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

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Tyack, David B., author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Education, Urban--United States.

Education, Urban.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (xii, 353 pages) : illustrations

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, Massachusetts : Harvard University Press, [1974]

Summary:

What we don’t know about learning could fill a book—and it might be a schoolbook. In a masterly commentary on the possibilities of education, the eminent psychologist Jerome Bruner reveals how education can usher children into their culture, though it often fails to do so. Applying the newly emerging “cultural psychology” to education, Bruner proposes that the mind reaches its full potential only through participation in the culture—not just its more formal arts and sciences, but its ways of perceiving, thinking, feeling, and carrying out discourse. By examining both educational practice and educational theory, Bruner explores new and rich ways of approaching many of the classical problems that perplex educators. Education, Bruner reminds us, cannot be reduced to mere information processing, sorting knowledge into categories. Its objective is to help learners construct meanings, not simply to manage information. Meaning making requires an understanding of the ways of one’s culture—whether the subject in question is social studies, literature, or science. The Culture of Education makes a forceful case for the importance of narrative as an instrument of meaning making. An embodiment of culture, narrative permits us to understand the present, the past, and the humanly possible in a uniquely human way. Going well beyond his earlier acclaimed books on education, Bruner looks past the issue of achieving individual competence to the question of how education equips individuals to participate in the culture on which life and livelihood depend. Educators, psychologists, and students of mind and culture will find in this volume an unsettling criticism that challenges our current conventional practices—as well as a wise vision that charts a direction for the future.

Contents:

Frontmatter

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

PROLOGUE

Introduction

1. The School as a Community and the Community as a School

2. "The Rural School Problem" and Power to the Professional

1. Swollen Villages and the Need for Coordination

2. Creating the One Best System

3. Teachers and the Male Mystique

4. Attendance, Voluntary and Coerced

5. Some Functions of Schooling

1. Critics and Dissenters

2. Configurations of Control

3. Lives Routinized yet Insecure: Teachers and School Politics

4. Cultural Conflicts: Religion and Ethnicity

5. A Struggle Lonely and Unequal: The Burden of Race

1. An Interlocking Directorate and Its Blueprint for Reform

2. Conflicts of Power and Values: Case Studies of Centralization

3. Political Structure and Political Behavior

1. Success Story: The Administrative Progressives

2. Science

3. Victims without "Crimes": Black Americans

4. Americanization: Match and Mismatch

5. "Lady Labor Sluggers" and the Professional Proletariat

EPILOGUE THE ONE BEST SYSTEM UNDER FIRE, 1940-1973

NOTES

BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX

Notes:

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

9780674251090

0674251091

9780674251120

0674251121

OCLC:

1198929617