Teaching Marianne and Uncle Sam: Public Education, State Centralization, and Teacher Unionism in France and the United States

Teaching Marianne and Uncle Sam shows how teachers' unions came into existence not as a result of the willful efforts of particular actors, but over the course of decades of conflict over the appropriate role of professional educators in public politics.

Nicholas Toloudis traces teacher unionism back to the first efforts of governments to centralize public education. He carefully documents how centralization created new understandings of the role of teachers in their societies and generated ...