Chapter 2

The History of Prosocial Education

Betty Waters Straub

[Teaching] is the hardest work on the planet. It’s also the most important. We can never forget that unit of change for an individual kid’s life—the transformational place where everything happens—is school. It starts in pre-K and goes straight through college.

—Dave Levin, Houston Americorps, 1992

Education is due for an overhaul. Not many people in the United States would argue that point. In my field—health education—a spirited discussion currently taking place around improving and better coordinating school health programs emphatically proposes that we first begin with improving education itself. Health education certainly shares considerable overlap with prosocial education, with the same goal of improving behavioral and environmental influences that affect whole child development. This handbook couldn’t come at a better time. If educators are going to improve our children’s future in a holistic sense, we may need to break the mold and begin by looking back at lessons we can learn from education’s history in the United States, a look at the past that we present as a compendium of focused prosocial education efforts. This book provides the indisputable rationale for reenvisioning educational methods: academic performance improves when educators take opportunities to focus on developing the whole child. These pages offer practical, achievable, and sustainable efforts supported across our past centuries as the critical keys to our children’s successful present and future.

Writing a history for prosocial education appears to be a simple task, since the term has existed only since our three coeditors named it in 2009. Though the term prosocial education might be new, the educational and developmental efforts that fall under this umbrella term have existed and been practiced for centuries. Its components and foundational focus on prosocial behaviors do indeed trace roots back as far as Aristotle in the Greek marketplace who taught—and learned—much more than book knowledge (O’Connor & Robertson, 1999). Most of this handbook’s authors provide considerable background for the multiple strategies, programs, and policies enacted and implemented as support for students’ nonacademic needs in prosocial areas.

To further make the case for prosocial education, consider the broad evidence found across America’s history of educators and other caring adults who have focused on “reducing barriers to learning” (per Spencer County’s goal described in chapter 21). Part 2 authors provide an astounding array of efforts that literally began with our country’s birth. Vincent and Grove (chapter 6) discuss the various names given across the centuries for helping children to grow into caring, participating citizens of the world. Just as they concluded, education is so much more than what takes place in a classroom. Those other parts of the learning process—prosocial education—are exemplified by the variety of efforts described throughout this book, the concept that Higgins-D’Alessandro described so eloquently in chapter 1.

The ASCD (formerly, the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development) couldn’t agree more with Vincent and Grove. The ASCD website reminds us that “academic achievement is but one element of student learning and development and only a part of any complete system of educational accountability” (ASCD, 2012a, para. 3). ASCD represents 150,000 educators in 145 countries who believe “a comprehensive approach to learning recognizes that successful young people are knowledgeable, emotionally and physically healthy, motivated, civically inspired, engaged in the arts, prepared for work and economic self-sufficiency, and ready for the world beyond their own borders” (ASCD, 2012b, para. 1). Its focus on educating the whole child emphasizes strategic policy efforts that require a prosocial education framework (ASCD, 2011, see the summary on p. 16; see also chapter 24 in this volume for Phil Brown and Maurice Elias’s interview with ASCD’s Molly McCloskey, managing director of the whole child initiative).

This collective ideal presumes to ask classroom teachers to do a great deal for our children; can we reasonably expect them to do all these ASCD-supported tasks? While teachers’ unions might answer, “No, we can’t and shouldn’t,” we believe that many teachers do all these things—and more—every day. Perhaps it’s the very reason that most people go into the teaching profession: to make a difference in students’ lives by doing more than transferring knowledge in reading, ’riting, and ’rithmetic. But teachers can’t provide all these components alone. Parents and citizens across many walks of life have realized since our nation began that it takes entire villages willing to encourage everyone to be engaged in helping kids learn. Many parents and community members have risen to the challenge of helping to provide prosocial education pathways through mentoring, coaching, sponsoring student clubs, and numerous other volunteer activities.

