And Sadly Teach: Teacher Education and Professionalization in American Culture

by Jurgen Herbst

Overview

To lend weight to his charge that the public school teacher has been betrayed and gravity to his indictment of the educational establishment for that betrayal, Jurgen Herbst goes back to the beginnings of teacher education in America in the 1830s and traces its evolution up to the 1920s, by which time the essential damage had been done.
Initially, attempts were made to upgrade public school teaching to a genuine profession, but that ideal was gradually abandoned. In its stead, with the advent of newly emerging graduate schools of education in the early decades of the twentieth century, came the so-called professionalization of public education. At the expense of the training of elementary school teachers (mostly women), teacher educators shifted their attention to the turning out of educational "specialists" (mostly men)-administrators, faculty members at normal schools and teachers colleges, adult education teachers, and educational researchers.
Ultimately a history of the neglect of the American public school teacher, And Sadly Teach ends with a plea and a message that ring loud and clear. The plea: that the current reform proposals for American teacher education-the Carnegie and the Holmes reports-be heeded. The message: that the key to successful school reform lies in educating teacher's true professionals and in acknowledging them as such in their classrooms.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780299121846
Publisher:	University of Wisconsin Press
Publication date:	02/15/1991
Pages:	246
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Jurgen Herbst is emeritus professor of history and education policy studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. One of America's foremost historians of education, he has published a number of influential journal articles, and is the author of The German Historical School in American Scholarship: A Study in the Transfer of Culture, From Crisis to Crisis: American College Government, 1636-1819, and Requiem for a German Past: A Boyhood among the Nazis, also published by the University of Wisconsin Press.

Table of Contents

	Tables	ix
	Preface	xi
	Introduction	3
1	Public Schools and Teacher Education: The Beginnings	12
2	The Atlantic Community of Whigs	32
3	The Massachusetts Normal School	57
4	Massachusetts and Beyond: Varieties of Teacher Education	87
5	Teacher Education in the Midwest	109
6	The Professionalization of Teacher Education	140
7	Professionalization: The Betrayal of the Teacher	161
8	What of the Teacher?	185
	Postscript	195
	Notes	201
	Index	225

Editorial Reviews

"Herbst makes a reasoned plea for reform of teacher education grounded in policies that would ensure the full professional empowerment of all teachers in the interests of revitalizing American public education in the emerging postindustrial age."—Choice

From the Publisher