Record: Robert L. Hampel, Fast and Curious: A History of Shortcuts in American Education (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2017).
Summary: Hampel, a historian of education at the University of Delaware, here releases the fruit of many years of study of various ways Americans have sought to create shortcuts to learning.
Hampel’s book is broken into two thematic units. Part One covers efforts to get an education faster and easier than the traditional route of years and years at school and especially at college or a university. It is titled “Faster and Easier.” Part Two covers efforts to get further through more rigorous, difficult time-saving mechanisms that promise a big payoff but require a big investment. It is titled “Faster and Harder.”
Part One is more relevant to home education, so we will emphasize it here. Briefly, Part Two, which is fascinating in its own right, covers high-exertion shortcuts to learning such as accelerated pacing for attaining higher education degrees through intensive programming, and accelerated approaches to reading and writing like speed-reading, shorthand notation, and simplified spelling. The common theme in these disparate examples is that if it is hard, most people won’t do it, even if it could save them tens of thousands of dollars in college tuition!
Part One covers two types of low-exertion shortcuts. The second chapter, which we will only briefly mention, deals with shortcuts to cultural sophistication. Examples here include various “Great Book” publications like the Harvard Classics or Encyclopedia Britannica’s “Great Books of the Western World,” breathless surveys of knowledge by writers like Will and Ariel Durant, comic-book condensations of classic works, Paint-By-Numbers, Cliffs Notes, and many other efforts to repackage or summarize knowledge in some sort of brief, easily digestible format. Though Hampel doesn’t address the way these resources were used by consumers, it would not be a stretch to think that most of the time people were reading condensed classics or painting-to-learn at home.
The first chapter of Hampel’s book is of great interest to students of home education. In it he tells an engrossing and complex story of the many kinds of correspondence programs that emerged in the 19th and 20th centuries. Unlike the culture shortcuts of chapter two, these programs were usually marketed not as a means to achieve a general cultural patina of sophistication but an actual expertise that could lead to remunerative employment. The goal was to replace traditional brick and mortar schooling with self-study at home, and then to get a great job making lots of money.
Long-time readers of this blog may remember that some years ago I reviewed an earlier article by Dr. Hampel that told the story of the home study programs created by Columbia University and the University of Wisconsin, which tried to provide a more respectable correspondence alternative to the many for-profit companies that used false advertising, predatory recruitment practices, and merciless collection of fees even when clients stopped taking the courses. Columbia University refused to play hardball with students who signed up but dropped out (only about 19% finished). Consequently, it lost money every one of the seven years its program was in existence. The University of Wisconsin was more successful, for two reasons. First, they required payment in full at the beginning of a correspondence course. Second, their recruiters, which they called “field agents,” were not businessmen but educators, and they worked directly with Wisconsin high school administrators to promote their courses to graduating seniors, whose home study efforts could count toward a degree at the University.
In a piece that was published before I began blogging, Hampel had told the story of the for-profits and their attempt to self-regulate through the formation of the National Home Study Council (NHSC), which functioned fom 1926 to 1942. More respectable outfits, like the International Correspondence Schools, which was founded in 1891, and several other veteran organizations, tried to separate their services from those of younger, less savory competitors and charlatans by establishing quality control standards, curbing sensationalism in advertising, trying to limit overly-agressive salesmanship and ruthelss fund collection from the 90% who did not complete the programs they signed up for. But the NHSC was never quite willing to discipline the industry as it set out to do, and federal and state governments stepped in with regulations that put most of these companies out of business. By the end of the 1930s the popularity of correspondence education had declined significantly, partly from lawsuits and regulations, but largely because more young people were staying in school longer, and more professions were requiring credentials much more rigorous than what a correspondence program could provide.
