Re: Ravitch on Cremins

[George Cunningham <gkc@LOUISVILLE.EDU>]

Allen,

If you are interested in the issues surrounding education reform and want to
understand its historical perspectives, I can recommend Ravitch's book
highly.  That does not mean you will not find some of her assertions to be
not to your liking.  You may even find the need to toss the book across the
room.  I have always found that I learned a lot from such books.

I was able to purchase Cremin's Transformations book for only $7 from
Amazon.  I hope I don't find the need to throw it but, if I did, at least is
not an expensive book.  Actually, my relationship with books is too
worshipful to ever damage one.  I cringe when I see a student highlighting
lines although I have dog-eared a few pages in my day.

George K. Cunningham
University of Louisville

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Assessment Reform Network Mailing List
> [mailto:ARN-L@LISTS.CUA.EDU]On Behalf Of Allen Flanigan.
> Sent: Tuesday, February 26, 2002 12:25 PM
> To: ARN-L@LISTS.CUA.EDU
> Subject: Ravitch on Cremins
>
>
> Interestingly, Diane Ravitch, author of the book George C. recommends
> highly, praises Cremin fulsomely, calls him the "consummate scholar", and
> says that his The Transformation of The School:  Progressivism in American
> Education 1876-1957 "remains the authoritative work on the subject of
> progressivism in education".
>
> I suppose I should find time to read "Left Back", or other works of
> Ravitch's, if only to find out for myself whether Ravitch has followed her
> own admonition to historians of education (need we limit it to education?)
> to be contextual and "latitudinal" (studying not just schools and
> educators
> but all of the influences, family, church, school, and other social
> phenomena and institutions that tend to educate either directly or
> indirectly) or whether she succumbed to the scholarly temptation of the
> "abridgement of history", the tendency to oversimplify the past by viewing
> it strictly through the lens of the present.
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: kber@EARTHLINK.NET [mailto:kber@EARTHLINK.NET]
> Sent: Monday, February 25, 2002 9:18 PM
> To: ARN-L@listsrva.CUA.EDU
> Subject: a second selection from Cremins
>
>
> which might help people understand why I value him so highly
>
>
> Ken
>
>
> Cremin on:
>   An approach to educational history
>
>   My argument in these lectures has been for renewed attention to
> context, complexity, and relationship
>   in our discussions of education, past, present, and future. Contrary
> to the drift of a good deal of
>   scholarly opinion during the past ten years, I happen to believe that
> on balance the American education
>   system has contributed significantly to the advancement of liberty,
> equality, and fraternity, in that
>   complementarity and tension that mark the relations among them in a
> free society. I have reached that
>   belief on the basis of evidence that is admittedly mixed and with a
> willingness to grant major
>   imperfections in performance. The institutions of American education
> are human institutions; they have
>   been guilty of their full share of evil, venality, and failure, and my
> phrase "on balance" is intended to
>   take account of the fact. But it is also intended to convey my sense
> that the aspirations of American
>   education have been more noble than base, and that its performance
> over the past two centuries has
>   been more liberating of a greater diversity of human energies and
> potentialities than has been the case
>   in most other eras and in most other places. As a historian, I believe
> it is important to make
>   judgments, but I also believe that the judgments should be of this
> world and not some other.
>
>   However that may be, my judgment in this matter is less important than
> the fundamental fact of
>   complexity. I do not mean to suggest that the educational system is so
> complicated and intractable that
>   nothing should be done until we learn more. I mean rather to urge that
> we go beyond studies that
>   analyze the family or the church or the school or television in
> isolation and then pronounce on their
>   educational effects, and beyond studies that scrutinize people through
> a single lens of class or race or
>   religion or ethnicity and, once again, pronounce on educational
> outcomes. Individual institutions and
>   individual variables are important, to be sure; but it is the ways in
> which they pattern themselves and
>   relate to one another that give them their educational significance,
> and the ways in which their outcomes
>   confirm, complement, or contradict one another that determine their
> educational effects. In sum,
>   complexity has marked American education from the beginning, and I
> would hope for a renewed
>   appreciation of the inescapable fact of complexity in our discussions
> of educational theory and policy
>   during the years immediately ahead.
>
>   From Traditions of American education, pp. 127-128.
>
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