For many decades, American schools have been mired in jargon and confused values. A few exceptional books have shown the way through the thicket of educational ideas, policies, and practices. The work of Michael John Demiashkevich belongs to this set and offers a special philosophical perspective. In "An Introduction to the Philosophy of…

In 1999, the changing goals of American schools were explored in "Education Week" through the events, achievements, and personalities that had formed United States education in the 20th century. First a series of articles, the collection was later published in book form as "Lessons of a Century: A Nation's Schools Come of Age." The chapter titled…

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…

Some questions about education in the United States are easier to answer than others. If one wants to compare curriculum requirements across states, the data can be acquired and conclusions announced. However, any discussion of philosophy of learning or results of some pedagogy or another requires a look at what others have thought about,…

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…

This article takes a closer look at Ralph Waldo Emerson's educational philosophy and its relationship to cooperative learning. Emerson believed that human beings should learn to think on their own, rather than solely acquire the craft of imitation or conformity by repeating the speech of their teachers. A liberating education, to Emerson, gives…

The purpose of this study is to explore the significance of 19th century American educator Alfred Holbrook through his writings and administration of the Lebanon, Ohio based National Normal University. Through a case study of Alfred Holbrook, the historical understanding of important issues relating to the history of pedagogy and normal schools…

The purpose of this article is to examine the life, pedagogical practices, and educational philosophy of Helen Lotspeich, who may be considered the premier practitioner of child-centered Progressive education in Cincinnati, Ohio during the first half of the 20th century. In "A History of The Seven Hills School," Driscoll (1995) concluded that in…

During the summer of 1964, Mississippi communities and activists established forty-one "Freedom Schools" that served over two thousand students. The Mississippi Freedom Schools embodied a critical philosophy of education. Despite its grassroots orientation, the educational ideas espoused in the Freedom Schools did not necessarily originate in…

Progressive education was pluralistic and often contradictory in its missions, motives, and degrees of success as was progressivism in general. The larger political progressive movement with its genesis in the latter half of the nineteenth century peaked in the Progressive Era at the beginning of the twentieth century. Until Lawrence Cremin's…

The author discusses philanthropy and educational reform from the Great Depression to the present, contrasting the views of that time to "Making It Count" (Chester E. Finn, Jr. and Kelly Amis, 2001.) Although Finn and Amis presented their suggestions as advancing democracy, they thought that educational reform took place best when elite groups…

By the beginning of World War I most U.S. American children attended elementary school. However, up to 65% of school age children left their studies to find work after the fifth or sixth grade when they were ten or eleven years old. Four years after the stock market crash of 1929 one quarter of the labor force, or thirteen million workers of all…

The American Civil War transformed societies' beliefs about education, as well as state policy regarding schools. The common schools of the 1850s tended to be locally funded, selective, and voluntary institutions. The Civil War, and the widespread belief, especially in the North, that a national system of common schools might have averted that…

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…

Current educational policies regarding equal educational opportunity are confused and often contradictory. There is no clear consensus as to what constitutes an equal opportunity. Most modern educators agree that the modern equal educational movement began in the 1950's with the Supreme Court decision in "Brown vs. the Board of Education," 1954…