For more than forty years, parents, teachers, veterans, and community activists have engaged in grassroots resistance to the military's presence in schools. The historical study of campaigns against militarism in schools remains underdeveloped. This is a glaring omission, given the breadth and history of this activism. Militarism in the…

The "Bakke" decision marked a turning point in higher education. Tested again most recently in "Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin," affirmative action policy remains in place even as the Roberts Court shakes its foundation by demanding a degree of administrative oversight not pursued by previous Courts. In spite of…

The role of nostalgia has been identified by those interested in the unique impact of one-room schoolhouses on historical memory and present-day fascination with the structures. Most notably, educational historian Jonathan Zimmerman explored the issue in "Small Wonder: The Little Red Schoolhouse in History and Memory" (2009). Zimmerman…

During the aftermath of the First Red Scare in the 1930s and during the early stages of the Cold War in the 1940s, the United States engaged in a great national effort to preserve and protect its capitalist system from international rival--the communist Soviet Union. In the American South, states such as Georgia, Mississippi, and Alabama faced a…

When viewing the landscape of learning and literacy, politics and policy often intersect. Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, literacy is one skill that progressives sought to expand and others historically used to restrict access to immigration, jobs, and civic participation. During the closing decades of the nineteenth century,…

On the day before the Thanksgiving school recess in 1912, teacher L. Thomas Hopkins made an unusual admission to his small American history class at Brewster High School on Massachusetts' Cape Cod. He told his students that he knew they disliked the course. He confessed that he, too, disliked how the course was going. Following a short period of…

After Greek independence from the Ottoman Empire (1827), a newly formed Greek state looked to retrieve its past through the teaching of a Greek national history. For much of the nineteenth century Greek schools forged common religious, linguistic, and historical ties among the Greek people through the teaching of a Greek historical past (Zervas…

The purpose of this article is to provide a detailed analysis of the development of reflective practice in American education. The essay will primarily ground itself in various works by John Dewey and Donald A. Schön, as well as analyze the impact these authors had on the topic. The essay will rely heavily on Schön's "Educating the Reflective…

In this paper, the author explains how homeschooling came to life in America, describing the forces that pushed it from the margins of acceptability to the center of the national political and social stage and to near normalization within the educational industry. The focus is on exploring the origins of homeschooling by exposing its intellectual…

In "The Transformation of the School", Lawrence Cremin warned against formulating any capsule definition of progressive education: "None exists, and none ever will; for throughout its history progressive education meant different things to different people, and these differences were only compounded by the remarkable diversity of…

This paper examines why so many northern teachers ventured into the South in the 1860s, and the reasons southerners first sought them out, and later wanted the teachers "put to rout." Changing attitudes toward teaching and learning, textbooks and teachers, were part of the emerging national identity of the antebellum South.

The Civil War ended slavery but not the pernicious inequality of power and status that still characterizes relations between black and white America. As soon as they could, with the help of presidents bent on appeasement and the benign neglect of northerners who had fought the war to preserve the union but not necessarily to invite former slaves…

At a time when most other institutions of higher education in the country excluded ex-slaves from admission, the University of Kansas conferred degrees upon sixty African Americans by 1910. However, while the university did allow ex-slaves to matriculate, these students still experienced a degree of exclusion and encountered barriers of racial…

After the Civil War, schooling for African Americans was irregular and consisted mainly of elementary grades. Education was provided, primarily, by elite, private institutions and fewer than three percent of students aged 13-17 attended regularly. In 1896, the United States Supreme Court issued a ruling in "Plessey v. Ferguson." Although…

The National Council for the Social Studies (NCSS or Council), founded in 1921, is the premiere professional association in the social studies field. This treatment of a transformative period in the institutional history of the Council is intended to serve as a partial antidote to the social studies field's longstanding case of "historical…