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21 of 22 humans found the following review helpful.
Another Painstaking Masterpiece
By B. Lack
Tyack, D. B. (1974). The one best system: A history of American urban education. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Ellen Lagemann (1989) has observed, "One can not comprehend the history of education in the United States in the twentieth century unless one realizes that Edward L. Thorndike won and John Dewey lost" (p.185). Put differently, in the words of David Tyack (1974), it was the administrative progressives who won and all the others who lost. In his classic work on the bureaucratization of schools in the late 1800s and early 1900s--The One Best System--Tyack proposes that school reformers of the late 19th century saw efficacy as the sine qua non to humane progress, and accordingly borrowed and amalgamated conceptions like regularity, hierarchy, docility, punctuality, assessment, and conformity into evolving administrative structures of schools, for these calibers seemed to unequivocally spur the booming production in industrial outfits of the time. In short, schools became corporations. His thesis is clear and iterative, his prose without doubt or question rich, his revision of early historical accounts rightful (especially those proffered by the likes of Elwood Cubberly), and perhaps most important, the literary arsenal from which he draws help is diffuse.
As cities grew quickly at the close of the 19th century, the need for social control became more of the utmost importance than ever. Tyack shows how school centralization in the early 20th century was plainly microcosmic of wide shifts occurring in huge cities (e.g., police, public health, welfare systems). In education, systematization of schools was veiled behind the banner of "taking schools out of politics"--a motion led by Wealthy Anglo Saxon Protestants (WASPs) who did not see themselves as "political" but as crusaders for an evident good with goal to be attained means. Put differently, why democratize the governance and institution of schools when experts (WASPs) without doubt or question believed there was one best system that would work anytime and anywhere? In the struggle for control over schools amid 1890 and 1920, amidst the losers were board members representing local wards, teachers, and pedagogical progressives (all representing ethnically and culturally diverse perspectives when it comes to schools) who were exhaustively discomfited by a powerful conglomerate of WASPs and media muckraking of the graft of machine politics. Among the biggest losers were Blacks, South Italians, and Poles, whose encounters with the bigotry of the one best system seemed most difficult. Tyack's paraphrasing of segregationist Theodore Bilbo captured the motion to a tee: "All this talk regarding taking the schools out of politics is a huge joke to intellectual people.... It means not one thing except to take the schools out of your politics and put them in [mine]" (p. 284). Clearly, there was never such a thing as one best system for all.
While Tyack's scholarship is unquestionably first-rate, his capacity to deploy strong arguments and have fun at the same time is ingenious: Whether it is brawny students in one-room school houses beating up their schoolmasters in front of 5-year olds (and being demoted by the local school board not for fighting, but losing!), school janitors engaging in espionage for superintendents who wanted to insure implementation fidelity among teachers, textbook companies sending "alluring women as accomplices to blackmail school officials into favoring their wares" (p. 95), or explaining the literal origin of the expression, "toe the line," Tyack seamlessly weaves these disparate pieces back into his main thesis: social control of the young through the most formidable institution of enculturation--the school.
Throughout my reading of Tyack, I couldn't aid but think of the annoying but general and indiscriminate use of the term "Best Practices" (originally a business term, by the way) in instructional parlance. Tyack's book reminds us of the need to take such claims with a grain of salt. Instead of taking the hard-nosed and misleading high road to an unequivocal science of education (also known as the one best system), ideals of pluralism and decentralized decision-making will have to be embraced by school reformers, peculiarly if schools are to be touted as genuinely democratic institutions.
This will have to be a required reading for any person mesmerized in urban education.
15 of 18 people found the following review helpful.
Want to recognise why schools have problems? Read this book
By scholar-activist
Every urban parent and teacher wonders why it is SO difficult to manufacture good urban schools. Funding is surely an issue, but something else seems to be wrong, something larger and more unchangeable. Read this book, and you will find the answer: Urban schools were organized this way on purpose. They were structured to be impersonal, bureaucratic, and unequal.
Great book. Tyack ranks as one of the best U.S. historians.
1 of 1 humans found the following review helpful.
Spot on
By Doc2Be
I was looking for a historical framework to view my community's local instructional history. This book has been an outstanding aid in this effort. I live in the South where the education systems comprise both urban and speedily urbanizing schools and tend to be more consolidated organizationally. My state's and local events were known but this book brought them into context for me.
I wish this book has been one of the texts employed in my history of urban schools class and have since commended it to my university.
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