Kyle Greenwalt’s new book, Home/Schooling: Creating Schools that Work for Kids, Parents and Teachers, examines how, during the nineteenth century, American social reformers took hold of an already existing institution—the school—and sought to make it compulsory. In the process, they supplanted parents and domestic life—the home—as the primary educational force for children.

In this book, Greenwalt argues that as education was taken out of the home, American classrooms were at the same time remade into a particular kind of home life—one based upon a sentimentalized maternity, where love can always triumph over the “public” and “masculine” forces of competition, merit, and hierarchy. In this model, a good teacher loves her students. She makes her classroom into a home. Like a good mother, she sacrifices for them, enduring long hours of isolation, low pay, and little public support or recognition. Students, in their turn, should love their teacher. To please her, they should learn the values that would sustain a more virtuous republic. Parenting, through all of this, was redefined as a private activity. Battle lines were drawn and the stakes were love, learning and control. Greenwalt argues that it doesn’t need to be this way. That it is time to rethink the ways in which parents and teachers interact with one another. That it is time to redefine “homeschooling” as something all families engage in and that all public schools should seek to support.

For more information: Home/Schooling

Cliff Harbour’s John Dewey and the Future of Community College Education, explains how faculty and staff at American community colleges can develop a new normative vision for their institution based on the work of John Dewey. More than other postsecondary institutions, community colleges are under increasing pressure to vocationalize their curricula and substantially increase graduation rates. Often the consequence of these “reforms” is to deny community college students the opportunity to learn from their experience and prepare for a full life in democratic communities. Harbour’s text provides concise parallel histories of the community college and John Dewey and shows how the philosopher is much more relevant to public two-year institutions than previously acknowledged.

For more information: John Dewey and the Future of Community College Education