How America Got Mean.

In schools across Scandinavia, students studied literature and folk cultures to identify their own emotions, wounds, and weaknesses, in order to become the complex human beings that modern society required. The "research ideal" supplanted the earlier humanistic ideal of cultivating the whole student. Schools began to abandon moral formation in the 1940s and '50s, as the education historian B. Edward McClellan chronicles in Moral Education in America: "By the 1960s deliberate moral education was in full-scale retreat" as educators "paid more attention to the SAT scores of their students, and middle-class parents scrambled to find schools that would give their children the best chances to qualify for elite colleges and universities.". [Extracted from the article]