Harry Targ
What We Were Taught in the 1950s
Growing up in the 1950s there were a lot of ideas, facts, historical narratives many of us never thought about. We were growing up during the “golden age of US capitalism.” We thought that as we matured we would enjoy more and more of the products that the society has to offer. These products were enticingly portrayed on television commercials.
Our sex roles determined how we were to behave and what we might expect of our activities. And each age cohort would experience the prerogatives and would be expected to behave in particular ways as to study, work, consumption, and sociability.
All would be good if we acted as expected. Only two threats had the capacity to impair the inevitability of our quality of life; life threatening diseases like polio or the spread of international communism. Until the polio vaccine was developed we just had to be careful about our sociability or outdoor habits. As to international communism we just needed to trust our government, our military, and the vibrancy of our economic institutions.
While this narrative was one expected by the so-called middle class, it was aspirational for those young people coming from the working class. The Golden Age of Capitalism was well portrayed, if cynically, byJohn Kenneth Galbraith, C. Wright Mills, David Reisman, Paul Goodman, Vance Packard, Jules Henry, Theodore Roszak and others.
Educational Institutions and Ideological Hegemony
It is obvious that the maintenance of any political or economic order is based largely on the education of the young in such a way as to give legitimacy to it. In the 1960s political scientists began to study what they called “political socialization:” how and what people learn about the norms, values, and procedures that govern the maintenance of society. Some studies found that children begin to accept the virtues of political institutions, the presidency, the courts, political parties, at very young ages. What they learn about politics in the home is reinforced and developed in school systems.
Selective presentations of history and the arts is provided by formal content and repeated rituals, such as the pledge to the flag, competitive sports, routinized social life such as dances. In addition, as theorists such as Jim Berlin have argued, the educational system not only produces and reproduces citizenship, but it also reproduces workers, giving young people appropriate skills in language an mathematics. Educational theorists have pointed out that the character of education develops and changes as the economy changes, from competitive to industrial, to monopoly capitalism.
In addition to adding “socialization” to the lexicon of analysis political scientists began to write about “political culture,” or the values and beliefs that dominate the thinking of most members of a society. Ideas about the basic units of society, individuals or communities for example, the relative importance in the society of cooperation or conflict, the role of “human nature” or institutions as primary forces in shaping society. Perhaps most basic in the United States is the relative acceptance of private property or public goods as prime values.
In higher education, curricula reinforce and solidify the dominant ideas of the political culture. Often, social science and humanities disciplines reify standard paradigms about history, what is great art and philosophy, and what values are beyond reproach. In the post-World War II in the United States the dominant political culture was tinged with virulent anticommunism, the demonic other. Ruling classes, powerful corporations, and state institutions oversaw what was defined as legitimate educational content.
Meanwhile business schools and science and engineering programs were training young people in the tools necessary to promote the political economy. The humanities and social sciences grounded student learning in the acceptable political culture while the fields, what we call STEM, trained these same students in the tools of system maintenance. The former president of the University of California, Clark Kerr, coined the term “multiversity” to describe the functions of such institutions in the late twentieth century and he made it clear that the multiversity was supposed to serve the national security interests of the United States.
As Clark Kerr was leading the California university system young people became increasingly engaged in struggles against racism and escalating war in Vietnam. While these educational institutions became more repressive, as with the shootings of students at Jackson State and Kent State Universities, increased discourse on college campuses, sometimes initiated by faculty, was critical of the dominant political culture and its normal functioning, that s training workers for the economic machine. The university, to use a workplace metaphor, became “contested terrain.” Some faculty and students began to criticize the capitalist system, the war machine, the privatization of the commons, and histories that seemed to endorse patriarchy and racism. From the vantage point of those who rule, ideological hegemony had to be reimposed in the educational system. As conservative talk show host Rush Limbaugh once proclaimed, “we,” that is conservatives, control all major institutions except for the university.
