the stages of competency development. Both the back-to-basics and competency-based educittional movements reveal an ideology employed by educators for making schooling a straight line to the reproduction of the existing social arrangements or the training site of a prefigured future, the product of educational researchers and planners. What if the reproduction of existing social arrangements is not predominate in competencies sought?

The reform tradition falters when society expects schools to become the surrogate conscience of society while all around there is the too usual corruption of the political processes, the selling of dangerous and even toxic goods, the continued exploitation of the poor and powerless, the evasion of taxes, the wasting of nonrenewable material resources with little care for the yet unborn, the blatant denial of the legal and constitutional rights of minorities and the brandishing of missiles as the path to a lawful world. These matters of conscience are the challenge not only of schools but of society as a whole.

The intellectual and moral fissures and fractures of our bureaucratic and corporate society impact upon our schools. Educators should know that a society as uprooted, divided, disillusioned, and confused as social commentators claim ours to be cannot expect to find unity either within or through the efforts of the schools. Educators, one would hope, could contribute in helping our society critically assess its traditions, set its aspirations and clarify its course and could help convert that assessment into the restoration of the public's confidence in itself. The odds are g reat against this happening without an aroused public and responsible leadership.

The economy of Hawai' i continues to have a narrow base, a characteristic extending back at least a century. The Islands' political and corporate elite, now heavily Asian in makeup, has become increasingly involved with or tied to the tourist industry, which now stands well above military expenditures and sugar and pineapple in economic importance. Because of the high level of overseas investment in tourist developments the Islands' elite is essentially subordinate to the controlling power of these overseas investments.

Dependent upon this narrowly based and externally directed economy, the people of Hawai'i are, at the same time, confronted with an

extremely high cost of living, the necessity of an extensive welfare system for humane and social order purposes, a housing crisis, high rates of taxation, petty graft and corruption, an unsettling crime rate, and a declining nlohn spirit!

These economic and social realities, along with the following indicators of the social dynamics of Hawai'i, together constitute social revolutionary proportions: We have witnessed a massive demographic shift from rural to urban to suburban, and from Asia, the Pacific and the mainland to Hawai' i. We have felt the increased tempo of urban life and with it stress and fear of violence, impersonality as well as new freedom. We have felt the transformation of family and communal life and we speculate with misgiving about the consequences of this transformation upon youth~ socialization and development. We have experienced participation in civil rights and liberation movements and we have become marginally acquainted with the new knowledge industries. Beneath it all we have felt the impact of mass television. Recognizing these political, economic, and social conditions, let us step back and take another tack.

In 1961, John Gardner's book, &ulltnu: Can Wt Bt Equal and &<tlltnl Too?, became required reading in graduate programs of professional education. Essentially, Gardner reasserted American traditional belief that equality was the major value of the great American majority whereas freedom was the major value of the aspiring or established leadership elite. The principle of equality of educational opportunity has become the major educational doctrine now attempting to join or accommodate to these two contrasting and competing values and social classes. Island education reflects this dialectic of "equal" and "best" for they are competing metaphors each with their own history.

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It is the central tenet of American liberal leadership that social direction and reform comes, essentially, from above. President Franklin Roosevelt put it succinctly when he said, "Reform if you will preserve," and what he, of course, preserved was the liberal American dream through strong governmental reforms. This tradition of reform from above is to be open to the best talent and leadership from below. Thus far, this leadership tradition has been an effective counter to revolutionary change and direction from below. In Hawai'i, the white caste barred the rise of non-white talent to top leadership, but that could not last once the forces of reform achieved economic and political power.

Schooling has come to be seen by the socially mobile as the intermediary state and stepping­stone to the American dream of someday enjoying the privileges, status and the opportunities and responsibilities of leadership. To become part of the establishment is to become part of the leadership and status elite. Ideally, the major function of an upper class is that of creating and perpetuating a set of standards carrying authority and toward which the rest of the society aspires. Civility and the life of the mind have been the major ingredients in this ideal. E. Digby Baltzell notes that 11

• • • when so many talented Americans are absorbed in success-striving and status seeking, the institutionalization of a minority community which relieves distinguished men and their families from further status is more important than ever-but only when its membership requirements are based on talent and moral distinction rather than ethnic or racial ancestry."10 Current educational politics yields little public debate on this matter of leadership and education.

