This research will examine Tyack's The One Best System, which is a history of the development of universal public education in the United States over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The research will discuss the manner in which he develops the pattern of his ideas about American public education, as well as the quality of the assumptions he brings to his study, the logic of his argument, and his use of evidence to substantiate his ideas, with a view toward identifying implications of conclusions that he draws.
The principal thesis of The One Best System is that the persistent, programmatic centralization and consolidation of schools and school districts in the US in conformity with the emergence of a corporatist political economy have been beneficial in some important ways but far from universally helpful to the construction of a well-educated body politic or a literate and cultured civil society. To the contrary, in the pursuit of control of the structure of public education in the service of a political and social economy dominated by the priorities of industrial and bureaucratic production efficiency, the content, environment, experience, and structure of American education have suffered as well as benefited. What began in the late 19th century as an ambitious effort on the part of "schoolmen," as educational policy makers were known, at educational reform that was meant to respond to dramatic transformation of the shape of American society may have fostered not only some benefits but also unanticipated negative consequences that in turn helped form the discourse of crisis that dominates the educational scene in the modern period.
Undoubtedly some elements of a current crisis in modern education could not have been anticipated by well-meaning educational reformers of an earlier period. But Tyack uses the evidence accumulated from examination of the history of American public education to suggest that cert...