Education : History

Tracing the transformation of early modern academics into modern researchers from the Renaissance to Romanticism, Academic Charisma and the Origins of the Research University uses the history of the university and reframes the "Protestant Ethic" to reconsider the conditions of knowledge production in the modern world. William Clark argues that the research university—which originated in German Protestant lands and spread globally in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—developed in response to market forces and bureaucracy, producing a new kind of academic whose goal was to establish originality and achieve fame through publication. With an astonishing wealth of research, Academic Charisma and the Origins of the Research University investigates the origins and evolving fixtures of academic life: the lecture catalogue, the library catalog, the grading system, the conduct of oral and written exams, the roles of conversation and the writing of research papers in seminars, the writing and oral defense of the doctoral dissertation, the ethos of "lecturing with applause" and "publish or perish," and the role of reviews and rumor. This is a grand, ambitious book that should be required reading for every academic. more...

Price: $22.50

In this refreshing and original exploration, George Dennis O'Brien looks at higher education in America. O'Brien argues that to debate intelligently the future of education we must stop focusing on its ideals and look instead at its institutions. He does this by addressing nine half-truths, such as whether "low cost public education benefits the least advantaged in society," and goes on to examine how accurately they reflect the true state of higher education. The result is a thought-provoking discussion of the present challenges and future prospects of American higher education. "O'Brien's historical overview of the transition from 19th-century denominational colleges to 20th-century research-driven and largely secular ones is provocative. Cleverly written and well-focused, the book addresses the financial pressures facing higher education and asks vital questions about cutbacks and curricula."—Publishers Weekly. "Lively, engaging, and richly suggestive." —Francis Oakley, Commonweal. "O'Brien employs calm, powerful reason, without sensationalism. His perspective is illuminating. . . . All the Essential Half-Truths About Higher Education is one of the wisest and most useful treatments of American higher education." —John Attarian, Detroit News. more...

Price: $17.00

American Education, Democracy, and the Second World War examines how U.S. educational institutions during World War II responded to the dilemma of whether to serve as “weapons” in the nation’s arsenal of democracy or “citadels” in safeguarding the American way of life. By studying the lives of wartime Americans, as well as nursery schools, elementary and secondary schools, and universities, Charles Dorn makes the case that although wartime pressures affected educational institutions to varying degrees, these institutions resisted efforts to be placed solely in service of the nation’s war machine. Instead, Dorn argues, American education maintained a sturdy commitment to fostering civic mindedness in a society characterized by rapid technological advance and the perception of an ever-increasing threat to national security. more...

Price: $85.00

In At Berkeley in the '60s, Jo Freeman argues that the stage for campus radicalism of the sixties was set by the repressive climate of McCarthyism that permeated American society in the 1950s. Skillfully laying the historical foundation, she argues that Berkeley in the sixties began in the 1930s when rules were laid down prohibiting political activity in order to protect the university against charges of Communist influence. These rules were later used to justify the suppression of all political activity and advocacy inside the campus boundaries. She concludes that what happened at Berkeley in the early 1960s was not so much a "battle in the Civil Rights Movement [as] a skirmish in the Cold War." more...

Price: $17.55

Between Church and State clarifies the historical context of some of America's most controversial educational issues, including classroom prayer, school vouchers, creationism and evolution, sex education, and the teaching of values. James W. Fraser rejects both the liberal idea that "the Christian right is engaged in a campaign to impose God on public schools whose purposes have always been secular" and the conservative idea that, when the Supreme Court banned prayer and Bible reading in the classroom in the '60s, "God was kicked out of the public schools." Countering these high-pitched recriminations, Fraser carefully examines the way that public education in early America "was pressed into service as a new kind of national church, commissioned to carry the common culture and morality of the nation" after the Constitution definitively separated church and state. He describes the fierce debates that arose when public education was called upon to honor the worldviews of Catholic immigrants, freed African Americans, and other ethnic and cultural groups who won battles over their right to respect and inclusion in the nation's common life. And he begins to answer the central question raised by his book--"How should a diverse and democratic society deal with issues of religion in public schools?"--in two important ways. more...

Price: $25.00