Patricians, Professors, and Public Schools: The Origins of Modern Educational Thought in America

Patricians, Professors, and Public Schools argues that the thinking behind efforts to reform American schools in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries emphasized two new ideas—that economic growth and the opportunity it created were more limited than had earlier been thought, and that popular aspirations should be revised downward accordingly.
After discussing the thinking that reformers reacted against in the first chapter of the book, later chapters examine those most responsib...