Transitions in American Education: A Social History of Teaching (review)

Jointly authored by a historian and a professional educator, this book takes as its premise that two significant transitions have taken place in American schooling, each roughly corresponding to the turn of a century, and that a third is now at hand. The first of these transitions, a result of the American Revolution and the market revolution that followed, replaced the haphazard and chiefly religious schooling of the colonial era with the common school of the nineteenth century, with its assumptions of equality and opportunity, one-room schoolhouse, and McGuffey Readers doling out a pan-Protestant and strongly patriotic curriculum. The second transition, born of the urban, corporate, and "modern" revolutions at the turn of the twentieth century, ushered in the modern graded school with its corporate management, progressive curriculum, and belief that all problems could be solved by science, technology, and government. Toward the end of each cycle, before the transitions were successfully made, schools and teachers came to be severely criticized, even reviled. But eventually, in each case, a new equilibrium was reached.

Following an exemplary introductory chapter that firmly roots the first two transitions in their respective historical frameworks, the authors use the transitions as a template to look at selected aspects of the history of American elementary education, and teaching. Successive chapters take up multicultural and multiracial change, ethnicity, and the rise of women in the teaching profession, as well as changes in curriculum and teaching styles, moral education and modes of discipline, and the organization and governance of schools. Each chapter revisits the nineteenth- and twentieth-century transitions while making sometimes contentious leaps ahead to issues that are identified as part of the contemporary transition.

Thus organized, the authors have written a work of synthesis drawn principally from secondary sources, enriched by accounts of teachers' experiences drawn from the existing literature, as well as classroom observations and teacher interviews in a limited number of eastern North Carolina schools. The decision to organize the book topically while using a historical template works well in general, but it is not without problems. It has the merit of tying contemporary issues closely to their antecedents. The regular return to the first two transitions, chapter after chapter, guarantees that no reader can miss what those transitions were, but results in a great deal of repetition ("as we have seen in chapter two..."). Especially problematic, the method enables the authors to deal only with topics that they choose, and where the template seems to fit. There is, for example, no discussion of students' changing family structures, of students' out-of-school education, of the growing political demands on schools to accept responsibility for nonacademic training, or of the power of entrenched bureaucracies in the schools, teacher unions, and in teacher-education programs to inhibit change.

The most questionable part of the book has to do with the transition now underway, in which little historical perspective is available for guidance, and the authors slip into unabashed advocacy. The result is roseate conclusions in a final chapter about three contemporary "revolutions" out of which, they predict, still another equilibrium will emerge. The demographic revolution will lead to multiculturalism, bilingual education, and whole language instruction—all current nostrums. (It is arguable that the latter two are already passing from the scene.) The communications revolution resulting from the computer and the internet will expand teaching resources. (There is no recognition that this revolution may not only enrich but actually transform curriculum and teaching styles.) Finally, the "governmental revolution" embedded in the increasing role of the federal government and national standards will free teachers from the pressures of local intrusions and leave them able to do what they want and should. (It's doubtful that the proponents of national standards view the matter this way.)

Teachers in training...