John Rury

The American collegiate curriculum has undergone significant change in the past two centuries. From its beginning through much of the 19th century a classical curricular approach prevailed, focusing on ancient languages and the liberal arts, while favoring recitation and debate as instructional modalities. The rise of “land-grant” institutions with a focus on practical instruction in agriculture, engineering, and military sciences in the later 19th century was a harbinger of change. It was followed by the rise of research institutions and comprehensive universities that further emphasized the importance of practical and professional education. The adoption of an elective approach to course-taking and the development of college majors led to debates about core curricula and the need for general education. Following publication of the famous Harvard Red Book in 1948, a broad consensus regarding the need for a liberal arts core emerged in the postwar era and has broadly persisted. Sinc...

ABSTRACT While its title is a bit misleading, this book examines schools undergoing social change, like many others in the United States. Castagno’s treatment of these developments is under-theorized and offers a somewhat thin ethnographic account of the events at hand, but it does provide telling insights into apparently typical public schools. In the end, it is a somewhat revealing examination of how such institutions function to sustain existing relations of social class and ethnicity in American life. Given its title, perhaps the most obvious problem is the book’s conceptualization of whiteness in institutions such as schools. Castagno devotes just four pages to this, much of it a quick review of various authors’ viewpoints on the general question. She does discuss how whiteness can appear in an educational setting, but complicates the matter by linking it to “niceness,” another theme in the study. Other theoretical constructs, such as cultural and social capital, are not even mentioned. The setting is a school district in metropolitan Salt Lake City which has undergone considerable change. It now has a more ethnically diverse population than earlier, with most “non-white” students being Hispanic or non-Hispanic immigrants. Relatively few are African American, potentially compromising her treatment of race. She focuses on two high schools, although differences between them do not figure prominently in her conclusions. Although Castagno does not state it clearly, whiteness appears to represent norms or expectations for appearance, behavior, and academic performance that are rarely, if ever, voiced explicitly. Instead, she suggests that it is concealed and subtly enforced by “niceness,” often resulting in “hurtful” experiences for students but not exactly oppression. Teachers discussed differences in student performance by using terms such as “culture” and “learning styles” to denote distinct groups, but they rarely discussed race or ethnicity outright. In this way important underlying assumptions about children were often masked, and opportunities for achievement constrained. This, of course, is more harmful than merely hurtful. Castagno has long been familiar with the district and started out to investigate multicultural education. The schools were supposedly leaders in this respect, but she discovered a celebration of diversity that ignored manifest evidence of inequity. In particular, English language learning students were segregated in one school and many other non-white students were tracked into less demanding classes program-matically. Some “colorblind” teachers had little tolerance for non-white students. Ruby Payne fostered deficit theories of low SES performance, and teachers readily accepted these ideas. Liberal ideology confounded more critical analyses of problems they faced. These, of course, are familiar patterns of inequity, but Castagno suggests that whiteness was a factor in the background. She doubtless is right, but the case surely would have been stronger in a setting with more African American students. It will be left to yet other scholars to take up these themes in settings where they can be explored in even greater depth, with a bit more conceptual sophistication.

... Inheriting shame: The story of eugenics and racism in America. Post a Comment. ... PAGES (INTRO/BODY): xvii, 177 p. SUBJECT(S): American Eugenics Society; History; United States; Race relations; Eugenics; Racism; Eugenics in textbooks; Racism in textbooks. ...

This masterful biography by one of America's foremost historians of women tells the story of Florence Kelley, a leading reformer in the Progressive Era. The book is also a political history of the United States during a period of transforming change when women worked ...

It is a false commonplace that history inevitably serves to bolster the prevailing outlook of the period that produces it. Yet few topics have witnessed as much interpretive and theoretical controversy about their normative implications as American slavery. The central problem has been slavery’s terrible legacy of violent, racist oppression of black and other &dquo;nonwhite&dquo; minorities in the United States. Interpretations ranging from U.B. Phillips’ &dquo;benign paternalism&dquo; (1918), to Kenneth Stamp’s moral indictment in The

In this essay we consider how the principles evident in Dewey's Democracy and Education would have been evident in response to the civil rights movement that took shape shortly after his death, and to the major educational reform movements of today. While acknowledging that Dewey's views on race and human development were inevitably influenced by his social and intellectual context, we maintain that he was fundamentally opposed to racist ideology and related popular beliefs, and that his deep commitment to democracy as a social process would have made him a staunch supporter of the civil rights movement and associated demands for racial equality. We likewise argue that Dewey would have had deep misgivings about the standards-driven assessment regimes that underlie current national reform efforts. In the end we suggest that Democracy and Education still has much to offer students of education today, and can serve as a helpful guide to those who would seek to change educationa...