Equality of educational opportunity in Hawai'i must be afforded by our society to all to prevent the

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esta~lishment from again becoming a caste system. If the leadership class increasingly stems from the development of talent, moral distinction and leadership drawn from private and dt facto segregated suburban public schools, then the American dream becomes reserved for the children of privileged families; the remainder of public schools will increasingly take on the character and warning signs which Lawrence Fuchs has called to our attention. Is it likely that the best of our cultural heritages and the expression of our highest ethical. social. and political aspirations as a people can be expressed by a leadership drawn primarily from only select public and from private school origins? According to some social theorists of American leadership, such class-segregated selection process would progressively turn the meaning of American equality toward socialism and the meaning of freedom in the direction of authoritarianism. These, of course, are basic fears of liberalism. Liberalism is the ambivalence between revolution and conservatism, between liberation and property.

Island society has made a beginning in the matter of developing a new leadership establishment in place of the old, white oligarchy. The quality of public education and public discourse must be improved if this new establishment is to be less dominating and despotic than was the former one.

Our social commitment to the principle or doctrine of equality of opportunity has the corollary: equality of educational opportunity. As an organizing principle for distribution of educational resources, this principle places the burden of proof of "intelligence" upon the student to provide the warrant for a

prolonged distribution of educational resources in his direction . Those of apparently greater intellectual power are readily encouraged to take advantage of extended and ultimately unequally distributed educational resources. Having merited extended educational opportunities presumably leads. then, to meriting some extended proportion of the social goods and status in our achievement and career-oriented society. At bottom we realize that both equality of opportunity and equality of educational opportunity mean being given an equal chance to compete in order to establish inequality. Though our concept of social justice centers very much on the principle of equality of opportunity, the struggle for inequality of reward often produces damaging stress and anxiety to both "sucesses" and "failures" in the schools. This zero­sum approach to education betrays or confuses the distinction between the qualities necessary to a truly liberating education and a comprehensive economy geared only to the dollar.

The older "educational trust" that once rather smugly reformed education through expert "scientific" management of the curricular and testing routes toward equality of opportunity and the American dream has come upon less harmonious days than it formerly enjoyed. There has been too much institutional bias, sexism and classlsm in this channeling of youth to allow for any notable public confidence in the exercise of these channeling procedures today.

Because controversy and conAict are newsworthy, they often result in a situation in which it is impossible to distinguish sophisticated manipulators of fear and anxiety from controversial figures whose statements are made and actions are taken without recourse to conspiracy fears and demagoguery. The manipulator can expect news coverage. If legitimate authority is weak and extensive social and

economic power falls in line behind the manipulators of fear and hatred, we are in danger of returning to a caste and authoritarian model of leadership, however benevolently that leadership might exercise power. The burden of public education in shaping leadership has never been greater; at the same time legitimate authority at all levels of our society appears to be undergoing erosion as private careers and gain in the status race appears to characterize many in power more so than public regard and the duties and responsibilities of the public trust.

How then do we take up anew the question of education and the public trust in the elCpectation of achieving a new popular consensus and, in the process, the development of leaders with legitimate authority and great public confidence? This lengthy quotation from Lawrence Cremin's little book, Public Edumlion. makes a worthy beginning:

I have a very simple starting point, to which I think there is no alternative. We converse­informally in small groups and more formally through organizations via systematic political processes. The proper education of the public and indeed the proper creation of "publics" will not go forward in our society until we undertake anew a great public dialogue about education. In fact, 1 would maintain that the questions we need to ask about education are among the most important questions that can be raised in our society, particularly at this juncture in its history. What knowledge should "we the people" hold in common? What values? What skills7 What sensibilities? When we ask such questions we are getting to the heart of the kind of society we want to live in and the kind of society we want our children to live in. We are getting to the heart of the kind of public we would like to bring into being and the qualities we would like that public to display. We are

getting to the heart of the kind of community we need for our many individuals to flourish.••

