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American Educational History Revisited
A Critique of Progress
Milton Gaither
Reflective History
Pub Date: January 2003, 216 pages
Cloth: $43, ISBN: 0807742902
 
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"Aspiring, beginning, and established scholars alike will find this required, provocative reading and a compelling invitation to rethink the history of the history of education."
—Donald Warren, Past president, History of Education Society In this thought-provoking volume, Milton Gaither challenges the dominant view of American educational history held almost universally since Bernard Bailyn and Lawrence Cremin’s work in the 1960s. Gaither claims that for forty years the myth has persisted of a monolithic pre-1960 educational historiography narrowly focused on schools and cut off from developments in mainstream historical writing. This book revises this perception by providing the most comprehensive coverage yet of this earlier period. Rather than condemning the entire pre-1960 tradition outright, Gaither seeks to understand it as a manifestation of the society and culture from which it came. In this context, Gaither finds a rich and conflicted pre-1960 educational historiography fully attuned to the spirit of its age. This well-written and persuasive volume revolutionizes our view of what has become the central self-image of nearly all practicing educational historians by going behind the Bailyn myth to recover a historical past that has been systematically misrepresented and suppressed from his day to our own. |
