The One Best System: universal public education

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

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. The increase in literacy opened opportunities to many who might not have otherwise had them, in both urban and rural environments. But those in control were the schoolmen, and their policy authority appears to have become self-protective. Even as the benefits of culturally predictable and plannable education emerged, they began to be plugged into an increasingly structured educational system where economies of scale could be realized. A prescribed curriculum could be assigned not to scholarly instructors but to less well-trained (and less costly) female teachers, who, on account of social custom and practice and their own socialization, were easier for school authorities to control. School principals and other administrators were men, and male teachers predominated in high schools. By the turn of the century, urban elementary education faculties had been largely feminized, a dynamic that was characterized by administrative authority and a culture of top-down management that was opaque to protofeminist protest (63). This hostile attitude toward females as administrators persisted into the modern period, with women largely excluded from education administration. Female teachers, conditioned to be subservient to men and "cultural

Category: Government - T