The one best system : a history of American urban education

Book

The one best system : a history of American urban education / David B. Tyack.

Summary:

The One Best System a major new interpretation of what actually happened in the development of one of America's most influential institutions. At the same time it is a narrative in which the participants themselves speak out: farm children and factory workers, frontier teachers and city superintendents, black parents and elite reformers. And it encompasses both the achievements and the failures of the system: the successful assimilation of immigrants, racism and class bias; the opportunities offered to some, the injustices perpetuated for others.

Mr. Tyack has placed his colorful, wide-ranging view of history within a broad new framework drawn from the most recent work in history, sociology, and political science. He looks at the politics and inertia, the ideologies and power struggles that formed the basis of our present educational system. Using a variety of social perspectives and methods of analysis, David Tyack illuminates for all readers the change from village to urban ways of thinking and acting over the course of more than one hundred years.

Record details

ISBN: 0674637801
ISBN: 9780674637801
ISBN: 0674637828
ISBN: 9780674637825
Physical Description: xii, 353 pages : 19 illustrations ; 24 cm
Publisher: Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press, 1974.

Content descriptions

Bibliography, etc. Note:: Includes bibliographical references (pages 317-343) and index.
Formatted Contents Note:: The one best system in microcosm : community and consolidation in rural education -- From village school to urban system : bureaucratization in the nineteenth century -- The politics of pluralism : nineteenth-century patterns -- Centralization and the corporate model : contests for control of urban schools, 1890-1940 -- Inside the system : the character of urban schools, 1890-1940 -- The one best system under fire, 1940-1973.