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The Oxford Handbook of the History of Education (Oxford Handbooks)

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ISBN-10 019934003X
ISBN-13 978-0199340033
Publisher Oxford University Press
Publication date July 17, 2019
Language English
Dimensions 9.8 x 1.7 x 6.9 inches
Print length 632 pages
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Publisher ‏ : ‎ Oxford University Press (July 17, 2019)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 632 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 019934003X
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0199340033
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 2.74 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 9.8 x 1.7 x 6.9 inches
#360 in Education History & Theory
#4,888 in History of Education
#11,454 in History (Books)

About the author

John l. rury.

JOHN L. RURY is professor emeritus in the School of Education and Human Sciences (ELPS) at the University of Kansas. His published work has focused on questions of race, gender and social inequality in the history of American education, and related policy issues.

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Rury, J. L. Tamura, E. H. (Eds.). (2019). The Oxford handbook of the history of education. Oxford University Press

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Contributors

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Creators/contributors, contents/summary.

Consensus and revisionism in educational history / Gary McCulloch
The urban history of education / Ansley T. Erickson
Method in the history of education / William Richardson
Theory in the history of education / Isaac Gottesman
Education in Greek and Roman antiquity / Mark Joyal
Education in Medieval Europe / Spencer E. Young
Education in pre-modern China and Japan / Conrad Schirokauer
Pre-colonial indigenous education in the Western Hemisphere and Pacific / Adrea Lawrence
National education systems : Europe / James C. Albisetti
National education systems : North America / Nancy Beadie
National education systems : Australia and New Zealand / Craig Campbell and Maxine Stephenson
National education systems : Latin America / G. Antonio Espinoza
National education systems : Asia / Elizabeth VanderVen
National education systems : Africa / Peter Kallaway
National education systems : Middle East / Heidi Morrison
Higher education in modern Europe / Vincent Carpentier
The German university and its influence / Charles E. McClelland
Higher education in Canada and the United States / Philo Hutcheson
Higher education in Asia / Anthony Welch
The professions and professional education / Richard K. Neumann Jr.
Inequality in education / Judith Kafka
Gendering the history of education / Lucy E. Bailey and Karen Graves
Education and migration in history / Paul J. Ramsey
Race and ethnicity in education history / Yoon K. Pak
Education and the African diaspora / Christopher M. Span and Brenda N. Sanya
Colonial education and anti-colonial struggles / Ana Isabel Madeira and Luís Grosso Correia
Conflicting constructions of childhood and children in education history / Barbara Beatty
Religion and the history of education / James W. Fraser and Diane L. Moore
Progressive education / William J. Reese
The history of school teachers and administrators / Kate Rousmaniere
Transitions from rural to urban schooling / David A. Gamson
The modern history of literacy / David Vincent
Curriculum history / Daniel Tröhler
The history of non-formal and informal education / Andrew Grunzke
The history of technology and education / Sevan Terzian
The history of transnational and comparative education / Marcelo Caruso.

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The Oxford Handbook of the History of Education

Jul 13, 2022

Edited by Eileen H. Tamura and John L. Rury

Podcast interview.

Revisit a conversation about The Oxford Handbook of the History of Education between its editors, Eileen H. Tamura and John L. Rury. You can listen here . This episode originally aired as Season 9, Episode 9 of the SHCY podcast. You can listen to other episodes by visiting the podcast website , or you can subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

This review appeared in the Journal of the History of Education and Society (2020): 1-6

The Oxford Handbook of the History of Education Edited by John L. Rury and Eileen H. Tamura New York, Oxford University Press, 2019 xvi + 615 pp., £97.00 (hardback), ISB 978-0-19-934003-3

This weighty volume of 36 chapters in 600 pages presents an ambitious range of scholarship, introduced by its editors with a compact but thought-provoking historiographical overview, rationalising past and present approaches, identifying current lacunae and likely future directions. The collection is infused throughout with a vibrant dialogue between history and historiography, recurring issues and themes that cross boundaries of time, place and methodology. Arranged in six parts, it opens with ‘Interpretive Frames’, followed by ‘Premodern Roots’, ‘The Rise of National Systems’ and ‘Emergence of Modern Higher Education’; two substantial thematic parts, almost half the book, then address ‘Inequality and Discrimination’ followed by ‘Educational Reform and Institutional Change’. Only a representative sample, reflecting quality and variety of treatment, is covered in this review, following just some of the lively arguments that emerge. A handbook to the field of study, each chapter has extensive bibliographical footnotes, serving as a valuable reference and bibliographical tool.

Taking cities as an interpretive frame for education, Ansley Erickson identifies the 1960s ‘urban crisis’ in the US and UK as a context that preoccupied educational historians, but questions some underlying assumptions when she echoes David Reeder’s 1977 question: What precisely is the history of urban education? Recognising a huge variation in urban settings worldwide, she calls for more sophisticated appreciation of geographical specifics, physical, social, cultural, political and economic, in the spatial organisation and two-way relationship between schools and their local environments.

In a moving chapter on ‘Precolonial Indigenous Education in the Western Hemisphere and Pacific’, where method and matter intertwine dramatically, intellectually and emotionally, Adrea Lawrence positions herself ‘as an Anglo historian writing about indigenous education history, I am an outsider to indigenous groups, by legacy in the colonizer camp, which I personally view as fraught, unreconcilable, privileged and painful’ (p. 132). She states that too much evidence has been occluded or lost in the colonisation enterprise, through the catastrophic spread of lethal diseases: ‘This apocalyptic loss created a profound loss of comprehensive knowledge, art, culture and even meaning . . . what learning happened, how it happened and how it changed the world’ for so-called primitive peoples (p. 133). Knowledge of ‘place’ is more crucial than that of ‘time’ in this context, amongst the nomadic Arikara on the Missouri for example, where women were teachers of agricultural science, the ceremonial cycle, ritual and song. A rich indigenous education has been hidden from history, and is now slowly being recovered.

‘National education systems’ were an early preoccupation of historians; a section on this theme provides methodological as well as geographical variety, where tension between colonisers and colonised continues. Contrasting experiences of development from colonialism to independence appear in a combined study of Australia and New Zealand by Craig Campbell and Maxine Stephenson, who draw attention to a shifting historiography from empirical ‘Whig’ narratives of system building and reform to social and revisionist history of the 1960s onwards. Contrasts between these neighbouring nations are further contrasted in Africa by Peter Kallaway, who focuses especially on a denouement of World Bank and UNESCO involvement in the 1980s, and on South Africa’s abolition of apartheid in 1994. Regarding education systems, the two southern neighbours present marked differences in scale, New Zealand with 3% of Australia’s landmass and about 20% of its population, as also in their indigenous cultural diversity between the Māori with their single language and the nearly 300 tongues of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. Policies shifted in both countries over time, taking on ‘new meanings . . . [addressing] . . . the paradox of seeking improved student and school performance, competition and social inclusion’ (p. 189).

Africa’s experience as a continent includes colonisation by the British, French, Belgian and Portuguese, with differing relationships but parallel trajectories. Neither Christian missionaries nor colonial bureaucracies, nor even national education systems following independence, included any support for indigenous forms of education. Kallaway laments the lack of attention to history in research by supranational bodies, which has ‘undermined the capacity to understand the roots of educational problems [so that] potential lessons to be learned from previous endeavours are often ignored’ (p. 238).

For Asia, Elizabeth VanderVen includes Japan, China, India, Malaysia and also Iran. Nationalisation of schools was linked with political reform, where most Asian countries boasted distinctive established traditions, encountering tension between (western) modernity and indigenous (eastern) education. VanderVen draws attention to a relative lack of sophisticated historiography for many Asian countries, noting that historical accounts are dominated by the voices of activists, and calls for more first-hand accounts of how children experienced their formative years in new schools. A following chapter by Heidi Morrison responds to that call by documenting experiences of humiliation in colonial schools of Middle Eastern children whose indigenous culture was denigrated. The Middle East had not undergone a (western) Enlightenment ‘by which scholars placed the laws of science over laws of God’ (p. 243), and a formerly close tie between high social standing and purely Islamic education broke down. Morrison brings her critique up to date with a post-9/11 fear that schools are pro-terrorist centres teaching anti-westernism: ‘Many scholars respond to these concerns by placing educational developments in historical context. There is a long history of education in the Middle East that is rich in pedagogical and philosophical approaches, intellectual contributions to humankind . . . Islam . . . does not have an innate bias against teaching democracy, peace, and equality’ (p. 254).

