Hope and History: What do future teachers need to know?

Despite the hostile climate of punitive testing, budget cuts, and top-down control facing public education in this country, a number of programs and courses seeking to encourage progressive teaching practices have been developed and are continuing to be created at colleges and universities around the country, some of them described in this issue. In this article I describe a single course embedded within a teacher education program that I believe contributes to this broad political project. This course, which is (somewhat awkwardly) titled Class, Race, Gender in the History of U.S. Education, reflects my strong belief in the need for a historical perspective for prospective teachers. It introduces prospective teachers to the powerful history of students and teachers who have claimed a broad and challenging education as a right for all people. While this course is obviously not perfect and is not the only example of how such material can be introduced to prospective teachers, I believe it has many strengths an d suggests approaches that may be useful to others. I created this course more than a decade ago. A number of other instructors have taught it over the years, and it is now being taught by Linda Mizzell. (*) All of the instructors of this course have contributed to its development, and my description of the course includes resources and assignments used in different versions of the course.

It may be useflul at the outset to set out what this course is not. It is not intended to be simply a chronological survey of institutional changes in state policies and educational practice. Instead, it considers the history of education in the United States as a struggle over access and control, focusing on the ways different groups have defined and organized education, considering the different experiences of Native American Indians, African Americans, women from different classes and ethnicities, and immigrant groups of a variety of cultures. Policies and attitudes toward education are examined in relation to changes in the U.S. economy, the growth of organized state structures, and racial and gender ideologies. Throughout the course, the emphasis is on the struggles of subjugated groups to gain access to and define a meaningful education.

Central to the design of this course is a belief that one of the most disempowering aspects of teaching is the isolation of the individual classroom teacher. Of course, this sense that each teacher is a unique individual mirrors the individualism and weak historical memory of U.S. culture as a whole. The emphasis in many teacher education programs on preparing lesson plans or on relationships within isolated classrooms encourages (often unwittingly) this individualism. Focusing on what goes on behind the closed classroom door leaves teachers with no sense of belonging to a larger collectivity and little understanding that their work is part of a larger historical process. Throughout this course, then, we have not only emphasized the way schools are located within larger social, political, and economic structures, but we have also introduced individual teachers as members of larger groups who were engaged in collective struggles. The story of Septima Clark and the citizenship schools in the Civil Rights moveme nt, for example, is not just a narrative of a heroic woman, but is an example of a person who participated in a collective struggle. Clark was a teacher activist, but she did not work alone. This idea--that we all are shaped by our personal and collective social locations and histories and that our actions can make a difference-is fundamental to the course.

In many ways, the linchpin of this course is the assignment asking students to explore their own families' educational histories. This paper is assigned early in the course with the intent that students begin to see that their own educational location is not just the result of their own individual hard work, but is shaped by larger social forces. The educational history assignment has two parts. The first part is to produce a genealogy indicating the educational attainment of members of the student's family. Gathering this information often involves interviewing family members about their own education and the education of their parents and grandparents. Students also can use any written documents that are available. Families differ enormously in the kind of knowledge they have about the past, so the sources of information available to students vary. The genealogy is presented in graphic form--as a chart or diagram. Students frequently create large poster board diagrams of their families for this exercise, wh ich they then present to the class. The second part of the assignment is an analytic paper, addressing some pattern in their family's educational history. This can be focused on the effect of class location, the role of religion, gender, race, ethnicity, or another factor seen as significant. They then discuss their papers with others in small groups. A number of powerful themes emerge from this assignment. By sharing their family's stories in small groups, students hear from one another that different families have access to different kinds of resources; they hear stories of privilege and of oppression not from the instructor or from assigned readings, but from their peers. This can be a powerful learning experience. On the other hand, as Linda Mizzell has commented, white students very frequently tell stories of their families' "coming to this country with nothing." She asks these students to consider whether the privilege associated with whiteness in the United States is "nothing." Moreover, these immigran ts often had the support of other members of their families already in this country, of an expanding economy, and the benefits of US imperial expansion at the turn of the twentieth century.