Reversing the Opening Up of Higher Education to “Contesting” Dominant Ideas
In the twenty-first century, efforts of the defenders of capitalism have sought to reimpose the traditional political culture by privatizing public schools. Not only are charter schools a profitable source of investment, but they by virtue of their existence and curriculum reify the idea of the market, private over public goods, opposition to teachers as workers and teacher unions, and the elimination of the tradition of public education entirely.
At the university level, traditional study of history and the arts (with all their ideological contestation) are being defunded while colleges and universities define science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) as the primary purpose for having education systems. And major funds for STEM education and research come from huge corporations, particularly digital, drug, and agricultural corporations, and the military. And in the spirit of Limbaugh, the Koch brothers, the Association of Trustees and Administrators (ACTA), the State Policy Network, and the Associated Legislative Executive Council (ALEC) have worked with state legislatures to the early post-World II days when Kerr spoke approvingly of the multiversity. In sum. education from kindergarten through the university is increasingly designed to instill the ideology of the dominant political culture and to create a twenty-first century work force to serve the needs of monopoly/finance/global capitalism
But a variety factors from the 1960s on began to stimulate the exposure of the “golden age’ narrative of American exceptionalism for all the ways it was limited and was a distortion of reality. Educational institutions, expanding alternative media, and people standing up and challenging the reality of their lives, became venues for contesting unexamined assumptions. And in a relatively short order, young people particularly began to raise a series of questions that were not part of popular and educational discourse. By the 1960s more and more people began to assume that “they,” (those with power) wanted us to think about certain things and not about others. And the more and more people began to raise questions not part of popular discourse, the more the legitimacy of the whole system past and present was weakened.
And that spirit of challenge became institutionalized in a variety of newer education programs in universities, not to insist on ideological conformity but to encourage independent thinking. In higher education, discourse around class, race, gender, war, the environment, and the economic system spread. But now, independent thought is being challenged by federal and state governments; sometimes to cancel existing academic programs and other times to reward the creation of new and celebratory programs.
Cancelling programs
In a late-night legislative session in Indiana, the Republican majorities voted to cancel academic programs throughout public institutions in the state that did not have certain numbers of majors. As the Chicago Tribune reported in a July 7 editorial: “there are 116 degree programs disappearing from Indiana’s Big Ten flagship campus, and 222 across a the Indiana University system from Indianapolis to Kokomo,” The editorial which challenged the negative impacts on higher education in the state reported that similar cuts will be occurring at other public universities around the state, including Purdue University and they indicated that they were “struck by how much damage is being done to education in the humanities and the arts?’
In addition, the editorial pointed out that Hoosier students who come from lower income families will not be able to study these subjects in their home state, where tuition is more modest. And the official claims that education should be more job oriented, the editorial suggests, cannot be predicted for any reasonable period because even certain STEM fields might go out of fashion or, in short order, may be in less demand. As the editorial noted; “Indiana University-Bloomington should not be turned into a trade school…”The state…needs teachers, artists, musicians and poets, too. And it sure as heck needs people with proficiency in languages and cultures other than English,”
Creating New Programs
Some time ago, the faculty and administration at Purdue University discussed whether there should be a “civic literacy” requirement for every student pursuing a bachelors’ degree. There were debates in the University Senate and elsewhere about what “civic literacy” meant, whether it was true that students were not receiving such materials in their core requirements, and if the policy recommended by the Purdue Administration and Board of Trustees was adopted would the requirement be successful.
https://heartlandradical.blogspot.com/2021/07/the-contradictions-facing-21st-century.html
As the article linked above by Targ and Morris suggests, the idea of a “civic literacy” program in the recent past has its roots in conversations in Koch Foundation institutions, not to dismiss political discourse but to return it to the “golden age” of the 1950s before universities became venues for discussion and debate about political issues.
This approach to higher education, as opposed to merely engaging in draconian cuts in existing educational programs, seeks to mold and shape higher education in more system-affirming ways. For example Ryna Guinn (Inside Higher Education, July 8, 2025) reported that the Trump Administration will fund colleges and universities that prepare K-12 seminars celebrating the 250th year celebration of the Declaration of Independence.