Within a section on ‘Emergence of Higher Education’, Vincent Carpentier on Europe and Anthony Welch on Asia construct profound historiographical comparisons, with long historical perspectives as a route to analysis of present conditions. In Europe, current issues of funding, access and differentiation are traced through the evolution of medieval, early modern and late modern universities with shifting connections and tensions between cultural, political, social and economic rationales, through to ‘massification’ in pursuit of social welfare, geo-political strategies or a ‘knowledge economy’. Globalisation has latterly accelerated international provision through cross-border movement in programmes or campuses, and online courses. Change and continuity over centuries are instructive within this fairly homogeneous global region.

Asia, far more heterogeneous, Welch describes as a Western concept, ‘a European cultural artefact’ (p. 302). Confucian ideals as a source may be most familiar, roughly contemporary with Plato’s Academy, but Buddhism and Islam also became focal points for higher learning. Just as varied throughout Asia was experience of colonialism’s foreign influence, British, French, Spanish and more recently from the USSR and USA. Post-colonisation, there emerged the concept of state-led development for rapid economic growth in some countries. Welch makes useful comparisons with Africa and Latin America, and concludes that while much has been accomplished, more basic historiographical work remains to be done, not least to evaluate in historical perspective the ongoing work of supranational bodies for higher education in Asia.

‘Inequality and Discrimination’ is perhaps the most potent theme for current readers, with its blend of history, anthropology and sociology, destined also to attract historians of the later twenty-first century revisiting this book as a primary source. Accorded a prominent section that includes gender, migration, ethnicity, diaspora and anti-colonial struggle, its chapters variously highlight historical and historiographical aspects. Judith Kafka shows how historians seem to explain inequalities across time and place in a socio-historical context, and hopes that illuminating the past will make sense of, and inform, the present. Revealing the limitations of past educational reform, however, research suggests that unless broader social and economic inequalities are addressed, the relatively advantaged will continue to protect their existing status in the realm of schooling. For gender, Lucy Bailey and Karen Greaves focus on ‘theories and methodologies through which the field produces meanings’ (p. 355). Extensively referenced, detailed and precise, with emphasis on definitions, contested and revised, of categories and interpretive positions, their description of past and present developments describes general trends rather than specific case studies. But ‘a productive aspect of gender scholarship is its kindling of diverse nonpositivist, feminist, and poststructural methodologies ... productive for educational history as well, although ... some dismiss such work as presentist and antithetical to historical study’ (p. 360).

Yoon Pak’s concern with race and ethnicity is rooted in a narrative of politics and religion, republican reformers and ideals of citizenship that include belief in a Christian God. ‘Darker races’, indigenous tribes and African slaves, were perceived as barbarian and savage, their earthy, natural existence lacking civilised and reasoned ways of being. Her account follows through to phenomena of European immigration and religious diversity, prompting educational ideals of individualism, liberty and virtue, fostering personal industry for social mobility, with a respected but limited domestic role for women. Education functioned to unify America’s diverse populations, by internalising the superiority of American Protestant culture and the grandeur of American destiny. International parallels are drawn, especially in later years, for example in the application of eugenics. She concludes that common schooling for all as a form of full democratic citizenship remains an ongoing experiment.

Christopher Span and Brenda Sanya begin their account of the African diaspora with the bitter irony of north and west African kingdoms fostering widespread education, and attracting overseas scholars in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (while Erasmus travelled to Cambridge, England, and John Harvard to Cambridge, Massachusetts). Yet during those very times a forced diaspora produced an enslaved African American population denied citizenship and education. Booker T. Washington’s campaign for industrial education is contrasted with the case of W.E.B. Dubois, whose Harvard PhD led him to advocate access to the liberal arts for black students, and further to promote pan-Africanism as a global movement.

Concluding this section on inequality and discrimination, Ana Madeira and Luís Correia examine colonial education and anti-colonial struggles. Two economic stages are described: extraction and plantation of natural resources; followed by trade in industrial goods, whereby European countries, predominantly Britain, France and Portugal, colonised 42% of the world’s land areas and 31% of its population. But with a few notable exceptions, colonial education was long neglected by scholars. Post-Second World War UNESCO studies identified a prevailing perception of developing countries as ‘other’, and a ‘so-called’ scientific approach to education seen as fundamental to social and economic progress. By that time the process of ‘decolonisation’ was under way, in which colonised ethnic groups strove to secure political, economic and intellectual freedom, and postcolonialism found its origins in the sentiments, thoughts and theories of anti-colonial movements. Notable leaders were members of the ‘Native elite’: Gandhi, Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon and Amílcar Cabral. Postcolonial theories and comparative methodologies prompted examination of the larger cultural process of empires, providing a frame to re-think education at all levels and at all points of its history. Postcolonial theory served to describe resistance against oppression by class, gender and ethnicity in many different settings. And ‘despite the indoctrination embedded in . . . colonial education, its appropriation by the Natives had significant social consequences’ (p. 424). It offered western-educated Natives power and opportunity to shape their own self-identity, and provided the ‘seeds to foster cultural nationalisms, undertaken by the local intelligentsia, which would strengthen the intellectual and political struggle against colonial dominance’ (ibid.).

The final and longest section is dedicated to ‘Educational Reform and Institutional Change’. On ‘conflicting constructions of childhood’, Barbara Beatty approaches the topic through lived experiences over time and space, two centuries of economic and cultural change, represented in real life histories, literary and even photographic evidence. ‘Constructions’ over time have ordered our understanding of these experiences by means of psychological theories and social scientific analysis. Competing demands on children’s lives, of labour and education, varied from region to region across the world as global economic competition and consequent income disparities impinged on families into the modern age. Workplace pressures in a period of industrial development transformed into academic pressures, and most recently a political discourse of standards and accountability have exacerbated parental anxieties and aspirations. ‘Co-constructors’ of their childhoods, pupils and students themselves now react to the burden with stress, and mental disorders are on the rise. Historians, Beatty argues, should be mindful of their own values in understanding how constructions of childhood have evolved over time.

Progressive education is explored by William J. Reese, whose account grounds it firmly in its European roots of political revolution, Enlightenment and Romanticism, ‘never a coherent movement’ (p. 460) but a range of shared fundamental beliefs. He describes how, in the USA, Pestalozzian methods were interpreted as ‘object teaching’, a suitable base for vocational education with outcast groups such as Native Americans, African Americans and poor whites. Other obstacles were that, confronted with growing school populations in cities like New York and Boston, educational administrators tried to bring order out of chaos by implementing not a flexible, but a more uniform curriculum. Moreover, in periods of economic recession, schools faced the wrath of taxpayers objecting to ‘fads and frills’ (p. 465). The legacy of progressivism in the USA might be reduced to Kindergarten, and ‘manual training’, seen inadequately as a discernible mark of ‘new education’ on schools around the world.

A universal perspective is especially apt in the case of schoolteachers and administrators as professionals, presented by Kate Rousmaniere in an insightful and sensitive manner, engaging comparative perspectives that international readers will inevitably bring to her text. Reviewing research perspectives from the 1960s onwards, schools are seen as dynamic and complex ‘loosely-coupled’ organisations (p. 487). With reference to Britain, Germany, France, USSR and India as examples, she exposes the ‘policy-to-practice’ tension in all these different settings, the teacher as middle-manager within an increasingly dense bureaucracy. Yet however authoritarian and standardised educational policies, teachers across time and location have maintained a sense of authority within the immediate locality of their own classroom. They adapt, accommodate and resist school rules every day, and ‘the history of education has taught us this is not a new phenomenon’ (ibid).

David Vincent introduces the intriguing history of literacy as not just a nations-wide skill, but for historians a statistical source of unique character and interest. Vital, if fiendishly difficult to interpret, the arithmetic was complicated and the results difficult to interpret. The innovation of computer technology enabled sophisticated statistical analysis, and at the same time enlivened the social history of reading and writing with intricate debates regarding their significance for interpreting cultural change. Alongside its multifaceted meanings, Vincent identifies literacy as ‘one of the first key performance indicators of public investment’ (p. 511). A particular quality of this chapter, in a Handbook addressed to an international readership, is its range of reference to both European and North American literacy, where ‘an education law became as essential as a railway and a post office’ (ibid). Constructing a bridge between education and the active use of literacy, most significant changes were outside the classroom.

