Life Adjustment Education

The progressive reform impulse that gained momentum at the turn of the 20th century signaled a fundamental shift in educational thought and practice in the modern era. Educational progressivism, as this movement came to be known by scholars, was an integral part of the broader progressive project and shared its interest in the democratic reconstruction of American society. With a philosophical commitment to democracy, community, and the whole child on the one hand, and an administrative embrace of efficiency, expertise, and differentiation on the other, the progressive education movement gave rise to a spate of innovative—and often conflicting—pedagogical and curricular reforms that spanned the 20th century.

Among the most notable, and deeply contested, curricular innovations to grow out of progressivism's commitment to the education of democratic citizens was the life adjustment movement. Proponents of the life adjustment movement expanded upon the progressive ideals first articulated in the National Education Association's 1918 Cardinal Principles of Secondary Education that forged an explicit connection between the public functions of the school and the private lives of students. Borrowing from the administrative and pedagogical progressive lexicon, the Cardinal Principles advocated that the school should test and track students at the same time that it should tend to their physical and emotional well-being. With “health,” “citizenship,” “ethical character,” and “worthy home membership” as defining objectives for secondary education, the NEA's Cardinal Principles—and the life adjustment educators who drew inspiration from them—championed a functional curriculum that eschewed traditional academic disciplines as it aimed to prepare students for [Page 526]healthy and productive citizenship in modern American life.

While the life adjustment project drew upon progressive antecedents like the Cardinal Principles, as a standalone movement, it gained its first expression in the post-World War II era. Like their Progressive era counterparts, life adjustment educators charged that the modern curriculum focused its attention at two ends of the educational spectrum: a classical, college-preparatory program on the one hand and a broad vocationalism on the other. In so doing, life adjustment educators insisted that the public school failed to meet the needs of all American youth. In order to develop a more comprehensive and inclusive curriculum, Charles Prosser, a proponent of life adjustment education and leading vocational educator who helped craft the 1917 Smith-Hughes Vocational Education Act, convened a committee of educators in 1945 under the auspices of the U.S. Office of Education. The findings of the committee, later dubbed the “Prosser Resolution,” stipulated that in order to prepare students adequately for democratic living, schools must extend their reach beyond the 20% of youth going to college, and the 20% headed for the vocations. The other 60% of modern American youth, Prosser noted, required a curriculum geared toward the development of sociability, personality, and industrious habits of mind. Using the concept of “adjustment” as an idiom of reform, life adjustment educators sought to meet the private and personal needs of students while socializing them into public life.

John H. Studebaker, the U.S. Commissioner of Education, convened the first national life adjustment conference in 1947 to revise and implement the findings of the Prosser Resolution. Drawing representatives from leading educational organizations and advocacy groups across the country, the meeting established a National Commission on Life Adjustment Education for Youth and propelled a bulwark of state commissions to integrate life adjustment education into the curriculum of public schools. Carried out under course names such as “life skills,” “basic living,” and “family life education,” and with remarkably uneven results, the life adjustment curriculum addressed a capacious range of issues from marriage to child rearing, from safety education to leisure studies, and from personal maladjustment to personal finance. While the life adjustment courses and programs differed in kind, they were united by the fundamental belief that the school curriculum should center on the ever-changing social needs of students living in a democracy, and prepare all young Americans for meaningful employment, fulfilling marriages, and model citizenship.

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