In the first chapter of Fast and Curious Hampel reprises this material but places it in a larger context and adds to the cast of characters. Hampel explains how correspondence education began in the 1870s with the Society to Encourage Studies at Home, the most prominent of several efforts by and for women to spread liberal education to the sex not permitted to attend the nation’s elite colleges. By the 1890s home study had shifted toward the male consumer, and now the goal was not intellectual cultivation but vocational training. Home study peaked in the mid-1920s, as nearly 500,000 people a year enrolled with one of the hundreds of companies offering correspondence programs. This is over half of the national collegiate enrollment (around 900,000 at the time). But, as we have seen, at this same time widespread fraud was tarnishing the reputation of the approach.
Given the crack-down on corrupt practices and more robust credential requirements for the professions that had been the correspondence industry’s bread-and-butter in the early decades of the 20th century, home study shifted gears in the 1940s away from pre-professional training to mentoring in fields that still did not require formal credentials, especially illustration, photography, and writing. Hampel chronicles the rise of the Famous Artists School, which hit on the brilliant strategy of hiring celebrity artists like Normal Rockwell, Alfred Eisenstadt, and Rube Goldberg to serve as “guiding faculty” who promised to help anyone realize their dreams of becoming a successful writer, illustrator, or photographer. The Famous Artists School grew by 20 percent or more every year throughout the 1950s, and numbers kept rising through the 1960s as the school expanded into more and more domains of creative endeavor. By 1967 the school had expanded overseas and had bought up several other companies, vastly extending its mission and range of services. This spending spree, however, proved costly when the stock market took a downturn in 1970, and then an Atlantic Monthly exposé by Jessica Mitford titled “Let Us Now Appraise Famous Writers” revealed a number of sordid details about the program. Time Magazine picked up the story. Mitford appeared on the Merv Griffin Show. America felt swindled. Enrollments declined. Stock value sank. By the end of 1971 the Famous Artist School was bankrupt.
Hampel ends this chapter with a brief discussion of Trump University, founded in 2005, noting its many marketing parallels with the earlier correspondence outfits. Hampel concludes with the reminder one cannot buy shortcuts to education.
Appraisal: It is a wonderful thing to have this material brought together in one convenient place within the covers of a book. Hampel’s topic is intrinsically fascinating and immediately relevant, as millions of Americans for generations have been impacted by it. It also provides much-needed context for all sorts of contemporary manifestations of the same instinct. Trump University did not survive, but hosts of for profit online “universities” emerged later, using aggressive and misleading marketing to hoodwink people into paying for an education they were unlikely to complete and that would not deliver the rewards promised even if thy did. In 2015 under President Obama the most predatory firms were put out of business, though now under the Trump administration the rules put in place to curb the most egregious abuses are being rolled back. Meanwhile, the non-profit sector has entered the fray, just as Columbia, the University of Wisconsin, and the University of Chicago did in the early 20th century. Just last week ProPublica and the New York Times Magazine teamed up to publish an exposé in the Mitford tradition of the unsavory practices going on at Liberty University Online, the nation’s second-largest provider of online higher education, which has been able to grow as at has partly because of its reputation as a Christian institution.
If I have a criticism to make of Hampel’s book it is that we learn far more about the institutional history of the home study outlets than we do about the uses to which they were put by those who purchased the services. On one occasion Hampel quotes historian Rhys Isaac, who said that reading Will Durant’s The Story of Philosophy “encouraged young beginners like me” to move eventually to more robust fare (p. 52). On another he quotes from a letter one disgruntled former Famous Artists School student, who wondered what would become of her ambition and talent now that the program she had sacrificed to pay for was washed up (p. 33). On another he mentions how some students of the Famous Artists School had requested that local clubs be created to facilitate peer exchange and growth, a request that was ignored by the company’s leadership (p. 11). But these are rare instances, and they do not lead to any sort of cumulative picture of what we might call the social history of shortcuts. Hampel has told a wonderful story. The more difficult story to tell, the story of the people who used and were used by these correspondence programs and other shortcuts, remains to be written.
Milton Gaither, Messiah College