A concluding chapter by Marcelo Caruso examines transnational and comparative histories of education. Starting from links between education and nation in the earliest studies, a ‘methodological nationalism’ (p. 574) persists even in analysing supranational levels of educational transformation. Yet theoretical sophistication has evolved in understanding global modernity and a ‘global polity’ (p. 575).

‘Connected histories’ have become ‘entangled histories’ as mutual influences in perception and exchange find participants ‘constituting each other’ in comparative historical studies, while ‘a series of rationalized ‘myths’ defined a model of society based on the modern (Western) ideas of progress and the individual’ (pp. 579–80).

A strong message from all these chapters is the ever-growing complexity of attending to space as well as time in our understandings of educational history. Just as sociology and philosophy have increasingly informed our methodology, so there is rich evidence here of insights from anthropology. This volume will in turn become a primary source for future historiography. It carries the imprint and status of an ancient western university press. It assembles a web of research by 43 historians rooted largely in the English-speaking world: 31 from universities across North America, eight from the UK and its ‘old Commonwealth’ (Australia, New Zealand and South Africa), and four from mainland Europe (Austria, Germany and Portugal). Historians of the future might question the balance of global voices represented here. And less a critique of the book, perhaps, than a reflection on the state of our field, the gender balance of contributors is surprisingly skewed, with almost twice as many men as women: authors on Inequality and Discrimination are mostly female, but no women contribute on Higher Education. The last five decades have seen a substantial shift in a traditionally male-dominated field. Yet a survey of the very useful ‘Suggested Reading’ lists following each of 36 chapters shows 35% of recommended books are by women; no female authors are listed for ‘Revisionism’, though for a chapter on ‘Gendering the History of Education’ all recommended authors are women; on ‘Teachers and Administration’ women outnumber men and for ‘Childhood and Religion’ the gender balance is equal, while for ‘Australia and New Zealand’ women’s authorship is strongly represented. Historians 50 years hence may find this worthy of comment?

Such caveats notwithstanding, this hugely impressive, authoritative and indispensable guide is a tribute to international networking, sharing and exchange of scholarship over the last half-century through bodies like ISCHE, ECER and WERA. Caruso concludes by summarising current conditions and their ongoing challenges: ‘As new economic, cultural and political settings have emerged . . . the field of international and transnational history is rechartered in a context of thick globalisation . . . high extensity, high-intensity, high-velocity and high impact transnational interconnectedness’ (p. 582). He notes that historians accustomed to working individually on grants and book projects need more collaborative efforts to meet the challenge of new historiography. Echoing a plea by Rury and Tamura in their editorial Introduction, he suggests that ‘The rare genre of collaborative books (without individual chapters)' might offer a more valid alternative for an educational historiography to challenge 'not only monocultural and monolanguage approaches but also the limits of the traditional making and circulating of texts and knowledge' (p. 582).

Peter Cunningham Homerton College, University of Cambridge

About John L. Rury

About Eileen H. Tamura

Eileen Tamura is professor emerita, University of Hawai‘i College of Education, where she served as chair of the Department of Educational Foundations. She is past president of the History of Education Society. She served as editorial board member and later associate editor of History of Education Quarterly , and editorial board member of Journal of American Ethnic History . Book publications include In Defense of Justice: Joseph Kurihara and the Japanese American Struggle for Equality (2013); The History of Discrimination in U.S. Education: Marginality, Agency, and Power (edited) (2009); Asian and Pacific Islander American Education: Social, Cultural, and Historical Contexts (co-edited) (2002); and Americanization, Acculturation, and Ethnic Identity: The Nisei Generation in Hawaii (1994). She received the Franklin Buchanan Award, 2003 (Association for Asian Studies) for Rise of Modern Japan, coauthored, and the James Harvey Robinson Prize, 1998 (American Historical Association) for China: Understanding Its Past, coauthored. Her articles appeared in History of Education Quarterly, Journal of American Ethnic History, Journal of Negro Education , Amerasia Journal , Teaching History , Journal of the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era, and Pacific Historical Review .

This post is part of the SHCY Featured Books series, in which SHCY members provide written contributions on various academic topics pertaining to the history of childhood and youth.

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9780199340033

Oxford Handbooks

John L. Rury

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17 June 2019

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The Oxford Handbook of the History of Education

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2 The Urban History of Education

Ansley T. Erickson is an associate professor of history and education at Teachers College, Columbia University.

Published: 13 June 2019
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This chapter draws on the historical literature on urban education published in English to explore how urban education has operated as an interpretive frame in the history of education. Four key themes emerge. First, cities appeared chiefly as context for the development of schooling; how schools interacted with the city or even shaped the city received much less attention. Second, unlike other settings, the U.S. historiography of urban education has overwhelmingly emphasized the industrial city. Third, despite the strong attention to urban education, scholarly attention to education in urban contexts remains incomplete. And fourth, the idea of the city as the prime site of educational innovation has been challenged by new works that emphasize the importance of educational developments in rural settings or at national rather than local scale.

Schooling in urban settings has long drawn the attention of historians of education, especially in the United States. 1 There, the fields of history of education and urban history grew up alongside one another, if not always together. Both had existed previously but gained new energy in the 1960s in significant part because of the contemporary concern for cities, and city schools, as sites of crisis. In the United States, the social consequences of deindustrialization and metropolitan segregation became points of popular and academic concern in these years as well. Over the next two decades, urban historians dug deeper into the many and broad origins of the urban crisis, tracing a raft of federal and local policies that combined with market dynamics and social preferences to draw resources away from city centers and into white suburbs. Meanwhile city school systems, only a few decades earlier the most resourced and institutionally elaborate in the nation, served socially and economically isolated children and families while their budgets dwindled. It was in this milieu that historians of education turned increasingly to the study of schools in cities.

In other parts of the twentieth-century world, however, urban education and the writing of its history proceeded on a quite different path. The United Kingdom reached “urbanization”—meaning that the majority of its residents live in cities—in the mid-nineteenth century (fully a half-century before the United States), but U.K. scholarship showed little focus on cities until the 1990s. On other regions and in other continents, urbanization proceeded more slowly and drew less concerted attention from historians of education (at least as is visible in works published in English from the vantage point of a U.S. university). It was only in the early twenty-first century that the majority of the global population lived in cities. As of 1910, when the U.S. became urbanized and primary schooling for white people without disabilities was near universal, fully 50 percent of the world’s population lived in Brazil, Russia, India, and China, where rates of participation in schooling remained strikingly low. Only one in ten Indian children between ages five and fourteen were in school. Although significant variation existed within nations and between them, across the twentieth century city residents were relatively more likely to have access to formal educational structures than their rural counterparts. Agrarian economies disincentivized investment in education, while increasing commercial and later industrial economies centered in cities created demand for skills that schools could help provide. By no means was educational access widespread, especially for the urban working classes, but urban economic and at times political factors enabled more investment in schooling. In China the rural-urban educational gap remains a key focus of scholars, while comparisons between rural and urban settings motivate work in Latin America as well. 2

In scholarship on the developing world, much of the history of education has focused on cities by default, as the locations where, for example, elite groups created educational institutions for their children and did or did not support broader access to schooling. Yet the specific urbanism of these locations drew less attention. In previously chiefly agricultural nations that underwent both industrial urbanization and crucial phases of postcolonial and/or postdictatorship state-building, as in Latin America, questions of state-building and democratic citizenship, often examined at the national scale, predominated. In scholarship on India, for example, investigations into the processes of colonial and postcolonial education have framed educational inquiry more than has the urban per se.

Even where historians have given cities and their schools extensive examination, core matters have not yet been settled—much as U.K. historian David Reeder noted in 1977. What was urban education, he asked? How should historians think about the relationship between cities and schools? Were city schools “a mirror that reflects social tensions” stemming from other, broader forces, in the city or beyond, or “a specific set of problems,” both distinct from and “integral” to understanding the modern city? 3 In the nearly four decades since Reeder characterized this historical problem, these questions remain without a firm answer—even more so when cities beyond the U.S. and U.K. come into view.

In popular usage in the U.S., “urban education” at present has an amorphous, and often obscuring, meaning. In the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries “urban” represented a particular combination of density, scale, and social diversity, often around an industrial economy. Today demography at times has trumped geography, with “urban” used to characterize students of color whether located in an industrial core or in a suburban or even exurban landscape. Given the tight association, particularly in the latter half of the twentieth century, between the terms “urban” and “crisis” in the U.S., “urban education” also has stood in for the educational consequences of economic decline and accompanying or reinforcing public disinvestment or systemic disarray. In the U.S. context, where cities did undergo a striking transformation, an emphasis on crisis may be appropriate. Yet we need to investigate the constructive as well as limiting consequences of a focus on crisis for understanding schools and cities historically.

