The purpose of this article has been to set the record straight as to the extent to which education of the mind and hands was prevalent in the United States prior to the 1880s. This effort is necessary since the proponents of the manual training curriculum that surfaced in the United States in the 1880s created a misperception that no prior form…

This article will examine a little known but long-standing group, the Lisle Fellowship, that endeavored to open the world to college students and foster international understanding--or "world-mindedness," as the organization's founders called it--ultimately with the goal to contribute to the ideal of world peace. It will also, in particular,…

There have been several periods during which the professionalization of American teachers has been investigated historically--the 1960s produced studies on the education and the miseducation of teachers; the 1970s gave sociological historical scholarship on class, bureaucracy and schools and the professionalization of teaching; the 1980s provided…

In 1839 the first normal school in the United States opened in Lexington, Massachusetts. Heralded as "an instrument of great good" (Everett 1863, 769) and a spring in which was coiled "a vigor whose uncoiling may wheel the spheres" (Ogren 2005, 16), normal schools continued to grow in numbers throughout the nineteenth century and produced…

In this analysis of deficit theory, the plan is to understand how deficit ideology was visually perpetuated in the early twentieth century. The belief that Mexicans were racially, culturally, and linguistically inferior perpetuated itself in the classrooms of Southwest public schools, resulting in the proliferation of a structure of…

Mary Coombs Greenleaf sought to take her place among the many frontier teachers who preceded her in 1800s. However, her destination--Indian Territory--was distinctive from previous American frontiers in that it was the geographical solution to a long record of Indian eradication policy. Mary Greenleaf was fifty-six years old, having just lost her…

The condition of education within the academy in the period surrounding desegregation might best be described as beleaguered. Ironically, this vulnerable and largely defensive stance emerged as the dividend of a unified movement among educationists (a derogatory term assigned to education faculty and those who populated the public education…

There is no doubt that women had a role in progressive reform a century ago, despite their lack of vote. However, it may not be so clear what the nature of this reform effort was. This article suggests that women were highly organized in women's clubs that served as a major organ of change in society, and that they had a great impact on education…

The author profiles two nineteenth-century architects of children's minds and children's spaces. More than any other two Americans Henry Barnard and Catharine Beecher defined children's educational spaces--the home and the school--and successfully specified how those spaces were to be organized and furnished, who was to govern those spaces, what…