It was never a fair fight. On one side stood the humanists, a coterie of tweed-coated academics at cushy, exclusive northeastern colleges. They were opposed by a broad coalition of pragmatic industrialists and ambitious psychologists steeped in the values of standardization and hierarchical management. These educational Taylorists pointed out that while it was nice to think about humanistic ideals like educational self-determination, at a time when many public schools had a hundred kids in a single classroom, half unable to speak English, many living in poverty, educators did not have the
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