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By Adam Laats

The concept that American schooling has been suggested by way of innovative values is well known via liberals and deplored by way of conservatives, yet either side settle for it as truth. Adam Laats exhibits that this extensively held trust is just fallacious. Upending the normal narrative of yank schooling because the fabricated from brave revolutionary reformers, he calls to heart degree the conservative activists who decisively formed America’s study rooms within the 20th century. The different tuition Reformers makes transparent that, within the lengthy march of yankee public schooling, revolutionary reform has extra frequently been a beleaguered dream than an insuperable force.

Laats takes an in-depth examine 4 landmark university battles: the 1925 Scopes Trial, the 1939 Rugg textbook controversy, the 1950 ouster of Pasadena Public faculties Superintendent Willard Goslin, and the 1974 Kanawha County tuition boycott. all in favour of concerns starting from evolution to the position of faith in schooling to the proper interpretation of yank background, those 4 hugely publicized controversies pressured conservatives to articulate their imaginative and prescient of public schooling―a imaginative and prescient that may hold conventional Protestant ideals in America’s study rooms and push out subversive matters like Darwinism, socialism, multiculturalism, and feminism. As Laats makes transparent in case after case, activists comparable to Hiram Evans and Norma Gabler, Homer Chaillaux and Louise Padelford have been fiercely dedicated to a view of the curriculum that inculcated love of state, bolstered conventional gender roles and family members constructions, allowed no possible choices to capitalism, and granted faith a primary position in civic life.

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Extra resources for The Other School Reformers: Conservative Activism in American Education

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Children must go to school to imbibe the wisdom of the ages, not to question authority and doubt the value of tradition. In addition, even in very different circumstances, conservative school reformers have unconsciously echoed the theme that pernicious classroom materials or classroom practices had shocked them into aggressive public activism. Such connections across the decades help make the case for a coherent tradition of educational conservatism. Most important, this book’s chapters demonstrate the institutional continuity among educational conservatives.

Boosted by the news that Darrow and Bryan had volunteered to represent the two sides, reporters and activists promoted the idea that this “monkey” trial would soon settle the vexing question of evolution education and all its concomitant controversies. What was the role of science in schools? Of religion? What was the nature of humanity? The origin of life on earth? What values did America want to pass on to its children in its public schools? 36 THE OTHER SCHOOL REFORMERS It is deeply ironic, then, that in the end the trial did not legally confront even the simplest questions about evolution.

11 The audience at this dramatic trial liked to hear both sides. They cheered for the defense as readily as they cheered for the prosecution. They cherished the Bible, but they also cherished America’s tradition of dissent. Some may have been “yokels,” but they were more like the rest of America than the rest of America might have liked to admit. In order to make some sense of why this trial seemed like such a big deal to America in 1925, we need to make sense of what the audience felt that day in July.

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