ABSTRACT
THE SOCIAL CRISIS precipitated by the economic depression, and the severe dislocation wrought by technological developments still naively regarded as “progress,” compelled many people in the 1930s to ask fundamental questions about their principal institutions and the values on which these institutions were sustained. “What should be the central purpose of our educational institutions?” asked thinkers of every ideological orientation, and “What knowledge, what view of human being, and what institutional practices are necessary and appropriate to guide such purposes?” The social foundations of education, as an integral component of teacher education programs looking to break with the technique-driven normal school tradition, was born of this kind of questioning. Teachers were to have a deepened understanding of the social and historical context in which they worked and be able to raise critical questions about the larger social order and their own teaching in relation to it. The emerging mass media in many ways supplanted the “educational” influence of traditional schooling, even as they dramatically altered the social environment in which schooling took place. But through the 1930s, at least, significant effort was made to expand teachers’ awareness of the vital role they played in shaping students’ consciousness, and to inquire into whose political and economic interests this was being done.
