The mythology of schooling: the historiography of American and European education in comparative perspective

Abstract

This essay explores the historiography of American and European education, considering how educational historians communicate powerful messages about the purposes and promises of schooling through their writing. I divide the historiography of American education into four interpretive traditions: traditionalism, radical revisionism, progressive revisionism, and plural revisionism. Each phase of the historiography, I argue, has supported particular myths about the relationship between public schooling and society. European historians have shared many of the interpretive assumptions contained within traditionalist, radical revisionist, and progressive revisionist scholarship, conveying similar myths to their US counterparts. Contemporary histories of European education, however, are distinct from recent histories of the US. In comparing the divergent trajectories of these two historiographies, I conclude by suggesting the strengths and weaknesses of contemporary scholarship in both fields, an assessment derived from a review of the underlying myths conveyed by each history. Recent US scholarship remains committed to narrative and draws attention to the educational experiences of marginalised groups. Scholarship on European education, in contrast, has explicitly embraced theoretical interpretive frameworks while also giving less attention to schooling on the margins. At the same time, many European histories of education have maintained a critical view of schooling, while some recent scholarship within the US has de-emphasised this connection, echoing older interpretive traditions and tacitly reinforcing faith in the ameliorative potential of public education.

Keywords:

• comparative history of education
• public schools and society
• theory and educational history
• history and the purposes of schooling
• historiography

Notes

¹ Barbara Finkelstein, “Education Historians as Mythmakers,” Review of Research in Education 18 (1992): 256.

² Finkelstein, “Education Historians as Mythmakers,” 289–90. Myth, in this sense, does not mean falsehood. Instead, I embrace Finkelstein’s definition of myth, which has shaped my thinking. Finkelstein defines myth not as “lie or mystification,” but “as revealing narrative”.

³ See Lawrence Cremin, The Wonderful World of Ellwood Patterson Cubberley: An Essay on the Historiography of American Education (New York: Teachers College Press, 1965).

⁴ Elwood P. Cubberley, Public Education in the United States: A Study and Interpretation of American Educational History; Revised and Enlarged Edition (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1919), 164–5.

⁵ Cubberley, Public Education in the United States, viii.

⁶ Cremin, Wonderful World of Ellwood Cubberley.

⁷ Lawrence Cremin, Traditions in American Education (New York: Basic Books, 1976), 127.

⁸ Lawrence Cremin, The Transformation of the School: Progressivism in American Education, 1876–1957 (New York: Vintage Books, 1964), viii.

⁹ Roy Lowe, “History as Propaganda: The Strange Uses of the History of Education,” in Trends in the Study and Teaching of the History of Education, ed. Roy Lowe (Leicester: History of Education Society, 1983), 49.

¹⁰ Quoted in Roy Lowe, “History as Propaganda,” 51.

¹¹ Quoted in Gary McCulloch, The Struggle for the History of Education (Abingdon: Routledge, 2011), 29.

¹² Daniel Tröhler, “The Formation and Function of Histories of Education in Continental Teacher Education Curricula,” Journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Curriculum Studies 2 (2006), http://www2.uwstout.edu/content/jaaacs/vol2/trohler.htm (accessed March 27, 2014).

¹³ Ibid.

¹⁴ Ibid.

¹⁵ For an overview of faith in the power of education reform in the United States, see Henry J. Perkinson, The Imperfect Panacea: American Faith in Education (New York: Random House, 1968).

¹⁶ Cubberley, Public Education in the United States, x.

¹⁷ Quoted in Colin Greer, The Great School Legend: A Revisionist Interpretation of American Public Education (New York: Basic Books, 1972), 17.

¹⁸ G.A.N. Lowndes, The Silent Social Revolution: An Account of Public Education in England and Wales, 1895–1935 (London: Oxford University Press, 1937), 240.

¹⁹ Michael Katz, The Irony of Early School Reform: Educational Innovation in Mid-Nineteenth Century Massachusetts (New York: Teachers College Press, 2001), 218.

²⁰ Greer, The Great School Legend, 152.

²¹ Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, Schooling in Capitalist America: Education Reform and the Contradictions of Economic Life (New York: Basic Books, 1976).

²² Ruben Donato and Marvin Lazerson, “New Directions in American Educational History: Problems and Prospects,” Educational Researcher 29, no. 8 (2000): 6.

