Barometers of Change: Individual, Educational, and Social Transformation

A barometer of change is a domain of social life where coalescing trends become visible before their full consequences are understood. Sarason treats the university, child-rearing practices, sexual behavior, and power relationships in schools as such barometers . The metaphor is diagnostic rather than predictive: a barometer registers pressure that is already present, not pressure that is coming. Sarason's argument is that these domains reveal transformations in the making, and that attending to them offers a way to comprehend social change rather than merely react to its effects. The book's twelve chapters each examine one such barometer, moving from the university as an institutional indicator to personal recollections of sexual memories as an intimate one.

Sarason argues that post-World War II American scholarship turned away from history as a basis for self-understanding, adopting what he calls an ahistorical stance . Drawing on Carl Schorske's account of how academic disciplines in the 1950s abandoned historical concerns—literary criticism turning to formal analysis, political science to behaviorism, philosophy to language and logic—Sarason contends this retreat left scholars unable to make sense of the coalescing trends of the 1960s . His book is an attempt to counter this stance by demonstrating how the past is always present in the categories and assumptions we bring to the present. The ahistorical stance, he argues, does not protect against bias; it merely hides the historical embeddedness of our thinking.

M. Brewster Smith, reviewing in PsycCRITIQUES, praised Sarason's informal essay style for encouraging productive learning but noted its problems: repetitiveness, undisciplined disorganization, and sloppy self-editing uncorrected by external editors . Kenneth Gergen in Choice similarly observed that Sarason is at his best when replacing simple linear accounts with sophisticated descriptions of multiple, coalescing transformations, but criticized his minimal reference to contemporary historical writing or sociological analyses of modernist culture . A review in Educational Studies noted that Sarason's elaborations of the barometers were often redundant, and that his reliance on viewing social change through the window of psychotherapy—despite his own critiques—contradicted his assertions of multiplicity .

The book's twelve chapters address: the coalescing of discrete trends, the individual and liberation, the university as barometer, personal barometers, the changing ecology of child rearing, the abortion issue, recollected sexual memories, working and loving, artistic expression, power relationships in schools, and cities and schools . Sarason concludes that these domains reveal transformations in individual-community relations, sexual norms, and institutional authority that cannot be understood as isolated events. His central finding is that seemingly discrete happenings in the 1960s were expressive of shared feelings and ideas that had been coalescing for decades. The book is an argument for historical consciousness as a professional and civic necessity, not merely an academic virtue.

The book extends Sarason's career-long concern with how social contexts shape individual functioning. His earlier work on the psychological sense of community argued that belonging to a supportive network is foundational to well-being. Barometers of Change applies this contextual sensibility to historical time: just as individuals cannot be understood apart from their social settings, social changes cannot be understood apart from their historical roots. The chapter on power relationships in schools and the concluding chapter on cities and schools directly continue themes from The Culture of the School and the Problem of Change . The book also reflects Sarason's consistent stance as a critic of professional complacency, now applied to the failure of intellectuals to attend to history.

Productive learning, a concept Sarason developed throughout his career, refers to learning that changes the learner's relationship to the subject matter and to themselves—learning that is not merely additive but transformative. M. Brewster Smith's review of Barometers of Change notes that Sarason's informal essay approach encourages the reader to participate with the author in 'productive learning in Sarason's sense of the term' . The book is designed not to transmit a fixed argument but to model a way of thinking historically about one's own society. Sarason's willingness to include personal recollections and to acknowledge his own uncertainty reflects his belief that genuine learning requires the learner's active engagement and self-examination.