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…

Throughout the 20th Century, medicine and law set the professional standards by which all other professions came to be measured. Teaching fell short of the mark because teachers were not perceived as having much control over their professional lives. For example, the professions of medicine and law developed standards boards or associations to…

The Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) created the Relocation Program in 1952 to sever Indian federal trust status and impose Euro-American values on Indians all under the guise of benevolence. Led from reservations to urban areas, Indians found the problems of their reservations in their new locations: few employment opportunities, poor housing…

This article describes the rise, diminution, and reorganization of East Texas Oilfield schools which was defined by the socio-economic conditions of the oil era, from the mid-nineteenth century until the third quarter of the twentieth century. Citizens of East Texas seized the opportunity at the time of oil discovery to provide superior school…

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…

Marcus Fabius Quintilianus (A.D. 35-95) was a teacher of rhetoric in Rome during the first century of imperial Rome. His seminal work, "De Institutio Oratoria"--The Education of the Orator, was written during his retirement. Quintilian's experience as a teacher had an impact on his ideologies and "De Institutio Oratoria" combined his practitioner…

"Race, ethnicity, and poverty are poor excuses for low expectations" (Monroe 1997, 111). Negro educators who forged an academic haven for secondary students in the early twentieth century held as strongly to this belief as did Monroe, an urban Black educator, a century and a half later. Whereas the American high school movement gained momentum in…

Joseph Schwab (1909-1988) is known for his scathing critique of curriculum theory and its over reliance on quantitative models derived from social science theories. From the late 1950's through the middle 1960's, Schwab was instrumental to efforts to create a new and more educationally sound curriculum for weekday religious schools in synagogues…

Many authors note that the history of teaching Latin would be a fruitful topic for a comprehensive treatise. Although intense debates about the quality and necessity of teaching Latin date back as early as in the eighteenth century, Latin courses have persisted into the present and, notably, with few changes in content. The author supports the…

The rapid expansion of public schooling during the 1950s and 1960s increased the need for teachers and teacher training. Colleges accomplished this by having professors of education train other educators in foundations of education. This broke the connections between academic history, philosophy, and sociology and educational history, philosophy,…

When Theseus sailed from Athens to the island of Crete to slay the Minotaur, a fearsome monster whose food was human flesh and whose home was the labyrinth, Ariadne, the daughter of the Cretan King Minos, gave her new found love, Theseus, a ball of thread to assist him in maneuvering his way through the great maze of winding passages. "Unwind it…

The once all black Howard High School in Wilmington, Delaware, has had a long and interesting past. For more than a century, the high school attempted to maintain a strong academic core amidst pressure from the white community to become a vocational or "industrial" school, following the Tuskegee model. In this article, the author discusses the…

Thoughts of college student protests during the late 1960's and early 1970's often ignite memories of demonstrations against the Vietnam War. Stories of college student activism during the these years underplay the Civil Rights focus of African American students that preceded and paralleled the more salient Vietnam War protests. Less attention in…