The Assault on 'The Assault on Humanism': Classicists Respond to Abraham Flexner's 'A Modern School'
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abraham Flexner’s controversial proposal in “A Modern School” (1916) to eliminate the classics from the secondary curriculum, prepared under the auspices of the General Education Board (GEB), precipitated a concerted campaign from classicists who kept the controversy before the public through editorials in the popular press, before educators through articles in professional journals, before social elites through a high profile conference at Princeton University and publication of Value of the Classics, and before the GEB through persistent correspondence. Capitalizing on the prestige that the classics enjoyed among social and political elites, classicists succeeded, through deft use of the existing and establishment of a new professional network, to persuade the GEB to subsidize a comprehensive study of classical pedagogy in US high schools. Through the resulting Classical Investigation, classicists co-opted progressive educators’ utility criterion and “scientific” method, exploited opportunities for favorable public promotion of the discipline, and procured generous funding from the GEB that supported not only the Classical Investigation, but also the fledgling American Classical League in the lean years ahead. After summarizing the development of and recommendations in Flexner’s “A Modern School,” this study reconstructs the response to Flexner’s proposals and evaluates the extent to which existing historical interpretations explain this overlooked struggle to defend the traditional academic curriculum.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.029 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".