History’s Lessons: A Practical Focus for Administrators and Teachers

With the persistent engagement of parents and other members of the community assisting in non-classroom education and helping educators succeed (as they have done throughout our history), teachers and administrators today can consider more deliberately the most effective and efficient methods for designing and delivering prosocial education for today’s students. Though teaching methods have a great bearing on students’ capacity to learn and retain skills, Comer, Giordano and Brown (chapter 13, case study A, this volume) refresh our hopes for reaching the whole child—in perfect symmetry with ASCD’s philosophy—with a reminder that history has taught us to integrate developmental perspectives throughout schooling. Comer et al. also emphasize the critical need to build relationships among everyone in the school building for the sake of students’ well-being and ability to learn.

Added to this undergirding for ensuring that students reach their fullest potential as caring and contributing citizens, which we categorize as prosocial education, are the nation’s earliest efforts to support schools in achieving the academic mission originally embraced for the sake of the whole child. These efforts include the varied topics our authors address, including a host of prevention programs and practices that reduce substance abuse and other negative behaviors and influences. Our list is not exhaustive. The foundation and history of the U.S. education system reveal content and strategies that form the precursors for the prosocial education umbrella.

Evolution of Types of Prosocial Strategies and Programs

In looking back across five centuries of education in the United States, determination to help develop mature, productive, and ethical citizens emanated from faith communities starting in the 1600s. Moral instruction was the primary focus that dominated Puritan education in the 1620s; Latin grammar schools in 1635 (for boys selected to be leaders in church, government, and the courts); and Harvard College, established in 1636 (Sass, 2011). The work of John Locke (1692/93) in England influenced educators on this side of the Atlantic. He advocated educating the masses (though he considered only boys and young gentlemen) in morality, rational thinking, and reflection. By 1697, Locke espoused the importance of assisting in the development of a work ethic (Sass, 2011), the genesis of schools often considered the training ground for business and industry.

For early childhood, “dame schools” in New England during the 1700s offered the equivalent of kindergarten at a local woman’s house to provide instruction in life skills, the alphabet, and rudimentary math; boys learned basic information for succeeding in town schools, while girls learned sewing and cooking (National Women’s History Museum, 2007). Mostly prohibited from attending town schools until the mid-1700s, females finally had their own schools when Moravians (Protestants from central Europe) opened the first ones in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, in 1741 and Salem, North Carolina, in 1772 (Sass, 2011; Savin & Abrahams, 1957). Philadelphia followed in 1787 with the Young Ladies Academy, supporting the argument that girls “are citizens and should have the same educational opportunities as men” (Savin & Abrahams, 1957, p. 58). Respected and prolific educator Benjamin Rush provided a colonial rationale in 1786 for educating girls: “Any system of education that would render the laws of democracy effective must provide adequate training for women and must give them a grasp of the principles involved in a democracy, for they must concur in all our plans of education for young men” (Wassenhove, n.d., para. 15).

Benjamin Franklin, a significant prosocial education proponent in the variety of teaching and learning methods he practiced in the 1700s, encouraged schools to be mindful of creating a healthy environment for students in using science, human reason, and secularism as education’s bases (Allensworth, Wyche, Lawson, & Nicholson, 1995; Sass, 2011). Though Franklin upset a host of religious groups who were the nation’s first and most prolific educators, he established the first English Academy in 1751 that taught a classical and modern curriculum, with subjects in history, geography, navigation, surveying, and languages, and without the influence of religious dogmas (Sass, 2011). He even insisted that physical exercise be taught as a primary subject (Allensworth et al., 1995).

Another famous American, Thomas Jefferson, created a two-track educational system in 1779, insisting that “the laboring and the learned” needed separate methods and content (Sass, 2011, para. 1779). Believing education to be a state’s responsibility, Jefferson led the way for public schools to come under government control, be free of religion, and be widely available to everyone without consideration of one’s social status (Thattai, n.d.). However, this level of availability occurred only later, in the 1840s, according to Thattai (n.d.), due to leadership from Horace Mann and Henry Barnard, common-school reformers who argued for public schools as a panacea for developing good citizens, uniting society, and preventing crime and poverty. In his prescient prosocial education voice, Mann advocated that “education, then, beyond all other devices of human origin, is the great equalizer of the conditions of men—the balance-wheel of the social machinery” (Richman, 1995, p. 49). Apparently their argument was sound, convincing the states—beginning with Massachusetts—to pass laws requiring towns to provide public schools that would be free for future citizens. By 1885, compulsory attendance laws were enacted in sixteen states, but with sporadic enforcement; by 1918, all states required children to attend school (Sass, 2011). Mann’s great equalizer was now available to every child in the United States.

