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The Origins of Public Education: A Reassessment

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 February 2017

Michael B. Katz
Michael B. Katz*
Affiliation:
York University, Toronto
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Extract

During the last fifteen years a modest revolution took place in the historiography of education. Historians rejected both the metaphor and the method which had characterized the record of the educational past. The method had divorced inquiry into the development of educational practices and institutions from the mainstream of historical scholarship and left it narrow, antiquated, and uninteresting. The metaphor portrayed education as a flower of democracy planted in a rich and liberating loam which its seeds continually replenished.

Type
Article I
Information
History of Education Quarterly , Volume 16 , Issue 4 , Winter 1976 , pp. 381 - 407
Copyright
Copyright © 1976 by New York University 

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References

Notes

1. White, Hayden V., “The Burden of History,” History and Theory, 5 (1966): 111–134, 132. The works especially important in starting the rejuvenation of the history of education are: Buck, Paul H., Faust, Clarence, Hofstadter, Richard, Schlesinger, Arthur Jr., and Storr, Richard, The Role of Education in American History (New York, 1957); Bailyn, Bernard, Education in the Forming of American Society: Needs and Opportunities for Study (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1960); Cremin, Lawrence A., The Transformation of the School (New York, 1961).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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3. For earlier formulations see, Katz, Michael B., The Irony of Early School Reform: Educational Innovation in Mid Nineteenth Century Massachusetts (Cambridge, 1968); Katz, Michael B., Class, Bureaucracy and Schools: The Illusion of Educational Change in America (New York, 1971), expanded edition, 1973).Google Scholar

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30. Katz, , People of Hamilton, ch. 5; Calhoun, Daniel, The Intelligence of a People (Princeton, N.J., 1973).Google Scholar

31. See note 22.Google Scholar

32. Katz, and Davey, , “Youth and Early Industrialization”.Google Scholar

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37. Davey, , “Educational Reform”.Google Scholar

38. Davis, , pp. 349–350.Google Scholar

39. Davis, , ibid; Kraditor, Aileen S., “American Radical Historians on their Heritage” Past and Present, no. 56 (August 1972): 141–142.Google Scholar

40. Thernstrom, , Poverty and Progress, p. 58.Google Scholar

41. Kraditor, , ibid; Gutman, , “Work, Culture and Society”.Google Scholar

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43. Dreeben, , What is Learned; Bowles, Samuel and Gintis, Herbert, Schooling in Capitalist America (New York, 1976).Google Scholar

44. Jencks, Christopher et. al., Inequality: A Reassessment of the Effects of Family and Schooling in America (New York, 1974); Bowles, and Gintis, , Schooling ; Katz, , Irony, pp. 39–40; Davey, , “Educational Reform”.Google Scholar