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Mental Testing As Science Fiction in Chicago

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Mental Testing As Science Fiction in Chicago while those considered advanced went to According to American gilded-age reformers professional and academic classes (Wrigley, like Chicago Public Schools (CPS) 1982). With everyone in their “place” social Superintendent Edwin G. Cooley (1857-1923), order would be restored. Bierce was known for American civilization was headed for collapse his ability to manipulate the epistemological in 1909. 1 Cooley’s solution was to administrate elements of time and space (Grenander, 1997) the CPS according to principles of science and and in this article; Bierce’s short story becomes efficiency. Cooley eventually resigned, an epistemological lens through which I treat however, because of struggles over his historian Julia Wrigley’s (1982) account of administrative approach (“Expect Cooley,” Cooley’s educational bureaucracy, with tropes 1909). In that same year the noted author found in Bierce’s science fiction. Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914) 2 compiled a Conversely, both Cooley and Moxon collection of his short stories to mark the close did not maintain control over intelligence. of his literary career. In this collection appeared Cooley, in fact, encountered resistance to his a short story, “Moxon’s Master,” which first reforms from mid-level superintendents, appeared in 1893. It was a tale about a reclusive building principals, teachers, and organized student of science named Moxon. A narrator in labor (Rousmaniere 2007; Wrigley, 1982). This conversation with Moxon, who speculated on narrative also attempts to reveal parallels in the nature of life and the presence of it in all Cooley’s bureaucracy in relation art education matter, tells most of the short story. Later, the in Chicago, in what I term the science fiction of narrator found Moxon playing chess with a intelligence. This narrative speaks to the theme robot in his machine shop. When Moxon of this volume of the Journal of Social Theory achieved checkmate, the robot lost control and in Art Education: students’ growth, learning, murdered his opponent, and the building burnt and assessment, which become acts of down. The narrator awakened in the hospital assessination – as barriers and limitations pondering if it all was real, or not (Bierce, placed on human lives. 1893/2014). These two men – Cooley and Moxon – both worked with systems of artificial intelligence and imposed them upon their subjects – Cooley’s public school students and Moxon’s robot – making them creatures of science. Cooley and other educators like him were out to ward off social collapse with a system wherein students were tested and sorted according to their mental capacity. Based on these mental tests, students considered less Figure 1. “Education in the year 2000”, by French postcard artist intelligent were placed in technical classes, Villemard c1910. National Library of France The Machine and Science Fiction of 1 Edwin Gilbert Cooley (1857-1923) was Chicago Public Intelligence Schools Superintendent from 1900 to 1909 (Cooley, Edwin Gilbert, 2009). The World English Dictionary defines 2 Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914) was an American the term “machine” in two ways — First, as an editorialist, satirist and author of short stories. He was known “an organized body of people that controls for horror stories and science fiction writing. His “writing shows the dependence of external reality of the shifting activities, policies, etc.” (Machine, 2014, para. awareness of a perceiver,” often manipulating “the 8), as found in the CPS and its bureaucracy. epistemological categories of space and time.” Critics “have The second definition is “an assembly of [cited] Bierce as an early postmodernist” (Grenander, 1997, p. 29). interconnected components arranged to transmit or modify force in order to perform that created a pleasant and calming atmosphere useful work” (Machine, 2014, para. 1). Moxon to support students’ adjustments to the world gave a similar definition of a machine: “Any (i.e., learning) (Gyure, 2011).3 Ironically, these instrument or organization by which power is clinical spaces also truncated student’s applied and made effective, or a desired effect identities as they limited students to the kinds produced” (Bierce, 1893/2014, para. 4). In fact of classes they would be allowed to take. he declares, “I do believe a machine thinks Students were faced with long-term limitations about the work it is doing” (para. 6). Cooley’s in the jobs they could get upon leaving high test-driven efficiency was precisely such a school that paid lower earnings, lesser housing bureaucratic machine that “thought” – it choices, and lower social status. differentiated and sorted students according to their intelligence levels