The Troubled Crusade: American Education 1945-1980

This is my favorite of Diane Ravitch's books, written while she was at Teachers College/Columbia, and published in 1983. Trained as an historian, Ravitch writes beautifully. She sees the conflicts that have troubled American public education, the advocates for the various sides, and the results of conflicts with an historian's clear-eyed sense of proportion, cause-and-effect, and the consequences of certain policies. The history begins in post WW II America, when the bomber plants were closing, America was further urbanizing and suburbanizing, and, having won the war, what else was there to do? She describes the following decades clearly--the loyalty investigations, how Brown v Board of Education in Topeka stressed the then-intact system of discriminatory education, the rise of "social science" in education, the Vietnam War era of protest, drugs, reformers, radicals, and romantics. Her history ends in 1985, with the "new politics:" the rise of aggrieved groups, use of courts to make basic educational policy decisions, the return to ethnocentrism, bureaucratization, and fierce politicalization of the unions.Diane Ravitch writes beautifully. I know of no comparable history in American education. She has taken a quantum leap from other historians' writings in education. I loved this fluent and clear-eyed book. In 1983 the Pulitzer History prize was won by a book called The Transformation of Virginia. Ravitch's book is at a Pulitzer level.

As a home-schooling father, who has already made personal decisions about the education of my own children, I found Ms. Ravitch's book to be an eye-opening look at the recent history of education in America. She paints a large mural of the course of education, a course that some might refer to as 'progress'. However, it depends on what one's goals are to make such as assertion. I think Ms. Ravitch makes clear the tremendous expansion of education in 20th-Century America: "modern buildings, larger enrollments, better materials, better trained teachers, more courses, more departments, and more graduates" (p. 328). The material advancement of this nation and the lives of many Americans has benefited greatly from the nation's incredible investment in American education.Furthermore, Ms. Ravitch makes clear the way in which schools were the very battlefield on which many recent cultural clashes were fought: progressivism, the education of a free and democratic citizenry, anti-Communism and the Red Scare, the movements of de-segregation, radicalism on college campuses, the expanding role of the federal government, ethnic rights, feminism. If not at the very center, all of these movements greatly impacted the form and substance of American schooling.However, do not forget the descriptor in the title of this book: "Troubled". The heart of this descriptor is not simply that the progress achieved over this time period was a difficult struggle, but that the form and substance of education was greatly modified to meet the egalitarian, inclusive goals of the many reformers. Progressives abandoned an idea of education as primarily a formation of the intellect and instead focused on the training in "life skills" and vocational arts. Rather than lifting a student to a higher realm of thought and culture, education became a preparation for whatever social or vocational life awaited the student. To accommodate the various educational paths, schools become large, impersonal, bureaucratized. No longer an intimate part of a community with shared values and shared goals; the school became another factory among factories (my words, not Ms. Ravitch's). This theme of the book was very helpful to me in explaining the elements of the current educational system that tend to repulse me.Yes, this book was very informative in explaining the course that American education has taken in the late 20th Century. It will be up to the reader to decide whether to emphasize the success of the crusade or the troubling changes that have so changed education in America.

This book explains the complexities of American education in the 20th century--the rise and fall of progressive education, the impact of the Brown decision, the turbulent years of the 1960s in schools and on campuses. It is simply an outstanding read; a real page-turner for anyone who wants to understand our vast educational system.