The American School: From the Puritans to No Child Left Behind

Joel Spring's historical accounts of education in The American School portray an uncommon, historical depiction of schooling in the United States. Spring's chronicled discourse illustrates many of the injustices that conservative frameworks manifested, ranging from colonial times to the present. For example, the majority of historical artifacts express the contemporary struggles that Native Americans and minorities like African Americans, Asians and Hispanics experienced. Here, Spring includes European cultures like the Irish who underwent violence and oppression on account of their Catholic roots. Of course, the religious struggles between Protestant ideologies and those of diverse cultures are presented throughout. Also polarized are the political reform movements between groups like the Progressive radicals and corporate minded conservatives. Interestingly, the text seems to carry an unbiased neutrality, but the authors candid, unreserved portrayal of how education mantles the academic underpinnings of the federal government, profit based corporations or overzealous unions and educational organizations, transcends a one sided implication that seemingly sides with the left. In so many words, it isn't surprising to hear about the federal and state governments uniting with private corporations, but it certainly provokes a critical overview of how such unisons re-structure, or maintain education. Notably, the book includes a diversity of educational topics scoping the outlines of American schooling, from the culinary schemes found in an accredited cookbook that seemed to implicitly Americanize young learners cultural behaviors to the somewhat futuristic and hopeful ideas of an environmental paradigm. In essence, Spring's transcendence from one academic period to another exhibit a social, academic and in some cases even physical struggle found amidst the spheres of race, class, sex, and sub-categories of power. I find these struggles to be amongst the books greatest strengths. In other words, history isn't simply laid out there for details and data; it is a blueprint for continuing to arm a resistance against the inequalities that may detach young learners, teachers and even administrative agents for rational, democratic changes in education today. Over the course of the book, one will undoubtedly find repetitive claims resurfacing and intertwining in between topics. Here, Spring's syntax may be found to be of slight criticism. Regardless, I find such repetitions to serve as indulging reinforcements and of solidifying character. The book serves as an exploratory trekking for anyone interested in American schooling, teachers, students and scholars.

I'm using this book right now for a required class in educational foundation. It was a little slow to grab me at first, but now that I've gotten into I found it's quite helpful and provides a good base of knowledge for anyone who's either going into teaching or is already in education. I think the people who criticize this book are generally closed-minded and likely not big fans of the public school system, anyway.

Spring's history is comprehensive, thoughtful, and fair. He sees the strengths and weaknesses in our schooling history. I do require this book in my Foundations of Education class and find it invaluable.

I like Joel Spring's approach of viewing the history of American schools through the lens of deculturation and multi-culturalism. He tells the story of an American school system that has been used as an instrument of decultutaration to "americanize" various ethnic groups (native american, asian american, african american, german american, hispanic american) and religious groups (irish catholics).One criticism I do have Spring's work is his lack of reference to sexual orientation and the schools' deculturation of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender youth. It seems that these issues would connect nicely with his overall arguments and would provide a poignant contemporary example of the continuing process of deculturation.

This book does a very good job of illustrating the struggles of various minority groups in the US. It provides an excellent emphasis on the historical status of how these groups came to be influenced by American Education-- which only promoted Anglo, Protestant, and middle-class values instead of multicultural ones. It showed how these groups struggled against and adapted to these restrictive educational principles and the book also questions whether or not we should place value on an education which only represents one view of our multicultural society. There are so many subjects of our society which are presented in this book-- from media to religion, capitalism, school board composition (and how most boards lack women and are represented by buisiness interests), segregation, deculturalization and politics-- even though it is a bit over-priced, it contains much priceless knowledge!