Over the life of this course, this assignment has been extremely powerful and meaningful to students. Nonetheless, I believe that it is important to recognize that it does ask students to make public their own private histories. Therefore, we have always offered students other options; they can choose to do the assignment, but not share their family's story with the other students; or as an alternative to examining their own families, they have the possibility of writing an analysis of the importance of education in an autobiography or biography chosen in consultation with the instructor. Paule Murray's Proud Shoes is a good choice for this kind of paper. In my years of teaching, no student has chosen this last option. All of us who have taught this course are convinced that this is a key assignment, but of course, as teachers we cannot control how the students understand this or ultimately what they learn from it. But raising the broader historical and social questions, challenging the accepted narratives wi thin their families, creating a space in which they speak and listen to one another, at least suggests the possibility of other realities.

As well as a paper on their family's educational history, students are required to read one additional book on educational history and to work in groups to present this topic to the class as a whole. There are usually five or six of these topics, arranged chronologically, so when these topic; appear on the syllabus, the student groups take responsibility for teaching the class. An example of the kind of books we used for this assignment is Thomas James' Exiles Within, a study of the education of children in the Japanese internment camps in World War II. Student presentations of this book are used in the context of examining patterns of racism toward Asian Americans, the role of the state in relation to wartime hysteria, and the meaning of democracy under such circumstances (the curriculum of the camp schools was in part set up by progressive educators). Other books and topics we used for this assignment include Stephen Jay Gould's The Mismeasure of Man on the development of the IQ test, as background to the d iscussion of the introduction of standardized testing in the schools; Ken Teitelbaurn's Schooling for "Good Rebels" to discuss radical alternatives to public schooling that developed at the turn of the twentieth century among socialist and anarchist groups; John Holt's How Children Fail and How Children Learn or Herbert Kohl's Thirty Six Children to examine the free school movement of the 1960s. We have also had students read and present on contemporary topics such as feminist pedagogy, anti-racist education, the debate over bilingual education, the recent immigrants to public schools, and gay and lesbian issues in schools. Of course we do not have time in any one course to do justice to all of these issues, but by providing students with choices of topics, we hope to allow students with a particular interest in one of these areas the chance to read in more depth and to present a topic to the class as a whole.

TOPICS AND TEXTS

The readings for this course have varied with the teacher, but the general outline of topics have remained roughly the same and followed a chronological sequence. The course is organized around the different ways education has been conceived and enacted in this country. We took as central the tension between, on one hand, a desire for social order--a vision of schools as maintaining a hierarchical society, of teaching children their proper place, of producing obedient workers or citizens, and on the other hand, a desire for freedom--a vision of education as a means of individual development or progressive social change. Questions the course raises include: who gets access to what resources? who controls knowledge (curriculum, tests)? who controls the work of teachers? what underlying interests guide educational policy? Throughout, we have emphasized that education is always deeply political and contested.

ORDER, DEMOCRACY, AND THE RISE OF THE COMMON SCHOOLS

The course begins with a discussion of ideas of education among indigenous peoples in North America, as best this can be recovered. We found J. R. Miller's chapter, "The Three L's: The Traditional Education of the Indigenous Peoples" from his book on Canadian native education, Shingwauk's Vision, to be useful here in raising the question of the cultural values underlying education. The film Hopi: Songs of the Fourth World can also raise issues about the cultural values underlying Native American education, although it is important to discuss the particular location of this film in the 1980s Southwest. The beliefs of Native American education can be compared to descriptions of education among the Puritans of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Here, we examine the catechism and alphabet from The New England Primer, with its emphasis on the innate sinfulness of children, their obligation to be obedient to their elders, and their need for salvation through faith. The catechism from The New England Primer, for example, includes the refrain:

I will fear God and honor the King

I will honor my mother and father

I will obey my superiors

I will submit to my ELDERS

In this early section of the course, we also considered the early development of class differences as well as the central importance of gender and race in defining who had access to schooling.

In the early Republic, we contrasted the ideas of Benjamin Rush, who argued for state supported schooling as means producing what he called "Republican machines" and Thomas Jefferson, who envisioned a kind of meritocracy available to all white boys, arguing that that free, state-supported schooling was vital to the development of intelligent citizens for the new Republic. In some versions of the course, we read excerpts from Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography to discuss the meanings and uses of literacy among white male artisans. Linda Kerber's Women of the Republic introduced the idea of Republican motherhood, the defense of literacy for girls so they could be good mothers who would raise responsible Republican sons. And we looked at Noah Webster, who attempted to create a national identity through the codification of a national language and whose spelling book became the standard textbook for generations of children.

