The No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) represents a quantum leap in both Federal involvement and Federal mandates to schools. In the relatively short period of less than a decade NCLB has changed how teachers teach, what subjects are taught, and how teachers and principals are evaluated. As NCLB continues to impact American education and educational…

Progressive education is often examined through the lens of curricular theorists, educational historians, and the experience of practitioners. One perspective, infrequently found in the debate, has been the experiences of students educated under the progressive philosophy. The Southern author, Flannery O'Connor, who attended progressive schools on…

In this article, the author shares the potential applications of Paul Ricoeur's philosophies of history, memory, and narrative to the interpretation of educational histories, and those histories' life spans: moving cyclically from early conception, to evidentiary construction, to published dissemination; and ultimately to death or immortality. Her…

In the closing weeks of 1867, an educational organization was founded in Washington, D.C., that should have been stillborn. Most farmers dismissed scientific agriculture as useless book-farming. They should have been lukewarm to the Patrons of Husbandry's promise to sponsor monthly meetings for mutual instruction in the application of scientific…

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…

The role of federal involvement in education has, in recent years, become more and more prevalent. Such an involvement was not part of the historical origins of education at virtually any level. Whether it was for economic reasons, defense of the nation, the accountability of American taxpayers, or the pursuit of better civic-minded individuals,…

For most of the nineteenth century, county agricultural fairs had little to do with schools and schooling; nevertheless, they served as potent sources of learning. During the post-Civil War generation, most of the learning county agricultural fairs generated had little to do with livestock, crops, and cultivation; nevertheless, farmers and others…

In "Managers of Virtue: Public School Leadership in America, 1820-1980," education historians David Tyack and Elisabeth Hansot (1982) offer a model for understanding the evolution of U. S. public school leadership from the mid-nineteenth through the early twentieth centuries. The authors assert that prior to 1890, common school "crusaders"…

Recent studies of G. Stanley Hall's opus, "Adolescence: Its Psychology and Its Relations to Physiology, Anthropology, Sociology, Sex, Crime, Religion and Education" (1904), have highlighted one of the book's most problematic implications: if young people were thought to be the developmental analogues of "primitive" or "savage," then the treatment…

This article considers two related educational endeavors of the Massachusetts colony. The first is the colonists' efforts to pass their religious traditions to their children. The second is the effort of missionaries to spread the Christian faith to Native Americans. In both cases, the colonists wanted their children and the American Indians to…

"The accomplishments of Indians and their actual place in the story of the United States have never been remotely touched by ... [most] historians. The major reason for this omission is that a substantial number of practicing historians simply do not know the source documents with sufficient precision to make sense of them; ... They spend a good…

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…

In a Cleveland that was one of the most foreign of the country's cities, the Slovenian community struggled with the problem of maintaining its cultural ties while still adopting enough American customs to enable it to take advantage of the opportunities in a democratic, industrialized city. This article attempts to clarify some of the problems of…

The Wright family, descended from the patriarch Allen Wright, who arrived in the new Choctaw Nation after surviving the "Trail of Tears," played an important role in Oklahoma politics and society. Following removal to Oklahoma, Allen went on to become Principal Chief of the Choctaw Nation and gave the name, Oklahoma, to the southwest territory. He…