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Richard Angelo144C Taylor
Ed. Policy Studies 257-3993
EPE 317
History of Education
Spring, 2004
The truest view rested in becomes false.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
Journals, 1835
A way of seeing is always a way of not seeing.
—Kenneth Burke
Permanence & Change, 1935
Required Reading:
Norman Brosterman, InventingKindergarten (Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1997).
Steven Conn, Museums & American Intellectual Life,1876-1926 (Chicago, 2000)
James Leloudis, Schooling the New South: Pedagogy, Self, and Society in North Carolina, 1880-1920 (University of North Carolina Press, 1996).
Beth Bailey, From Front Porch to Back Seat: Courtship in 20th Century
America (Hopkins, 1989).
These books cross the same region of issues at different angles. I hope you’ll agree they make a fine introduction to the challenges and the pleasures of thinking about education historically.
Brosterman opens the door to the exciting new ideas about childhood, learning, and nature which informed the “kindergarten” in its classical phase. He then goes on to argue that the “gifts”—the geometrically-shaped materials which the German educator, Friedrich Froebel, designed as play-things for children—laid the foundation for modernism in painting and architecture. In other words, Brosterman claims that the materials which Frank Lloyd Wright and others like him manipulated daily as youngsters decisively shaped the art they later produced as adults.
We’ll hear more about Froebel and “object lessons”—teaching by appealing to the sense, through concrete experience rather than abstractions—when we get to Leloudis’ account of the “graded school revolution.” But first we’re going to take an extended look at museums. In their formative stage, at least, these institutions were also preoccupied with objects, dedicated to educating the public through the proper arrangement, classification, and display of collections. Steven Conn argues that while this “object epistemology” lost its wider appeal by the 1920’s, it lives on today in both the fine arts and in exhibits created especially for children.
When most people think about education, of course, they think about the politics of school reform, a subject never far from the newspaper headlines. KERA, the brewing controversy over “No Child Left Behind,” or the Supreme Court’s decision last spring on the role of affirmative action in admissions policy at the University of Michigan is only the most obvious examples. James Leloudis’ Schooling the New South contextualizes these issues by bringing us back to the rural world that was North Carolina in the aftermath of the Civil War, a world where most youngsters didn’t attend school at all, or when they did, their classrooms and the experiences they had there were radically different from what we take for granted today. He not only delineates the ideas which inspired the “graded school revolution” in the 1880’s, but the conflicts that ensued over those ideas. After charting the profound social changes set in motion by the struggles for institutionalization—the new politics of race, class and gender—he points to the successes that had been achieved by the 1920’s and the legacy of decidedly mixed results which we live with today.
The redirection of the university’s intellectual life is an essential part of the story Leloudis tells (and Conn too, come to think of it), but for the most part, he leaves the social life of undergraduates in the shadows. So we turn to Beth Bailey to conclude the course precisely because her book explores the changes in campus life from the 1920’s through the 1970’s. Once the practice of “dating” got underway, she argues, the conventions governing courtship altered dramatically. Colleges and universities got into the act not only as a staging area for extracurricular activities—the proms, homecomings, and a whole raft of now competitive social pressures—but through courses in “marriage and the family.” By the 1970’s, she argues, dating and the customs that supported it had become outmoded. For all of our anxieties about the uncertain future, she argues, there is no returning to the patterns of the past.
You may chose to keep a journal, which I will read and respond to occasionally, or write short reaction papers to three of these four books. I’m also asking you to develop a small-scale research project on some aspect of the history of education in Kentucky—on kindergartens, museums, school reform, or campus life. We’ll discuss the details of these assignments in class. As you can see from the schedule, some our regular class meetings will be devoted to working together in the archives. I also hope we can take a field trip to a museum, whether here in Lexington, in Frankfort, or Cincinnati. There will be no final exam. Your grade will be based on my appraisal of your papers, the caliber of your project and your participation in class. Attendance counts, of course. I’ll be here for each class meeting, and unless you have a good reason, I expect you to do the same.
Enjoy the course!
______
January 15: First meeting.
January 20-22: Brosterman, Inventing Kindergarten, Prologue & Introduction, chapters 1 & 2, “Friedrich Froebel,” and “Kindergarten,” pp. 7-39;
January 27-29: chapter 3,“Gifts,” pp. 40-90. (Visitor: Montessori Teacher…?)
February 3-5: chapters 4, 5, & 6, “Success,” “Art,” and “Architecture,” pp. 90-153. Visit the archives…? (Lucy Walby and the Lexington kindergarten.)
February 10-12: Conn, Museums & American Intellectual Life, Chapters 1 & 2, “Museums and the Late Victorian World,” and “Museums and the Development of Anthropology,” pp. 3-73.
February 17-19: Conn, Chapters 4 & 5, “The Philadelphia Commercial Museum: A Museum to Conquer the World,” and “Objects and American History: The Museums of Henry Mercer & Henry Ford,” pp. 115-151.
February 24-26: Conn, Chapters 6 & 7, “From South Kensington to the Louvre: Art Museums and the Creation of Fine Art,” and “1926: Of Fairs, Museums, and History.” Field Trip: visiting a museum together (Frankfort, Lexington, Cincinnati)?
March 2-4: Leloudis, Schooling the New South, chapters 1 & 2, “A Classroom Revolution” & “Apostles of the New South,” pp. 1-72. Visit the archives?
March 9-11: Leloudis, chapters 3 & 4, “Servants of the State” & “Voices of Dissent” (pp. 73-141).
March 16-18: Spring Break, No class
March 23-25: Finish Schooling the New South, “Rubes & Redeemers,” “The Riddle of Race,” and “Afterword.”
April 6-8: Bailey, From Front Porch to Back Seat, chapters 1, 2, & 3, “Introduction,” “Calling Cards and Money,” and “The Economy of Dating,” pp. 1-56.
April 13-15: Bailey, Chapters 3,4, & 5, “The Worth of a Date,” “Sex Control,” and “The Etiquette of Masculinity and Femininity,” pp. 57-118.
April 20-22: Finish Baily, “Scientific Truth…and Love,” and the “Epiloque,” pp. 119-141.
April 27—29: Local history paper due.
May 3-6: Exam Week.