Daniel Tanner in his home study near Rutgers University
Daniel Tanner might be nearly 96, but he recalls his days of playing hooky with the clarity of the vivacious teenager he was. A decade or more before he became a PhD student studying education at The Ohio State University, Tanner was a bored but brilliant high schooler who had spent most of his youth in foster care.
Tanner, ’55 PhD, remembers his years at an orphanage starting at age 4. He and his 2-year-old brother were sent there after the untimely death of his father and hospitalization of his mother. They spent their childhood and early adolescence in six foster homes.
“My family clearly were members of a ‘suffering humanity of the Great Depression,’ to borrow the expression used by President Franklin Roosevelt,” Tanner said.
Teachers walked him home in an effort to convince his foster parents that he should have the opportunity to go to college.
“More than once I witnessed the teacher slump in realization that the foster parents had no interest in my future education,” he said.
His best schools were a refuge for Tanner and his brother, and their fortunes changed in their teenage years. Tanner’s younger brother went on to law school and served as chief counsel to the United States Senate Committee on Juvenile Delinquency.
Tanner became a leader in the field of curriculum studies and adolescent education and development. Together with his wife, Laurel, they co-authored such leading texts as History of the School Curriculum and Curriculum Development: Theory into Practice. Laurel Tanner passed away in 2013.
Tanner now has donated $1 million to found the Daniel Tanner Foundation Endowed Professorship in Ohio State’s College of Education and Human Ecology. The faculty position will focus on curriculum studies on adolescence and democracy. Tanner has written about and researched the topics extensively over his 67-year career.
“Adolescence is a period when youth learn to think hypothetically, or should,” he said. “They develop speculative reasoning. In school, we deal with who, what, when, where, how many or how much. We don't deal enough with ‘Why?’ and ‘So, what?’ Or, ‘What if?’ and ‘How come?’ And those are the questions that adolescents like, and they have to come up with hypotheses to deal with these questions intelligently in connection with real problems and issues.”
Crusading for democracy’ through education
Those crucial years between childhood and adulthood are also when people begin establishing their ideals about how the world could be.
“It may last your whole life or may change, but adolescence is the period when you form an ideology,” Tanner said.
Those ideologies have critical implications for how society moves forward. Will the United States continue being a nation fractured on political, economic and educational fault lines? Will young people work together to find solutions to the prevailing problems of poverty, war, disinformation, racism and violence?
Those same questions have plagued American education all of Tanner’s life, and even before, when the progressive education movement first took root from the late 1800s through the early 20th century. The issues continue to be battled over in state houses, among school boards and education researchers.
Students’ discussions and study of societal problems are being suppressed, Tanner said, as is relevant literature. That’s part of the reason he believes democracy is more at risk today than it has been since World War II.
“World War II was a great unifier in that sense,” he said. “Each generation has to experience a renewal process — putting our beliefs into practice. Each generation has to discover, to find, its ideology, and yet we ignore that in the schools. We can't indoctrinate the ideology. So, we have to deal with controversy in the curriculum. And that creates all kinds of problems” that schools try to evade. “We don't have critical thinking. We leave out the hypothetical, the speculative, the issues, the problems.”
Tanner is a great fan of Ohio State and its renowned education scholars, including Edgar Dale, who served on his dissertation committee. He is also an admirer of John Dewey and has written books for and about the education society named for the philosopher. He ascribes to Dewey’s concept of the “complete act of thought” or “method of intelligence” — finding real problems in the world around you, considering evidence, interpreting of data, forming hypotheses and testing possible solutions.
“He's a Deweyan,” said Barry Galasso, Tanner’s one-time doctoral student who went on to become superintendent of several school districts in New Jersey. “He believes that the purpose of public education is to advance democracy, not the status quo. So, the only way you can do that is by having kids think and have discourse about different opinions. Not debate, but discourse, so that the issues can be studied. And then adolescents can draw their own conclusions about how that fits into a democracy.”
The new professorship will focus on just that. It is telling that as a child, Tanner heard Hitler’s speeches on American radio and wondered why they were broadcast. He knows full well that history is cyclical, said Dean Don Pope-Davis.