A key moment in the history of education in the United States is the common school movement, a loosely organized social reform movement that was centered in New England in the thirty years before the Civil War. Carl Kaestle's Pillars of the Republic, Michael Katz's Ironies of Early School Reform, and David Nassaw's Schooled to Order were useful in conceptualizing this section of the course. The common school reformers argued for state supported and controlled compulsory schooling, open to all children in common school rooms, reading the same textbooks. In other words, this reform movement established the ideological claims of public schooling that dominated public discourse in the United States until the last decade (however much the schools may have failed to meet these goals). The contradictions of the common school movement are perhaps best explored by looking at the writings of Horace Mann, Massachusetts Secretary of Education in the 1840s and probably the best-known of the common school reformers. One as signment that proved useful here was to have the students work in groups to explicate specific passages from Mann's Twelfth Annual School Report from 1848. We reminded students of the significance of this date, not only the European Revolutions of that year, but that this was the date of the publication of The Communist Manifesto. In doing a close reading of passages from the Twelfth Annual School Report, students are introduced to Mann's fears of working class violence, his desire for a patriotic and Protestant curriculum that would create a common national identity, the belief that schooling could domesticate and transform the possibly revolutionary masses into a population that would accept cooperation between owners and workers. The opposition of Catholics, some workers, farmers who controlled local one-room schools, as well as those who didn't want to pay taxes to support the common schools are all explored. Most students in the course have only heard of Horace Mann if his was the name of their Junior Hi gh School. But the arguments Mann and the common school reformers put forward represent a powerful founding vision for state supported education, and it is important for students to engage those ideas and to try to formulate their own stance toward public schooling.

RACE AND RACISM IN US EDUCATION

As is true of every other aspect of U.S. society, education in this country has been profoundly shaped by conceptions of race. White English speakers continue to be imagined as the norm with others envisioned as "different" or "lacking." The history of African American education is particularly important in illuminating this dynamic, because as many have noted, the distinction between white and black is the model for subsequent varieties of U.s. racism. As is well known, Africans and Europeans arrived in the Americas at roughly the same time; racist theories justified the slavery of the Africans, the destruction of native peoples, and the privileges of the white Europeans which shaped all aspects of the emerging American cultures, including education. In the ante-bellum United States, over 90% of the African American population lived in the South in slavery. There it was a crime to teach slaves how to read and write. Historians have examined educational practices under slavery to highlight the way whites "edu cated" slaves to accept their slavery; while in the slave community, the passing on of African traditions and beliefs can be seen as a form of resistance. Thomas Webber's Deep Like the Rivers and Wilma King's Stolen Childhood are both useful in discussing the nature of education in the slave society of the South. Passages from Frederick Douglass's Autobiography on his struggles to learn how to read are also powerful in raising these issues, as are the early chapters in Booker T. Washington's Up From Slavery. The story of the freedmen's schools and the importance of education during Reconstruction has been told in a number of studies. James Anderson's The Education of Blacks in the South is perhaps the best account of this period and the effect of Jim Crow. Willie Lee Rose's Rehearsal for Reconstruction is a wonderful account of what was called "the Port Royal experiment," the first schools set up to teach newly-freed slaves in the early years of the Civil War. This book can be used as the basis for a group pr esentation. The section on the Northern teachers who taught in the freedmen's schools in Nancy Hoffman's Woman's "True" Profession is accessible and powerful, although it tends to overemphasize the work of white women teachers.

In many versions of the course, W. E. B. DuBois's The Souls of Black Folks has been used as a central text to discuss issues of nineteenth and early twentieth century African American education. Few students in my experience teaching this course have previously read this book, one of the most important works of U.S. cultural criticism of the twentieth century. Learning about DuBois's own life as well as the issues he raises is a way of engaging students with issues of racism and questions of educational policy--not least whether integration is always beneficial to the African American community, an issue that is addressed again later in the course. The film W.E.B. DuBois, A Biography in Four Voices provides a multifaceted view of DuBois's complex life. It is also useful to read the sections on the talented tenth in The Souls of Black Folk against his later writings about race and class in The Education of Black People: Ten Critiques. Questions of the content of education, the role of an educated elite, the na ture of community control, the relationship of education and work are all raised by DuBois in the context of his analysis of U.S. racism.

