Schools and Society, Educational History Flashcards
Week 1
Schools and Society: Educational History
Lloyd P. Jorgensen
The fundamental assumption of the common school movement is “the public school would be an agent of moral/social redemption that resulted from nonsectarian religious instruction”; exposed evils associated with this movement.
Schools and Society: Educational History
Robert J. Breckenridge
Robert Jefferson Breckinridge (March 8, 1800 – December 27, 1871) was a politician and Presbyterian minister. He was a member of the Breckinridge family of Kentucky.
Breckinridge accepted the call to pastor the Second[a] Presbyterian Church of Baltimore, Maryland in 1832. While at the church, he became involved in a number of theological debates. During the Old School-New School controversy within the Presbyterian Church in the 1830s, Breckinridge became a hard-line member of the Old School faction, and played an influential role in the ejection of several churches in 1837. He was rewarded for his stances by being elected moderator of the Presbyterian Church’s General Assembly in 1841.
After a brief stint as president of Jefferson College in Pennsylvania, Breckinridge returned to Kentucky, where he pastored the First Presbyterian church of Lexington, Kentucky and was appointed superintendent of public education by Governor William Owsley. The changes he effected in this office brought a tenfold increase in public school attendance and led to him being called the father of the public school system in Kentucky.
Schools and Society: Educational History
Theodore Sizer
Theodore R. Sizer, 1932-2009
Founder of the Coalition of Essential Schools, Ted Sizer was one of the 20th century’s leading educational visionaries and reformers.
Sizer received his B.A. from Yale and his doctorate from Harvard. After a career that included U.S. Army service, classroom teaching, serving as the Dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Education, and leading Phillips Academy Andover as its Headmaster, Ted Sizer came to Brown University as chair of its education department.
There, in 1984, Ted founded the Coalition of Essential Schools to bring together examples of the radical school restructuring that was the focus of Horace’s Compromise, his work about the state of American high schools. Ted served as executive director of the Coalition of Essential Schools until 1996; during that time, he also established and led the Annenberg Institute for School Reform.
He retired from Brown as Professor Emeritus in 1996, returning to Massachusetts to accept an appointment as Visiting Professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, where he taught, along with Nancy, until very recently.
In 1994, Ted and Nancy helped to found the Francis W. Parker Charter Essential School, in Devens, Massachusetts, where they served as trustees, and for one year as co-principals. With Nancy and other educators, Ted also co-founded the Forum for Education and Democracy. Until his death, Ted remained an active part of many of the institutions of which he was affiliated and organizations that he founded, including CES, of which he was Chairman Emeritus.
Schools and Society: Educational History
Bernard Bailyn
He has specialized in American colonial and revolutionary-era history, looking at merchants, demographic trends, Loyalists, international links across the Atlantic, and especially the political ideas that motivated the Patriots. He is best known for studies of republicanism and Atlantic history that transformed the scholarship in those fields.[3] He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1963.[4]
Bernard Bailyn (born September 9, 1922) is an American historian, author, and professor specializing in U.S. Colonial and Revolutionary-era History. He has been a professor at Harvard University since 1953. Bailyn has won the Pulitzer Prize for History twice (in 1968 and 1987).[1] In 1998 the National Endowment for the Humanities selected him for the Jefferson Lecture.[2] He was a recipient of the 2010 National Humanities Medal.
Schools and Society: Educational History
Carl Kaestle
Schools and Society: Educational History
Horace Mann
Horace Mann (May 4, 1796 – August 2, 1859) was an American education reformer.
Mann established the state board of education (Massachusetts) and departed from the senate to serve as the board’s first secretary. Seeing public school as a way to improve and equalize educational opportunity, Mann comprehensively surveyed the condition of the state’s schools, established training institutes for teachers, increased the length of the school year to six months, and gathered support for more funding for teacher salaries, books and school construction.
He often argued for public education in economic terms, saying that it would increase the wealth of individuals, communities, the state and the country as a whole, while teaching respect for private property.Mann argued that all children should learn together in “common” schools, yet he did not take a stand against school segregation in his own city of Boston.
