Dorn, S. (2018, October 31). Review of Fast and curious: A history of shortcuts in American education by R. L. Hampel. Education Review, 25. http://dx.doi.org/10.14507/er.v25.2425 October 31, 2018 ISSN 1094-5296 Hampel, R. L. (2017). Fast and curious: A history of shortcuts in American education. New York, NY: Rowman & Littlefield. Pp. 192 ISBN: 978-1-4758-3692-9 Reviewed by Sherman Dorn Arizona State University United States Robert Hampel’s Fast and Curious is a brief and efficient history of American efforts to provide brief and efficient education. Hampel focuses on correspondence schools such as the Famous Artists School, collections of high culture such as the Mortimer Adler’s Great Books collection of canonical literature, three- year baccalaureates and other attempts to abbreviate college and graduate programs, as well as shorthand courses, speed reading, and their ilk. Hampel describes his project as an historical perspective on fears about educational shortcuts – inspired by fears of colleagues that drugs for learning would eclipse educational psychology as a field. In roving the landscape of 19th and 20th century shortcuts, Hampel focuses on two types, what he calls “faster and easier” shortcuts and “faster and harder” shortcuts. These types do not refer to the realities of Americans who tried these shortcuts but rather to their appeal. In the category of “faster and easier,” he places 20th-century correspondence schools and collections of “great literature” that Education Review /Reseñas Educativas 2 promised to provide shortcuts to credentials and to high culture. He traces the rise and fall of Albert Dorne’s Famous Artists School from its start in suburban Connecticut during the 1940s to its demise in 1973. Boasting notables such as Norman Rockwell, Famous Artists and other correspondence schools promised to provide a path to success for those who were otherwise bound in their communities and dead-end jobs. In describing shortcuts to culture, Hampel includes a range of products from the Harvard Classics, also known as the “five-foot shelf,” to that ubiquitous digest series of great works that grated on teachers everywhere, Cliffs Notes. What Hampel argues that they had in common was the promise of a fast path to cultural knowledge. Hampel’s second category is “faster and harder,” in which he discusses shorter paths through formal higher education credentials and various techniques to shorten acquisition of knowledge from shorthand to Evelyn Wood. Hampel points out that in the 19th century, students rarely stayed long in college, and the primary effort of collegians was to extend courses of study, not shorten them. The dissenters from this trend included efforts to establish the Doctor of Arts pedagogical degree, dual enrollment courses, calls for three-year undergraduate degrees, experiments such as Simon’s Rock, and competency-based education. In the end, few of these efforts lasted, and the role of the persisters such as Advanced Placement courses and dual enrollment has served less to shorten college than to provide momentum so that students will actually finish. The last substantive chapter in Fast and Curious is a curious collection of the simplified spelling movement, shorthand schools, and speed-reading fads, stretching from the late 19th century to the last few decades. Other than specialized uses such as court reporting or occasional alternative spellings such as thru, none of these efforts has thrived. In the end, Hampel concludes, Americans have a penchant for believing in practical shortcuts despite the persistent norms of regularized schedules of formal schooling. Hampel contributes in three areas. First, Fast and Curious fits into the small literature on autodidacticism (see Kett, 1994). Much of the marketing of shortcuts depended on Americans’ willingness to believe in the value of autonomous striving for knowledge and recognition. Self-efficacy may not have been efficacious except for correspondence school bottom lines, but Hampel documents how many American shortcuts have relied on individual self-confidence in the capacity to learn outside more formal, scaffolded structures that we call schools. In addition, Hampel’s story is one that relies on the institutional traces of cultural norms – using the success or failure of these shortcuts to tell us about American culture more broadly. In this way, the work follows Zelizer (1985) and her reliance on court records to make a case for the evolution of the priceless child. Some will be as upset with Hampel’s focus on institutional documentation as with Zelizer’s when her book was new. There is quite a bit to learn from this type of argument, as long as one understands that Hampel does