Leading historians provide new insights into the founding generation's views on the place of public education in America. This volume explores enduring themes, such as gender, race, religion, and central vs. local control, in seven essays of the 1790s on how to implement public education in the new USA. The original essays are included as well.
The award-winning author of Founding Brothers and The Quartet now gives us a deeply insightful examination of the relevance of the views of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and John Adams to some of the most divisive issues in America today. The story of history is a ceaseless conversation between past and present, and in American Dialogue Joseph J. Ellis focuses the conversation on the often-asked question "What would the Founding Fathers think?" He examines four of our most seminal historical figures through the prism of particular topics, using the perspective of the present to shed light on their views and, in turn, to make clear how their now centuries-old ideas illuminate the disturbing impasse of today's political conflicts. He discusses Jefferson and the issue of racism, Adams and the specter of economic inequality, Washington and American imperialism, Madison and the doctrine of original intent. Through these juxtapositions--and in his hallmark dramatic and compelling narrative voice--Ellis illuminates the obstacles and pitfalls paralyzing contemporary discussions of these fundamentally important issues.
The full-scale assault on public education threatens not just public education but American democracy itself. Public education as we know it is in trouble. Derek W. Black, a legal scholar and tenacious advocate, shows how major democratic and constitutional developments are intimately linked to the expansion of public education throughout American history. Schoolhouse Burningis grounded in pathbreaking, original research into how the nation, in its infancy, built itself around public education and, following the Civil War, enshrined education as a constitutional right that forever changed the trajectory of our democracy. Public education, alongside the right to vote, was the cornerstone of the recovery of the war-torn nation. Today's current schooling trends -- the declining commitment to properly fund public education and the well-financed political agenda to expand vouchers and charter schools -- present a major assault on the democratic norms that public education represents and risk undermining one of the unique accomplishments of American society.
This concise and elegant contribution to the Very Short Introduction series reintroduces the history that shaped the founding fathers, the history that they made, and what history has made of them. The book provides a context within which to explore the world of Washington, Franklin, Jefferson, Adams, and Hamilton, as well as their complex and still-controversial achievements and legacies.
How a con artist "reformer" shaped America's modern public schools. Two centuries ago, London school reformer Joseph Lancaster swept into New York City to revolutionize its public schools. Pennsylvania and Massachusetts passed laws mandating Lancaster's methods, and cities such as Albany, Savannah, Detroit, and Baltimore soon followed. In Mr. Lancaster's System, Adam Laats tells the story of how this abusive, scheming reformer fooled the world into believing his system could provide free high-quality education for poor children. The system never worked as promised, but thanks to real work done by students, teachers, and families, Lancaster's failed reforms eventually led to the creation of the modern public school system. Lancaster's idea was simple: instead of hiring expensive adult teachers, Lancasterian schools made children teach one another to read, write, and behave properly. America's city leaders poured the equivalent of millions of dollars into the scheme, built specialized school buildings featuring Lancaster's teaching machines, and offered him a huge salary. In London, where Lancaster opened his first school, the enthusiasm of city leaders was quickly and similarly followed by scandal and dismay. Lancaster borrowed money—even from the king of England—and spent it on fancy carriage rides and cases of champagne. Even worse, Lancaster proved to be a sexual predator. Kicked out of London, Lancaster brought his simplistic plan to the United States. His school model didn't work any better in US cities than it had in London, and Lancaster himself never changed his abusive ways. Mr. Lancaster's System details how American cities created their first public schools out of the wreckage of Lancasterian failure. In the end, the most important people in this story are not self-proclaimed geniuses like Lancaster or elites like New York's mayor De Witt Clinton, but rather the thousands of parents and children who forced urban public schools to assume their modern shape.
Questions at the very heart of the American experiment—about what the nation is and who its people are—have lately assumed a new, even violent urgency. As the most fundamental aspects of American citizenship and constitutionalism come under ever more powerful pressure, and as the nation’s politics increasingly give way to divisive, partisan extremes, this book responds to the critical political challenge of our time: the need to return to some conception of shared principles as a basis for citizenship and a foundation for orderly governance. In various ways and from various perspectives, this volume’s authors locate these principles in the American practice of citizenship and constitutionalism. Chapters in the book’s first part address critical questions about the nature of U.S. citizenship; subsequent essays propose a rethinking of traditional notions of citizenship in light of the new challenges facing the country. With historical and theoretical insights drawn from a variety of sources—ranging from Montesquieu, John Adams, and Henry Clay to the transcendentalists, Cherokee freedmen, and modern identitarians—American Citizenship and Constitutionalism in Principle and Practice makes the case that American constitutionalism, as shaped by several centuries of experience, can ground a shared notion of American citizenship. To achieve widespread agreement in our fractured polity, this notion may have to be based on “thin” political principles, the authors concede; yet this does not rule out the possibility of political community. By articulating notions of citizenship and constitutionalism that are both achievable and capable of fostering solidarity and a common sense of purpose, this timely volume drafts a blueprint for the building of a genuinely shared political future.
American Education: A History, Sixth Edition is a comprehensive, highly regarded history of American education from precolonial times to the present. Chronologically organized, it provides an objective overview of each major period in the development of American education, setting the discussion against the broader backdrop of national and world events. In addition to its in-depth exploration of Native American traditions (including education) prior to colonization, it also offers strong, ongoing coverage of minorities and women. This much-anticipated sixth edition brings heightened attention to the history of education of individuals with disabilities, of classroom pedagogy and technology, of teachers and teacher leaders, and of educational developments and controversies of the twenty-first century.
In the last twenty years, transnational perspectives have gained momentum in the field of historical-educational research. Scholars have made substantial efforts to rethink nation-based historiographies by reconstructing and reinterpreting the cross-border encounters and intertwined processes that have turned the history of education into a transnational enterprise. A closer look at specific transnational spaces furthers a better understanding of these processes. Against this backdrop, the book offers case studies focusing on transatlantic encounters with special regard to the manifold entanglements between Germany and the United States of America that represent one of the most complex, dynamic, and vivid educational spaces between the eighteenth and twentieth century. Drawing on excellent source material, each contribution examines interaction processes as the genuine transformative moment within any cross-border transfer, and investigates exchanges of concepts, institutions, and materials. Under this premise, the book draws attention to shifting trajectories in the German-American history of education that can be identified by focusing on long-lasting transnational entanglements. By offering a wide range of research approaches, the publication furthermore contributes innovative methodological thoughts to transnational histories of education that go beyond the German-American context and will interest students, emerging researchers, and experts of history of education.
Following the American Revolution, it was a cliche that the new republic's future depended on widespread, informed citizenship. However, instead of immediately creating the common schools--accessible, elementary education--that seemed necessary to create such a citizenry, the Federalists in power founded one of the most ubiquitous but forgotten institutions of early American life: academies, privately run but state-chartered secondary schools that offered European-style education primarily for elites. By 1800, academies had become the most widely incorporated institutions besides churches and transportation projects in nearly every state. In this book, Mark Boonshoft shows how many Americans saw the academy as a caricature of aristocratic European education and how their political reaction against the academy led to a first era of school reform in the United States, helping transform education from a tool of elite privilege into a key component of self-government. And yet the very anti-aristocratic critique that propelled democratic education was conspicuously silent on the persistence of racial and gender inequality in public schooling. By tracing the history of academies in the revolutionary era, Boonshoft offers a new understanding of political power and the origins of public education and segregation in the United States.
