ABSTRACT
Education is an important issue for nearly all Americans, but for almost none is it the most central issue in our lives. The new and dominant progressive education movement, committed to the "whole child", became codified after World War II as the Life Adjustment Movement in which 20 percent of students were to be educated for college, 20 percent for vocational training, and the remaining 60 percent with "general life skills," or how to adjust to life. The first federal aid to schools was the Smith-Hughes Act of 1917, which provided funds for vocational education in the high school as a supplement or an alternative to the traditional classical or college-preparatory curriculum. As Richard Freeman and Harry J. Holzer have observed, "Young blacks have made advances in both occupation and education". The twentieth-century American strategy has been to keep children in school by changing the curriculum while holding the pedagogy constant.