and then tracked them Cooley, Child Study, and Social Efficiency into art and industrial classes. Moxon’s Chicago Public School art educators discussion of machines that “think,” in robots were among the teachers ensnared within programmed and automated for specific tasks, Cooley’s assessment bureaucracy and there is parallels the narrow focus of Cooley’s technical much in this narrative that today’s art educators high schools, where students learned to think in can learn to better understand their own rhythm with factory machines (Bierce, metrically laden school systems. Then and now, 1893/2014; Callahan, 1962). Testing students’ public school administrators were, and still are abilities to do tasks and programming a robot to preoccupied with profiling the conditions of also do tasks are arguably two ways to create education through high-stakes testing. Our forms of intelligence and they are both current discourse about everything from school overlapping fictional representations of mental report cards to school systems have constrained activity and constitute a science fiction of teachers and hampered students (Fitzgerald, intelligence. 2013; Heilig, 2011). Likewise, early 20th- If the CPS testing machine can be century art teachers also felt constraint in the defined as a technology, then educators treated CPS technocracy driven by test data and students as technologically classified humans, tracking. as if they were cyborgs from myths of science The CPS culture of testing was only a fiction, which were part human and part small part of the larger bureaucracy that machine (Pope, 2005). Child-study stretched across metropolitan Chicago. psychologists ranked students’ mental capacity Progressive4 city planners and social scientists by imposing a particular medical language of descriptors such as “backward … subnormal 3 School decoration in the gilded-age American high …[or] feebleminded” (Ryan, 2011, p. 343). schools constituted the placement of graphic and three- dimensional art forms to facilitate the development of good This part-technology and part-human culture of character in students; but Gyure’s (2011) history reveals that art schooling comprised Cohen’s (1999) educators were also enamored of the therapeutic value of medicalization of education and included, “the school decoration used to create a calming school atmosphere, especially in Chicago’s new and innovative high school infiltration of psychiatric, psychoanalytic and buildings of the early 20th century. therapeutic norms, concepts, and language of 4 Kidel (1999b) defines progressive education as discourse … into virtually all aspects of specific educational traditions that derive from John Comenius, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi, and American schooling … in the twentieth Friedrich Froebel. Broader uses of the term progressive connote century” (p. 249). Indeed, Cooley intended the advancement of science, technology, and industrial growth th th Chicago’s public high schools to be designed as in the 19 and 20 centuries. Cremin (1961) traces the decline of the progressive education era to the closing of the clinics that functioned as therapeutic machines Progressive Education Association in 1955, but Kidel (1999b) Funk, C. (2014). The creatures we “Assessinate”: A tale of “Mental Testing” as science fiction in Chicago 5 public high schools in 1909. Journal of Social Theory in Art Education (34) (S. Bey, Ed.). 3-15. were bent on moral and fiscal reform. They 1900, he put forth his agenda of differentiated reorganized and centralized the city, suffusing schooling. Cooley planned a dual system in Chicago’s press, commerce, and public affairs which schooling after the grammar grades was with tropes of efficiency. They strove to housed in two kinds of high schools. Some eliminate waste and control in a city that had students would be sent to technical high expanded by two thirds, from 503,185 in 1880 schools, where boys learned mechanical to 1,698,575 in 1900 (McClendon, 2014). By drawing, woodworking machining, and the turn of the 20th century, the majority of electrical work and girls learned domestic Chicagoans were mostly European working- applications of handicrafts, sewing, and class immigrants who outnumbered native-born cooking. Other students would go to elite high Anglo-American Chicagoans. Because of this schools for professional classes to prepare for shift, the elite officials and executives in charge managerial jobs, architectural drafting, of Chicago’s civic and commercial affairs commercial art, photography, and college believed something had to be done, lest society preparation at some high schools (Gyure, 2011) as they knew it would collapse (Rury, 2005). Cooley had the support of the recently formed Just as the city planners set out to reform an Chicago Commercial Club (CCC) of elite entire city, the Chicago Board
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