We have addressed Native American education in different ways in different versions of the course. The course almost always begins with a class on the educational beliefs of the indigenous peoples in North America at the time of European settlement. We tended to pick up the question of Native American education in the nineteenth century with the establishment of the boarding school system. We have used a number of different texts in the course around this topic. Jon Reyhner's A History of American Indian Education provides a brief overview. Much more extensive is David Adams's moving and comprehensive history of the boarding schools, Education fir Extinction. Adams describes the kind of cultural genocide implicit in these schools, particularly in his discussion of the Carlisle School in Pennsylvania. Selections from Luther Standing Bear's autobiography My People the Sioux provides a moving account of his experiences at Carlisle. Zitkala-Sa's account of growing up on a reservation in the late nineteenth centur y and then attending boarding school in her American Indian Stories gives a girl's and woman's perspective. K. Tsianina Lomawaima's They Called it Prairie Light and Devon Minesuah's Cultivating the Rosebuds are studies of specific boarding schools. Lomawaima uses oral history to reconstruct the experience of American Indian students at the Chiloco Indian School, while Minesuah tells the history of the Cherokee Female Seminary in the late nineteenth century. Lomawaima and Minesuah present a more mixed picture of the boarding school experience than does Adams. Whichever text we used, we would show the video In the White Man's Image about the Carlisle school at this point in the course. And we discussed the present day movement for self-determination and the creation of more recent schools under Indian community control in the West. The theme that we kept coming back to in this discussion was the question of culture and schooling and what the purpose of schools for indigenous students ought to be.

THE GROWTH OF THE "ONE BEST SYSTEM"

We addressed the key period between 1865 and 1924 in different ways. There is really no way to do justice to the richness of this period in a few weeks. These are the years when public education became compulsory, when large bureaucratic urban school systems and the familiar architecture of graded public schools were established, when teaching became firmly established as women's work, when urban schools were faced with large numbers of immigrant children who did not speak English, when Deweyan and progressive educational ideas were formulated, and when ideas of testing, "scientific management," and social efficiency were put forward and came to dominate the schools. We addressed these complex issues from different perspectives and used different texts in various vers ions of the course. Raymond Callahan's classic study of the rise of scientific management, Education and the Cult of Efficiency, and Herbert Kliebard's The Struggle for the American Curriculum both were useful in discussing the growth of large urban school systems in this period, as was Kate Rousmaniere's study of New York, City Teachers. It was at this point in the course that a student group would give a class on Gould's Mismeasure of Man. What is central here is to introduce students to the way concepts of management and control taken from business and industry have been applied to public education for almost a century. But this period also saw the development of alternative conceptions of public schooling, most powerfully in the work of John Dewey. We frequently asked students to read selections from Dewey, either "My Pedagogic Creed" or parts of School and Society or The Child and the Curriculum.

The first great wave of immigration from Eastern and Southern Europe and from Asia took place in this same period. There are numerous accounts of the immigrant experience, but one of the most vivid and moving we have used is Mary Antin's The Promised Land. First published in 1912, The Promised Land is Antin's account of her education, first in a Jewish ghetto in Poland, and then in the public schools of Boston. Ron Takaki's work on the Asian American experience was also useful here. The issues raised in this part of the course about the bureaucratic nature of public schooling, bilingualism and the teaching of immigrant children, and use of standardized testing to classify and monitor students and teachers all of course are issues facing teachers in schools today.