Historians of education outside of the United States see and interpret a broader array of urban landscapes. In other parts of the developed as well as the developing world, cities located wealth and privilege, poverty and neglect, largely on a pattern that reverses the U.S. model. There, poor and newcomer communities rim the metropolitan edge, while wealth remains largely concentrated in the city center. This is the pattern of the French banlieu , which has more in common with the Nigerian or Brazilian dynamics of self-built slums and favelas than with the U.S. model of affluent suburbanization.

Some scholars have responded to the diversity of the urban form globally and to the increasing dispersal of poverty, racial and class segregation, and poor infrastructure in the U.S. by gathering ever more under the label “urban.” Equating the urban with social and economic problems “not fundamentally about geography,” as do George Noblit and William Pink, may have the benefit of inclusivity and may help in the ways that the idea of “crisis” did in U.S. scholarship: by drawing attention through a dramatic simplification. Yet it obscures as well. By removing geography—physical, social, political, and economic—from the conversation, the idea of the urban can lose its analytical power and specificity. Taking stock of the development of the history of urban education and noting promising trends that approach the varied and changing urban landscape with analytical rigor can help toward an idea of the “urban” and of “urban education” that clarifies more than it encumbers.

To consider how urban education has operated as an interpretive frame in the history of education, one route is to examine the countries with the most developed and extensive historical literature on urban education published in English: the United States and the United Kingdom. “Urban education” has operated there as a key organizing concept in approaching both social and economic histories of education, but there remain key questions about schooling that have received less attention in connection with the urban. Scholarly work on other locales comes in for discussion here, where it complements or challenges the dominant strains of thought in work on the U.S. and U.K. David Reeder’s enduring questions about what, precisely, is the history of urban education will also be engaged.

Historiographical Approaches to the City and Its Schools

Four key themes emerge in a survey of work on the history of urban education in English. First, even as much work on both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has emphasized urban education, cities appeared chiefly as context for the development of schooling. Urban conditions—especially deriving from industrial production—spurred demand for particular educational forms. Still, the question of how schools might have interacted with the city, or may even have contributed to the making of the city, received much less attention. Second, as apparent in comparison with accounts of the history of urban education from Europe as well as countries in Latin America and elsewhere, the U.S. historiography of urban education has overwhelmingly emphasized the industrial city, often on the Chicago School’s concentric zone model. Third, despite the strong attention to urban education in the history of education in the U.S., scholarly attention to education in urban contexts remains incomplete. Historians have devoted extensive attention to the making of educational bureaucracies, to problems of state control, and more broadly to matters of political economy, particularly in the twentieth century. By contrast, several major themes in the history of education have not been engaged fully in, or in relationship to, the city. And fourth, the idea of the city as the prime site of educational innovation has been challenged, or at least qualified, by new works that emphasize the importance of educational developments in rural settings or at national rather than local scale.

The City as Context for Schooling

U.S. historians of education have made city settings their chief focus, particularly in works on the twentieth century. Collectively they examine the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century city as a site for educational innovation, often out of the force of necessity. Cities were bursting at the seams with new immigrant and migrant communities, and schools appeared to be crucial mechanisms for managing urban scale, urban diversity, and the needs of an urban, industrial economy. David Tyack’s 1974 The One Best System offered the most powerful and enduring view, locating in the urban industrial crucible the forces that crafted the dominant modes of educational practice and organization in the twentieth-century United States.

For Tyack, and for many writing after him, the story of urban innovation petered out in the decades after World War II, and the narrative of crisis took hold as the chief depiction of urban education. If urban schools had appeared more sophisticated, more resourced, more fully elaborated than their suburban or rural counterparts in the first half of the twentieth century, by the second half of the century the balance had shifted. The site of innovation became the site of crisis, and scholars often defined urban schooling as the troubled product of the crumbling city.

Although this view of American cities and schools was responsive to major shifts in urban form, it offered a largely one-dimensional view of city and school interaction. It holds that cities contain and condition schooling. Schools face social and political struggles generated by the urban (typically industrial) form. Despite their great collective value in describing how institutions function and how urban communities struggled over schooling, these works are much less likely to explore how schools may have shaped the city.

This pattern may flow in part from a view of history of urban education that is at times surprisingly disengaged from the specifics of urban forms, the built and human geography of the city. Some of the major works of the 1960s and 1970s on nineteenth-century history of education paid intricate attention—if with competing results—to the geography of small cities and the connections between geography, schooling, and class formation and hierarchy. Yet subsequent work paid more attention to broad ideas of social structure and inequality, with relatively less attention to education in connection with the spatial form of the city.

Reluctance to think about education as a force in the making of the city also may stem in part from relationships between the fields of history of education and urban history. Situated often within colleges of education, historians of education long worked within the relatively narrow boundaries of institutional histories. They answered questions that mattered to their colleagues in education, but only sometimes located their work within related historical fields. Historians of cities and historians of city schools often participated in separate networks of knowledge production, moving in parallel but rarely in conjunction. Important shifts in scholarship in urban history in the 1980s and 1990s, for example, did not immediately find engagement by historians of education.

The terms of debate for much of U.S. urban history of education, set out in works like Tyack’s The One Best System , predated the crucial urban historical scholarship of the 1980s by such scholars as Kenneth Jackson and Arnold Hirsch. Tyack’s work was completed at a time when city growth, and city decline, appeared to be nearly inexorable processes of urban economic and social development. Works like Jackson’s and Hirsh’s, and later Thomas Sugrue’s Origins of the Urban Crisis , emphasized the structural forces and policy choices that made the twentieth-century U.S. city, especially in its post–World War II form. This scholarship rendered the city a place that, rather than developing ecologically, was a deeply and intentionally human, political construction. There was not an immediate response to these key works by historians of education, nor was there an embrace by urban historians of matters of schooling.

In the United Kingdom, with a historiography less focused on ethnic or racial divisions but with significant concern for class formation, several lines of scholarship developed that demonstrated thinking about how schools helped shape the city. William Marsden’s research led the way, examining the reciprocities between urban growth and educational change even while working within an ecological framework. Marsden understood status hierarchies in schools as reproducing and interacting with lines of class segregation in London, a process he attributed to the “ecological forces” that had shaped the residential landscape extending into and reinforced by schooling as well. Marsden’s approach is evident in scholarship on England and Scotland and other European settings, as well as on Australia, that highlights the role of the school in helping to construct the urban landscape via the formation of neighborhoods, the demarcation of state institutions, or the architectural choices made in schools and educational spaces—moving toward a more interactive view of city and school. 4

One step in moving beyond views of the city as context in the history of education in U.S. scholarship came in a 1997 survey of historical and social science work on urban education. John Rury and Jeffrey Mirel emphasized a transition between ecological views of the city and the new urban sociology that focused on the policy choices and interests that led to urban development and change. Rury and Mirel called, then, for more historical work in the latter vein, particularly work that appreciated the spatial organization of the city as, in Henri Lefebvre’s terms, a landscape that was produced and not simply evolving of its own accord. 5

Scholarship emerging over the past decade has taken up a more spatially focused view of the history of urban education. A first wave of work in the U.S. placed heavy emphasis on white Americans’ reactions to efforts to end racial segregation in schools, which became another motive for suburban out-migration of white and middle-class and wealthy residents. Schools became factors in the making of the city, largely by provoking angry resistance and departure. 6 Later works in this vein more explicitly considered how city decline and suburban growth were interconnected within education and helped indicate the value of a more metropolitan, rather than only central city, perspective on urban education. Gradually this work has moved from an emphasis on “race relations” as a social matter to appreciating how racism and white supremacy operate at the core of the political and economic terrain of schooling and the city.

Recognizing that schools work in multiple ways to define urban space, new studies of U.S. cities ranging from Hartford, Connecticut, and Flint, Michigan, to Raleigh, North Carolina, not only traced expressions of individual or group preference around schooling but also documented how actors in the metropolitan landscape, from real estate developers and philanthropists to urban planners and educators, conceptualized schools at the center of metropolitan development and helped construct race- and class-segregated neighborhoods and jurisdictions. Marta Gutman’s examination of Oakland, California, shows how women shaped the built environment, including schools, to serve children. 7 Careful attention to schools and spatial dimensions of the metropolis helps to avoid sweeping pronouncements regarding class reproduction or social control while still documenting important interactions among schooling, racism, and unequal development.