Guinn quoted from the Federal Register that: “Priority will be given to applicants from institutions of higher education that have established independent academic units dedicated to civic thought…These institutes should demonstrate a sustained commitment to robust civic discourse.” The article identified centers at 13 public universities in eight states that critics have called “conservative centers.” Guinn quoted from the Department of Education about the grants for preparing these short courses: “Citizens must understand why our free-market democracy is a highly evolved system of cooperation made robust by our constitutional republic, and how it functions tos secure the blessings of liberty for all Americans.”
Cancelling and Replacing Programs in Higher Education; Why?
While most academics (even those in STEM fields) believe that higher education could and should be a space for discussion and debate, whether evaluating hypotheses about the physical universe or social arrangements, it is clear that political and economic elites are determined to return the educational process to propaganda, blind celebration of dominant institutions that they control, and the period in the 1950s when education and culture was shaped by the desire to promote American exceptionalism. The campaign to cancel or replace educational programs are designed to eliminate at least six topics critical to society.
First, educational programs seek to eradicate any discussion of the existence of economic and social classes in the United States (and other countries). Any discussion of class differences would entail examining readily available data on the extraordinary economic inequality in the society; an inequality that features a small number of elites who control most of the wealth in the country and vast majorities of people who barely survive.
Second, narratives of American history are favored that deny the horrific and enduring consequences of slavery and the racism against all “foreigners,” which misreads a major element of conflict between states, and individuals, and ignores racist tools as they shape US politics today.
Third, while not unique to the United States, gender inequalities pervade the society that require serious discussion of identities and how they have been used to impair freedoms.
Fourth, libraries of books have underscored narratives that the United States has sought global hegemony, at least since the onset of the industrial revolution. US strivings for power and control are not unique in world history. As a result reigning mythologies, that legitimize this drive for hegemony is the proposition that “war is inevitable.” This proposition is a powerful intellectual tool that rationalizes enormous expenditures for war and interventions everywhere.
Fifth, a central feature of public ideologies, at least since the end of World War Two is the idea that unbridled development of all kinds will improve the human condition. And central to the economic growth model is the assumption that nature can be used (and abused) to facilitate growth. In other words, the devastation of the environment, is either, from this point of view, necessary or is not a reality.
Sixth, to the extent that historic narratives of the American experience recognize problems, such as slavery, these problems do not have any connection with the economic system, capitalism. Central to cancelling programs or creating others requires the celebration of the “free enterprise system.”
Conclusion
Scholars, politicians, economic elites, citizens, and students may disagree about the role, significance, and history of higher education. Criticisms might be raised about various existing programs. But it is clear that there are two basic models of education that surfaced in the twentieth century and are the source of struggles today.
One model, the ‘socialization model,” assumes that the prime purpose of education is to inculcate and train the young to carry on economic and political institutions as they have been in the past. This includes training the young to endorse and support the legitimacy of political and economic elites, and to assume that what has existed should continue.
The other model, the “contested terrain model,” assumes that a central role of education is to encourage discussion and debate and where relevant to challenge orthodoxies: political, economic, social. And, this model assumes that it is the challenges and contestations that help create new thinking and social and economic improvement.
In the end, the attacks on higher education are one significant manifestation of attacks on human survival by an economic and political elite who oppose change.
MORE ON WHAT THEY WANT US TO THINK
Dan Morris (note: I am writing these remarks as a private citizen and not as a representative of my current employer, Purdue University)
Harry…thank you for sharing your blog essay with me and allowing me to add my comments. The first part of your piece is a thoughtful quasi-biographical reflection on how folks coming up in America in the 50s were sold a bill of goods that most white middle class people adhered to, even as there was already a good deal of disquiet. For example, when Mildred asks the leather-clad biker played by Marlon Brando in The Wild One (1953), "Hey Johnny, what are you rebelling against?", he answers "Whaddaya got?"