The question of gender and, in particular, ideas about the education of girls and the role of women in education appeared throughout the course. After introducing the idea of Republican motherhood, the argument in the early Republic that women should be literate so they could raise Republican sons, we looked at the transformation of reaching from male to female work One of the most useful texts we found for this topic is Nancy Hoffman's Woman's "True" Profession, a collection of primary sources about women teachers. Other texts useful for discussing women in public education were Jackie Blount's Destined to Rule the Schools, a study of women school superintendents and my own Country Schoolwomen, a study of rural women teachers in California. We also looked at the history of higher education for women and the debates around women's ability to be educated. Dr. Edward Clarke's infamous 1871 tract Sex in Education works well to show students the nineteenth century argument against women's education because of the ir "female apparatus. The examples of Margaret Haley in Chicago and Grace Strahan in New York in organizing urban women teachers are also a powerful and usually unknown history for students. There are a number of studies of the early women's colleges, among them Barbara Solomon's In the Company of Educated Women, Lynn Gordon's Gender and Education in the Progressive Era, and Patricia Palmieri's wonderful study of Wellesley, In Adamless Eden. One of these books was often the focus for a group presentation. We have often used the moving film Women of Summer about the Bryn Mawr summer school for women workers in the 1920s and 1930s to bring together class and gender in this period. The education of Black women has been examined by a number of scholars. We found Linda Perkins's Fanny Coppin and the School for Colored Youth and the recent collection of the writings of Anna Julia Cooper, The Voice of Anna Julia Cooper, valuable in introducing students to this history.

MID-CENTURY THEMES

One of the most dramatic periods in twentieth century educational history in the United States was the Civil Rights movement. From the Supreme Court's decision on Brown vs. Board of Education through the battle over desegregation at Central High School in Little Rock to the student Black power movement and demands to transform the college curriculum, education was central to the Black freedom struggle. Central to our study of this key period in all the versions of the course has been the invaluable resource of the video series Eyes on the Prize. Different instructors have used different segments of this series, but the segment on Little Rock and the depiction of the Boston busing crisis in particular have proven extremely useful in documenting racism in both the South and the North. We have used different texts to present the Civil Rights movement. Vanessa Siddle Walker's Their Highest Potential depicts the efforts of one African American community to provide high quality education for its children in a segre gated society, while David Cecelski's Along Freedom's Road describes the successful struggle of a community to maintain a high quality high school for African American students during the period of desegregation. Autobiographical accounts of the young activists in the Civil Rights movement provide students with examples of young people taking responsibility for social change. Collections like Hampton and Fayer's Voices of Freedom, Jay David's Growing Up Black, or the Eyes on the Prize Civil Rights Reader provide vivid accounts of racism and the experience of growing under segregation, but also the courage and strength of activists in the Civil Rights movement. Dan Perlstein's article, "Teaching Freedom: SNCC and the Creation of the Mississippi Freedom Schools" uses the experiences of the teachers in the Mississippi summer project of 1964 as an example of a curriculum for social justice. And Vincent Harding's Hope and History ties the lessons of the Civil Rights struggle to contemporary social and educational questions.

It was at this point in the course that we have addressed patterns of racism against other groups in U.S. society'. The treatment of Asian children in the Western stares, which included formally segregated schools and the imprisonment of Japanese American children in camps during the Second World War is addressed for its own importance but also as a way of talking about how patterns of racism. have structured the education of children of different ethnicities throughout the United States. Ron Takaki's work is very useful here, particularly Strangers from a Different Shore, a history of Asian America. In more recent versions of this course taught by Linda Mizzell, more attention has been paid to Chicano/a and Latino/a educational history. Ruben Donaro's The Other Struggle for Equal Schools about a Mexican-American community's fight to gain equal education in California provides an excellent case study of this history. Bilingual education policy and community control of schools in the West and Southwest are als o addressed here.

In several versions of the course, we looked at the impact of the Cold War on education. In my experience teaching the course, few students have been aware of this history or of the activist teachers and theorists of the 1930s such as the left-wing educational philosophers from Teachers College, Columbia, who edited and wrote for the journal Soda/Frontier. Nor did they know about the work of members of the Communist Party in anti-racist education or in teacher unions in the large cities. And they were shocked at McCarthyism and the witch hunt against progressive teachers in the late 1940s and 1950s. One very effective text to address this history is Martha Kransdorf's brief A Matter of Loyalty, the story of Frances Eisenberg, a progressive Los Angeles teacher who lost her job because of accusations that she was a subversive and her own refusal to testify before an investigating committee of the California legislature. Ellen Shrecker's No Ivory Tower is another very effective text about the impact of McCarthyi sm on the university. This text was often assigned to a small group for a class presentation. Parts of the film Point of Order on the McCarthy committee were also very useful to show the climate of these times. The impact of the social movements of the i 960s on education also were addressed in some versions of the course. The film Berkeley in the 60s gives students a flavor of a time very different from their own. This was also the point in the course when student groups would present a class on the open and free school movements of the 1960s. And in some years, we used Ira Shor's Culture Wars to discuss the conservative reaction to the sixties and the foundations of the conservative, free market ideas that now dominate educational policies. What has been called the "marketization" of education is a topic that is of increasing importance and it seems essential that students consider both how ideas of competition and efficiency taken from business had a powerful influence on education throughout the twentieth century. A close examination of the 1983 document "A Nation at Risk" is very useful in examining the origin of these ideas.