²³ Harold Silver, “Historiography of Education,” vol. 1 of History of Education: Major Themes, ed. Roy Lowe (Abingdon: Routledge, 2000): 225.

²⁴ Richard Johnson, “Educational Policy and Social Control in Early Victorian England,” Past and Present 49, no. 1 (1970): 119.

²⁵ Bruce Rosen, “Education and Social Control of the Lower Classes in England in the Second Half of the Eighteenth Century,” Paedagogica Historica 14, no. 1 (1974): 92–105.

²⁶ Kenneth Barkin, “Social Control and the Volksschule in Vormärz Prussia,” Central European History 16, no. 1 (1983): 32; Folkert Meyer, Schule der Untertanen (Hamburg: Hoffmann u Campe Vlg GmbH, 1977); Hartmut Titze, Die Politisierung der Erziehung (Frankfurt: Fischer Athenäum, 1973); Christa Berg, Die Okkupation der Schule (Heidelberg: Quelle und Meyer, 1973).

²⁷ Quoted in Barkin, “Social Control,” 35.

²⁸ Ibid.

²⁹ J.J.H. Dekker and L.F. Groenendijk, “Philippe Ariès’s Discovery of Childhood after Fifty Years: The Impact of a Classic Study on Educational Research,” Oxford Review of Education 38, no. 2 (2012): 133–47.

³⁰ Philippe Ariès, Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life, trans. Robert Baldick (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1962), 413.

³¹ Ibid.

³² Karier, Roots of Crisis, 12.

³³ Michael B. Katz, Class, Bureaucracy, and Schools: The Illusion of Educational Change in America (New York: Praeger, 1971), 48.

³⁴ Johnson, “Educational Policy and Social Control,” 119.

³⁵ Finkelstein, “Education Historians as Mythmakers,” 275.

³⁶ Carl Kaestle and Maris Vinovskis, Education and Social Change in Nineteenth-Century Massachusetts (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980).

³⁷ David Tyack, The One Best System: A History of American Urban Education (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974), 10.

³⁸ Ibid., 4.

³⁹ Michael Katz, it should be noted, also highlighted the mixed motives of reformers in The Irony of Early School Reform.

⁴⁰ Tyack, The One Best System, 242.

⁴¹ William Reese and John Rury, introduction to Rethinking the History of American Education, ed. William Reese and John Rury (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 4.

⁴² Carl Kaestle, Pillars of the Republic: Common Schools and American Society, 1780–1860 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1983), 70.

⁴³ David Tyack, “The Common School and American Society: A Reappraisal,” History of Education Quarterly 26 (1986): 302.

⁴⁴ William Reese and John Rury, introduction to Rethinking the History of American Education, 5.

⁴⁵ John Rury, Education and Social Change: Themes in the History of American Schooling, 2nd ed. (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2005), 239.

⁴⁶ Katz, Irony of Early School Reform, 217; David Angus and Jeffrey Mirel, The Failed Promise of the American High School, 1890–1995 (New York: Teachers College Press, 1999), 199.

⁴⁷ Detlef K. Müller, “The Qualifications Crisis and School Reform in Late Nineteenth-Century Germany,” History of Education 9, no. 4 (1980): 315.

⁴⁸ Jonathan Zimmerman, review of Schools Betrayed: Roots of Failure in Inner-City Education, by Kathryn M. Neckerman, Journal of American History 94, no. 4 (2008): 1313.

⁴⁹ Brian Simon, The Two Nations and the Educational Structure (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1974), 366.

⁵⁰ Ibid., 367.

⁵¹ Tyack, The One Best System, 289.

⁵² Kaestle, Pillars of the Republic, 224.

⁵³ John Rury, Education and Social Change, 2nd ed. (London: Taylor & Francis, 2005), 241.

⁵⁴ Quoted in Richard Aldrich, “The Real Simon Pure: Brian Simon’s Four-Volume History of Education in England,” History of Education Quarterly 34, no. 1 (1994): 80.

⁵⁵ McCullogh, The Struggle for the History of Education, 52–3.

⁵⁶ According to some scholars, American historians in general have been more averse to theory than their European peers. For a recent reflection on the role of theory in American educational history, see “Theory in Educational History,” ed. Eileen H. Tamura, special issue, History of Education Quarterly 51, no. 2 (2011): 145–271.

⁵⁷ See “Children and Youth at Risk,” eds. Christine Mayer and Ingrid Lohmann, special issue, Paedagogica Historica 45, nos. 1–2 (2009): 1–265.

