Education in Crisis
Critique of Adjustment and Conformism
The critique of conformism was politically promiscuous and was employed by both conservatives and liberals.
Conservatives criticized that progressive education would forcefully "adjust" pupils to a faceless mass and 'effeminate' them: "The great decision confronting the West in the future is how to overcome the spoiled-child psychology sufficiently to discipline for struggle."
Richard Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948
"Effemination' functioned synonymously with conformism. Richard Hofstadter criticized the 'feminization' of the teaching profession (Hartman, 134); Arthur Bestor drew a picture of a teachers college as "overprotective mother".
Arthur Bestor, The Restoration of Learning: A Program for Redeeming the Unfulfilled Promise of American Education, New York: Knopf, 1955, 79