Among the objectives that Chapter 5 seeks to achieve are these:
Students will understand and be able to evaluate the massive shifts in political economy, ideology, and schooling that took place at the beginning of the twentieth century.
Students will also develop a deeper and broader base from which to evaluate the history of racial and ethnic prejudice in the United States. They should be able to compare progressive educational responses to ethnic differences, such as the responses, identified in other chapters, to Irish Americans and African-Americans.
This chapter provides an opportunity to assess the degree to which scientific management in the industrial workplace served the interests of workers, and was or was not consistent with democratic ideals. Students should also be able to assess whether progressive social reform was consistent with democratic ideals.
The chapter also helps students evaluate the degree to which modern liberal ideology was consistent with specifically articulated conceptions of democracy, such as Jeffersonian participatory democracy or Dewey's developmental democracy.
Students will consider the degree to which domestic social order was achieved by the exercise of the force of arms and by political and economic control of schooling, thus calling into question a "consensus" theory of social order.
Students will be able to distinguish among different strands of progressive education and be able to evaluate the interests served by these different camps.
Finally, the chapter enables students to consider the degree to which all population groups of students were or were not equally well served by the four progressive educational aims of social stability, employable skills, equal educational opportunity, and meritocracy.