not address much about the reception and uses of either short-and-easier or short-and-harder efforts. Third, Hampel’s book is one more volume on the growing shelf skeptical of educational “disruption.” Whether one wishes to compare Hampel with a fellow historian such as Cuban (1986, 2009) or contemporary critics such as Watters (2014), Stoll (1996), or Morozov (2013), there is an inherent pessimism in Hampel’s story about the belief that shortcuts are likely to be effective, except as marketing and ideology and American hype. Finally, Hampel provides some of the subaltern story of American credentialism. For those who recognized the growing value of formal credentials in the 20th century, correspondence schools provided an appealing alternative, one they might still yet attain. Review of Fast and Curious by S. Dorn 3 Anyone could buy a shelf of Will and Ariel Durant or the Encyclopedia Britannica, and if no one other than a young puppy truly digested it, well, it was on the shelf as a visible attempt at acquiring cultural capital. One could do much worse than assign Hampel and McMillan Cottom (2017) as reading for a course that explored the uses and abuses of credentialism. Hampel excludes some types of shortcuts, such as cheating. He also avoids the world of elementary and secondary education except for the story of Cliffs Notes and brief references to dual-enrollment courses. These are limits, not flaws. Of somewhat greater concern is the collapsing of awkward collections into two of the chapters. It is not clear how Cliffs Notes is the same shortcut to culture as the collection of books associated with Harvard or the University of Chicago. In the former case, the market for quick digests was explicitly tied to success in formal schooling to the extent that college bookstores have willingly sold Cliffs Notes and its imitators. No college bookstore has sold Mortimer Adler’s collection of his selected classics to 19-year-old students. Similarly, the last chapter matches two attempts at skills shortcuts (shorthand and speed reading) with an attempt to change American spelling more broadly. For whatever else we might fault “Melvil Dui” (Ogren, 2017), one can hardly argue that he and his compatriots only thought of simplified spelling as shortcuts for skills. One suspects that a slightly longer book and more unified chapters might have made a more coherent argument. Despite the awkwardness of some chapters, Fast and Curious is a unique work that should be in the hands of anyone who believes in shortcuts, not to mention those who wish to educate the Pollyannaish about the history of such beliefs. References Cuban, L. (1986). Teachers and machines: The classroom use of technology since 1920. New York, NY: Teachers College Press. Cuban, L. (2009). Oversold and underused. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Kett, J. F. (1994). The pursuit of knowledge under difficulties: From self-improvement to adult education in America, 1750-1990. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. McMillan Cottom, T. M. (2017). Lower ed: The troubling rise of for-profit colleges in the new economy. New York, NY: The New Press. Morozov, E. (2013). To save everything, click here: The folly of technological solutionism. New York, NY: PublicAffairs. Ogren, C. A. (2017). Complexities of efficiency reform: The case of simplified spelling, 1876–1921. History of Education Quarterly, 57(3), 333–368. https://doi.org/10.1017/heq.2017.15 Stoll, C. (1996). Silicon snake oil: Second thoughts on the information highway. New York, NY: Anchor Books. Watters, A. (2014). The monsters of education technology. Hermosa Beach, CA: Author. Zelizer, V. A. R. (1985). Pricing the priceless child: The changing social value of children. New York, NY: Basic Books. Education Review /Reseñas Educativas 4 About the Reviewer Sherman Dorn is a professor of education and Director of the Division of Educational Leadership and Innovation, Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College, Arizona State University. He is the author of Creating the Dropout (1996) and Accountability Frankenstein (2007) and coeditor of Schools as Imagined Communities (2006) and Education Reform in Florida (2007). He can be followed on Twitter, @shermandorn, and his irregular newsletter is available at https://t.co/naVvM7M38s Education Review/Reseñas Educativas/Resenhas Educativas is supported by the edXchange initiative’s Scholarly Communications Group at the Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College, Arizona State University. Copyright is retained by the first or sole author, who grants right of first publication to the Education Review. 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