He lived at a time of tremendous social change when immigrants were pouring into the Northeastern states, farmers were leaving rural areas to work in factories, and cities were growing rapidly with crime and poverty on the rise. Some historians believe that Mann and other reformers were alarmed by the upheaval, and promoted state regulated public education as a way to bring order and discipline to the working class in this rapidly changing society. Threatened by the growing population of urban poor, Mann and his fellow reformers placed a major emphasis on “moral training”, standardization and classroom drill.
Many historians, however, see Mann’s legacy as positive, contending that overall his contributions led to a more egalitarian and democratic society. Some credit Mann with spearheading the most successful progressive social movement of the 19th century: Public Education.
Schools and Society: Educational History
John Joseph Hughes
John Joseph Hughes (1797-1864)
Unshakable faith, political savvy and indefatigable energy were the assets possessed by John Hughes, the first Archbishop of New York. Hughes was born in County Tyrone, Ireland. Soon after arriving in Pennsylvania, he became a priest and started his quick ascension through the ranks of the Catholic Church, becoming Archbishop of New York in 1850.
By the mid 1800s, the immigrant population in New York City swelled with poor Irish immigrants fleeing the potato famine that decimated their homeland. Although the public schools were nominally non-denominational, Catholics were taught from the Protestant King James Bible, and many complained that their own religion was mocked. Catholics, and most specifically, the Irish, were frequently vilified in the curriculum of New York’s public schools. Public schools used textbooks that portrayed the Irish immigrants as “extremely needy, and in many cases drunken and depraved…subject for all our grave and fearful reflection.”
After initial failed attempts at finding a conciliatory solution to the problem, Hughes took the offensive in public speeches, sermons and writings during the 1840s, demanding public funds for Catholic schools. Hughes was unsuccessful in obtaining taxpayer dollars for religious schools, but his struggles and the fiery debates between Hughes and members of New York’s prominent Protestant establishment helped to set in motion the secularization of American public schools, a process that began in the 19th century, and continues to this day. (Note that even as late as the 1950s, American schoolchildren were still reciting the Protestant Lord’s Prayer daily in the classrooms of many states.)
Schools and Society: Educational History
Catherine Beecher
Catherine Beecher (1800-1878)
A rebellious nature that surfaced in her youth and continued through her adult years led Catherine Beecher to challenge accepted notions of femininity and the education of women in the nineteenth century. Born in East Hampton, New York, and raised there and in Litchfield, Connecticut, Beecher’s aversion to the social expectations for women in her well-heeled sphere expressed itself early in the founding of the Hartford Female Seminary.
In her teachings and writings Beecher extolled the power of women in the family by advising them to assume control over domestic affairs. To Beecher, the role of women as mothers served a great purpose in the health of American democracy. She believed women’s education should prepare them for roles of responsibility and that higher education for women should train them as teachers-a natural public extension of women’s role in the family. Beecher published many pamphlets promulgating her positions, and also founded the Western Female Institute in Cincinnati and the Milwaukee
Schools and Society: Educational History
Booker T. Washington
Booker T. Washington (1856-1915)
Being born the son of a slave and an unknown white father in antebellum Virginia posed no insurmountable obstacle to the unbridled ambition of Booker T. Washington. His personal drive led him “up from slavery” (the title of his widely read autobiography) to become the founder and first head of the Tuskegee Institute and a leading advocate for the educational and economic improvement of African Americans. Inspired by his education as a boy at the Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute, Washington shaped Tuskegee as the leader in vocational curriculum and character building.
Steeped in his philosophy of racial solidarity, self-help and accommodation, Washington advocated vocational education for African Americans as a way to teach his community the manual skills that would help them work their way up the social ladder and improve their economic status. His vision, persuasively articulated on the lecture circuit, enhanced public awareness of the educational needs of African Americans. His popular lectures espoused the values of hard work, persistence and self-discipline — values he embodied and for which he is remembered. Washington’s views were hotly contested by African-American educator W.E.B. Dubois in one of the “great debates” of U.S. educational history at the start of the twentieth century. Dubois held that what African Americans needed was “real education” that would teach African American children “to know, to think and to aspire.”