⁵⁸ William Reese and John Rury, introduction to Rethinking the History of American Education, 6.

⁵⁹ Barbara Brenzel, Daughters of the State: A Social Portrait of the First Reform School for Girls in North America, 1856–1905 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983); David Tyack and Elisabeth Hansot, Learning Together: A History of Coeducation in American Public Schools (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990); John Rury, Education and Women’s Work: Female Schooling and the Division of Labor in Urban America, 1870–1930 (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1991); Nancy Beadie, “Emma Willard’s Idea Put to the Test: The Consequences of State Support of Female Education in New York, 1819–67,” History of Education Quarterly 33, no. 4 (1993), 543–62.

⁶⁰ Ruben Donato, Mexicans and Hispanos in Colorado Schools and Communities (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2007).

⁶¹ Gilbert Gonzalez, Chicano Education in the Era of Segregation (Cranbury: Associated Universities Press, 1994), and Guadalupe San Miguel, Let All of Them Take Heed: Mexican Americans and the Campaign for Educational Equality in Texas, 1910–1981 (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1987).

⁶² Eileen H. Tamura, Americanization, Acculturation, and Ethnic Identity: The Nisei Generation in Hawaii (Urbana-Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1993).

⁶³ David Adams, Education for Extinction: American Indians and the Boarding School Experience (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 1995).

⁶⁴ James Anderson, The Education of Blacks in the South, 1860–1935 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), 1.

⁶⁵ Christopher Span, From Cotton Field to Schoolhouse: African American Education in Mississippi, 1862–1875 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2009).

⁶⁶ Ron Butchart, Schooling the Freed People: Teaching, Learning, and the Struggle for Black Freedom, 1861–1876 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2010).

⁶⁷ Michael Fultz, “African American Teachers in the South, 1890–1940,” History of Education Quarterly 35, no. 4 (1995), and Vanessa Siddle Walker, Their Highest Potential: An African American School Community in the Segregated South (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1996).

⁶⁸ Span, From Cotton Field to Schoolhouse, 11.

⁶⁹ Ibid., 9.

⁷⁰ Ibid., 176.

⁷¹ Vanessa Siddle Walker, “Valued Segregated Schools for African American Children in the South, 1935–1969: A Review of Common Themes and Characteristics,” Review of Educational Research 70 (2000): 276.

⁷² Siddle Walker, Their Highest Potential, 3.

⁷³ Myers, “Immigrant and Ethnic Minorities,” 805.

⁷⁴ W. Richardson, “British Historiography of Education in International Context at the Turn of the Century, 1996–2006,” History of Education 36, nos. 4–5 (2007): 573.

⁷⁵ Marc Depaepe, “What Kind of History of Education May We Expect for the Twenty-first Century? Some Comments on Four Recent Readers in the Field,” Paedagogica Historica 39, nos. 1–2 (2003): 196.

⁷⁶ Sol Cohen, Challenging Orthodoxies: Toward a New Cultural History of Education (New York: P. Lang, 1999).

⁷⁷ Alfred Oftedal Telhaug, “From Descriptive to Theory-Oriented Research: Norwegian Historical-Educational Research in a Historical Perspective,” in Knowledge, Politics and the History of Education, ed. Jesper Eckhardt Larsen (Münster: Lit Verlag, 2012), 223.

⁷⁸ Richardson, “British Historiography,” 570–1.

⁷⁹ Kevin Myers, “Immigrant and Ethnic Minorities in the History of Education,” Paedagogica Historica 45, no. 6 (2009): 802.

⁸⁰ Myers, “Immigrant and Ethnic Minorities,” 802.

⁸¹ McCullogh, Struggle for the History of Education, 88.

⁸² Marc Depaepe, “Qualities of Irrelevance: History of Education in the Training of Teachers,” in Knowledge, Politics and the History of Education, ed. Jesper Eckhardt Larsen (Münster: Lit Verlag, 2012), 50.

⁸³ Myers, “Immigrants and Ethnic Minorities,” 807.

⁸⁴ Thomas Holt, “African American History,” in The New American History, ed. Eric Foner (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1997), 330.

⁸⁵ Cass Sunstein, “The Idea of a Useable Past,” Columbia Law Review 95, no. 3 (1995): 603.

⁸⁶ Donato and Lazerson, “New Directions in American Educational History,” 10.