Cremin goes on to quote Dewey in making his point on the nature of reform: " . . . all reforms which rest simply upon the enactment of law, or the threat of certain penalties, or upon changes in the mechanical or outward arrangements, are transitory and futile." Cremin adds: "In the last analysis, the fundamental mode of politics in a democratic society is education, and it is that way over all others that the educator is ultimately projected into politics." Politics is the citizen's profession; citizen and educator need to be brought into partnership.

Corporate liberalism has produced, with the support of formal education, the great social machinery that now surrounds us as a man• made environment, much of it the result of the foolish zeal to dominate nature. Its idol is power, the power which comes through experts of efficiency, predictability, replication, quantification, and control. This idol reduces life to fit the metaphor of the machine. The ultimate absurdity of this reductionism would be, I suppose, push-bottom atomic war, ironically in defense of power, or of the flowering of biological and social individuality and adaptability, freedom and human purpose, neither of which would be the result.

In 1927, in Tht Public and l/s Prob/mu. Dewey anticipated this great social machinery and laid out the conditions required if this "great society," this expert-dominated social machinery, was to be transformed into a "great community," a society, through public education in the broadest meaning of that process, guided by an informed, organized and articulate public. It's time to put the public into public education.

Footnotes

•M. Henningsen. "The Dangers of local Entrenchment," in Ka I.to 0 Haioai'i. Honolulu, Hawai'i . University of Hawai'i at Manoa Board of Publications, October 15, 1979, p. z.

1The Rtporl of the Hawaiian Commission Appointed in Pursuance of the "Joint Resolution for Annexing the Hawaiia" Islands to the United States," Washington, D.C. : US Government Printing Office, 1898, p. 10.

J0riginally lraalr was the name given white men by Hawaiians. To do something in the manner of the whites was to do it the haalt way or style. As the haolt achieved economic, political, and social power and advantages for which Hawaiians, and later Orientals, were often resentful, haolt connoted that resentment as well. Today. the term is most generally used to specify those of Caucasian ancestry but the connotation of undeserved special heritage is often implied.

•U,,der the monarchy and beginning in the 1850s, there developed a policy whereby Hawaiians and non-Hawaiians wishing their children to be taught in English were allowed on a m.itching funds basis to develop "select" schools. As English gradually replaced Hawaiian as the medium of instruction in the government school system, except on the island of Ni'ihau, the designation " select" went out of use.

tUS Bureau of Education. Survry of Education in Hawai't, Bulletin No. 16, Washington, D.C. : US Government Printing Office, 19ZO.

•Tyack. D. Tht Ont DtsJ: Sy1ltm, Cambridge : Harvard University Press. 1974, p. Z91.

' Cited in HShaping Our Understanding of Hawai'i," in Tht Haw11i'I Obstrvtr, November 19, 1974.

•Tyack, 0. and E. Hansot "Conflict and Consensus in American Public Education," in Datda/u1, Vol 10, No. J, Summer 1981, p. ZO.

•Commager, H.S. Thr Proplt and Tht1r Schools, Phi Delta Kappa Education Foundation Fastback No. 79, 1976, p. 28.

•oBaltzell, E.D. Tht Proltslanl Establishmrn/, New York : Vintage Books, 1964.

11Cremin, l . Pub/it Education, New York : Basic Books, 1976, pp. 74-75.

R11/plt K. Slutbtr is Profrssor a{ Education, Collrgr of EducaliDn, Univrrsily of Hawai'i al Manaa. Ht rtctivrd his PhD from lht Univmily of Wisconsin. Hu arras of sptci11liZAlian 11rt Amrrican tdutalional lrislory. his/ory of tducali~" in Haioai'i and community tducalion. Ht cu"tnlly strvts as Dirtclor a{ /ht Hawai"i Ctnltr far Adu// and C1mm11nily Educalion.

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