The One Best System: A History of American Urban Education |
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The One Best System: A History of American Urban Education
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by David Tyack
Sales Rank: 237046
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List Price: $23.50
$21.15
At Amazon
on 6-17-2008.
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Features
Cover Type: Paperback with 378 pages
Published by: Harvard University Press June 28, 2007
Written in: English
ISBN 10 Number: 0674637828
ISBN 13 Number: 978-0674637825
Book Dimensions:
8.3 x 5.5 x 0.9 inches
Weighs: 14.4 ounces
Product Review
This brilliant and readable book opens a variety of new perspectives on the development of public education in this countryTyack does the most responsible, nonsentimental social history yet seen, and I think it highly likely that readers will find themselves educated, enlarged, and excited by what he says.
--Maxine Greene (Today's Education )
Product Description
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.
Reader Reviews
Tyack, D. B. (1974). The one best system: A history of American urban education. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Ellen Lagemann (1989) has observed, "One cannot understand the history of education in the United States in the twentieth century unless one realizes that Edward L. Thorndike won and John Dewey lost" (p.185). Put differently, in the words of David Tyack (1974), it was the administrative progressives who won and all the others who lost. In his classic work on the bureaucratization of schools in the late 1800s and early 1900s--The One Best System--Tyack suggests that school reformers of the late 19th century saw efficiency as the sine qua non to human progress, and therefore borrowed and amalgamated concepts like regularity, hierarchy, docility, punctuality, assessment, and conformity into evolving administrative structures of schools, for these qualities seemed to unequivocally spur the booming production in industrial outfits of the time. In short, schools became corporations. His thesis is clear and iterative, his prose distinctly rich, his revision of early historical accounts legitimate (especially those proffered by the likes of Elwood Cubberly), and perhaps most important, the literary arsenal from which he draws support is diffuse. As cities grew rapidly at the close of the 19th century, the need for social control became more imperative than ever. Tyack shows how school centralization in the early 20th century was merely microcosmic of broad shifts occurring in large cities (e.g., police, public health, welfare systems). In education, systematization of schools was veiled behind the banner of "taking schools out of politics"--a movement led by Wealthy Anglo Saxon Protestants (WASPs) who did not see themselves as "political" but as crusaders for an obvious good with objective means. Put differently, why democratize the governance and organization of schools when experts (WASPs) clearly believed there was one best system that would work anytime and anywhere? In the struggle for control over schools between 1890 and 1920, among the losers were board members representing local wards, teachers, and pedagogical progressives (all representing ethnically and culturally diverse perspectives about schools) who were thoroughly defeated by a powerful conglomerate of WASPs and media muckraking of the graft of machine politics. Among the greatest losers were Blacks, South Italians, and Poles, whose encounters with the bigotry of the one best system seemed most difficult. Tyack's paraphrasing of segregationist Theodore Bilbo captured the movement to a tee: "All this talk about taking the schools out of politics is a huge joke to intelligent people.... It means nothing except to take the schools out of your politics and put them in [mine]" (p. 284). Clearly, there was never such a thing as one best system for all. While Tyack's scholarship is unquestionably first-rate, his ability to deploy strong arguments and have fun at the same time is ingenious: Whether it is brawny students in one-room school houses beating up their schoolmasters in front of 5-year olds (and being demoted by the local school board not for fighting, but losing!), school janitors engaging in espionage for superintendents who wanted to insure implementation fidelity amongst teachers, textbook companies sending "alluring women as accomplices to blackmail school officials into favoring their wares" (p. 95), or explaining the literal origin of the expression, "toe the line," Tyack seamlessly weaves these disparate pieces back into his main thesis: social control of the young through the most formidable institution of enculturation--the school. Throughout my reading of Tyack, I couldn't help but think of the annoying but popular and indiscriminate use of the term "Best Practices" (originally a business term, by the way) in educational parlance. Tyack's book reminds us of the need to take such claims with a grain of salt. Instead of taking the hard-nosed and misleading high road to an unequivocal science of education (also known as the one best system), ideals of pluralism and decentralized decision-making should be embraced by school reformers, especially if schools are to be touted as truly democratic institutions. This should be a required reading for anyone interested in urban education.
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The One Best System: A History of American Urban Education
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