Ideas of the city (and of the rural context) have also been shaped in and by education. Preferences for urban, or for rural, spaces find expression in school practices—such as primary grades field trips—or in national debates over the appropriate space for university campuses or high school locations. Some educational practices linked school curricula to students’ experiences and understandings of their urban locales or, going further, imagined “anarchic” education practices that freed students from the physical confines of the school and learning at large in the urban context. In Argentina the nineteenth-century city was considered the bastion of civilization’s positive forces and potential for the making of citizenship, in keeping with ideas of urbanity emerging in European contexts as well. Yet by the later twentieth century the city took up a negative connotation, as the site of problems of decline or barbarism. 8

Some urban historians are also newly attentive to interactions between education and markets for labor. One strand of this work appreciates the importance of employment within education, as an at times contested resource in an urban or metropolitan economy. Another returns to some of the core questions of the 1960s revisionist debates to ask how, in metropolitan space, the school curriculum has been a mechanism for promoting economic growth through the conscious production of students as future workers. 9

David Reeder’s 1977 questions about the field of history of urban education juxtaposed two views of cities and schools: of schools as important windows into city dynamics or of schools as separate and important features of the city landscape. New work in history of urban education increasingly values both of these views while exploring a third as well: how schools can be forces in the making of the city, at once shaped by and helping to shape the urban context. Such a focus does not displace attention from such crucial matters as the impact of resources and power in politics and the economy that continue to shape cities and their schools, nor does it choose one side or the other in debates between economic drivers and political drivers in the expansion of education. Instead it encourages scholars to consider how schools have been implicated within these processes.

The Primacy of the Industrial City

Whether taken as context or viewed in interaction with schools, the paradigmatic city in most history of education research in the U.S. and the U.K. is the industrial city. History of education in the U.S. emerged in an era when a singular version of the urban form dominated both popular and scholarly imaginations. In the U.S. scholars believed the industrial city had a particular geography, as famously depicted in the concentric zone model of the Chicago School, spreading outward from a manufacturing and commercial core to residential areas of increasing privilege and wealth. Cities on this model dominated the important case study research of the 1970s through the 1990s. Thinking about the industrial city made sense for historians of education working in a materialist tradition and seeking to trace how the economic order and schooling interacted. Inculcating industrial discipline and balancing the various effects of industrial capitalism motivated many advocates of education. Similarly, industrial work offered influential paradigms for the organization of school systems.

Surveys of the developing world also cast industrialization as a key prompt to the advancement of mass schooling. Yet recent work on Norway by the scholar Ida Bull helps challenge this pattern by tracing the roots of Norway’s early (eighteenth-century) shift to mass educational provision in cities not to the Industrial Revolution but to the development of a mercantile economy. This economy, and the class diversity it produced in urban spaces, generated a particularly urban embrace of mass education. The broader implication of Bull’s work—that urban economic processes that predate industrialization helped foster investment in schooling—finds reinforcement as well in research on India and China, where schooling developed earlier in coastal, mercantile cities as well as in industrializing spaces. Andy Green makes an even broader critique of the primacy of the industrial in stories of the expansion of schooling. He suggests that it was not economic pressures—industrial or otherwise—that fed the expansion of mass schooling in the U.S. and in Europe, but rather state-building processes. 10

U.S. scholars have pushed beyond the industrial model in work on higher education. Margaret O’Mara has examined the efforts of higher education and municipalities together to create economic growth through scientific innovation and knowledge production. Recent studies from Cambridge to Chicago and New York draw attention to universities’ impact on the spatial organization of the city, at times furthering urban renewal projects (or at times opposing them) depending on whether projects would help create or protect favorable campus environments. Universities proved powerful actors in making the postwar city. 11

Recent projects that highlight the role of schooling in shaping metropolitan space have focused on cities that take on polycentric or postindustrial forms. These works have shifted to an explicitly metropolitan rather than solely urban frame of reference, understanding cities in relationship to expanding and often privileged suburbs. Yet this work has not fully interrogated schooling in the context of postindustrial urbanism. Scholarship on European contexts can offer important examples for U.S. scholars writing new histories of suburban spaces that, by the turn of the twenty-first century, faced poverty, disinvestment, and inadequate infrastructure and became home to broad racial and cultural diversity. Such spatial configurations come to the fore in a study of Madrid’s working-class suburbs in the Franco period. Targeted by the Catholic Church and state for “urbanization,” which meant spatial rationalization, class segregation, and deterrence of working-class organizing, these suburbs became a locus of church-run educational programs and hubs of working-class activism that Manuel Castells called “schools of citizenship.” 12 Whether by shifting to a metropolitan frame of reference or by examining suburban educational history, these projects consider how schooling interacts with multiple geographic and economic forms of the city.

Citizenship, Culture, Religion, and Learning Outside of School

Urban sites have remained the chief location for examining the political economy of education in the U.S and the U.K. Yet cities have been less deeply examined with a focus on other crucial aspects of education: its relationship to citizenship, culture, and religion, as well as in nonschool or noninstitutional settings.

As many historians in locations around the world have demonstrated, citizenship—and particularly the making of citizens for new and developing republics—was a major motivation for the mass expansion of public education in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Although in some settings cities were thought to encourage traits of citizenship, urban industrial poverty and the anonymity of life in diverse and dense cities often seemed threats to the shaping of a citizenry. In twentieth-century China, associations among education, urbanism, and elitism proved an impediment in the expansion of education beyond the city. Many historians approached urban spaces as sites of particular demands and challenges for schooling but have been less likely to consider how schools, the specific urban context, and ideas of citizenship at times constructed one another together.

Work on highly local democratic governance of schooling in New York City in the 1960s and 1970s demonstrates both the potential of and the turn away from this attention to urban space and citizenship. Ira Katznelson’s 1982 City Trenches , focused on community politics more broadly but with engagement with education-specific struggles, consciously locates ideas of citizenship in the relationship between working-class identity formation and the geography of the city. Subsequent work on decentralized school governance emphasizes racial and ethnic fissures while attending much less to the spatial form. 13

A few examples of recent scholarship in the U.S. context show engagement with education, citizenship, and the particular urban context. Historians long treated African American residents in northern U.S. cities in the early nineteenth century as if they existed outside of larger narratives of growing educational provision linked to citizenship. As Hilary Moss has shown, however, debates over education were deeply implicated in contests over the boundaries of citizenship. If schooling was important for the ways it produced citizens—a status denied black residents—then exclusion from citizenship and exclusion from schooling reinforced one another. Moss’s attention to differing urban cases helps point out city particularities—like Baltimore’s demand for skilled black labor—that helped broaden opportunities for schooling. Moss also observes that the particular shape of dense urban economies, as in Baltimore, created multiple avenues, beyond schooling, by which black residents could gain education. These modes of education could not themselves produce citizenship, but they helped establish even stronger claims for both learning and political status. In the 1930s and 1940s, New York City educator Leonard Covello’s Benjamin Franklin High School engaged students in community research projects that helped galvanize local support and official commitment to new housing construction in the area. Covello’s work was influenced by the broader movement for “community schools” in the early twentieth century, motivated at once by John Dewey’s ideas of schooling and citizenship and a desire to intentionally make schools sites of community bonds. 14

Another indicator of the value of considering citizenship and education together with city space comes in histories of black activism in the urban U.S. As Donna Murch shows in her study of Black Panther activism in Oakland, California, urban community colleges functioned not only as formal educational institutions but also as hubs of activist energy enacting new visions of citizenship. Porous boundaries between the campus and activist networks in the broader community helped sustain an organizing base for the Black Panthers. Although often framed as studies of activism rather than under the broader rubric of citizenship, other examples of student organizing are similarly evocative of how students use urban spaces to achieve their civic goals. The richness of these examples should prompt historians to consider more fully how education and new visions of citizenship were articulated and realized in urban contexts. 15

