Public Schooling in the United States

Abstract

The history and politics of education in the United States exhibit several para doxes : heavy expenditure combined with anti-intellectualism, local administration combined with national homogeneity, and the belief that improvements in educa tion can remedy a variety of social ills and compensate for failures in other areas of social engineering.1 The parochial issue apart, however, Americans have long tended to take the relationship between school and society very much for granted, a tendency shared until recently by social scientists and historians. Studies of the politics and history of education have tended to be of two main kinds, being either administrative in character (directed at fellow-professionals, and hence apolitical), or else offshoots of socio-intellectual history in the Parringtonian tradition (as exemplified by the work of Merle Curti, Richard Hofstadter, and Rush Welter). In 1959 in ' Toward an Understanding of Public School Politics ', Thomas H. Eliot felt it necessary to emphasize that ' Public schools are part of government. They are political entities '.2 And in i960 in Education in the Forming of American Society, Bernard Bailyn criticized the history of education for ' its separateness as a branch of history, its detachment from the main stream of historical research, writing and teaching '.3 These strictures were not entirely deserved (vide the work of George S. Counts on Chicago 4), but whatever their force fifteen years ago, such criticisms could not be made today. During the last ten years, the nature, quality, and social uses of the public school system have received greater attention than at any time since the First World War. There have been three main lines of inquiry and exposition : (1) studies by