The One Best System: A History of American Urban Education

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Harvard University Press, 1974 - 353 pages

The One Best System presents 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.

David 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, 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.

 

Contents

PROLOGUE
3
CENTRALIZATION AND THE COR
8
THE ONE BEST SYSTEM IN MICRO
13
The Rural School Problem and Power to the Profes
21
FROM VILLAGE SCHOOL TO URBAN
28
NINE
78
Configurations of Control
88
Teachers and School Poli
97
Religion and Ethnicity
104
THE CHARACTER
177
EPILOGUE THE ONE BEST SYSTEM UNDER FIRE
269
NOTES
295
BIBLIOGRAPHY
317
INDEX
345
Copyright

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About the author (1974)

David B. Tyack (1930-2016) was Vida Jacks Professor of Education, Emeritus, and Professor of History, Emeritus, at Stanford University.

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