'Patricians, Professors, and Public Schools' argues that the thinking behind efforts to reform American schools in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries emphasized two new ideas — that economic growth and the opportunity it created were more limited than had earlier been thought, and that popular aspirations should be revised downward accordingly. After discussing the thinking that reformers reacted against in the first chapter of the book, later chapters examine those most responsible for these new ideas, especially Felix Adler and John Dewey. These chapters argue that reformers' fears about the social dislocation stemming from economic growth makes the most sense of the educational redirection they promoted. This is a new interpretation of developments that have long been debated by American historians, and should be of interest to a wide variety of readers.
Author(s): Allan S. Horlick
Series: Brill's Studies in Intellectual History, 53
Publisher: E. J. Brill
Year: 1994
Language: English
Pages: 274
City: Leiden
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction 1
1. The Late Nineteenth Century Confronts the Common School Tradition 15
2. E. L. Godkin, Patrician Tutor: Limited Growth, Education, and the Defense of Caste 46
3. Patrician Reform and Traditionalist Reaction in Boston: Charles Francis Adams, Jr. and John Philbrick 75
4. Felix Adler, Ethical Culture, and Educational Reform in New York: From the Workingman's School to "The Ethics of Neighborhood," 1876-1900 100
5. Nicholas Murray Butler: From the Labor Question to Teachers College 139
6. Academic Careers and the Reform Impulse: The Example of John Dewey 172
7. The Uses of Pedagogy: Children's Needs and the Meaning of Work 190
8. Education and Utopia: The Community of the Self-Fulfilled 212
Bibliography 243
Index 258