Schools and Society: Educational History
John Dewey
John Dewey (1859-1952
A formidable intellect supplemented by service to social and democratic causes provided the impetus to John Dewey’s profound impact on education in the twentieth century. Dewey was born in Burlington, Vermont, and attended local schools and the University of Vermont, eventually earning a doctorate from Johns Hopkins University.
While Dewey’s accomplishments as a philosopher gained him posts at the University of Michigan, the University of Chicago and Columbia University, his educational theories broke new ground and continue to wield influence at the dawn of the twenty-first century. As an alternative to the drill-and-recitation methods of the nineteenth century, Dewey’s School and Society (1899) espoused the notion that ideas should be grounded in experience. In Experience and Education (1938), he argued that education should be based on the child’s psychological and physical development, as well as the world outside the schoolroom.
The relevance of Dewey’s ideas to industrial and urban growth made his theories prominent in his lifetime, and the recurring notions of child-centered learning formed the basis of progressive education, enjoying continued popularity today.
Schools and Society: Educational History
Ellwood Cubberley
Ellwood Cubberley (1868 – 1941)
Applying industrial management theory to school leadership was the idea of Ellwood Cubberley, giving rise to modern school administration.
His history of American education and his history of Western education asserted confidently that
a nation’s educational progress could be measured by whether control of education passed from church to state, from private to public, and from laypeople to professionals. The highest form of educational development, he proposed, was ‘‘state control of the
whole range of education, to enable the State to promote intellectual and moral and social progress along lines useful to the State.’’
In Cubberley’s view, a democratic school system was one in which the state exercised complete control; everything else— including schools operated by private individuals, churches, school societies, academies relying on private initiative, or even the district system of local school boards—were no more than way stations preceding the ‘‘rising’’ of a ‘‘democratic consciousness.’’
Cubberley described the expansion of state power as the foundation of democratic education. Similarly, the secularization of education, and the withdrawal of state aid from sectarian schools, he said, was ‘‘an unavoidable incident connected with the coming
to self-consciousness and self-government of a great people.’’
Schools and Society: Educational History
Albert Shanker
Albert Shanker (1928-1997)
As head of the American Federation of Teachers, Albert Shanker became the most widely known educational figure in the history of organized labor. The son of Russian Jewish immigrants, Shanker was raised in New York City where he attended Stuyvesant High School. He once remarked that in his home “unions were just below God.”
As a student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, he developed an interest in socialism. In the 1950s Shanker taught mathematics and in 1959 he went to work for the Teachers’ Guild as a labor organizer. He soon developed an interest in union activities. In 1964 he was elected president of the United Federation of Teachers (UFT) and three years later led a strike that shocked New Yorkers unaccustomed to white-collar walkouts.
In 1974 he became president of the American Federation of Teachers, but also remained president of the UFT for another twelve years. Shanker left the UFT in 1986 to devote all of his efforts to the national union and presided as its president until his death. Late in his life his hard-line stance on labor issues softened and he became a leader in the standards movement, arguing that social promotion offered no incentives for children to excel.
Schools and Society: Educational History
Linda Brown Thompson
Linda Brown Thompson (1943- )
As a third-grader in Topeka, Kansas in the 1950s, Linda Brown Thompson is often credited with single-handedly bringing down segregation in America. The truth is far more nuanced and interesting.
In fact, Brown’s family was just one of thirteen African-American families recruited in Topeka by the NAACP. In 1950, the national civil rights organization was busy enlisting plaintiffs nationwide in preparation for a legal assault on the “separate but equal” Supreme Court ruling that had permitted segregation in American schools for half a century.