As the Industrial Revolution was unfolding (1820–1870), an increasing emphasis on worker preparedness influenced school structure and content, making way for the notion that education’s aim reached beyond classical topics to life instruction in responsible family and work habits. Mann supported the Prussian system, developed by Pestalozzi in 1805 as a means for incorporating “meaningful experience to create productive people” (Smith, 1997, p. 1). Pestalozzi built on Rousseau’s dilemma of educating individuals to enhance their freedom versus educating citizens for responsibility (Smith, 1997). Though this development was deemed a panacea by progressive educators, the Prussian system: (1) imposed high school graduation examinations as a requirement for professional positions and civil servants, (2) abolished or negated religious instruction and private schools that did not follow government standards for public education, (3) sought to fine parents or have their children taken away from them if they ignored the compulsory attendance law, and (4) required an official language to offset the cultural influence of immigrants from Europe (Richman, 1995).

Historical journeys in U.S. prosocial education are not complete without considering John Dewey’s influence at the turn of the twentieth century, who considered schools as the most effective way to promote and sustain democracy (Sass, 2011). A pragmatic leader of the progressive movement, Dewey (1916) can be viewed as a prosocial educator in his emphasis on experiential education, with the teacher acting as facilitator or guide of a mutually beneficial process. The Montessori movement in 1911 exemplified Dewey’s ideals and continues today (Sass, 2011). If students and teachers are engaged as collaborators in hands-on lessons across the curriculum, Dewey would agree with us that students are more than receptacles, capable of helping to shape their character, social-emotional, and moral development. Vincent and Grove extend the Dewey discussion in chapter 6.

The early 1900s also witnessed the explosion of testing as a primary component of schools, first through IQ measurements at Stanford University in 1916, followed by the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) in 1926. Through emphasis on these types of tests and their descendents (e.g., mandated state tests), our education system has little time to assist students in applying classroom lessons to their lives—our second side of the coin. Corrigan more fully examines testing in chapters 5 and 23.

A wonderful rebuttal to the testing focus was a then-unique grant opportunity by an anonymous businessman for schools to renew their commitment to moral and character education (Character Education Institution, 1922). A twenty-thousand-dollar award was offered for the best methods of instruction in public schools for character education, “the only public expression of direct interest on the part of all the people of the Nation in preparation of the Nation’s boys and girls for their life as citizens of the republic and of the states of which it is composed” (Character Education Institution, 1922, pp. vi). The Iowa Plan won, aiming at K–12 instruction and teacher training regarding effective methods to help students understand moral experiences and develop related personal convictions through its focus on eleven areas: “health, life in the group, civic relations, industrial and economic relations, vocations, parenthood and family life, mastery of a tradition, appreciation of beauty, use of leisure time, reverence, and creative activity” (Character Education Institution, 1922, pp. 6–8). An inspiring quote exemplifies the Iowa Plan’s contribution to prosocial education:

The center of responsibility [for success of the school] must shift to the children. The joy of each one is full when allowed to share in the duties and responsibilities of the place. If the pupils learn the delight of helping in the conduct of recitations, projects and other activities, the outcome is a heightening of the feeling of ownership in the school, and of their pleasure in accepting its tasks as personal. Loyalty to the group and the school should ripen naturally. (pp. 6–7)

In a profound rebuke of the prevailing spirit of U.S. education (then and now), the fourth of Iowa’s six guiding principles emphasized “that while Prussian methods of teaching the school subjects were superior to our own, its organization was fit only for an imperialism and not for a democracy. . . . Prussianization . . . has made for centralization and domination rather than for freedom and initiative (Character Education Institution, 1922, p. 9). We believe the Iowa Plan championed the prosocial education umbrella in its sixth principle: “The democratic spirit in school brings happiness and health to all concerned. . . .The sweetness of real companionship of teacher and pupil in enjoying each other and accomplishing nice things together is an unmixed satisfaction and contains within itself the very essence of democracy” (p. 11). The reader can find additional motivation and a remarkable rationale for prosocial education in this ageless reference, which was digitized in 2008 (searchable in Google Books for a cost).

