ABSTRACT
During the 1960s, the spotlight shifted from curricular to social concerns. What happened in schools, how their curricula evolved and how their policies were shaped, became grist for the mills of politicians. Educational policy entered the halls of Congress. The schoolmen’s debates were overshadowed by state and national legislation that substituted social, economic, and racial policies for curricular and pedagogical considerations. The traumatic events of the decade were in large measure responsible for this shift. The strains of the Cold War and of the war in Vietnam were creating social and racial unrest at home. The civil rights movement, highlighted for educators by the aftereffects of the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, spread racial ferment far and wide. The nationwide discrepancies in income and health standards added fuel to the conflagrations that broke out in cities from Watts in California to Newark in New Jersey. University students went on the rampage from Berkeley to Madison to New York. The assassinations of President John F.Kennedy in November of 1963 and, five years later, of civil rights leader Martin Luther King and of the slain president’s brother Attorney General Robert F.Kennedy deepened the traumatic impact of the decade. When in 1970 university students were killed by gunfire and bomb blasts at Kent State, Jackson State, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison, it became clear to the last doubter that the developments in the country’s educational institutions were intertwined with the larger destiny of the nation.