ABSTRACT This paper considers African-American student protests in secondary schools during the 1960s and early 1970s. Taking a national perspective, it charts a growing sense of independence and militancy among black students as they made the schools a focal point of activism. Activist students challenged established civil rights organisations on a variety of questions. They also engaged in an escalating series of protest activities to make schools change. Much of this focused on curricular change, particularly adding black history courses and hiring African-American teachers and principals. Generally, these protests proved quite successful. Black students also protested against conditions encountered in integrated schools, where they often met hostility from whites. Distinct regional patterns characterised such activities, with more protest over school issues in the North and greater conflict regarding desegregation in the South. By the mid-1970s the era of black secondary student protest concluded, although its legacy continues to live.

... On the urban-suburban migration at this time and its effect, see Jon C. Teaford, The Twentieth Century American City, Second Edition ... The arrival in 1953 of new superintendent BenjaminCoppage Willis, an energetic, progressive school leader from Buffalo, heralded a new era ...

... JOHN L. RURY DePaul University JEFFREY E. MIREL Northern Illinois University ... Jeffrey E. Mirel would also like to thank the Social Science Research Institute, Northern Illinois University, which provided support for his work on the essay. 49 Page 2. ...

Page 1. Teachers, Professionalism, and Craft RICHARD PRATTE Ohio State University JOHN L. RURY DePaul University In light of recent critiques of American education, much attention has been devoted to the matter of improving the professional status of teachers. ...

... DPU Centennial Essays Vincentian Family - Contemporary 1-1-1998 Chapter Five: Student Life and Campus Culture at DePaul: A Hundred Year History John L. Rury ... CHAPTER FIVE STUDENT LIFE AND CAMPUS CULTURE AT DEPAUL A Hundred Year History John 1. Rury ...

Recent work in women's history suggests that the dramatic rise in female labor force participation in the first decades of the twentieth century cannot be understood solely in terms of labor market forces. Although the demand for female labor increased substantially between 1900 and 1920 (Oppenheimer, 1970), such variables as religion, education, ethnicity, and social class interacted to determine the supply of women available for hire at any one time. It should not be surprising, therefore, that “cultural” variables such as these also served to limit the ability of women to improve their position in the labor market generally. This article will examine the ways in which the family and work environments interacted to determine the responsiveness of working women to different sorts of organizations which (theoretically) could have assisted them in altering the basic conditions of their work and family experiences.

... Historians have neglected to emphasize the importance of commercial education, perhaps because contemporaries devoted comparatively ... and 1910 the proportion of all public school students enrolled in such courses more than ... 30 HISTORY OF EDUCATION QUARTERLY ...

John Rury's Education and Women's Work is a historical study of the reciprocal relationship between women's education and women's work. Guiding the narrative is the thesis that the development of women's secondary schooling at the turn of the century was shaped by economic ...

This paper examines the impact of war on African-American education. This question is considered in three different periods: the eras of the American Revolution, the Civil War and the Second World War. Large-scale conflict, such as these instances of total war, can afford historical moments when oppressed groups are able take steps to improve their social status, challenging the forms of domination that have subjugated them in the past and demanding rights and liberties long denied them. This is an especially noteworthy case because of the highly developed system of racial oppression that African Americans became subjected to historically. In each of these cases, disruptions of existing patterns of social and political inequity provided openings for African Americans to realise new opportunities for education and social advancement. Implications of these historical patterns are discussed in the conclusion.

Olympia Brown came to Ohio's Antioch College in 1856 in search of a liberal education. At Mount Holyoke Female Seminary she had found too many rules and restrictions: "young ladies are not allowed to stand in the doorway"; "young ladies are not allowed to linger in the halls"; ...