Varieties, Verities and Paradoxes in the History of Education

Ronald D. Cohen and Raymond A. Mohl. The Paradox of Progressive Education: The Gary Plan and Urban Schooling. Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat Press, 1979. 216 + viii pp. Barbara Finkelstein, ed. Regulated Children/ Liberated Children: Education in Psychohistorical Perspective. New York: Psychohistory Press, 1979. 225 pp. Vincent P. Franklin. The Education of Black Phila- delphia: The Social and Educational History of a Minority Community, 1900-1950. Philadelphia- University of Pennsylvania Press, 1979. 298 + xxi pp. In a variety of ways, the three books under review certify that paradox in human history is a truth to be explained, not an illusion to be explained away. Few libertarian philosophies are free of regulative elements; not many libera- tion movements are without their regulating agents. If progressivism in American education was a force for social redemption, as Lawrence A. Cremin suggests in The Transformation of the School one has to explain why the school board in Philadelphia was so reluctant to employ democratic values in the education of its black minority. If Raymond E. Callahan, the author of Education and the Cult of Efficiency, perceived Gary's William Wirt as an administrative progressive whose platoon system replicated the factory rather than the fulness of life, why was Wirt able to command the admiration and respect of a social reconstructionist like Alice Barrows for full twenty years?1

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• The transformation of the school

  Lawrence Arthur Cremin•The transformation of the school•1961

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• Education and the cult of efficiency

  Raymond E Callahan•Education and the cult of…•1962

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• Saints, Sinners, and People

  Geraldine Jonçich Clifford•History of Education Quarterly•1975

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