In The Struggle for History Education, Gary McCulloch sets out a vision for a future of study in the history of education which contributes to education, history and social sciences alike.

The history of education is a contested field of study, and has represented a site of struggle for the past century of its development. It is highly relevant to an understanding of broader issues in history, education and society, and yet has often been regarded as being merely peripheral rather than central to them. Over the years the history of education has passed through a number of approaches, more recently engaging with a different areas such as curriculum, teaching and gender, although often losing sight of a common cause. In this book McCulloch contextualizes the struggle for educational history, explaining and making suggestions for the future on a number of topics, including: finding a set of common causes for the field as a whole engaging more effectively with social sciences and humanities while maintaining historical integrity forming a rationale of missions and goals for the field defining the overall content of the subject, its priorities and agendas and reassessing the relevance of educational history to current educational and social issues. Throughout this book the origins of unresolved debates and tensions about the nature of the field of history of education are discussed and key examples are analysed to present a new view of future development. The Struggle for the History of Education demonstrates the key changes and continuities in the field and its relationship with education, history and the social sciences over the past century. It also reveals how the history of education can build on an enhanced sense of its own past, and the common and integrating mission that makes it distinctive, interesting and important for a wide range of scholars from different backgrounds.

In The Struggle for History Education, Gary McCulloch sets out a vision for a future of study in the history of education which contributes to education, history and social sciences alike.

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.

First Published in 2004. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

In the 1990s the debate over what history, and more importantly whose history, should be taught in American schools resonated through the halls of Congress, the national press, and the nation's schools. Politicians such as Lynne Cheney, Newt Gingrich, and Senator Slade Gorton, and pundits such as Rush Limbaugh, John Leo, and Charles Krauthammer fiercely denounced the findings of the National Standards for History which, subsequently, became a major battleground in the nation's ongoing struggle to define its historical identity. To help us understand what happened, Linda Symcox traces the genealogy of the National History Standards Project from its origins as a neo-conservative reform movement to the drafting of the Standards, through the 18 months of controversy and the debate that ensued, and the aftermath. Broad in scope, this case study includes debates on social history, world history, multiculturalism, established canons, national identity, cultural history, and "liberal education." Symcox brilliantly illuminates the larger issue of how educational policy is made and contested in the United States, revealing how a debate about our children's education actually became a struggle between competing political forces.

Joel Spring’s history of school polices imposed on dominated groups in the United States examines the concept of deculturalization—the use of schools to strip away family languages and cultures and replace them with those of the dominant group. The focus is on the education of dominated groups forced to become citizens in territories conquered by the U.S., including Native Americans, Enslaved Africans, Chinese, Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, and Hawaiians. In 7 concise, thought-provoking chapters, this analysis and documentation of how education is used to change or eliminate linguistic and cultural traditions in the U.S. looks at the educational, legal, and social construction of race and racism in the United States, emphasizing the various meanings of "equality" that have existed from colonial America to the present. Providing a broader perspective for understanding the denial of cultural and linguistic rights in the United States, issues of language, culture, and deculturalization are placed in a global context. The major change in the 8th Edition is a new chapter, "Global Corporate Culture and Separate But Equal," describing how current efforts at deculturalization involve replacing family and personal cultures with a corporate culture to increase worker efficiency. Substantive updates and revisions are made throughout all other chapters