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State Government and American Public Education: Exploring the “Primeval Forest”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 February 2017

David Tyack
Affiliation:
Stanford University
Thomas James
Affiliation:
Wesleyan University

Extract

James Bryce observed in 1888 that “he who would understand the changes [in] the American democracy will find far more instruction in a study of the State governments than of the Federal Constitution.” So neglected was the subject, he found, that it could not even be called a field: “it is rather a primeval forest, where the vegetation is rank, and through which scarcely a trail has yet been cut.” Although Bryce himself cut one such path in The American Commonwealth, much of the terrain of state government in the nineteenth century remains unexplored to this day.

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Articles
Copyright
Copyright © 1986 by the History of Education Society 

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References

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50 There are many ways to approach the topics we have suggested here. These are some preliminary forays: on the work of urban educators as leaders at the state level—James, Thomas, “State Constitution-Making and Educational Policy in Nineteenth Century America: The Case of California,” paper presented at the Organization of American Historians, Minneapolis, April 20, 1985; on moral reform legislation—Tyack, David and James, Thomas, “Moral Majorities and the School Curriculum: Historical Perspectives on the Legalization of Virtue,” Teachers College Record, 86 (1985): 513–37; on the relation between state legislation and professionalization—Gilb, Corinne L., Hidden Hierarchies: The Professions and Government (New York, 1966); on state legal issues concerning race—Wollenberg, , Segregation; Hendricks, , Non-Whites; Tyack, David and Lowe, Robert, “The Constitutional Moment: Reconstruction and Black Education in the South,” American journal of Education, forthcoming.CrossRefGoogle Scholar