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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 February 2017
The past decade has witnessed a surge of writing in history of education, broad in scope, humanistic in character, solid and mature in its use of the tools and apparatus of historical scholarship: Lawrence Cremin's The Transformation of the School, Jack Campbell's biography of Francis W. Parker, Timothy Smith's work in immigration history, Claude Bower's history of progressive education in the depression, Patricia Graham's history of the Progressive Education Association, Krug's history of the American high school, Geraldine Joncich's biography of Thorndike come to mind. And recently several of our more venturesome colleagues have demonstrated how methods and insights borrowed from the social sciences, especially sociology and statistics, can provide significant new approaches to the history of education. I have in mind David Tyack's study of the relationship of bureaucratic processes in the Portland school system at the turn of the century and progressive education, Michael Katz's examination of bureaucratic structure and educational innovation in mid-nineteenth-century Massachusetts, and Charles Bidwell's extremely sophisticated use of sociological and statistical tools to analyze the relationships between school control, moral training, and social structures in the Northeast during the Jacksonian period.
1. Cremin, Lawrence A., The Transformation of the School: Progressivism in American Education, 1876-1957 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1961); Campbell, Jack K., Colonel Francis W. Parker, The Children's Crusader (New York: Teachers College, 1968); Albjerg Graham, Patricia, Progressive Education, from Arcady to Academic: A History of The Progressive Education Association (New York: Teachers College, 1967); Krug, Edward A., The Shaping of the American High School (New York: Harper & Row, 1964); Bowers, Claude A., The Progressive Educator and the Depression: The Radical Years (New York: Random House, 1969); Joncich, Geraldine, The Sane Positivist: A Biography of Edward L. Thorndike (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1968); Tyack, David B., “Bureaucracy and the Common School: The Example of Portland, Oregon, 1891-1913,” American Quarterly, XIX (Fall 1967), 475–98; Katz, Michael B., The Irony of Early School Reform: Educational Innovation in Mid-Nineteenth Century Massachusetts (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1968); Bidwell, Charles E., “The Moral Significance of the Common School: A Sociological Study of Local Patterns of School Control and Moral Education in Massachusetts and New York, 1837-1840,” History of Education Quarterly, VI (Fall 1966), 50-91; Cobun, Frank F., “The Educational Level of the Jacksonians,” History of Education Quarterly, VII (Winter 1967), 515-20.Google Scholar
2. Professor Brickman, for one, has long labored in this vineyard, and it's high time to exploit his labors, e.g., Brickman, William W., “An Historical Survey of American Educational History,” Paedogogica Historica, XI (1962) 5–21; Fraser, Steward E. and Brickman, William W., eds., A History of International and Comparative Education; Nineteenth Century Documents (Palo Alto, California: Scott, Foresman, 1968).Google Scholar
3. There is much to learn from the following: Bereday, George Z. F., Comparative Method in Education (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1964), Havighurst, Robert J., Comparative Perspectives on Education (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1968), and Coombs, Philip H., The World Educational Crisis: A Systems Analysis (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968).Google Scholar
4. Cf., Earl Pomeroy, The Pacific Slope: A History of California, Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Utah, and Nevada (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1965); and Rischin, Moses, “Beyond The Great Divide: Immigration and the Last Frontier,” Journal of American History, LV (June 1968), 42-53.Google Scholar
5. Higham, John, “Beyond Consensus: The Historian as Moral Critic,” American Historical Review, LXVII (April 1962), 609–25.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
6. United States Immigration Commission, The Children of Immigrants in the Schools, vols. 29-33 of Reports of the Immigration Commission, 41 vols. (Washington, D.C., 1907-1914), esp. vol. 29 (1911), pp. 14, 15, 23. In the public schools of Boston, 63.5 per cent of the children were of foreign parentage; in the public schools of Chicago, 67.3 percent; in those of New York City, 71.5 percent.Google Scholar
7. Lowi, Theodore J., At the Pleasure of the Mayor: Patronage and Power in New York City, 1898-1958 (New York: The Free Press, 1964), p. 30, passim.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
8. Available studies reveal that even as late as the early 1930's, 98.5 percent of the country's school superintendents were native-born; 90 percent were of Anglo-Saxon ancestry. The composite picture of the American school superintendent, briefly: he was native, white, of long-established American ancestry; he was born, reared, and educated in a rural environment, by parents who were regular attendants at a Protestant Evangelical church. Studies done of school board members in the late twenties and early thirties reveal that the boards typically represented the professional and mercantile classes. About the regular classroom teachers, a 1911 study revealed that 91.3 percent of the men were native-born, 83.8 percent of the women; 89.9 percent of the men and 85.5 percent of the women were of Anglo-Saxon lineage. The vast majority had been reared and educated on a farm or in a small hamlet. See Lotus Delta Coffman, The Social Composition of the Teaching Population (New York: Teachers College Press, 1911), chap. III; Haigh Bair, Frederick, The Social Understandings of the Superintendent of Schools (New York: 1934), sec. III; Arnett, Claude E., Social Beliefs and Understandings of School Board Members (Emporia, Kansas: Emporia Gazette Press, 1932), passim. These studies are ably summarized in Newlon, Jesse H., Educational Administration as Social Policy (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1934), chaps. VI-VIII.Google Scholar
9. Higham, John, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860-1925 (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1955).Google Scholar
10. Higham, John. “Another Look at Nativism,” Catholic Historical Review, XLIV (July 1958), 147–58; Digby Baltzell, E., The Protestant Establishment: Aristocracy and Caste in America (New York: Random House, 1964).Google Scholar
11. I have elaborated and documented the above in much greater scope and detail in “The Industrial Education Movement, 1906-17,” American Quarterly, XX (Spring 1968), 95–110.Google Scholar