Many important works in the history of education in the U.S. place schools at the center of conflict over culture and religion—sparked by or manifest in debates over what languages students and teachers speak, what textbooks they use with what portrayal of what culture, or what lessons about ideology, morality, or religion schools offer, implicitly or explicitly. This is a rich strain of history of education, but it is one in which the urban is relatively less represented or more often understood as context rather than as a subject of inquiry and particular interaction with schooling. Recent work on schooling and the concept of race and struggles over bilingual education, for example, engage some of the nation’s largest school systems but often leave unanswered the question of how the stories they tell might be different because of the particular political, social, and economic configurations of the city. New work on culture and religion offers more nuanced views than earlier interpretations that saw elites imposing economic, political, and cultural conformity on working-class and immigrant communities. Yet despite this, recent works tend to retain a relatively static view of the city as backdrop. Immigrant communities arrive in the U.S. and become “Americanized” via schooling; extra-institutional modes of education, like the foreign-language press, aid in the process of acculturation, as Jeffrey Mirel shows. Similarly, an exploration into colonial education as a venue for cultural and linguistic negotiation examines an urban colony, Hong Kong, but does not query the place of the urban in the story. How the city works in this process and how, perchance, that process helped shape the city get less attention in this body of work. 16

Pathbreaking works in U.S. urban history offer lines of inquiry that educational historians have not yet tapped but may prove valuable in exploring more interactive views among urban space, citizenship, and culture. George Chauncey’s Gay New York links cultural history to highly specific attention to the urban landscape, including in the spaces, interactions, and relationships it enables for queer people. 17 What would a history of education be that follows Chauncey’s careful attention to the urban form and its interactions with the making of sexuality and culture?

These matters converge also in the enduring challenge for historians of getting beyond schooling as the sole site of education. Many historians acknowledge that the history of education is much broader than the history of schooling. However, schools have consumed the vast majority of scholarly energy. Historians of African American education, telling stories about learning in communities often formally denied or excluded from educational institutions available to white people, have provided more attention to education in other institutions (like churches and clubs) and outside of institutions (in homes and apprenticeships), yet few have followed Lawrence Cremin’s 1988 call to attend carefully to the full range of spaces where education occurs. This absence is particularly significant for urban history of education, given that the density of urban space, as well as the institutions that such density entails, make cities ripe locales for an investigation of learning beyond schooling. Hints of what might be found if this field were to be fully explored appear in works in other fields, as when historians of the civil rights movements notice the pedagogical practice of organizers like Ella Baker working in Depression-era Harlem or scholars of the narcotics trade notice how youth gangs disciplined one another against drug use in the 1950s cities. 18

In a 1992 essay Barbara Finkelstein encourages scholars to think about how the city is an educational entity. Finkelstein identifies a range of topics, from understandings of children to the nature of community, that could better be understood if scholars shifted from considering education (or, more narrowly, schooling) in the city to considering how cities themselves educate. This perspective is more likely to be engaged when scholars trace the creation and the potential of the city rather than prioritize crisis and failure. Attention to the city as an educative force is on view in work on twentieth-century Colombian cities, where the city is not only a site of learning, but the making of the city—the modernization process—served to educate. 19

Labeling cities places of crisis makes it easier to perceive problematic developments and harder to notice patterns of constructive organizing, human productivity, or accomplishment. The negative cast of the idea of crisis, part of the deficit model that has inflected U.S. urban scholarship especially on black communities, obscures instances of great creative innovation in urban spaces. The emergence of global hip hop from some of the poorest and most institutionally neglected neighborhoods in the United States is a prime example. Similarly, the deficit model makes it harder to perceive the multiple, even if struggling institutional and noninstitutional contexts in which people, however embattled in the face of ongoing political and economic struggles for survival, manifest a rich admixture of hope and skill, knowledge and power.

Cities, Schools, and the State

The primacy of the urban in U.S. history of education has been especially visible in relationship to questions of institution-building, developing educational bureaucracy, and, in the process, the development of new kinds of state capacity. Tyack’s view of the U.S. urban “one best system” exemplifies the dynamic, in which the urban proved the point of creation for models of bureaucracy, governance, and state capacity that later expanded across rural and suburban systems.

Even as cities received relatively less attention as standard-bearers in cases outside the U.S., new forms of state capacity developed out of urban schooling in other Western nations. Kevin Brehony’s inquiry into efforts to structure children’s play in Victorian England shows that privately initiated reform efforts quickly opened the way for expanded state functions. Also in the U.K., school practices in the early twentieth century such as the making of report cards and educational records about families pioneered governmental practices of surveillance not only in schooling but for the state more generally. Urban school systems have appeared less dominant in cases of highly nationalized education, such as that in France. The French system was long thought to operate with much more power at the central, national level. Yet work focused squarely on the place of cities in French educational development shows that beneath claims to centralization (and the national-state capacity it might seem to have implied) a more haphazard, varied, and privately administered configuration of schooling continued well into the twentieth century. This work shows that the emphasis on centralized French state-run education was overstated, veiling a long history of “local action and diversity” of educational offerings, particularly at the secondary level. This French pattern aligns with scholarship on developing nations in the early and mid-twentieth century as well. 20

A key part of the question of state capacity in and through education is the matter of social welfare provision. Historians in the U.S. have asked how schools figure within various forms of social welfare support. U.S. historians of education have recognized the tendency in U.S. social policy since World War II to use education as a substitute for more robust social service provision. The “educationalization” of social problems as David Labaree has titled it, makes schooling or training a shaky substitute for more active intervention into the economy, such as job creation, minimum wage supports, and similar measures. 21 “Educationalization” is by no means limited to urban contexts, but it gained particular support from post–World War II U.S. political opposition to social welfare that reflected the racialization of urban poverty in particular. Many Americans held a view of poverty as the product of cultural or individual failing rather than structural circumstances, and therefore one subject to remedies through education. New work on the place of education in relationship to the broader landscape of social welfare provision developing in the early twentieth century identifies cities and their schools as contributing to the making of the “civic welfare state,” with schooling complementing rather than displacing commitments to social welfare. 22

Although this line of investigation continues to develop, other work emerging in the past decade in the U.S. context raises questions about an urban-centric view of education and state formation. Without denying that urban school districts were sites of innovation and bureaucratic elaboration, new scholarship points toward other modes of state-formation at work in rural and state-level governance and in the administration of new policies operating at the national scale. Nancy Beadie documents how rural and small-town settings linked the building of education and the transition to the capitalist marketplace. Tracy Steffes examines state-level efforts to remedy deficiencies in rural schools in the early twentieth century and identifies modes of expansion in state power over education apart from those under way concurrently in cities. Where elite control and managerial authority ruled in the city context, negotiation and incentives for cooperation with state agendas characterized the rural and state dynamic. Looking at the presence of education programs during and after World War II, Christopher Loss sees a strengthened role for the federal state in education through its direct interaction with citizens as soldiers and then students. Loss and Steffes clarify that as education helped further new state capacities, it did so at scales of governance beyond the city alone. Neither popular support for education as a state function nor the negotiation of state power was of necessity urban. In this regard U.S. historiography becomes more aligned with scholarship on European nations, and Latin America as well, that have long emphasized citizenship and the state over urban innovation, or with China, where questions of state capacity find investigation around the development of education in rural settings more than the urban. 23 This new work does not simply point attention away from cities but offers historians the chance to revisit with increasing clarity the question of what is distinct about education in urban spatial, political, economic, and social contexts.

When, in 1977, Reeder helped inaugurate the field of history of urban education and critique its early growth, he rightly noted key ambiguities in the basic shape of the field. What constituted urban education? How did historians understand the relationship between schools and cities—in terms of their historical findings and of the historiographic approaches they took? In the decades of robust work that followed—centered heavily, but not exclusively, in the most urbanized countries, like the U.S. and the U.K.—much of this ambiguity continued. Many historians located their investigations in cities but at times seemed to take the city, and its importance for education beyond urban contexts, for granted. They could do so in part because of the power of the idea of urban crisis, first in the U.S. and later in the U.K. and beyond. Who would need to justify studying the most troubled, the most uncertain spaces in the educational landscape? Yet while the idea of crisis could motivate more investigation, it could not on its own define the field sufficiently. Nor could it ensure that all of the important questions to ask about education in cities have been asked. Important questions about citizenship and culture remained much less fully interrogated as educational problems in urban space.

