Full Description
By exploring the tensions, impacts, and origins of major controversies relating to schooling and curricula since the early twentieth century, this insightful text illustrates how fear has played a key role in steering the development of education in the United States.
Through rigorous historical investigation, Evans demonstrates how numerous public disputes over specific curricular content have been driven by broader societal hopes and fears. Illustrating how the population's concerns have been historically projected onto American schooling, the text posits educational debate and controversy as a means by which we struggle over changing anxieties and competing visions of the future, and in doing so, limit influence of key progressive initiatives. Episodes examined include the Rugg textbook controversy, the 1950s "crisis" over progressive education, the MACOS dispute, conservative restoration, culture war battles, and corporate school reform. In examining specific periods of intense controversy, and drawing on previously untapped archival sources, the author identifies patterns and discontinuities and explains the origins, development, and results of each case. Ultimately, this volume powerfully reveals the danger that fear-based controversies pose to hopes for democratic education.
This informative and insightful text will be of interest to graduate and postgraduate students, researchers, and academics in the fields of educational reform, history of education, curriculum studies, and sociology of education.
Contents
List of Figures
Acknowledgements
List of Abbreviations
List of Manuscript Collections Abbreviated in Notes
Introduction: Fear and Schooling
Chapter 1. The Rugg Textbook Controversy: Prelude to a Crisis
Chapter 2. "Crisis" Over Progressive Education, 1947-1958
Chapter 3. The MACOS Dispute: Nationwide Controversy and the End of an Era
Chapter 4. The Conservative Restoration and Return to Tradition, 1971-1989
Chapter 5. Culture War Over the Schools: US History, Texas, Arizona
Chapter 6. Corporate School Reform: From Charlottesville to Jefferson County