The Iowa Plan might be viewed as a return to the original ideal celebrated in early U.S. classrooms. Teachers were autonomous, using academic freedom to fully engage students in lesson plans that included prosocial education, as exemplified in the above paragraphs. Iowa’s plan was not subjected to today’s curriculum pacing guides, and educators were not forced to teach to the test. During the days of the one-room schoolhouse, parents and community actively connected to the school’s whole-child mission. Today’s large school systems, set up in highly industrial structures, and court-ordered busing to achieve desegregation of family race, income level, and educational attainment have resulted in schools’ effectual exclusion of family involvement and sense of community, two of the most critical components of a child’s development—and of prosocial education.

A Brief Historical Perspective on Prosocial Education Components

In part 2 of this book, some authors provide the history of the chapter’s topic. For example, the history of character education is well traced by Vincent and Grove in chapter 6. This section primarily expounds on aspects of prosocial education’s history that are not covered elsewhere.

Civic education’s start, as Branson relates in chapter 7, marched in step with America’s first days. Educating for the perpetuity of democracy reigned alongside religion as the primary or dual goals of education in 1642, when Massachusetts required parental involvement in children’s attainment of a proper education (Sass, 2011).

Moral education began when the Massachusetts Bay Colony schools of 1647 provided basic Calvinist religious information (Applied Research Center, 2011) and continued throughout our nation’s early development, primarily for males. However, by 1772, Moravians from central Europe established a school for girls in Salem, North Carolina, joining several schools recently begun in New England as assurance that girls were trained to raise good, moral men, as noted earlier in this chapter. Because moral education grew to be deemed equally critical for both genders, chapter 8 extols the profound contribution that Kohlberg’s theory made to our national thoughts around moral development.

Service learning became formally organized in 1903 with the Cooperative Education Movement that began at the University of Cincinnati. William James and John Dewey advanced its intellectual foundations from 1905 to 1910 in developing service-based learning processes (National Service-Learning Clearinghouse, 2012), particularly nonmilitary national service, which James envisioned in his essay “The Moral Equivalency of War” (James, 1906). Berea College in Kentucky still embodies the 1915 onset of Folk Schools in Appalachia developing two- and four-year colleges that required a living connection between “work, service and learning” (National Service-Learning Clearinghouse, 2012). After President Kennedy established the Peace Corps in 1961, numerous efforts increased the linkage between service and learning, from President Johnson’s VISTA (Volunteers in Service to America) in 1964 and the 1969 Atlanta Service-Learning Conference, to the 1971 White House Conference on Youth, which led to the creation of national internships and the Society for Field Experience Education (National Service-Learning Clearinghouse, 2012). The 1980s solidified service learning with grassroots support, ensuring its continuation throughout K–20 school levels: the National Youth Leadership Council in 1982 prepared youth to lead the way through service; Campus Compact in 1985 involved colleges and universities in giving back to their communities through a formal learning process; and youth conservation corps replicated service learning across states and cities in 1985 (National Service-Learning Clearinghouse, 2012). Maryland led the way in creating a mandatory service requirement for high school graduation in 1992, with twenty-three states currently implementing policies regarding service learning (Education Commission of the States, 1999).

