Oxford University Press's
Academic Insights for the Thinking World
In the New York Times Art Section today, Michiko Kakutani writes about British poet Craig Raine’s new book on T.S. Eliot, calling Raine’s description a “new, more accessible T. S. Eliot, an Eliot he describes as a virtuosic fox in terms of style, and a single-minded hedgehog when it came to themes.”
A closer look at happiness.
David Tolin, PhD provides some advice for confronting a loved one who hoards.
Friday procrastination.
An excerpt in honor of Veterans Day.
This Day in History the Nobel Prize in Chemistry is awarded to Linus Pauling.
Word of the Year.
News and The Great Risk Shift.
“At age two I tried teaching other kids to count using number blocks” Terrence Tao, recent Fields Medal winner, is also the author of Solving Mathematical Problems, which will be published by Oxford University Press in September. Tao’s Medal was in “honor of his contributions to partial differential equations, combinatorics, harmonic analysis and additive number […]
Over most of the first half of the twentieth century, America’s public colleges and universities functioned quite autonomously. They were mostly small, enrolling less than ten percent of the nation’s eighteen to twenty-one year olds, and, for the most part, financially self-sufficient. None of the public institutions were competitive with the best international universities.
The barren setting in this picture of the Purdue University campus in 1900 reflects the modest beginnings of the public institutions. Now, Purdue is an internationally renowned institution, especially for scientific research.
Black students seeking higher education during this period were most likely to find it in a segregated institution. Among the best of the segregated institutions was Tuskegee where these young women learned mattress making early in the twentieth century as part of their “higher education.”
After World War II, the United States felt secure as a world power and despite the vitriolic critics of the 1950s who complained that “Johnny can’t read,” the pressure upon educators was to provide special programs for special needs. The ordinary student was largely ignored and left to the temptations of tv, adolescent culture, and, occasionally, sports. Academic study did not occupy much of their energy.
The creation of a US Department of Education in 1979 was highly controversial. “Too much federal control, and we don’t need it,” Republicans claimed. However, the newly-elected Republican president, Ronald Reagan, did have to appoint a secretary and his appointee, Terrel Bell, attempting to save his department and his own job, asked his Utah neighbor, David Gardner, to chair a commission to look at the state of American education. Most improbably, this group’s 1983 report, A Nation at Risk, startled the country. Exposing the academic deficiencies of American youth, the report forced the country to pay attention to its schools. Few federal reports have had such a profound effect on the general population.
When the US Supreme Court decided in Brown v. Board of Education that segregation by race in public schools violated the US Constitution, the response from segregated school systems was not immediate. Rather, overcrowding was the issue most on the minds of the parents of the baby boomers.
The solution to the challenges posed by the Brown decision was “Access.’’ If the mother who wanted special attention could not get that, then she wanted a special program, preferably one for her child who undoubtedly was “gifted and talented.” Such a child had likely been identified by high performance on the intelligence and achievement standardized tests that were sweeping schoolrooms. These were the children who were introduced to the “new math” and other such subjects now being designed for schoolchildren by some of America’s most notable scholars, including those at the University of Illinois, who encouraged children to use “manipulables” while learning mathematics.
The Education Carnival is now up. Go read some excellent posts on American education. LINK
Lucy Sprague Mitchell and Carleton Washburne, embody the Adjustment period from 1920 to 1954. Mitchell with her friend Caroline Pratt founded the City and Country School in New York City as her children entered school in the 1920s. Mitchell had tried unsuccessfully to break the formalism of the New York City schools, and having inherited family money, she decided to establish a school of her own design. Its 1922 program of arts, play, shop, rest, as well as a little reading, is revealed in this chart showing the “Greenwich Village School Program, 1922 -1923.”
Patricia Graham provides historical context to today’s battles over public education.