In a book published in 2000, entitled "An Elusive Science: The Troubling History of Education Research," Ellen C. Lagemann traced educational research (ER) in the U.S. from its pre-history--the training of common school teachers in summer schools, high schools, normal schools, female institutes, and later colleges and universities.…

The doctorate has long been associated with advancement in one's field, not only within academic work but also within one's profession. But the doctorate had the weakness of trying to serve two ends, teaching and research, ends not always distinguished clearly by graduate schools. As the twentieth century continued, the idea of professionalism…

The purpose of this article is to review four educational issues introduced by this author in previous articles (Beyer 2004, 2015) that faced the Kingdom of Hawai'i in order to investigate the educational policies taken to address these issues by the White Architects of Hawaiian education. The American Protestant missionaries, who arrived in…

Historians have recently opened up a reconsideration of the 1950s. Long characterized as a time of stolid conformity and Cold War conservatism, the era is increasingly seen in more variegated terms. Studies exploring a range of institutions, causes, and activities have illuminated ways the intellectual and social soil of postwar America gave root…

This article focuses on the historical roots of Ernest Boyer's most popular work, "Scholarship Reconsidered: Priorities of the Professoriate" (1990). Seeking to transcend the traditional view of scholarship as simply that which is published, Boyer expanded scholarship to include four domains: discovery, application, integration, and…

After Greek independence from the Ottoman Empire (1827), a newly formed Greek state looked to retrieve its past through the teaching of a Greek national history. For much of the nineteenth century Greek schools forged common religious, linguistic, and historical ties among the Greek people through the teaching of a Greek historical past (Zervas…

The purpose of this article is to provide a detailed analysis of the development of reflective practice in American education. The essay will primarily ground itself in various works by John Dewey and Donald A. Schön, as well as analyze the impact these authors had on the topic. The essay will rely heavily on Schön's "Educating the Reflective…

In this paper, the author explains how homeschooling came to life in America, describing the forces that pushed it from the margins of acceptability to the center of the national political and social stage and to near normalization within the educational industry. The focus is on exploring the origins of homeschooling by exposing its intellectual…

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…

During the twentieth-century, American engineers harnessed the atom, sent men to the moon, and literally reshaped the world. They re-routed rivers to create giant hydroelectric dams, created a massive and interconnected highway system, and designed skyscrapers, jets, computers, and the internet. As a modern profession, engineering boasted strong…

Since the end of World War II and the beginning of the Cold War, public education has been high on the national agenda. The nation's need for human capital and the need to provide equality of educational opportunity to all children and youth without regard to their race, ethnicity, or social status are the two needs that then framed education…

Current educational restructuring movements espouse democratic ideas and reordered relations among teachers and administrators under the guise of improved teaching and learning and touts standards and accountability as the only way to achieve equality in education. Unfortunately, these efforts are unlikely to address enduring historical and…

This article examines the effect of history and law in the segregation and integration of Latinas/os in schools. Initially, a Critical Race Theory (CRT) analysis of the question of the effects of Latina/o school desegregation history and law on their present-day educational conditions highlighted the reasons for the omni-present struggle for…

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…