Mentoring—Homer introduced Mentor as part of the Trojan War epics. Ulysses went to war, leaving wife Penelope and baby Telemachus with his close friend Mentor, who, for twenty years, focused on “the boy’s education, shaping of his character, wisdom of his decisions, and clarity and steadfastness of purpose” (Barondess, 1995, p. 3). To address the critical, spiritual element during moral dilemmas or anxious times, Athena (goddess of wisdom) often embodied Mentor, providing “good counsel, prudent restraint and practical insight” (Barondess, 1995, p. 4). Barondess (1995) summarized the ancient, literal beginning of mentoring as an “eloquent expression of important elements of its anchoring and guiding characteristics” (p. 6).

In 1805, New York demonstrated a mentor system with a master teacher in a room with hundreds of students, providing lessons to older students who worked with younger ones. Factory owners influenced these schools, asking educators to emphasize discipline and obedience as a method for producing successful employees.

Social-emotional learning—Goleman’s (1996) Emotional Intelligence book helped catalyze the research that produced the modern concept of SEL, though its roots—like most prosocial education components—are traceable to Plato. Strolling around ancient Athens, the philosopher-teacher heralded a comprehensive curriculum that found balance among “physical education, the arts, math, science, character and moral judgment. ‘By maintaining a sound system of education and upbringing, you produce citizens of good character,’ he explained” (Edutopia, 2011). Yale’s James Comer (see his case study after chapter 13 in this volume) piloted the embryonic SEL-focused Comer School Development Program during the late 1960s around the notion that relationships among a school’s children and adults were the keys to learning. By 1992, Comer had demonstrated significant reduction in the education gap for poor-performing schools using the Comer method, stimulating a movement that resulted in CASEL—the Collaborative to Advance Social and Emotional Learning. Primarily through the partnership of Roger Weissberg, professor, and Yale graduate and local educator Timothy Shriver, “New Haven became the de facto hub of CASEL research” (Edutopia, 2011). With Weissberg’s move to the University of Illinois at Chicago in 1994, CASEL was renamed in 1996 as the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning, “to reflect the new research in the field and to make sure that academics were a part of the conversation” (Edutopia, 2011; see chapter 11 in this volume for an in-depth discussion of CASEL).

Prevention (e.g., bullying, substance abuse)—in chapter 3, Kidron and Osher discuss the effect of a mid-twentieth-century phenomenon on prevention research efforts that also has caused a simultaneous, disjointed focus on providing holistic approaches to prosocial education. Funding for grants, beginning at the federal level, has created a profound silo effect, leaving in its wake the tendency to create programs targeted to specific policy initiatives, to “go where the money flows.” Good rationales emanate from policy makers, who attempt to meet the greatest needs but are often distracted by headlines, catastrophes, and their most ardent constituents.

The proliferation of illegal drugs during the 1960s led to a wide outbreak of program development to help keep youth drug free, which called for massive funding to introduce this new topic and lots of new curricula in schools. Hence, an influx of grants split off a content area from the comprehensive focus of prosocial education and holistic health. Within a couple of decades, more programs addressed content that was deliberately related to substance abuse prevention as a clever method to provide funding for prosocial education, including mentoring, violence and bullying prevention, life skills development, youth resiliency training, and social development. All these areas are discussed in this book. The hopeful message to educators and policy makers is the same: return to our roots of understanding the symbiotic emanation of prosocial education. It’s all connected in the lives of children and in the minds of teachers dedicated to nurturing tomorrow’s fully engaged adults.

Contemporary Examples and Themes

This final section brings us up to date historically, with several current examples to be welcomed under the prosocial education umbrella. As a teacher educator since 1982, I’ve experienced an ebb and flow of teacher preparation methods and strategies. One of the most influential for me personally and for my state was the Kentucky Education Reform Act of 1990 (KERA), the result of Kentucky’s Supreme Court declaring the educational system unconstitutional for its flagrant disparities in resources and student outcomes across the state (University of Kentucky, 2010). The collaborative teaching process that KERA required brought new thought to colleges of education in the state and throughout the nation, as many of us were invited to make national presentations about the sweeping reforms taking place. In hindsight, the overall goal was to include prosocial education in our classrooms and school buildings. We just didn’t have the term this handbook presents.

