Readings in Educational Thought – serie

The writings in this collection on American educational thought represent the many stories, individuals, and ideas that have shaped American education during the past several centuries. This book should serve as a useful primary or supplementary text for any undergraduate or graduate course in the history of American education, American educational thought, social foundations of education, philosophy of education, or curriculum theory. The editors of this volume hope that readers of this book will come to understand, and perhaps develop a desire to participate in, the “great conversation” that is American educational thought.

The writings in this collection on American educational thought represent the many stories, individuals, and ideas that have shaped American education during the past several centuries. This book should serve as a useful primary or supplementary text for any undergraduate or graduate course in the history of American education, American educational thought, social foundations of education, philosophy of education, or curriculum theory. The editors of this volume hope that readers of this book will come to understand, and perhaps develop a desire to participate in, the “great conversation” that is American educational thought.

This book is titled Forgotten Heroes of American Education because it contains representative writings by significant educators who challenged mainstream thinking. The editors of this volume believe that the work of these thoughtful and important educators deserves to be remembered. They have been forgotten because in the great pedagogical battles of the twentieth century, they lost. Time and again, they battled with their Progressivist colleagues over the purpose and goals of elementary and secondary education. Because they lost the arguments, their role as leaders and thinkers was almost completely ignored by historians of education, who identified with the winners. We think this was a grand mistake. To honor the legacy of these eight educators, we have written this book and entitled it Forgotten Heroes of American Education.

This book is titled Forgotten Heroes of American Education because it contains representative writings by significant educators who challenged mainstream thinking. The editors of this volume believe that the work of these thoughtful and important educators deserves to be remembered. They have been forgotten because in the great pedagogical battles of the twentieth century, they lost. Time and again, they battled with their Progressivist colleagues over the purpose and goals of elementary and secondary education. Because they lost the arguments, their role as leaders and thinkers was almost completely ignored by historians of education, who identified with the winners. We think this was a grand mistake. To honor the legacy of these eight educators, we have written this book and entitled it Forgotten Heroes of American Education.

Clinical Teacher Education focuses on how to build a school-university partnership network for clinical teacher education in urban school systems serving culturally and linguistically diverse populations. The labor intensive nature of professional development school work has resulted in research institutions being slow to fully adopt a clinical teacher education Professional Development School (PDS) network approach across the entirety of their teacher preparation programs. Faculty have often been hesitant to commit to such models in light of the demands of institutional expectations of publish or perish. In this book, faculty, researchers, and administrators from academia and from public schools involved in a clinical teacher education PDS network discuss their commitment to collaborative clinical teacher preparation and development, and to inquiry in PDS initiatives in urban schools. Clinical Teacher Education serves as an in-depth analysis of the strengths and challenges of establishing school-university networks in metropolitan environments.Many experienced and noteworthy authors contributed to Clinical Teacher Education. The authors hold various administrative and faculty positions in both university and public school settings.

Clinical Teacher Education focuses on how to build a school-university partnership network for clinical teacher education in urban school systems serving culturally and linguistically diverse populations. The labor intensive nature of professional development school work has resulted in research institutions being slow to fully adopt a clinical teacher education Professional Development School (PDS) network approach across the entirety of their teacher preparation programs. Faculty have often been hesitant to commit to such models in light of the demands of institutional expectations of publish or perish. In this book, faculty, researchers, and administrators from academia and from public schools involved in a clinical teacher education PDS network discuss their commitment to collaborative clinical teacher preparation and development, and to inquiry in PDS initiatives in urban schools. Clinical Teacher Education serves as an in-depth analysis of the strengths and challenges of establishing school-university networks in metropolitan environments.Many experienced and noteworthy authors contributed to Clinical Teacher Education. The authors hold various administrative and faculty positions in both university and public school settings.

Paul Diederich worked in five new organizations dedicated to transforming American schools: the Ohio State University lab school, the Eight Year Study, a Harvard institute to revamp English language instruction, the University of Chicago's Board of Examiners, and the Educational Testing Service. Throughout his career he wrote critiques of American high schools and set forth many proposals to make them more flexible without sacrificing academic excellence. This anthology resurrects 14 Diederich essays, eight of them never before published. The scope ranges from visions of social justice to the details of the daily schedule. Like his heroes Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, he combined a passion for utopian speculation with a fascination for practical problems, a combination that is rare in the world of school reform today.

Paul Diederich worked in five new organizations dedicated to transforming American schools: the Ohio State University lab school, the Eight Year Study, a Harvard institute to revamp English language instruction, the University of Chicago's Board of Examiners, and the Educational Testing Service. Throughout his career he wrote critiques of American high schools and set forth many proposals to make them more flexible without sacrificing academic excellence. This anthology resurrects 14 Diederich essays, eight of them never before published. The scope ranges from visions of social justice to the details of the daily schedule. Like his heroes Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, he combined a passion for utopian speculation with a fascination for practical problems, a combination that is rare in the world of school reform today.

We examine Hart’s peripatetic career as teacher, editor, journalist, lecturer, and public philosopher. It is biographical as well as an intellectual history of a fascinating character and prolific author.Our goal is to resurrect Hart’s intellectual life in order to more deeply understand the significant issues he not only confronted, but endured. These issues primarily include academic freedom and humanizing education, with their direct links to community organizing and Danish folk schools—themes that run throughout the book. Instead of seeing Hart’s intellectual life as a cautionary tale against forceful criticism, we offer a view consistent with Hart: we should embrace the “full and frank” sense of academic freedom in order to demonstrate a truly democratic mode of associated living in universities and civic communities. Respecting different views should not mean mollifying critique. The opposite, in fact, is in keeping with our view of the open exchange of ideas characteristic of free societies and legitimate institutions of higher education.Other themes of significance in this book include the status of the social foundations in teacher education, social welfare, pacifism, community organizing, the broader purposes of schools and universities in the U.S., and Hart’s commitment to adult education via Danish folk schools and rural community living. The politics of teacher education are legion, and this was no less so when Hart began his career in the early twentieth century. Debates were had about the degree to which normal schools, as two-year teacher training sites, should broaden their technical scope to include the liberal arts. This is the distinction between teacher training and teacher education. Those in favor of classroom management and efficient controls or methods for dispensing curriculum faced criticism from those who thought schools should be embryotic spaces for individual and democratic growth. Hart was clearly on the side of individual and democratic growth and this meant, in part, less order, less routine, and less bureaucratic imposition of standards from bureaucratic hierarchies. Positively, it meant engaging in debates that challenge students to think differently than they have ever thought before. As we show in the following pages, Hart was enormously successful at challenging ideas...and many people would rather not be challenged. As we noted above, this position results in demonstrating a “full and frank” enactment of academic freedom.