Barbara Finkelstein – författare

This one-of-a-kind, comprehensive history of moral education in American schools provides an invaluable historical context for contemporary debates. McClellan traces American traditions of moral education from the colonial era to the present, illuminating both debates about the subject and actual practices in public and private schools, colleges, and universities. He pays particular attention to changing fashions in pedagogy, to church-state conflicts, to the long decline of character training in the schools, and to recent efforts to restore moral education to its once-honored place. The book concludes with a thorough examination of recent theorists, including Lawrence Kohlberg, William J. Bennett, Carol Gilligan, and Nel Noddings, and an appraisal of current practice in American schools.

In this trenchant interpretation of the rise of vocational education, Herbert M. Kliebard explains how Americans turned to public schools for answers to the problems of an increasingly urban, industrial society. Tracing the evolution of job training as an educational ideal, Kliebard analyzes the construction of vocationalism through three overlapping but distinctive stages. In the first stage, manual training is promoted as a pedagogical reform and moral corrective. In the second stage, vocational training for the new industrial workplace emerges as a major component of the American curriculum and contributes to its bifurcation. In the final stage, preparation to enter the workforce begins to eclipse other educational purposes. Concluding with a Deweyan critique of vocationalism, this book offers a much-needed perspective with which to view current debates about the meaning of public education and the transition from "school to work."

In Changing Course, Herbert Kliebard explores an array of efforts to reform the American curriculum. From revolutionary changes effected in a tiny one-room frontier schoolhouse in the late nineteenth century to a modern comprehensive high school, this accessible volume presents a chronological account of specific reform efforts—exposing factors likely to achieve success as well as the roots of many failures. Using a historical perspective to illuminate contemporary problems, this volume examines both the conceptual defects of various reform theories and the ways in which theory clashes with classroom reality. Kliebard argues that educators must examine the entire range of reform efforts in order to find the telltale patterns and "fads" that must be replaced with more meaningful structural changes.

The preparation of America's teachers is among the foremost issues facing education in the United States today. In this compelling account, James W. Fraser, an eminent historian of education, takes readers through two centuries of teacher preparation to uncover its development from colonial times to current standards-based models. Fraser examines a broad array of institutional arrangements, such as more familiar ""normal schools"" and less well-known arrangements, including teacher institutes and high school programs in rapidly expanding cities, segregated communities, rural areas, and Indian reservations. For any reader wishing to understand how to prepare teachers and reform schools, Fraser's incisive survey provides much-needed historical grounding.

This is a profoundly moving story of Black colleges in Mississippi during a watershed moment in their history. It is also the story of young Americans trying to balance their pursuit of higher education with the parallel struggle for civil rights. ""Radicalizing the Ebony Tower"" examines colleges against the backdrop of the black freedom struggle of the middle twentieth century, a highly contentious conflict between state agents determined to protect the racial hierarchy and activists equally determined to cripple white supremacy. Activists demanded that colleges play a central role in the Civil Rights Movement (a distinct challenge to the notion of the ivory tower) while state agents demanded that colleges distance themselves from the black freedom struggle and promised to mete out harsh penalties if they did not. Through the words and deeds of actual participants, this path-breaking study documents how activists ultimately transformed non-political institutions into libratory agents.