Trad Amern Educ

by Lawrence A. Cremin and Lawrence Arthur Cremin

Book Overview

Consists of lectures given by Cremin at the University of Wisconsin to inaugurate the Merle Curti Lectures, highlights aspects of his three volume study of the history of American education. This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0465086845
• ISBN13: 9780465086849
• Release Date: March 1979
• Publisher: Basic Books
• Length: 172 Pages
• Weight: 0.45 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 5.3" x 7.8"

Customer Reviews

Educated opinion on US culture for everyone

A book on the history of education in America could be a dry and uninteresting experience in reading. Not so, especially with the style and substance of Professor Cremin.I came across Lawrence A. Cremin's name because he is prolific and well-respected, as attested to in many footnotes and references I've come across in my recent interest in the subject of public education. One reads about all kinds of educational ideas, efforts, buildings and traditions from the early days of white settlement in America, through all the major phases of history. In this book, the main chapters are:"The Colonial Experience: 1607-1783"; "The National Experience: 1783-1876" and "The Metropolitan Experience: 1876-1976". While one may pick minor quarrels about the choice of dates for the second period, on the whole, Cremin is clear, concise and fair in the way he characterises the traditions of American education. We see the influence of churches and religion - waxing and waning but never distant - on educational thinking in these pages. One gets a new perspective on America, not just the topic of schooling.In the first section, we discover that "Education ...was part and parcel of the process of cultural transmission, affording the colonists access to the political, moral, and technological wisdom of the West..." but this changed slowly and surely in a new environment. Thus, household, church and school would mean diffrent things and take different priorities from time to time, even from year to year.We learn from Cremin, for the period 1783-1876, that America's Founding Fathers such as Bejamin Rush, were happy to receive compliments that America had won more rights for all of humanity in 1776, but he chose to be "somewhat more restrained." He acknowledged the words of Richard Price, the English Nonconformist, with a sobering reminder: "We have changed our forms of government but it remains yet to effect a revolution in our principles, opinions, and manners ...This is the most difficult part of the business of the patriots and legislators of our country." This - and the movement for a truly American and national education - became the challenge of the third period discussed in this book. And the task is unfinished in some ways. Cremin has offered us a road map since 1607, pointed out some mileposts and major scenic attractions, hotels and gas stations, with the tasks unfinished to be taken up by all of us for edifices of the future. He concludes with important advice for us not to be simplistic or uni-dimensional. He calls for a "renewed attention to context, complexity, and relationship in our discussions of education, past, present, and future." He reminds us of something he noted in the earlier pages, that education can be socializing or liberating. He is on solid ground to conclude that on balance, education in America has always been more liberating, even as he (and we) recognize those groups who were "the underclass" in each pahse of our history.I recommend t