The purpose of this article is to provide a detailed analysis of the development of reflective practice in American education. The essay will primarily ground itself in various works by John Dewey and Donald A. Schön, as well as analyze the impact these authors had on the topic. The essay will rely heavily on Schön's "Educating the Reflective…

On the day before the Thanksgiving school recess in 1912, teacher L. Thomas Hopkins made an unusual admission to his small American history class at Brewster High School on Massachusetts' Cape Cod. He told his students that he knew they disliked the course. He confessed that he, too, disliked how the course was going. Following a short period of…

This article focuses on the historical roots of Ernest Boyer's most popular work, "Scholarship Reconsidered: Priorities of the Professoriate" (1990). Seeking to transcend the traditional view of scholarship as simply that which is published, Boyer expanded scholarship to include four domains: discovery, application, integration, and…

The March 24, 2008, edition of "National Review" (NR) was dedicated to the memory of its founder: William F. Buckley, Jr., who had passed away on February 27, 2008. It included thirty two different memorials about him written by prominent authors, editors, social commentators, fellow journalists, politicians, and historians. Then NR…

When one reads scholars from the past, many of the same problems found in schools in 2009 are quite similar to the problems educators were complaining about more than a century ago. One of the current controversial topics in schools today, for example, is student success, or lack thereof, in mathematics. Because of differences in mathematics…

Since the end of World War II and the beginning of the Cold War, public education has been high on the national agenda. The nation's need for human capital and the need to provide equality of educational opportunity to all children and youth without regard to their race, ethnicity, or social status are the two needs that then framed education…

The author profiles two nineteenth-century architects of children's minds and children's spaces. More than any other two Americans Henry Barnard and Catharine Beecher defined children's educational spaces--the home and the school--and successfully specified how those spaces were to be organized and furnished, who was to govern those spaces, what…

Marcus Fabius Quintilianus (A.D. 35-95) was a teacher of rhetoric in Rome during the first century of imperial Rome. His seminal work, "De Institutio Oratoria"--The Education of the Orator, was written during his retirement. Quintilian's experience as a teacher had an impact on his ideologies and "De Institutio Oratoria" combined his practitioner…

Many authors note that the history of teaching Latin would be a fruitful topic for a comprehensive treatise. Although intense debates about the quality and necessity of teaching Latin date back as early as in the eighteenth century, Latin courses have persisted into the present and, notably, with few changes in content. The author supports the…

The author discusses philanthropy and educational reform from the Great Depression to the present, contrasting the views of that time to "Making It Count" (Chester E. Finn, Jr. and Kelly Amis, 2001.) Although Finn and Amis presented their suggestions as advancing democracy, they thought that educational reform took place best when elite groups…

Current educational policies regarding equal educational opportunity are confused and often contradictory. There is no clear consensus as to what constitutes an equal opportunity. Most modern educators agree that the modern equal educational movement began in the 1950's with the Supreme Court decision in "Brown vs. the Board of…

Joseph Schwab (1909-1988) is known for his scathing critique of curriculum theory and its over reliance on quantitative models derived from social science theories. From the late 1950's through the middle 1960's, Schwab was instrumental to efforts to create a new and more educationally sound curriculum for weekday religious schools in synagogues…

Throughout the 20th Century, medicine and law set the professional standards by which all other professions came to be measured. Teaching fell short of the mark because teachers were not perceived as having much control over their professional lives. For example, the professions of medicine and law developed standards boards or associations to…