Since the 1970s, historical scholarship has moved from taking cities as context to beginning to conceptualize schools and cities in interaction with one another. In some cases, this work identifies ways that schools have helped define the urban landscape. In others, it continues to detail and examine the complex demands on and conditions faced by schools working in urban settings. The strongest of this work pays careful attention to the spatial organization of the city. Similar attention to the spatial organization of education and its consequences for political economy, for culture, and for citizenship has been at times applied to areas outside of the historic urban core, either through a metropolitan frame of reference or with a particular focus on suburban or exurban development. This work, rather than being subject to lumping under a generalizing idea of “the urban” because of the presence of diversity, segregation, or poverty, can instead offer useful comparative perspectives on how education has operated and has taken on particular meanings and has had particular impacts in various geographical forms. More specificity, rather than less, is helpful at this time of widely diverse urban forms and demographics. Specificity remains crucial as exciting new work in urban history takes up transnational frames of reference, from the global movement of segregationist practices and logics to the cross-border construction of cities themselves.

With specificity about the urban form can come an even firmer sense of how much the story of urban educational history matters for broader views of history of education. If we can answer how urban space matters for education, and how education matters for urban space, then we can identify more clearly, as Reeder suggested we do, what is “the particular set of problems” that is urban schooling.

The author thanks Viola Huang for her research assistance.

Latika Chaudhary, Aldo Mussachio, Steven Nafziger, and Se Yan, “Big BRICS, Weak Foundations: The Beginning of Public Elementary Education in Brazil, Russia, India, and China,” Explorations in Economic History 49 (2012): 221–240; Emily Hannum, “Political Change and the Urban-Rural Gap in Basic Education in China, 1949–1990,” Comparative Education Review 43, no. 2 (May 1999): 193–211; Suzanne Pepper, Radicalism and Educational Reform in 20th-Century China: The Search for an Ideal Development Model (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Stig Thogerson, A County of Culture: Twentieth Century China Seen from the Village Schools (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002); Suresh Chandra Ghosh, The History of Education in Modern India, 1757–2012 , 4th edition (New Delhi: Orient Black Swan, 2013); Alicia Civera, “Range and Limits of the Countryside Schooling Historiography in Latin America,” in Connecting Histories of Education: Transnational and Cross-Cultural Exchanges in (Post)Colonial Education , ed. Barnita Bagcchi, Eckhardt Fuchs, and Kate Rousmaniere (New York: Berghahn, 2014), 61–84.

Reeder, David, ed. Urban Education in the Nineteenth Century (London: Taylor and Francis, 1977) , 1.

William Marsden, “Education and the Social Geography of Nineteenth Century Towns and Cities,” in, Urban Education in the Nineteenth Century , ed. David Reeder (London: Taylor and Francis, 1977), 49–74; Roger Moore, “Haddow Reorganization in a Community Setting: A. H. Whipple and the William Crane School in Nottingham 1931–1938,” History of Education 30, no. 4 (2001): 379–399; Eulalia Collelldemont, “Tracing the Evolution of Education through Street Maps and Town Plans: Educational Institutions in the Maps of Edinburgh during the Seventeenth, Eighteenth, and Nineteenth Centuries,” Paedagogica Historica 50, no. 5 (September 2014): 651–667; Ian Grosvenor and Ruth Watts, “Urbanisation and Education: The City as a Light and a Beacon?,” Paedagogica Historica 39, nos. 1–2 (2003) : 1–4; Gary McCullough, “History of Urban Education in the United Kingdom,” in International Handbook of Urban Education , ed. George Noblit and William T. Pink (New York: Springer, 2007), 943–958; Catherine Burke, editorial, History of Education 36 (2007), 165–171; David. N. Livingstone, “Keeping Knowledge in Site,” History of Education 39, no. 6 (November 2010): 779–785; and the articles in Julie McLeod, ed., special issue of History of Education Review 43, no. 2 (2014).

John L. Rury and Jeffrey Mirel, “The Political Economy of Urban Education,” Review of Research in Education 22 (1997): 49–110; John Rury, “Race, Space, and the Politics of Chicago’s Public Schools: Benjamin Willis and the Tragedy of Urban Education,” History of Education Quarterly 39, no. 2 (Summer 1999): 117–142.

Ronald Formisano, Boston against Busing: Race, Class, and Ethnicity in the 1960s and 1970s (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991); Jonathan Rieder, Canarsie: Jews and Italians against Liberalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985); Kevin Kruse, White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006); Matthew D. Lassiter. The Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005).

Karen Benjamin, “Suburbanizing Jim Crow: The Impact of School Policy on Residential Segregation, in Raleigh”; Jack Dougherty, “Shopping for Schools: How Public Education and Private Housing Shaped Suburban Connecticut”; and Ansley T. Erickson, “Building Inequality: The Spatial Organization of Schooling in Nashville, Tennessee after Brown ,” all in Journal of Urban History 38, no. 2 (March 2012); Andrew Highsmith, Demolition Means Progress: Flint, Michigan and the Fate of the American Metropolis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015); Marta Gutman, A City for Children: Women, Architecture, and the Charitable Landscapes of Oakland (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014).

Ines Dussel, “Republicanism ‘Out of Place’: Readings on the Circulation of Republicanism in Education in 19th-Century Argentina” in Schooling and the Making of Citizens in the Long Nineteenth Century ,ed. Daniel Trohler, Thomas S. Popkewitz, and David F. Labaree (New York: Routledge, 2011), 131–152; Hester Baron, “‘Little Prisoners of City Streets’: London Elementary Schools and the School Journey Movement, 1918–1939,” History of Education 42, no. 2 (2013): 166–181; Anthony Potts, “The Power of the City in Defining the National and Regional in Education: Reactions against the Urban Universities in Regional Australia,” Paedagogica Historica 39, no. 1 (2003): 135–152; Catherine Burke, “Fleeting Pockets of Anarchy: Streetwork . The Exploding School,” Paedagogica Historica 50, no. 4 (2014): 433–442; Peter Medway and Patrick Kingwell, “A Curriculum in Its Place: English Teaching in One School, 1946–1963,” History of Education 39, no. 6 (November 2010): 749–765.

Jack Dougherty, More Than One Struggle: The Evolution of Black School Reform in Milwaukee (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004); Emily Straus, The Death of the Suburban Dream: Race and Schools in Compton, California (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014); Ansley T. Erickson, Making the Unequal Metropolis: School Desegregation and Its Limits (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016).

Ida Bull, “Industriousness and the Development of the School-System in the Eighteenth Century: The Experience of Norwegian Cities,” History of Education 40, no. 4 (July 2011): 425–446; Chaudhary et al, “Big BRICS”; Andy Green, Education and State Formation: Europe, East Asia and the USA , 2nd edition (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2013).

Margaret Pugh O’Mara, Cities of Knowledge: Cold War Science and the Search for the Next Silicon Valley (Princeton, NJ: Princeton, 2005); Hilary Moss, Yinan Zhang, and Andy Anderson, “Assessing the Impact of the Inner Belt: MIT, Highways, and Housing in Cambridge, Massachusetts,” Journal of Urban History 40, no. 6 (November 2014): 1054–1078; LaDale Winling, “Students and the Second Ghetto: Federal Legislation, Urban Politics, and Campus Planning at the University of Chicago,” Journal of Planning History 10, no. 1 (February 2011): 59–86; Micheal Carriere, “Fighting the War against Blight: Columbia University, Morningside Heights, and Counterinsurgent Urban Renewal,” Journal of Planning History 10, no. 1 (February 2011): 5–29.

Lassiter, Silent Majority ; Kruse, White Flight ; Erickson; Making the Unequal Metropolis ; Straus, Death of a Suburban Dream ; Highsmith, Demolition Means Progress ; Maria del Mar del Pozo Andres and Teresa Rabazas Romero, “Exploring New Concepts of Popular Education: Politics, Religion, and Citizenship in the Suburbs of Madrid, 1940–1975,” Paedagogica Historica 47, nos. 1–2 (February 2011): 221–242.

Ira Katznelson, City Trenches: Urban Politics and the Patterning of Class (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981); Daniel Perlstein, Justice, Justice: School Politics and the Eclipse of Liberalism (New York: Peter Lang, 2004); Jerold Podair, The Strike That Changed New York (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004). The exception is Wendell Pritchett, Brownsville, Brooklyn: Blacks, Jews, and the Changing Face of the Ghetto (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002).

Hilary Moss, Schooling Citizens (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009); Michael Johanek and John Puckett, Leonard Covello and the Making of Benjamin Franklin High School: Education As If Citizenship Mattered (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2008).

