The National Defense Education Act of 1958
Congress Enlists Children to Fight the Cold War
October 4, 1957. Radio transmitters began picking up a high-pitched sound from space. The Soviet Union had just launched the world’s first artificial satellite. Even though Sputnik did nothing but beep, many Americans feared that our cold-war enemy would soon be dropping bombs and spying on us from space. Congress declared that America had fallen behind in the space race because the nation’s children were weak in math and science. Without verifying this assertion, they passed the National Defense Education Act of 1958. As chief rocket engineer Wernher von Braun put it, the new soldier would carry a slide rule instead of a gun.
The $9 billion legislation gave money to schools for the development of courses and facilities that would prepare students to go to college to study math, science, and engineering. Within the year, schools had remodeled labs and revamped curriculum.
The drive for military and technological superiority eventually paid off. But the focus on preparing students to go to college to study math, science and engineering widened the gap between rich and poor and denigrated the importance of the arts and humanities and anyone who studied them. Schools also shortchanged average students, contributing to what would become the erosion of what was once America’s great middle class.
Even as Americans won the space race by walking on the moon, the vision of the American education system had grown so narrow that school officials and politicians were unprepared to meet the challenges of the cultural revolution of the sixties.