“Through our scholarship and pedagogy, we need to ensure that history does not repeat itself,” Pope-Davis said. “Or if it does, we must have better informed people who are reminded of history. What is our responsibility? This professorship will invest in the notion that adolescents are the next generation of leaders. If we miss them and their understanding of the role democracy plays in their lives, we have another lost generation.”
Trauma leads to inquiry
Tanner remains in awe of teachers who first led him to ask, “So, what?” “What if?” and “How come?” Given his own personal history, those questions were critical not just for his success, but his survival.
When he and his brother landed in the New York orphanage, Tanner took it upon himself to be his brother’s guardian. Though the two endured years of bouncing from one foster home to the next, they remained together. He is writing a book about his experiences now.
“Some of (the homes) were good,” he recalled. “Some were bad.”
The same was true for the schools he attended. In his suburban New York schools, Tanner said, “Teachers saved me…. They opened up the world to me, in many ways.”
His sixth-grade education centered around a progressive curriculum. “We could make a lamp, and that was unbelievable,” he said. “The base of the lamp had to be a perfect circle. The vertical part of the lamp is a half-circle. You had to do the electrical work, which meant you had to deal with the radius, the diameter and the circumference. And we were in sixth grade.”
Tanner also took a junior high printshop class, where he learned to typeset and bind volumes, as well as edit a book of essays and poetry written by classmates. He fondly recalls the smell of printer’s ink and the tactile quality of the paper. (His interest in printing continues; his book contracts included clauses that he would approve the design, type, binding material and color of each book.)
“All that hands-on is gone; it's not in schools anymore. The curriculum is purely academic,” he said.
“Unfortunately, the junior high school, an American invention, has been virtually eliminated in favor of the nondescript middle school,” he said.
Spend time with Tanner and you find that he is an admirer and collector of art. He met and befriended author James Michener and U.S. General James Gavin. He was a colleague and friend of Stanford’s Paul Hanna — a leading figure in modernizing curriculum in history and social studies during the progressive era and author about the Frank Lloyd Wright house he owned.
Tanner’s bookshelves are crammed with 3,000-plus volumes on every conceivable topic. He has read them all but also wrote 15 of them. Through the Tanner Foundation, he edited and published a forgotten edition of John Dewey’s Sources of a Science of Education, including Dewey’s last published words on education. A French edition published under Tanner’s editorship.
His first book, Schools for Youth: Change and Challenge in Secondary Education, contains his photographs — “a hobby of mine,” he said, “which began in a photo laboratory in junior high school.” He approved the book design himself.
Every one of Tanner’s books talks about the danger of removing what some call “education frills” — arts, music and extracurricular activities, Galasso said. As superintendent, Galasso never cut exploratory and enrichment electives out of the curriculum.
“I’ve seen kids grow six, seven years and grade levels in reading based on the fact that they got interested in something,” he said. “It wasn't that they didn't have the capability. They weren't interested. So, the electives and broad-based curriculum allow kids the opportunity to turn that light on.”
Forever a teacher
Tanner’s letters to the editor appeared regularly in the New York Times in the 1990s; other articles have appeared in The Atlantic, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Educational Researcher and Education Week.
“Standardized tests exert enormous coercive power over the curriculum as well as over children, teachers, and school administrators….” he wrote in a 1996 article in Education Week that featured Edvard Munch-like drawings by distressed third graders who had just finished standardized tests. “The tests tend to reinforce a skill-drill and error-oriented curriculum, while driving out or negating a curriculum rich in generative ideas and the expression in childhood experience.”
Tanner is still and ever will be an educator. He continues to quiz former students — including Galasso, who is 75 and retired — about education literature and whether they are writing enough.
“He’s 95 years old, and he can write,” Galasso said. “So, it’s like, ‘What the hell, you guys are juveniles,’ compared to him, and we should be stepping this up.”
Tanner has a knack for insisting on the best work anyone can produce — better than people believe they can do. It goes back to that concept of hypothetical thinking. “What if?” “So, what?”
What if a professorship at his beloved alma mater could lead more students — tomorrow’s leaders — to solve the great problems facing the 21st century? What if they reached their best solutions working together?
That could lead to a “a universe of discourse, understanding and competence,” Tanner said. In short, a better world for all.