CONTEMPORARY ISSUES

In the last section of the course, we addressed a number of contemporary issues. Obviously there was not enough rime to do justice to all of these complex issues and we tended to address what seemed most pertinent at the time. In most versions of the course, we addressed contemporary issues of gender and sexuality We looked at studies of girls and boys in schools, sometimes using Peggy Orenstein's popular study of junior high school girls, Schoolgirls. We also looked at the development of ideas of feminist pedagogy at the university level. Both bell hooks's Teaching to Transgress and Francis Maher's and Mary Kay Tetrauk's The Feminist Classroom were valuable in introducing students to these ideas. We also addressed the question of gay and lesbian students and teachers. There is a growing literature in this field. Over the years at different times we used the collection The Gay Teen, edited by Gerald Unks, Arthur Lipkin's Understanding Homosexuality/Changing Schools, and the special issue of the Harvard Educat ional Review (Summer 1996) on gay and lesbian education. These topics were frequendy used as group assignments, with students organizing and running these classes. No adequate examination of contemporary issues in education in the United States can ignore the politics of race and language. In the last section of the course we have used a variety of different texts and films to address these issues. First person accounts such as Gloria Anzaldua's Borderlands or Luis Rodriguez's Always Running provide vivid descriptions of Latino/a experiences growing up in the United States. Sandra Cisneros's The House on Mango Street uses fiction to address similar issues. At times we have used collections of essays such as Teresa Perry's and Jim Fraser's Freedom's Plow. Articles by such authors as Enid Lee, Christine Sleeter, Lisa Delpit and Gloria Ladson-Billings have also been used to discuss ideas of multicultural education and anti-racist education. Class differences and the class division of American schools are raised by Mike Rose's powerful autobiography, Lives on the Boundary, which also explores the meaning of literacy and the concept of voice from the perspective of a white, working class man.

The course concludes with the idea of moving from history and theory to practice. The students in the course usually include both undergraduates who have a broad interest in education or U.S. history and graduate students in the MAT program who are about to begin their student teaching term in the public schools. While undergraduates may see this course in the context of other courses in history or American Studies, the MAT students are preparing to move into the classroom as student teachers. This course is grounded in a belief that despite the discriminatory and oppressive practices often shaping public education m the United States in the past, teachers can teach for progressive social change. The contrast between this stance and the reliance on packaged curricula, standardized testing, and belief in the unquestioned wisdom of the market now shaping the classrooms in which these students will teach is profound. Here in Massachusetts, the schools are driven by the demands of the MCAS, a high stakes set of t ests established in 1994 that is now used to judge teachers, schools, and students and which students must pass in order to graduate from high school. State educational policy here as elsewhere is dominated by ideas of business efficiency and human capital theory. Underlying these policies is a belief that the schools should provide a basic education for future workers to meet the needs of business. Alternative conceptions of how society might be organized, of the values of community, of basic common human rights, of social justice and the need to acknowledge and address past injustices in the United States are completely ignored by educational policy makers. It will be up to a new generation of teachers to join the embattled teachers who presently teach in public school classrooms and work through teachers' unions to fight for a more just educational system for all children. We hope the readings and resources of this course and the questions we raise in the study of educational history can be useful to this new generation of teachers as they move from the university to the schools.

* Sara Freedman, Christine Woyshner, and Victoria MacDonald have taught versions of this course.

KATHLEEN WEILER is Professor of Education at Tufts University. She has written a number of works on women and education among them Women Teaching for Change (Bergin and Garvey, 1988) and Country School women (Stanford, 1998). Her most recent book is her edited collection Feminist Engagements (Routledge, 2001). She is a member of the Radical Teacher board.