Chapter 3: The National Interest and the Teaching of English

The exhortation of University of Kansas Chancellor Franklin D. Murphy, written just months after Sputnik’s launch, illustrated the American educator’s fear and anticipation wrought by the implications of the Soviet scientific feat. Extreme rhetoric warned that education was necessary to compete in an increasingly complex world. Congress sought to remedy the situation through the passage of the National Defense Education Act (NDEA) in 1958. Though this act provided funding beyond research in math and science, including investigations in audio-visual techniques and student loan reform (“Final Action by the 85th,” 1958), those two areas were the primary subjects associated with the NDEA. Since English was left out, NCTE leadership felt that their subject was deemed inferior and unimportant (Christenbury, 1980). Albert R. Kitzhaber (1965), 1964 NCTE president, reacted strongly to the NDEA’s passage, “We in English protested vigorously … The subject to which we had given our lives, the subject that underlies instruction in all other subjects, had in effect been labeled a frill by Congress, something of no importance to national wellbeing” (p. 338). In the minds of NCTE leadership, action was needed.