Although the seeds of major social change were sown in the 1950s — especially in the area of civil rights — the second half of the 1960s and the early years of the 1970s must be understood as a watershed moment for fundamental challenges to the status quo in higher education. Teachers and students disputed basic assumptions about their enterprise: Who is funding the research and to what ends? Why are we reading these texts and not others? Why are we imagining history in this way? Who is excluded from the master narratives? Can teaching and learning liberate rather than indoctrinate? Why are most faculty members white men? Such questions took hold of the academy and real change took place, even at conservative midwestern universities, where Black Studies, for example, now found a significant presence on campus and interdisciplinary programs, such as American Studies, really did partake in the "contested domain" aspects of higher education that Harry Targ speaks of in his blog essay.
In American Studies, for example, classic texts in the “myth and symbol” school spoke of America as a “Virgin Land” (Henry Nash Smith, 1950) and the role of Puritans as an “Errand in the Wilderness” (Perry Miller, 1956). By the time I began teaching in American Studies at a conservative midwestern state university in the 1990s, such approaches clashed with new critical models put forward by emerging scholars such as Patricia Limerick who in Legacy of Conquest (1987) offers views on the American West as a place that challenges the myth of “rugged individualism.” Rather than “virgin land,” the American West for Limerick was a contested, multicultural terrain. Far from the myth of the American West as “settled” by freedom-loving individual whites seeking to flee the shackles of an expanding Federal government and a greedy corporate business environment back East, Limerick reveals that the interests of the state and big business funded the infrastructure that made conquest possible.
When I arrived in the early 1990s, our conservative midwestern state university continued to hire new American Studies faculty. These faculty taught the work of foundational scholars such as Frederick Jackson Turner, as well as Smith and Miller, but were also fascinated by scholarship authored by New Americanists such as Limerick, Jane Tompkins, Shelley Fisher Fishkin, and Donald Pease. American Studies at that time admitted a diverse cohort of graduate students and offered thematic, team-taught seminars led by faculty from different disciplines. For example, I had the pleasure of teaching Huck Finn with a gifted, Missouri-trained historian, Susan Curtis. In our seminar, we not only read Twain’s novel, but essays ranging from T.S. Eliot’s archetypal interpretation of the Mississippi River in “The Boy and the River: Without Beginning or End” (1950) to Fishkin’s “Was Huck Black?” (1993). The interdisciplinary environment encouraged a stimulating culture of debate and multi-perspectivism. In the years of its heyday (roughly from the 1960s to 2015), American Studies produced successful graduates. Teachers learned as much as their students about how to think across disciplines, periods, and genres.
The robust version of the American Studies program I am describing above has come to a screeching halt at our home institution and everyone is the poorer for it. When I say, "everyone is poorer for it," I think here of one female American Studies graduate student with a literature focus who received her master’s degree from the program in 1997. She is now featured in Purdue advertisements at half time of football games because, upon graduation from American Studies, she became a famous Air Force fighter pilot who, according to a College of Liberal Arts website, “was one of the first pilots in the air with the mission of protecting the nation’s capital” on September 11, 2001. Indoctrinating “woke” critics of American exceptionalism was never the point of the program or how any of us taught.
