Traditional Philosophical Foundations of Curriculum

Chapter Two outlines the three major traditional philosophies: Idealism (Plato), Realism (Aristotle), and Neo-Scholasticism (ancient and medieval precedents and origins of schooling). Each is briefly sketched, then critiqued for its ill-effects when serving as a contemporary basis of music curriculum as aesthetic education (MEAE). While perhaps suited to the schools of the past, those of nobles and aristocrats before the rise of “public” (or “common”) schools for all children, the strong legacy of each is often ill-suited to contemporary life, students, and music. These three traditional philosophies share a usually abstract, “merely academic,” and detached approach to schooling. For all three, questions about reality, truth, and beauty are not questions at all! They are eternal and unchanging claims that exist independently of and, therefore, logically prior to the experiences, needs, and musical interests of particular students.

The End of the Awakening

Between 1840, when chapters five, six, and seven leave off, and 1848, when Horace Mann left his position as secretary of the board of education, the religious consensus that had helped to give rise to the Common School Awakening definitively broke down. By the end of the decade, American Christians of all stripes were issuing objections to common schools. Lutherans, Reformed Christians, and members of other confessions joined the Catholics who had first voiced opposition to the vision of Christianity without sectarianism that stood at the heart of the Common School Awakening. As a result, the dramatic reform of the 1830s came to a halt, occasionally even retreating. But whatever regression might have occurred in terms of short-term policy, the religiously motivated ideals of systematization and professionalization had been permanently enshrined in the American vision of public education. Once stirred from her slumbers, American public education would not go quietly back to sleep.

Introduction

This chapter uses as a case study an incident from 1824 in which the New York Tract Society convinced John Van Ness Yates, New York’s acting superintendent of common schools, to encourage the use of its literature in schools under his oversight. This incident highlights the significance of growing educational bureaucracy in this era and how it might be used for distinctly religious aims. This educational bureaucracy emerged as part of what this book calls the “Common School Awakening,” a transatlantic, transdenominational movement that introduced systematized, professionalized schools to America in the first half of the nineteenth century. Previous historical scholarship on education in this era, notably the very different work of Ellwood Cubberley and Michael Katz, has ignored the strongly religious roots of the movement for common schools that has found its representative figure in the person of Horace Mann.

State and School Lands

This chapter focuses on Article XI of the Oklahoma constitution, which concerns state and school lands. Section 1 provides for acceptance by the state of all grants of land and donations of money by the United States under the Enabling Act. In 1982, the Oklahoma Supreme Court held that this section, when considered with the Enabling Act, is an irrevocable compact between the United States and Oklahoma for the benefit of the state’s schools. In accepting grants from the federal government to establish the permanent school fund, Section 2 requires that the fund may only be used for the benefit of Oklahoma common schools, and that the $5 million principal of the fund shall never be spent. The state is also required to reimburse the fund for all losses that may occur, and no portion of this fund is to be used for any other purpose. Meanwhile, Section 4 confers on the legislature exclusive power to set the rules and regulations for selling public lands granted to the state by Congress for charitable and other purposes.

The Common School Awakening in Ohio

This chapter narrates the key developments in the movement to systematize and professionalize Ohio’s schools, which culminated in 1837 with the creation of the office of the superintendent of common schools. In many ways, Ohio resembled Massachusetts: religious reformers pointed to the example of Prussia in a successful campaign to introduce legislative change. In other respects, however, the case of Ohio differed. One important contrast between the course of the Common School Awakening in the two states involves the scope of the legislative victories achieved in each. In Massachusetts, the board of education and state-sponsored normal schools that came into existence in the 1830s continued largely unchanged for decades. In Ohio, however, the awakening did not result in a state-sponsored normal school and the superintendent office that it created passed out of existence when its first occupant resigned.

The First Era of School Reform

This chapter explains how, during the 1810s and 1820s, a more effective political opposition to aristocratic education formed. In different ways, the “Jeffersonian Revolution” of 1800, the War of 1812, and the Panic of 1819 all helped bolster the critique of academies, and built popular support for public common schools. Historians often skip over this “first era of school reform” and look instead at Horace Mann and the common school reformers of the 1830s. But it was during this period that many northern states started investing in common schools, and also revamping academies and colleges to serve a new educational vision. These institutional changes were all geared toward overthrowing aristocratic education and instead trying to create widespread informed citizenship. But as education came to be seen as an important path to citizenship, the impulse to segregate public schools grew, confining their benefits primarily to white men.

Aristocratic Education and the Making of the American Republic

Following the American Revolution, it was a cliché that the new republic's future depended on widespread, informed citizenship. However, instead of immediately creating the common schools--accessible, elementary education--that seemed necessary to create such a citizenry, the Federalists in power founded one of the most ubiquitous but forgotten institutions of early American life: academies, privately run but state-chartered secondary schools that offered European-style education primarily for elites. By 1800, academies had become the most widely incorporated institutions besides churches and transportation projects in nearly every state.In this book, Mark Boonshoft shows how many Americans saw the academy as a caricature of aristocratic European education and how their political reaction against the academy led to a first era of school reform in the United States, helping transform education from a tool of elite privilege into a key component of self-government and citizenship. And yet the very anti-aristocratic critique that propelled democratic education was conspicuously silent on the persistence of racial and gender inequality in public schooling. By tracing the history of academies in the revolutionary era, Boonshoft offers a new understanding of political power and the origins of public education and segregation in the United States.

A política de educação inclusiva e o futuro das instituições especializadas no Brasil

The present article is a theoretical essay that compiles a historical analysis of the special education policy in Brazil, focusing on the changes produced from the year 2000 with a view to radicalize the perspective of school inclusion. Since then, this field has been subject to strong tensions between those who point to the need to educate all the students of the target public of special education in the common schools, and others who recommend a more cautious approach, based on empirical analysis and historical considerations. At the heart of this debate is the decision of what to do with the traditional specialized institutions of the sector, and in this sense the proposals go from extinction to prevent segregation, they also recommend their reconfiguration as a service to support inclusive schooling, a predominant tendency in the current policy, to those who defend its maintenance. In the present work, we analyzed such possibilities, taking into account historical, legal, political, pragmatic and scientific arguments, in order to conclude that they must be reconfigured, not as centers of support, but as special schools, in a diversified network of articulated services to support the needs of certain students of the target public of special education.