How Sputnik Launched Ed-Tech: The National Defense Education Act of 1958
On October 4, 1957 news brokethat the Soviet Union had successfully launched the first man-made satellite into space. Sputnik prompted a national panic, not simply over a looming Cold War – the possibility of Soviet spying or bombing, for example – but about the purported failures of the US education system.
“The schools never recovered from Sputnik, ” education researcher Gerald Bracey contends.
According to historian Robert Divine, President Eisenhower was “not impressed by the Soviet Fear. … He believed that American science and American education were much sounder than critics charged, and, above all, he was confident that the United States held a commanding lead over the Soviet Union in striking power.” But the President couldn’t compromise the military intelligence that reassured him that the US was ahead of the USSR in science and in education. And he failed to reassure the public or politicians or journalists that that was the case either.
So something had to be done.
One year later, in 1958, Eisenhower signed into law the National Defense Education Act, a cornerstone of his administration’s response to Sputnik. The law helped reshape education in the US with a massive influx of federal dollars. And it served to give education technology in particular not only funding and legitimacy but its ideological mission: a corrective to progressive education in the name of national security and science.
“When education becomes completely enmeshed in the petty, surface details of a student’s everyday life, it loses the opportunity of equipping him with the intellectual powers that lie beneath the surface. By frittering time away upon the ‘felt needs’ of adolescents, the school runs the risk of leaving its students helpless in the presence of the real ‘real life’ needs that will come later and that will put to test all the resources of a mature and disciplined intelligence.” - Arthur Bestor. Educational Wastelands
Progressive education was already under attack in the 1950s, with accusations from scholars and scientists that it was contributing to a growing anti-intellectualism in the US. It was, according to one admiral, making us “soft.” Progressive education, according to its critics, had become an excuse to not teach a huge swath of CONTINUE READING: How Sputnik Launched Ed-Tech: The National Defense Education Act of 1958
