James B. Conant and The American High School Today: Constructing the "Gifted" and "Academically Talented" Child 1955–1960

• In Event: Promising Scholarship in Education: Dissertation Fellows and Their Research

Abstract

KEY FINDINGS:
Between 1956 and 1959 James Bryant Conant conducted what he argued was an independent and scientific analysis of U.S. public high schools. Published in 1959 as The American High School Today, Conant’s study strongly recommended the rational reordering of American high schools around presumed individual differences in intelligence, and the placement of high I.Q students in more academically rigorous science, math and foreign language classes. My analysis of documents related to the production of this study reveal that “intelligence” (or “aptitude,” “I.Q.”) served as more than just a scientific measure of individual worth. It also functioned as a political trope that was used to resolve a Cold War crisis in public education in the late 1950s, bridging as it did so divides between ‘liberal’ and ‘conservative,’ and ‘federal/national’ and ‘local/provincial.’ My analysis also discovers that The American High School Today should be viewed less as Conant’s “personal study” and rather the result of networks of collaboration that joined Conant, The Educational Testing Service, The National Education Association, The Carnegie Corporation and Eisenhower administration architects of the National Defense Education Act. Furthermore, I closely examine how this sub rosa network actors produced a veritable explosion of discourse across a range of media and literatures that worked to construct new educationally operationalizable categories of person: the “gifted” and “academically talented” student.

Chiefly these new public and scientific conversation about “intelligence” proposed that the “gifted” and “academically talented” were a natural category of person who were particularly well suited for the study of the sciences and mathematics. Moreover, this new discourse proposed that “giftedness” and “academic talent” were currently largely unrecognized as a distinct human category and that gifted and talented individuals were overlooked neglected as a result. Conant and many others held that this alleged invisibility of the gifted and their resultant neglect posed a great risk to the gifted themselves as individuals (this was often depicted as the potential for atrophy of talent, isolation, maladjustment or psychological damage), and a great risk to the nation, to our technological and cultural progress and to our national security. Yes, the idea of the “giftedness” is indeed an old one, but it was repurposed in ways very specific to this time period, and it was reimpressed at this historical moment with striking force and visibility upon the national imagination. As this category of person was reinvested with belief, it was also systematized and made actionable in an educational setting in a way and to a degree it never had been before. Given the cultural bias of these tests and the narrow, essentialist underlying conception of intelligence that supported their use, I argue that this dramatically reinvigorated interest in educating the “gifted” and “academically talented” amounted to a repositioning and “safeguarding” of whiteness in response to desegregation, mandated four years earlier by Brown v. Board.

BACKGROUND AND OVERVIEW:
This NSF and NAEd/Spencer foundation funded research in the history of science and the history of education analyzes debates about intelligence and educational opportunity in the post-WWII US, from 1945-1960. Specifically, my research question asks how “intelligence” as an idea (or really a contested set of ideas) was constructed and redefined in this period in response to a shifting complex of social, cultural and scientific pressures. Further, I am interested in how these evolving constructions of intelligence functioned to regulate educational opportunity. Thus my analysis addresses: 1) the theorization of intelligence within psychology, 2) continuities between psychological theory, federal-level legislation, and school-place testing and ability grouping, and 3) the influence of broader Cold War/Civil Rights-era cultural contexts on all these developments.

My analysis presumes that whatever “intelligence” is, it is not simply an ahistorical or organically determined given, but rather a nexus of assumptions, practices and performances that shape-shift over time in response to cultural exigencies. This analytical position denaturalizes “intelligence” and allows us to see how beliefs about intelligence serve as powerful but under-examined regulators of status and opportunity in our culture. To this point, I argue that--in the aftermath of Nazi atrocities and in the context of an emerging Civil Rights movement--when group identifiers like race, class and to some extent gender came under mounting scrutiny as constructed and potentially discriminatory categories—“intelligence” rather assumed a kind of objectivity as a valid, measurable identifier of natural capability. Intelligence tests were the technological products of a new scientific psychology, and what they measured was presumed, more widely than ever before, to fairly mark an individual’s place in the social order. In this sense, and in the context of a post-World War II meritocracy, I argue that “intelligence” should be viewed as a culturally constructed category in its own right, on par with and functioning in dynamic relation to other highly salient categories of cultural analysis like race, class, or gender. Clearly, deeply entrenched beliefs about race, class, and gender still powerfully shaped constructions of what intelligence was, who was likely to be perceived as intelligent and in what ways, but now more than ever before, measured “intelligence”—a set of numbers one bore through one’s school years like both a prophecy and a kind of personal essence—asserted itself as another primary marker of worth.

This dissertation focuses on 1) a 1958 scientific study of US public high schools conducted by James Bryant Conant known as The American High School Today, 2) on networks of collaboration (ETS, NEA, Carnegie, and architects of emergent National Defense Education Act legislation) that worked to produce this study and 3) on the study’s widespread cultural influence and policy-shaping power—in tandem with the NDEA--in relation to “academic talent” and “intelligence.” My work here extends the analyses of others who have written on Conant and Cold War education, such as Wayne Urban, Andrew Hartman, Carl Kaestle, Nicholas Lemann and Ellen Lagemann. The historiography has yet to examine numerous striking similarities between The American High School Today and specific title mandates of the National Defense Education Act. Both The American High School Today and The National Defense Education Act emerged at more or less precisely the same time. Likewise both texts argued the national need to identify “academically talented” students through augmented guidance and testing programs, and to afford these students selective curricula in the public high schools in the sciences, mathematics and foreign languages. My dissertation has taken up these issues in concert to argue that we have underestimated the influence of The American High School Today and the role this study played, in concert with the NDEA, in shaping ideas about talent, intelligence and educability.

Author

• Jim Porter, Michigan State University