Crisis in the Classroom

Written for both the professional educator and the layperson, Crisis in the Classroom: The Remaking of American Education, published in 1970, brought national attention to the problems of schooling and introduced the term mindlessness that quickly became a common criticism of educational programming. Charles Silberman's critique of the (repressive) elementary school curriculum was surpassed by his assessment of the secondary school program—a curriculum that instilled passivity and conformity—and that of the middle school or junior high, which he described as a wasteland of U.S. education. From the perspective of curriculum studies, educational programs were called upon to achieve more than relevance and high test scores. Silberman captured the attention of U.S. society with the thought and hope that a public dialogue (in a Deweyan sense free of economic and political maneuverings) would lead to common purposes and to action from students, parents, teachers, administrators, professors, and the general public.

Although it is often noted that the author was a professional journalist rather than an educator, Silberman was well versed in educational theory and history and had previously prepared an education report on cognition and the psychology of perception with Jerome Bruner as a research associate. Lawrence Cremin, after seeing this research report, brokered support from the Carnegie Corporation to establish the Carnegie Study of the Education of Educators so that Silberman could examine the many educational influences of society (and not focus just on schools). Yet Crisis in the Classroom did ultimately focus on education as practiced in schools, to the dismay of the Carnegie Corporation. The publisher, Random House, sold the first year serial rights to The Atlantic, which named the featured series “Murder in the Classroom” (a title that Silberman, in 2006, said that he would not have approved). This publication, along with a Sunday New York Times feature article, turned Silberman's book into a topic of national interest.

Based on 4 years of intensive travel and research, occurring between 1966 and 1969, Silberman produced a best selling publication at over 550 pages. He described the publication as an indignant book and portrayed schools as wastelands and grim, joyless places. Unlike the Conant Report, released 11 years before, Silberman's assessment did not arise from empirical data or surveys. His scholarship, qualitative and historical in nature, drew strongly upon the professional literature, his observations, and assistance and guidance from many of U.S. leading educational researchers and scholars: Cremin, David Riesman, Lillian Weber, Vito Perrone, Philip Jackson, Christopher Jencks, Lee Cronbach, and others. With Silberman's periodic anecdotes, vignettes, and facts from his studies scattered throughout the publication, he showed promise for change and did not lay blame for the national crisis on school administrators and teachers, a point that resulted in support from elementary and secondary school teachers.

Crisis in the Classroom offered suggestions for structural and curricular reform without adopting the tone of the deschoolers and romantic critics. Combining Deweyan general education-core [Page 147]curriculum with practices of the open classroom and informal infant schools, Silberman searched for tenable middle ground to change high schools by humanizing and experimenting with curriculum and instruction. Such recommendations, although viewed as commonsensical today, reflected a powerful antidote for the remaking of U.S. education after accounts of repressive, petty school rules, and intellectually and aesthetically sterile settings where a lack of civility and unconscious contempt for children, according to Silberman, was commonplace. At the elementary school level, Silberman introduced and popularized to a U.S. audience the British open classroom (where he drew a very distinct line between his suggestions and that of the deschoolers, John Holt, Paul Goodman, and others).

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