During the KERA-shifting phenomenon, transformative teaching gained a footing in teacher preparation and early teaching careers. Teach for America (the corps) has magnified the link between teaching, real learning, and prosocial education for first-time teachers who are passionate about bringing education reform to resource-poor areas. Started in 1990, three of its core values are magnificent marketing demands for prosocial education: (1) transformational change—education must be a force that is “life-changing for children and transforming for our country,” focused on a “deep belief in children and communities, the magnitude of educational inequity and its consequences, and our optimism about the solvability of the problem” (Teach for America, 2011a, n.p.); (2) team—members of the corps “value and care about each other, operate with a generosity of spirit, and have fun in the process of working together” (Teach for America, 2011a, n.p.), translating those elements into the classroom for today’s students; and (3) diversity—acknowledging and celebrating multiple perspectives, the corps recruits teachers who match the racial and economic backgrounds of their students as its most effective way to achieve real change in eliminating educational gaps. One alumnus, Dave Levin, indicated that “Transformational schools can exist in every single neighborhood” (Teach for America, 2011b, n.p.). We couldn’t say it better: prosocial education marks the path for ensuring that schools transform across our nation.

Health-related disciplines—Rash and Pigg (1979) reported that focusing on the whole student was a founding principle for education and required attention to mind, body, and spirit. These authors listed early international efforts that looked to schools for more than curriculum: free lunch for low-income students in 1790 (Bavaria), 1891 (London), and 1899 (New York City), the same year that eyesight testing began in Connecticut. As early as 1879–1898, efforts included teaching the harmful effects of alcohol, drugs, and narcotics (Rash & Pigg, 1979). In the 1920s, over 73 percent of surveyed schools in 108 cities reported that they integrated content related to the whole student in “other subjects such as language, civics, reading, physical education, general science, and art” (Allensworth et al., 1995, p. 10). Students were recognized as capable of being more than receptacles into which knowledge was poured.

Today’s health curricula are aligned with National Health Education Standards and include at least ten common content areas that nurture the body–mind–spirit connection, which is deeply linked to prosocial education: community health, consumer health, environmental health, family life, mental and emotional health, injury prevention and safety, nutrition, personal health and fitness, prevention and control of disease, and substance abuse prevention (National Joint Committee on National Health Education Standards, 2007). In practical terms, thriving in these areas necessitates doing well in the prosocial education realm.

How is making healthy choices related to prosocial education? The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) tie it together succinctly through established research: healthy students are more likely to succeed academically (Dewey, 1999; Dunkle & Nash, 1991; Mandell, Hill, Carter, & Brandon, 2002; Shephard, 1996). Specifically “hunger, chronic illness, or physical and emotional abuse, can lead to poor school performance,” and “health-risk behaviors such as substance use, violence, and physical inactivity are consistently linked to academic failure and often affect students’ school attendance, grades, test scores, and ability to pay attention in class” (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2011, para. 3). Further, the CDC asserts that “effective school health policies and programs may also help close the educational achievement gap” (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2011, para. 4), certainly a goal consistent with prosocial education (see chapter 18).

Comprehensive school health also includes the variety of strategies and programs outlined in this volume because the scope includes contexts and influences on body, mind, and spirit. We similarly assert that the prosocial education movement unites the breadth and depth of efforts that comprehensively affect students, most pointedly experienced when school climate is the focus (see chapter 9). When educators fully understand the interconnection of seemingly disjointed strategies, programs, and policies, they begin to realize that their influence is a most powerful factor in helping students to reach their potential.

In fact, as we have and will continue to affirm, meaningful relationships between students and teachers and other adults are the heartbeat of prosocial education, formally confirmed in research since the early 1980s (Garmezy, 1985; Rhodes, 2001; Rutter & Giller, 1983; Werner & Smith, 1982). Rhodes (2001) emphasized that these relationships with nonparent adults might be the most powerful influence on adolescents, but she asked a critical question on the minds of many educators: with today’s increasing emphasis on test scores, where do teachers find the time to focus on listening to youth and developing supportive relationships? May this book be a guide to answering that query.

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