Richard Angelo
Educational Policy Studies
& Evaluation
144-C Taylor
257-3993
angelo@uky.edu
EPE 651
History of Education in the US
Fall, 2005
(To a poetic student and friend.) –I only seek to put
you in rapport. Your own brain, heart, evolution, must
not only understand the matter, but largely supply it.
–Walt Whitman
Specimen Days, 1882
It is not history one is faced with, nor biography,
but a confusion of histories, a swarm of biographies.
There is order in it all of some sort, but it is the
order of a squall or a street market: nothing metrical.
—Clifford Geertz
After the Fact, 1995
Required Reading:
Norman Brosterman, Inventing Kindergarten (Abrams, 1997).
James Leloudis, Schooling the New South: Pedagogy, Self, and Society in North
Carolina, 1880-1920 (University of North Carolina Press, 1996).
Steven Mintz, Huck’s Raft: A History of American Childhood (Belknap Press, 2004).
Heather Andrea Williams, Self-Taught: African-American Education in Slavery &
Freedom (North Carolina, 2005).
Nicholas Lemann, The Big Test: The Secret History of the American Meritocracy (Farrar,
Strauss, & Giroux, 2000).
These books cross the same broad region of issues at different angles. While each is
of independent interest, together they make a fine introduction to the challenges and
pleasures of thinking historically about American education.
As you might guess from his title, Brosterman focuses on the exciting new ideas
about childhood, learning, and nature which informed the “kindergarten” in its classical
phase. But there’s something more awaiting you here than stimulating account of early
childhood education, or the transmissions of European ideas to the U.S. The“gifts,”he
argues, —the geometrically-shaped materials which the German educator, Friedrich
Froebel, designed as play-things for children—laid the foundation for modernism in
painting and architecture. In other words, Brosterman claims that the materials which Frank
Lloyd Wright and others like him manipulated daily as youngsters decisively shaped the art
they later produced as adults.
When most people think about education, of course, they think about the politics of
school reform, a subject never far from the newspaper headlines. KERA, the brewing
controversy over “No Child Left Behind,” or the Supreme Court’s decision 2 years ago on
the role of affirmative action in admissions policy at the University of Michigan is only the
most obvious examples. James Leloudis’ Schooling the New South contextualizes these
issues by bringing us back to the rural world that was North Carolina in the aftermath of the
Civil War, a world where most youngsters didn’t attend school at all, or when they did, their
classrooms and the experiences they had there were radically different from what we take
for granted today. He not only delineates the ideas which inspired the “graded school
revolution” in the 1880’s, but the conflicts that ensued over those ideas. After charting the
profound social changes set in motion by the struggles for institutionalization—the new
politics of race, class and gender—he points to the successes that had been achieved by the
1920’s and the legacy of decidedly mixed results which we live with today.
In addition to the required reading and weekly discussions, you have a choice: (a) write 4
short papers, one on each the assigned books; (b) write a longer paper on two or possibly
three additional books, showing how they complicate, correct, or extend the interpretive
interests in Rudolph or Veysey; (c) conduct a small-scale archival investigation of your
own on some aspect of the history of (higher) education in Kentucky. We’ll discuss these
options and the point of these options in more detail as we go along, but no matter what
path you chose, the goal is the same—namely, introducing you to the pleasures and the
challenges of thinking seriously about the history of education. Yes, attendance counts.
I’ll be here each week. You should do the same. There will be no final exam. Your
grade will reflect my appraisal of your written work as well as your participation in class.
Enjoy!
Schedule
August 24: First day of class
August 31: Brosterman, Inventing Kindergarden, Chapters 1-2 (“Froebel,”
“Kindergarten,” and “Gifts.”)
September 7: Brosterman, Chapters 3-4 (“Success,” “Art,” and “Architecture.”)
September 14: Leloudis, Schooling the New South, Chapters 1-3 (“A Classroom
Revolution, “Apostles of the New South,” “Servants of the State”)
September 21: Leloudis, Chapters 3-6 (“Voices of Dissent,” “Rubes and Redeemers,”
“The Riddle of Race.”)
September 28: Mintz, Huck’s Raft, Chapters 1-6 (“Children of the Covenant,” “Red,
White and Black in Colonial Aerica, “Sons and Daughters of Liberty,” “Inventing the
Middle-Class Child,” “Growing up in Bondage,” “Childhood Battles of the Civil War.”)
October 5: Mintz, Chapters 7-12 (“Laboring Children,” “Save the Child,” “Children
under the Magnifying Glass,” “New to the Promised Land,” “Revolt of Modern Youth,”
“Coming of Age in the Great Depression.”)
October 12: Mintz, Chapters 13-17(“Mobilizing Children for World War II,” “In Pursuit
of the Perfect Childhood.” Youthquake,” “Parental Panics and the Reshaping of
Childhood,” “The Unfinished Century of the Child.”)
October 19: Williams, Self-Taught, Chapters 1-3 (“In Secret Places,” “A Coveted
Possession,” “The Men Are Actually Clamoring for Books.”) “We Must Get Education
for Ourselves and Our Children.”)
October 26: Williams, Chapters 4-6 (We Must Get Educaiton for Ourselves and Our
Children,” “We are Sriving to Dwo Business on Our Own Hook,” “We Are Laboring
under Many Difficulties.”)
November 2: Williams, Chapters 7-9 (“A Long & Tedious Road to Travel…,” “If
Anybody Wants an Education, It Is Me,” “First Movings of the Waters.”)
November 9: Lemann, The Big Test, Book 1, “The Moral Equivalent of Religion.”
November 16: Lemann, Book 2, “The Master Plan”
November 23: Thanksgiving—no class
November 30: Lemann, Book 3, “The Guardians,” plus the epilogue and the afterword to
the paperback edition.
December 7: Last Day of Class