I think about the fate of the American Studies program at our university in the context of the current call for universities to engage in civics education. As Harry Targ reports, in a recent article in Inside Higher Education, Ryan Quinn notes that the “federal government is funding educational seminars about the 250th anniversary of America’s founding. Applying institutions get a leg up if they have what are often criticized as conservative centers.” I emphatically support civics education at the university level. I want to see civics education implemented with the depth and rigor that characterized the qualities of teaching and learning that we experienced in the American Studies program in its heyday. Such a program requires resources, yes, but just as important is faculty development of the civics curriculum. Faculty from areas including history, English, sociology, politics, philosophy, anthropology, economics, and the visual and performing arts should be tasked with developing a set of courses in civics education. The program should include the flexibility for faculty to co-teach classes with experts outside of their own fields. Civics classes should be designed as seminars and should be supported by interdisciplinary graduate programs to create the energy and viewpoint diversity that young scholars bring to a program. Civics education also requires administrators to support critical inquiry and who trust that faculty will design and implement a meaningful program. By “meaningful program,” I refer to one that requires students to analyze civic culture by bringing to bear how historical contexts influence the meaning and purpose of “foundational texts” over time. Students should develop close reading skills with a sensitivity to how a variety of readers will interpret texts differently and also how many readers will want to read texts other than those deemed "foundational" (as well as reading "foundational" texts through new eyes).
My main point is that a real civics education cannot limit itself to asking students to take a test upon graduation that reveals familiarity with basic facts about U.S. government and that assumes the way the U.S government is designed is inherently the foolproof way to imagine a civil society. Unfortunately, the test model has been the main approach to civics education at our university in recent years. While it is true that you have to start somewhere, and knowing the set-up of the U.S. government is a starting point, it is not a sign of intellectual engagement to present facts about government without offering students a comparative approach to how societies are designed and without allowing students the time, space, and resources in classroom settings to read about and discuss the history of civic life in America.
Civics should be taught fairly and with intellectual integrity. One might start by debating the merits of the statement that "our free-market democracy is a highly evolved system of cooperation made robust by our constitutional republic, and [that] it functions to secure the blessings of liberty for all Americans.” Has our country ever challenged "constitutional" principles? Is liberty being secured "for all Americans." Defining what we mean by “Americans” would be worthy of discussion. As was the case with American Studies, civics needs to be taught in an interdisciplinary, comparative context. A course in foundational texts is worthwhile, but it must ask questions about which are the foundational texts, what was the context in which they were written and selected as foundational, and how have they been interpreted over time by a variety of readers. Alongside obvious choices such as The Federalist Papers, The Constitution, The Declaration of Independence, and Common Sense, I would include writings by authors including Jonathan Edwards, Ben Franklin, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, Sojourner Truth, Susan B. Anthony, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain, William Dean Howells, John Steinbeck, Zora Neale Hurston, Martin Luther King, and James Baldwin.
I would highly recommend a full course on how the Supreme Court has interpreted the constitution from Marbury v. Madison to Trump v. United States. Stops along the way would include decisions such as Dred Scott, the Cherokee case decided during the presidency of Andrew Jackson, Plessy v. Ferguson, Korematsu v. United States and Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. In addressing Brown v. Board of Education, I would include the history of how that case from 1954 was resisted by citizens at the state and local level to the point that President Eisenhower needed to send troops to Little Rock, Arkansas to enforce that watershed ruling. I would look into how resistance to Brown v Board led to the closing of all public schools in states such as Virginia, and trace the relationship between reaction to Brown v. Board and the charter school movement. Are American schools less segregated now than they were in 1953? Why or why not? We could also analyze how and why the court limited FDR's New Deal agenda, especially in the first term.
As noted above, it is crucial for students to learn about civics in a comparative context. Israel, England, Saudi Arabia, and New Zealand do not have one official written constitution. The majority of countries do adhere to a written constitution, but the nature of these constitutions varies in terms of scope and depth as does the amendment process. How constitutions are amended is a critical aspect distinguishing them. One Social Studies website notes:
Rigidity or flexibility in amendment procedures affects how readily a constitution can evolve with societal changes.
In Making Our Democracy Work: A Judge’s View, former Associate Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer argues that “the Court should interpret words, whether in the Constitution or a state, using traditional legal tools, such as text, history, tradition, precedent, and, particularly, purposes and related consequences, to help make the law effective” (xiv). Following Breyer, I would argue that for a civic education to be as effective as the law, students must also be trained in the pluralistic interpretive methods that Justice Breyer recommends for those who sit on the nation’s highest court.
