Tracing the first two decades of state-funded African American schools, Educational Reconstruction addresses the ways in which black Richmonders, black Mobilians, and their white allies created, developed, and sustained a system of African American schools following the Civil War. Hilary Green proposes a new chronology in understanding postwar African American education, examining how urban African Americans demanded quality public schools from their new city and state partners. Revealing the significant gains made after the departure of the Freedmen’s Bureau, this study reevaluates African American higher education in terms of developing a cadre of public school educator-activists and highlights the centrality of urban African American protest in shaping educational decisions and policies in their respective cities and states.

This book presents a clear overview of the debates that surrounded the making of the 1944 Act, which affected every aspect of education in this country. It gives a detailed account of the tripartite divisions into 'three types of child' that were sanctioned in the reforms of the 1940s. At the same time, it also emphasises the idea of education as a civic project which underlay the reforms and which was such an important part of their lasting authority. The education policies of the past decade and the current attempts to shape a new education settlement need to be interpreted in a long-term historical framework and in particular, in relation to the aims and problems of the last great cycle of reform in the 1940s. This book makes an important contribution to the development of such a framework and the social history of education policy in this country.

"...A powerful interpretation of the uses of history in educational reform and of the relations among democracy, education, and the capitalist state. How did the American education take shape? What can a historian say about recent criticisms and proposals for improvement? What drives the politics of educational history? Katz shows how the reconstruction of America's educational past can be used as a framework for thinking about current reform."--Back cover.

James Anderson critically reinterprets the history of southern black education from Reconstruction to the Great Depression. By placing black schooling within a political, cultural, and economic context, he offers fresh insights into black commitment to education, the peculiar significance of Tuskegee Institute, and the conflicting goals of various philanthropic groups, among other matters. Initially, ex-slaves attempted to create an educational system that would support and extend their emancipation, but their children were pushed into a system of industrial education that presupposed black political and economic subordination. This conception of education and social order--supported by northern industrial philanthropists, some black educators, and most southern school officials--conflicted with the aspirations of ex-slaves and their descendants, resulting at the turn of the century in a bitter national debate over the purposes of black education. Because blacks lacked economic and political power, white elites were able to control the structure and content of black elementary, secondary, normal, and college education during the first third of the twentieth century. Nonetheless, blacks persisted in their struggle to develop an educational system in accordance with their own needs and desires.

During the 1950s, leading American scientists embarked on an unprecedented project to remake high school science education. Dissatisfaction with the 'soft' school curriculum of the time advocated by the professional education establishment, and concern over the growing technological sophistication of the Soviet Union, led government officials to encourage a handful of elite research scientists, fresh from their World War II successes, to revitalize the nations' science curricula. In Scientists in the Classroom , John L. Rudolph argues that the Cold War environment, long neglected in the history of education literature, is crucial to understanding both the reasons for the public acceptance of scientific authority in the field of education and the nature of the curriculum materials that were eventually produced. Drawing on a wealth of previously untapped resources from government and university archives, Rudolph focuses on the National Science Foundation-supported curriculum projects initiated in 1956. What the historical record reveals, according to Rudolph, is that these materials were designed not just to improve American science education, but to advance the professional interest of the American scientific community in the postwar period as well.

First published in 1978, Reconstructing Educational Psychology presents a new look at topics of central social concern such as children’s rights, the community approach to children’s problems, the inutility of traditional concepts of intelligence and personality, the interactionist approach to the concept of ‘deviant’ behaviour and the invalidity of psychiatric concepts of ‘maladjustment’. New ideas are the core of the book. It begins with historical and personal accounts of the origin and the nature of the situation of educational psychology. It spells out the way in which new thinking determines new practice, and the extent to which progress has been made. The book will be of interest to teachers, psychologists as well as to students of pedagogy and psychology.