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The Rise of the South in American Thought and Education documents the generalization of southern values and institutions northward at the close of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century. The traditional emphasis in the South on vocational education (a reflection of the Christian ethic of work as redemption, not the Republican one of free labor), country life and living, racial segregation, and the centrality of nature study as a source of both science and religion, added up to a coherent vision that responded to "undesirable" economic and social change in the urban North. The survival of Southern cultural traditions, as antiquated as they were, posed no threat to the plans of corporate progressives; indeed, as the book argues, it facilitated them, and nowhere more so than in the field of education. Modern educators wanting to put into historical context relations of class, race, and ethnicity as they persist in today's schools will find much here to inform them, putting to rest, for example, false distinctions in the history of school reform between a liberal-progressive North and a conservative and reactionary South. The book will appeal as well as to a popular audience of Americans curious to understand the illiberal foundations of the modern liberal state.
List of contents
Jackie M. Blount: Preface - Acknowledgments - Introduction - "Old times there are not forgotten": A Didactic New South in the Development Plans of the North, 1880-1903 - Moral and Practical Uplift in the New Agricultural Education: Nation-Building for a Solid South, 1900-1920 - "To Form a More Perfect Union": The Moral Example of Southern Baptist Thought and Education, 1890-1920 - Otis W. Caldwell, Part I: Nature Study, Ecumenicalism, and the Rise of General Science - Otis W. Caldwell, Part II: The Mission of Science in General Education - Race Education for All: "The Hampton-Tuskegee Idea" and Its Americanization - The New Machinery of Social Discipline: Educating for an Immigrant Nation, the Case of the Gary Schools - The Lincoln School of Teachers College: Elitism and Educational Democracy - Epilogue: The Global (American) South: The Past as Prologue? - Index.
About the author
John M. Heffron, Ph.D. is Professor of Educational History and Culture and Director of the MA Program in Educational Leadership and Societal Change at Soka University of America. He completed his doctorate in American history at the University of Rochester.
Report
"In this important book, Heffron upends the received narrative of a triumphant North reforming the South in the years after the Civil War, showing how Northern industrialists drew on the Southern tradition as a model for the nation in the late nineteenth century. He demonstrates how the most powerful force in national school reform during this era-the General Education Board lavishly funded by the Rockefellers-promoted a Dixie-based model of progressive schooling that featured vocationalism, racial and ethnic paternalism, class hierarchy, and traditional religious values. The result was a triumph of Southern culture rising from the ashes of military defeat." -David F. Labaree, author of A Perfect Mess: The Unlikely Ascendancy of American Higher Education
