Innocents Abroad: American Teachers in the American Century

Innocents Abroad: American Teachers in the American Century

by Jonathan Zimmerman
ISBN-10:
0674032063
ISBN-13:
9780674032064
Pub. Date:
12/15/2008
Publisher:
Harvard University Press
ISBN-10:
0674032063
ISBN-13:
9780674032064
Pub. Date:
12/15/2008
Publisher:
Harvard University Press
Innocents Abroad: American Teachers in the American Century

Innocents Abroad: American Teachers in the American Century

by Jonathan Zimmerman
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Overview

Protestant missionaries in Latin America. Colonial "civilizers" in the Pacific. Peace Corps Volunteers in Africa. Since the 1890s, thousands of American teachers--mostly young, white, middle-class, and inexperienced--have fanned out across the globe. Innocents Abroad tells the story of what they intended to teach and what lessons they learned.

Drawing on extensive archives of the teachers' letters and diaries, as well as more recent accounts, Jonathan Zimmerman argues that until the early twentieth century, the teachers assumed their own superiority; they sought to bring civilization, Protestantism, and soap to their host countries. But by the mid-twentieth century, as teachers borrowed the concept of "culture" from influential anthropologists, they became far more self-questioning about their ethical and social assumptions, their educational theories, and the complexity of their role in a foreign society.

Filled with anecdotes and dilemmas--often funny, always vivid--Zimmerman's narrative explores the teachers' shifting attitudes about their country and themselves, in a world that was more unexpected and unsettling than they could have imagined.


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780674032064
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Publication date: 12/15/2008
Edition description: New Edition
Pages: 312
Product dimensions: 9.02(w) x 6.00(h) x 0.30(d)

About the Author

Jonathan Zimmerman is Professor of Education and History at the Steinhardt School of Education and in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at New York University. He spent two years as a teacher with the Peace Corps in Nepal.

Table of Contents

  • Acknowledgments
  • Introduction: Aboard the USS Thomas


    I. American Dilemmas
  1. The American Method
  2. he American Curriculum
  3. Schooling for All?

  4. II. American Critiques
  5. Teacher Professionalism and Its Critics
  6. Church-State Relations
  7. The Problem of Empire

  • Epilogue: American Teachers in a Global Age
  • Notes
  • Index

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