这是一部开拓性地将历史分析的视角深入教育观变迁的专著。通过肖像画、育儿习俗等微观史料，分析17—19世纪的英国社会，解读儿童观与育儿意识变迁。儿童观的社会史研究旨在把握新历史学方法论，在历史考察的过程中厘清社会中的儿童发展与教育问题。全书从构成儿童世界的社会性经验事实出发，探究共同体、家庭、儿童等相关教育要素的历史变迁，力图构建一部儿童、家庭及其观念的历史长卷。

How ed tech was born: Twentieth-century teaching machines--from Sidney Pressey's mechanized test-giver to B. F. Skinner's behaviorist bell-ringing box. Contrary to popular belief, ed tech did not begin with videos on the internet. The idea of technology that would allow students to go at their own pace did not originate in Silicon Valley. In Teaching Machines, education writer Audrey Watters offers a lively history of predigital educational technology, from Sidney Pressey's mechanized positive-reinforcement provider to B. F. Skinner's behaviorist bell-ringing box. Watters shows that these machines and the pedagogy that accompanied them sprang from ideas--bite-sized content, individualized instruction--that had legs and were later picked up by textbook publishers and early advocates for computerized learning. Watters pays particular attention to the role of the media--newspapers, magazines, television, and film--in shaping people's perceptions of teaching machines as well as the psychological theories underpinning them. She considers these machines in the context of education reform, the political reverberations of Sputnik, and the rise of the testing and textbook industries. She chronicles Skinner's attempts to bring his teaching machines to market, culminating in the famous behaviorist's efforts to launch Didak 101, the pre-verbal machine that taught spelling. (Alternate names proposed by Skinner include Autodidak, Instructomat, and Autostructor.) Telling these somewhat cautionary tales, Watters challenges what she calls the teleology of ed tech--the idea that not only is computerized education inevitable, but technological progress is the sole driver of events.

At the genesis of the Republic of China in 1912, many political leaders, educators, and social reformers argued that republican education should transform China's people into dynamic modern citizens--social and political agents whose public actions would rescue the national community. Over subsequent decades, however, they came to argue fiercely over the contents of citizenship and how it should be taught. Moreover, many of their carefully crafted policies and programs came to be transformed by textbook authors, teachers, administrators, and students. Furthermore, the idea of citizenship, once introduced, raised many troubling questions. Who belonged to the national community in China, and how was the nation constituted? What were the best modes of political action? How should modern people take responsibility for "public matters"? What morality was proper for the modern public? This book reconstructs civic education and citizenship training in secondary schools in the lower Yangzi region during the Republican era. It also analyzes how students used the tools of civic education introduced in their schools to make themselves into young citizens and explores the complex social and political effects of educated youths' civic action.

A book that explores the problematic connection between education policy and practice while pointing in the direction of a more fruitful relationship, Inside the Black Box of Classroom Practice is a provocative culminating statement from one of America's most insightful education scholars and leaders. Inside the Black Box of Classroom Practice takes as its starting point a strikingly blunt question: "With so many major structural changes in U.S. public schools over the past century, why have classroom practices been largely stable, with a modest blending of new and old teaching practices, leaving contemporary classroom lessons familiar to earlier generations of school-goers?" It is a question that ought to be of paramount interest to all who are interested in school reform in the United States. It is also a question that comes naturally to Larry Cuban, whose much-admired books have focused on various aspects of school reform--their promises, wrong turns, partial successes, and troubling failures. In this book, he returns to this territory, but trains his focus on the still baffling fact that policy reforms--no matter how ambitious or determined--have generally had little effect on classroom conduct and practice. Cuban explores this problem from a variety of angles. Several chapters look at how teachers, in responding to major policy initiatives, persistently adopt changes and alter particular routine practices while leaving dominant ways of teaching largely undisturbed. Other chapters contrast recent changes in clinical medical practice with those in classroom teaching, comparing the practical effects of varying medical and education policies. The book's concluding chapter distills important insights from these various explorations, taking us inside the "black box" of the book's title: those workings that have repeatedly transformed dramatic policy initiatives into familiar--and largely unchanged--classroom practices. [Amazon]

Getting ahead and getting an education are inseparable in the minds of most Americans. David Labaree argues, however, that the connection between schooling and social mobility may be doing more harm than good, for the pursuit of educational credentials has come to take precedence over the acquisition of knowledge. Labaree examines the competing intellectual and ideological traditions that have fought for dominance in our public schools from the nineteenth century to the present. He claims that by thinking of education primarily as the route to individual advancement, we are defining it as a private good -- a means of gaining a competitive advantage over other people. He endorses an alternative vision, one that sees education as a public good, providing society with benefits that can be collectively shared -- for example, by producing citizens who are politically responsible and workers who are economically productive. He points out that when education is seen primarily as a private consumer good, a number of consequences follow. Formal characteristics of schooling -- grades, credits, and degrees -- come to assume greater weight than substantive characteristics, such as actually learning something. Grading becomes more important for its social consequences than for its pedagogical uses. For these and other reasons, the pursuit of certification and degrees takes precedence over the goals of learning, and the private benefits of schooling take precedence over its democratic and civic functions. "A wonderful book that draws on the history and sociology of education to show why schools have been increasingly oriented around the awarding of credentials rather than the pursuit oflearning". -- William Reese, author of The Origins of the American High School

During the educational and social transformations in politically tumultuous early twentieth-century China, Chinese teacher's schools played a critical role. They were a force in the changes that swept Chinese society, bridging Chinese and Western ideals, empowering women, and contributing to rural modernization. This innovative account examines the social and political aspects and impacts of these schools, their role in a society in transistion, and their production of grassroots forces that lead to the Communist Revolution.