Thanks for sharing the link to the full article! I read it without looking at the author's name and jotted many things down in the margins. Looked back at the author's name and crossed off a slew of my notes. Not because I thought my scribbles were wrong, but rather, because of who the author is.

Fallace is an education historian who focuses on historiography and the history of ideas in education. As an example of that, there are many who work in and out of schools who (incorrectly) believe that children have "learning styles" - visual, auditory, kinesthetic, etc. Learning scientists have been pushing hard to correct that misperception and Fallace is one of the historians who've written a history of how "learning styles" came to be widespread in schools. He's also taken a look at ideas that have been adopted among education historians. For example, its been popular since the 1970s or so for people advocating for change in schools to use the phrase "factory model" or otherwise imply schools are based on factories or connected to turning children into docile factory workers. Historians have long pushed back on it as a way to describe the history of education in America and used the Social Efficiency Doctrine to help modern readers understand why educators in the early 1900s wrote so much about factories. It wasn't that school leaders cared about factories, it was that everyone in positions of leadership in the early 1900s was thinking about efficiency, especially as it related to spending tax dollars. Fallace and Victoria Fantozzi wrote a history of Social Efficiency Doctrine idea and questioned if the doctrine actually influenced schools in the way some historians claim it did. Their work sits in conversation with the work of other education historians who are going back and revisiting the work of previous education historians and reconsidering how certain people and ideas have been approached. (Personally, and I freely admit it's a tad conspiratorial on my part, I'm looking forward to the day when someone writes a definitive history that reveals much of John Dewey's writing was actually written by his daughter, Evelyn.)

Back to the article: it's basically a summary of his book, "In the Shadow of Authoritarianism: American Education in the Twentieth Century." I don't have access to a copy of the book but I was able to read a handful of reviews from other historians and this paragraph from one of the reviews is helpful:

The book does not include a conclusion, a customary space for discussing a book’s thesis, arguments, and evidence. Though drawn from a mix of primary and secondary sources, superficial treatment of some topics could be strengthened with archival sources. Despite these limitations, this is a thoughtful, clearly written work that historians of education may enjoy reading. Though it falls short of creating a substantial new interpretation, Fallace’s book offers an interesting reflection upon the history of ideas from twentieth-century education.

In other words, Fallace isn't looking to tell a complete history of ideas in American schools, rather offering up a simplified summary of an idea he studied and is likely still studying. And as far as I can tell, he's the only education historian who is looking at the history of the idea that there was a shift from "what to think" to "how to think." (As an aside, one of the reviews described the idea as "cliched," and that he's possibly over-simplified the nature of content in schools. This isn't, though, necessarily a bad thing. The idea of the "grammar of schooling" to refer to the things make American schools identifiable as American schools - apples, bulletin boards, using a gendered title and a person's last name, etc. - was coined by two education historians, Tyack and Cuban, and has served as a straightforward way to describe a complicated topic.)

And all of this is a lot of words for me to say I can't give you a straightforward answer because Fallen is the primary person writing about this particular topic and his book (and this article) is new enough such that other education historians haven't yet (as far as I can tell) engaged with it in any meaningful way. That said, I've written about some of the things he talked about that you may find useful.

• What's the history of the US school system?
• Is it true that the U.S. education system was #1 in the world until the inception of the Department of Education in 1979?
• Brown vs Board lead to firing of thousands of black teachers as schools were desegregated. Were many of these teachers also integrated into the newly mixed schools?

This is great. I was getting close to completing an answer to this question when I discovered r/edhistory101’s great answer. It completely derailed me in a wonderful way and allowed me to reframe my answer. Thus, I want to use this opportunity to both answer your question AND to discuss a bit of how historians work.

First off, Thomas Fallace has some amazing work. I first learned of him because of his book, The Emergence of Holocaust Education in American Schools. It is the ONLY book length work on the early history of American Holocaust education that comes from a historical perspective, as opposed to pedagogical. He emphasizes that historians who work in education often (I am somewhat guilty here) stress cultural, political, etc. influences on curriculum and pedagogy without giving adequate attention to developments and trends in teaching philosophy. In other words, he stresses that teachers sometimes teach what they do and the way that they do because of pedagogical developments, not as immediate reactions to events outside the educational realm. That said, he does recognize that those exterior influences shape teaching theory, but, nevertheless, he stresses the mediation of educational philosophy.

I say all this because Fallace takes the same approach here, but with a twist. Whereas his earlier book saw him look at curriculum development and connect it to broader trends in ideas about education, In the Shadow of Authoritarianism does the work of connecting educational philosophy to very broad cultural anxieties and pressures. In this, he does an excellent job.

The review that Edhistory101 mentioned states that “though it falls short of creating a substantial new interpretation, Fallace’s book offers interesting reflection upon the history of ideas from twentieth-century education.” To a certain extent, I believe this doesn’t give Fallace enough credit while it is also accurate. In the Shadow of Authoritarianism does recognize a significant, broad trend in educational philosophy. Historians of education need to take seriously his argument that American anxieties over authoritarianism, both in educational processes as well as in competing states, shaped ideas about how to approach education. Though his work is rewriting the history of ideas of education, he certainly provides a framework for future historians. His broad approach allows plenty of room for other scholars to get into those archival resources that the reviewer mentions would strengthen Fallace’s work.

In fact, I have the privilege of being one such historian. In particular, I have found that his chapters, “In the Shadow of Dictatorship” and “In the Shadow of Totalitarianism” have both proven to have significant applicability to my work. Notably, the connections Fallace draws between competition with both the Soviet Union and Germany and both democracy and intercultural education is in some ways in line with what I have found in sources more closely related to the classroom than the education philosophers with whom he deals. Though I might quibble with some points, his broader analysis stands.

With all that said, I think that Fallace’s primary thesis is not the most likely reason for the turn from “how to think” to “what to think.” And this—as promised—is where we get to my promised “How historians work.”

So without any further ado…