Reconstructing American Education

One of the leading historians of education in the United States here develops a powerful interpretation of the uses of history in educational reform and of the relations among democracy, education, and the capitalist state. Michael Katz discusses the reshaping of American education from three perspectives. First is the perspective of history: How did American education take shape? The second is that of reform: What can a historian say about recent criticisms and proposals for improvement? The third is that of historiography: What drives the politics of educational history? Katz shows how the reconstruction of America’s educational past can be used as a framework for thinking about current reform. Contemporary concepts such as public education, institutional structures such as the multiversity, and modern organizational forms such as bureaucracy all originated as solutions to problems of public policy. The petrifaction of these historical products—which are neither inevitable nor immutable—has become, Katz maintains, one of the mighty obstacles to change. The book’s central questions are as much ethical and political as they are practical. How do we assess the relative importance of efficiency and responsiveness in educational institutions? Whom do we really want institutions to serve? Are we prepared to alter institutions and policies that contradict fundamental political principles? Why have some reform strategies consistently failed? On what models should institutions be based? Should schools and universities be further assimilated to the marketplace and the state? Katz’s iconoclastic treatment of these issues, vividly and clearly written, will be of interest to both specialists and general readers. Like his earlier classic, The Irony of Early School Reform (1968), this book will set a fresh agenda for debate in the field.

Tracing the first two decades of state-funded African American schools, Educational Reconstruction addresses the ways in which black Richmonders, black Mobilians, and their white allies created, developed, and sustained a system of African American schools following the Civil War. Hilary Green proposes a new chronology in understanding postwar African American education, examining how urban African Americans demanded quality public schools from their new city and state partners. Revealing the significant gains made after the departure of the Freedmen’s Bureau, this study reevaluates African American higher education in terms of developing a cadre of public school educator-activists and highlights the centrality of urban African American protest in shaping educational decisions and policies in their respective cities and states.

The Civil War transformed American life. Not only did thousands of men die on battlefields and millions of slaves become free; cultural institutions reshaped themselves in the context of the war and its aftermath. The first book to examine the Civil War's immediate and long-term impact on higher education, Reconstructing the Campus begins by tracing college communities' responses to the secession crisis and the outbreak of war. Students made supplies for the armies or left campus to fight. Professors joined the war effort or struggled to keep colleges open. The Union and Confederacy even took over some campuses for military use. Then moving beyond 1865, the book explores the war's long-term effects on colleges. Michael David Cohen argues that the Civil War and the political and social conditions the war created prompted major reforms, including the establishment of a new federal role in education. Reminded by the war of the importance of a well-trained military, Congress began providing resources to colleges that offered military courses and other practical curricula. Congress also, as part of a general expansion of the federal bureaucracy that accompanied the war, created the Department of Education to collect and publish data on education. For the first time, the U.S. government both influenced curricula and monitored institutions. The war posed special challenges to Southern colleges. Often bereft of students and sometimes physically damaged, they needed to rebuild. Some took the opportunity to redesign themselves into the first Southern universities. They also admitted new types of students, including the poor, women, and, sometimes, formerly enslaved blacks. Thus, while the Civil War did great harm, it also stimulated growth, helping, especially in the South, to create our modern system of higher education.

What constitutes the common good in American public education? This volume explores the ongoing debate between those who expect schools to cultivate citizens through personal, moral, and social development, as well as to bind diverse groups into one nation, and a new generation of school reformers intent on using schools to solve the nation's economic problems by equipping students with marketable skills.

This book presents a clear overview of the debates that surrounded the making of the 1944 Act, which affected every aspect of education in this country. It gives a detailed account of the tripartite divisions into 'three types of child' that were sanctioned in the reforms of the 1940s. At the same time, it also emphasises the idea of education as a civic project which underlay the reforms and which was such an important part of their lasting authority. The education policies of the past decade and the current attempts to shape a new education settlement need to be interpreted in a long-term historical framework and in particular, in relation to the aims and problems of the last great cycle of reform in the 1940s. This book makes an important contribution to the development of such a framework and the social history of education policy in this country.

This book reconstructs the foundations of developmental and educational psychology and fills an important gap in the field by arguing for a specific spatial turn so that human growth, experience and development focus not only on time but space. This regards space not simply as place. Highlighting concrete cross-cultural relational spaces of concentric and diametric spatial systems, the book argues that transition between these systems offers a new paradigm for understanding agency and inclusion in developmental and educational psychology, and for relating experiential dimensions to causal explanations. The chapters examine key themes for developing concentric spatial systemic responses in education, including school climate, bullying, violence, early school leaving prevention and students’ voices. Moreover, the book proposes an innovative framework of agency as movement between concentric and diametric spatial relations for a reconstruction of resilience. This model addresses the vital neglected issue of resistance to sheer cultural conditioning and goes beyond the foundational ideas of Bronfenbrenner’s ecological systems theory, as well as Vygotsky, Skinner, Freud, Massey, Bruner, Gestalt and postmodern psychology to reinterpret them in dynamic spatial systemic terms. Written by an internationally renowned expert, this book is a valuable resource for academics, researchers and postgraduate students in the areas of educational and developmental psychology, as well as related areas such as personality theory, health psychology, social work, teacher education and anthropology.

Presents the history of America from the earliest times of the Native Americans to the Clinton administration.

After the destruction of the Civil War, the United States faced the immense challenge of rebuilding a ravaged South and incorporating millions of freed slaves into the life of the nation. On April 11, 1865, President Lincoln introduced his plan for reconstruction, warning that the coming years would be “fraught with great difficulty.” Three days later he was assassinated. The years to come witnessed a time of complex and controversial change.