See, among others, Donna Murch, Living for the City: Migration, Education, and the Rise of the Black Panther Party in Oakland, California (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010); Barbara Ransby, Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005).

Diane Ravitch, The Great School Wars: A History of the New York City Public Schools (New York: Basic Books, 1974); Benjamin Justice, The War That Wasn’t: Religious Conflict and Compromise in the Common Schools of New York (Albany: SUNY Press, 2004); Zoe Burkholder, Color in the Classroom (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010); Natalia Mehlman-Petrzela, Classroom Wars: Language, Sex, and the Making of Modern Political Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015); Jeffrey Mirel, Patriotic Pluralism: Americanization Education and European Immigrants (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010); Anthony Sweeting and Edward Vickers, “Language and the History of Colonial Education: The Case of Hong Kong,” Modern Asia Studies 41, no. 1 (January 2007): 1–40.

George Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890–1940 (New York: Basic Books, 1995).

V. P. Franklin, The Education of Black Philadelphia: The Social and Educational History of a Minority Community, 1900–1950 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1979); Lawrence Cremin, American Education: The Metropolitan Experience, 1876–1980 (New York: Harper and Row, 1988); Ransby, Ella Baker ; Eric Schneider, Smack: Heroin and the American City (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008).

Martha Cecilia Herrera, “The City as a Modernizing Paradigm: Colombia in the First Decades of the Twentieth Century,” Paedagogica Historica 39, no. 1 (January 2003): 65–74.

Daniel Trohler, “Classical Republicanism, Local Democracy, and Education: The Emergence of the Public School of the Republic of Zurich, 1770–1870,” in Trohler, Popkewitz, and Labaree, Schooling and the Making of Citizens ; Kevin Brehony, “A ‘Socially Civilising Influence’? Play and the Urban ‘Degenerate,”’ Paedagogica Historica 39, no. 1 (2003): 87–106; Ian Grosvenor and Kevin Myers, “Progressivism, Control and Correction: Local Education Authorities and Educational Policy in Twentieth-Century England,” Paedagogica Historica 42, nos. 1–2 (February 2006): 225–247; Phillippe Savoie, “The Role of Cities in the History of Schooling: A French Paradox (Nineteenth–Twentieth Centuries),” Paedagogica Historica 39, no. 1 (January 2003): 37–51. See also Chaudhary et al., “Big BRICs”; Hannum, “Political Change.”

David Labaree, “The Winning Ways of a Losing Strategy: Educationalizing Social Problems in the United States,” Educational Theory 58, no 4 (November 2008): 447–460.

Miriam Cohen, “Reconsidering Schools and the American Welfare State,” History of Education Quarterly 45, no. 4 (December 2005): 511–527; Daniel Amsterdam, The Roaring Metropolis: Businessmen’s Forgotten Campaign for a Civic Welfare State (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016).

Nancy Beadie, “Education and the Creation of Capital: or What I Have Learned from Following the Money,” History of Education Quarterly 48, no. 1 (February 2008): 1–29; Tracy Steffes, School, Society, and State: A New Education to Govern Modern America, 1890–1940 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012); Christopher Loss, Between Citizens and the State: The Politics of American Higher Education in the Twentieth Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011); Trohler, Popkewitz, and Labaree, Schooling and the Making of Citizens ; Thogerson, A County of Culture ; Pepper, Radicalism and Educational Reform .

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The Oxford Handbook of the History of Education
Abstract. This handbook offers a global perspective on the historical development of educational institutions, systems of schooling, ideas about education, and educational experiences. Sections deal with questions of theory and methods, ancient and medieval education, the rise of national school systems, the development of universities in ...
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The Handbook provides insight and perspective on a wide range of topics, including pre-modern education, colonialism and anti-colonial struggles, indigenous education, minority issues in education, comparative, international, and transnational education, childhood education, non-formal and informal education, and a range of other issues.
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John L. Rury, Eileen H. Tamura. Oxford University Press, 2019 - Comparative education - 632 pages. This handbook offers a global view of the historical development of educational institutions, systems of schooling, ideas about education, and educational experiences. Its 36 chapters consider changing scholarship in the field, examine nationally ...
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Oxford University Press, Jun 17, 2019 - History - 640 pages. This handbook offers a global view of the historical development of educational institutions, systems of schooling, ideas about education, and educational experiences. Its 36 chapters consider changing scholarship in the field, examine nationally-oriented works by comparing themes and ...
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The Oxford handbook of the history of education. Responsibility edited by John L. Rury and Eileen H. Tamura. Publication New York, NY : Oxford University Press, [2019] ... xvi, 615 pages ; 26 cm. Series Oxford handbooks. Online. Available online Oxford Handbooks Online; Report a connection problem. At the library. Education Library (Cubberley) ...
The Oxford Handbook of the History of Education
The Oxford Handbook of the History of Education. Edited by John L. Rury and Eileen H. Tamura. New York, Oxford University Press, 2019. xvi + 615 pp., £97.00 (hardback), ISB 978--19-934003-3. This weighty volume of 36 chapters in 600 pages presents an ambitious range of scholarship, introduced by its editors with a compact but thought ...
The Oxford handbook of the history of education
Journal of the History of Education Society Volume 50, 2021 ... 0 CrossRef citations to date 0. Altmetric Book Review. The Oxford handbook of the history of education edited by John L. Rury and Eileen H. Tamura, New York, Oxford University Press, 2019, xvi + 615 pp., £97.00 (hardback), ISBN 978--19-934003-3 ...
The Oxford Handbook of The History of Education
The Oxford Handbook of The History of Education New York: Oxford University Press, 2019. 615, xvi pp. John L. Rury and Eileen H. Tamura edit The Oxford Handbook of The History of Education. The handbook is over 600 pages long. It has thirty-six chapters, each with notes and suggested readings, authored by more than three dozen historians from all
The Oxford Handbook of the History of Education 1st Edition
The Oxford Handbook of the History of Education 1st Edition is written by John L. Rury; Eileen H. Tamura and published by Oxford University Press. The Digital and eTextbook ISBNs for The Oxford Handbook of the History of Education are 9780199340040, 0199340048 and the print ISBNs are 9780199340033, 019934003X. Save up to 80% versus print by going digital with VitalSource.
The [Oxford] Handbook of the History of Education
Like many other subfields of historical analysis, the history of education has been deeply affected by global processes of social and political change, especially since the 1960s. The handbook weighs the influence of various interpretive perspectives, including revisionist viewpoints, taking particular note of changes in the past half century.
4 Theory in the History of Education
The Oxford Handbook of the History of Education Contents Contents Search in this book. Chapter 4 Theory in the History of Education Isaac Gottesman. Isaac Gottesman Education, Iowa State University. Find on Oxford Academic. Google Scholar. Isaac Gottesman is an associate professor and chair, Department of Education, University of Saint Joseph. ...
The Oxford Handbook of the History of Education|Hardcover
This handbook offers a global view of the historical development of educational institutions, systems of schooling, ideas about education, and educational experiences. Its 36 chapters consider changing scholarship in the field, examine nationally-oriented works by comparing themes and approaches,...
Rury, J. L. & Tamura, E. H. (Eds.). (2019). The Oxford handbook of the
The Oxford handbook of the history of education. Oxford University Press. About About the Journal Editorial Team Editorial Team 2 Submissions Contributors Contributors (page 2) Contact Current Archives News Register Login Register Login Vol. 4 No. 2 (2021), Book Reviews. Vol. 4 No. 2 (2021) Rury, J. L. & Tamura, E. H. (Eds.). ...
The Oxford handbook of the history of education; Handbook of historical
The Oxford handbook of the history of education, edited by John L. Rury and Eileen H. Tamura, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2019, xvi + 615 pp., £110.00 (hardback), ISBN 978--19-934003-3; Handbook of historical studies in education. Debates, tensions, and directions, edited by Tanya Fitzgerald, Singapore, Springer Nature, 2020, xvii + 961 ...
The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Education
Abstract. The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Education serves as a general introduction to key issues in the field, furthers the philosophical pursuit of those issues, and hopes to bring philosophy of education back into closer contact with general philosophy. Philosophy of education has an honored place in the history of Western ...
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2 The Urban History of Education
In other parts of the twentieth-century world, however, urban education and the writing of its history proceeded on a quite different path. The United Kingdom reached "urbanization"—meaning that the majority of its residents live in cities—in the mid-nineteenth century (fully a half-century before the United States), but U.K. scholarship showed little focus on cities until the 1990s.