Schooling the Poor - A Social Inquiry into the American Educational Experience

By combining history with sociology, Rothstein presents a new way of looking at state-supported schools. He describes the pauper schools of the early 1800s and shows how they became the foundation for the common schools that followed. Compulsory education sought to alleviate urban crime while assimilating the immigrants who flocked to our shores in each generation. In the late 19th century, the militaristic schools became more bureaucratic and set in their ways in spite of the new thinking in education represented by John Dewey. Rothstein shows how Dewey was taught in college but that Thorndike was followed in the public schools. The high school was an attempt to meet the changing needs of the Industrial Revolution. After recapitulating the foundational history of American public schools, Rothstein examines the psychological effects of martinet teaching methods on students' self-perception and performance. A stunning new (old) perspective on American education.

List of contents

Preface
Pauper Schools
Houses of Confinement
Schooling the Poor
Organizational Perspectives
The Birth of Modern Schools
New Divisions: The Emergence of the High School
Agents of the State: Ambivalence in the Teacher's Position
The Other Side of Segregation: Ethnographic Glimpses of an Inner City Junior High School
Language and Pedagogy
Selected Bibliography
Index

About the author

STANLEY WILLIAM ROTHSTEIN is Professor of Education and Social Foundations at California State University, Fullerton. He is the author of Identity and Ideology (Greenwood, 1991), The Voice of the Other (Praeger, 1992), and Handbook of Schooling in Urban America (Greenwood, 1993).

Product details

• Authors: Stanley Rothstein, Stanley W. Rothstein
• Publisher: Bloomsbury
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 22.06.1994
• EAN: 9780897893725
• ISBN: 978-0-89789-372-5
• Subjects: Humanities, art, music > Education > Special education; USA, SOCIAL SCIENCE / Poverty & Homelessness, HISTORY / Social History, Social & cultural history, EDUCATION / Special Education / General, Poverty & unemployment, Social and cultural history, United States of America, USA, Teaching of students with different educational needs, Schools, Poverty and precarity, Schools and pre-schools, EDUCATION / Schools / General, Current Events and Issues: Education