In the fall of 1950, the Browns and 12 Topeka families were asked by the NAACP to try and enroll their children in their neighborhood white schools, with the expectation that they would be rejected. The NAACP then filed a lawsuit against the Board of Education in Topeka. That lawsuit and others brought on behalf of plaintiffs in Virginia, South Carolina, Delaware and Washington, DC were presented together on appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court. By alphabetical accident, because Brown’s name started with a ‘b’, the landmark 1954 decision that ended legalized segregation in America went down in history as “Brown v. Board of Education.”
The Supreme Court ruling in the case of Brown v. Board of Education was unanimous — the doctrine of “separate-but-equal” was inherently unconstitutional. Delivering the court’s opinion, Chief Justice Earl Warren asserted that “segregated schools are not equal and cannot be made equal, and hence they are deprived of the equal protection of the laws.” This landmark ruling began our nation’s long journey toward school desegregation.
Schools and Society: Educational History
Jose Angel Gutierrez
Jose Angel Gutierrez (1944- )
Jose Angel Gutiérrez was one of many activists working to change public education on a local level in the 1960s and 70s. Born in Crystal City, Texas, and educated in local schools, Gutiérrez mobilized the community to demand equal treatment for Chicano students.
As he studied for his master’s degree and doctorate in political science, Gutiérrez’ commitment to social activism focused on community organizing. Gutiérrez took his first decisive step toward activism in 1967 while a student at St. Mary’s University in San Antonio. There he organized the Mexican American Youth Organization, a vehicle for social activism. Later he established a political organization, La Raza Unida.
In a school system and a town where the vast majority of the population was Latino but the power structure was dominated by “Anglos”, Gutiérrez helped Mexican-American students to organize a strike in 1969. He staged an election upset and became head of the Crystal City School Board. Gutiérrez instituted a series of sweeping changes including use of Spanish in the classroom, the hiring of many Spanish-speaking teachers and principals, the introduction of a new curriculum that stressed Latino history and achievements, and bilingual education. For six years Gutiérrez served as a judge in Zavala County, and he has held various academic appointments. Currently, he is an associate professor of political science at the University of Texas at Arlington.
Schools and Society: Educational History
Deborah Meier
Deborah Meier (1931- )
Deborah Meier has spent more than three decades working in public education as a teacher, principal, writer, advocate, and ranks among the most acclaimed leaders of the school reform movement in the U.S. Meier was born in New York City in 1931 and was educated at Antioch College and the University of Chicago. She began her teaching career in Chicago, New York, and Philadelphia as an elementary and Head Start teacher, continually fascinated with why schools did not work well and what was needed to fix them.
For 20 years, Meier helped revitalize public schools in New York City’s East Harlem district. In 1974, Superintendent Tony Alvarado asked Meier to test her theories in a new elementary school in Harlem’s District 4, where test scores were the lowest in the city. She founded Central Park Elementary School (CPE), a highly successful alternative school emphasizing active learning. Within the next dozen years, Meier opened two other Central Park elementary schools and, in collaboration with the National Coalition of Essential Schools, the Central Park East Secondary School. At CPE and the schools that grew out of it, Meier succeeded by fostering democratic community, giving teachers greater autonomy in the running of a school, giving parents a voice in what happens to their children in schools, and promoting a family-oriented system. The Central Park East Secondary School has been lauded as a model of urban education reform. Her progressive philosophy created an environment of nurturing adults with high standards, resulting in a school with a graduation rate of 90 (90 percent of these graduates going on to college) and is now a model school for the Small Schools Collaborative.
She is the author of The Power of Their Ideas, Lessons to America from a Small School in Harlem and an outspoken critic of state-mandated standards and tests. Meier is currently the principal of the Mission Hill School, a K-8 pilot elementary school recently established in Boston’s Roxbury community. Despite all of the praise including a MacArthur Fellowship and several honorary degrees form elite schools, Meier’s commitment remains simple and sincere: “What I wanted was to create thoughtful citizens — people who believed they could live interesting lives and be productive and socially useful. So I tried to create a community of children and adults where the adults shared and respected the children’s lives.”
