Showing papers on "Compulsory education published in 1982"

Public Schooling and Working-Class Formation: The Case of the United States

Abstract: This essay examines the role of the working class in the expansion of the American public school system from 1870 to 1900. In contrast to progressive and recent revisionist historians, the authors identify the nature and limits of conflict as the key to explaining the growth of public education in the United States. Four empirical claims are made: (1) The working class did not provide the central agency struggling to expand the school systems created before the Civil War. This role was taken by educators finding their professional voice. (2) The American working class did not engage in school politics as a class. (3) Rather, when working-class Americans fought school battles they did so in more narrowly defined terms, either as labor or as ethnics. (4) This pattern of selective attention is accounted for by the fact that (white) workers did not have to struggle against significant opposition to secure access to free common public schooling and, second, by the features of class formation which post-Civil W...

The Campaign for Compulsory Education in Manitoba

Abstract: A number of explanations covering the full range of ideological positions have been offered concerning why governments chose to introduce compulsory education measures in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This paper examines the development of that issue in Manitoba where, over a period of twenty-six years, it attracted considerable discussion and was given a thorough public airing. In no other Canadian jurisdiction did anything approaching the intensity of the debate take place; however, social perspectives which shaped views held by Manitobans reflected those held elsewhere in the country between 1890 and 1916. Indeed they may still have some relevance in an age when compulsory schooling receives so little critical examination.

Racial Intelligence Testing and the Mexican People

Abstract: In the 1920s and 1930s the Mexican school age population increasingly participated in the educational system of the US. Meanwhile, many first experiences of these children with the state came in the form of educational research. The intelligence testing movement had a brief history before then, one which was gathering much momentum and greatly encouraged by corporate foundations and the cooperation of university administrations. The rapid immigration in the 1920s and settlement of Mexicans into colonias of the Southwest coincided with the rise of academic research and publications on racial intelligence as well as with the combination of mass compulsory education and intelligence testing tracking and curriculum differentation [differentiation].