American Education, the Metropolitan Experience, 1876-1980

With this final volume in the trilogy that includes The Colonial Experience 1670-1783 and American Education: The National Experience, 1783-1876, Cremin, a professor at Teachers College, Columbia University, puts in place a comprehensive, scholarly architecture of the history of American education. The present volume traces into this decade the multiphasic transformation of educative institutions in the United Statessettlement houses, libraries, museums, as well as schools and collegesand spotlights such seminal agents of change as Margaret Mead and John Dewey in an overview that visualizes the configurations of education in the 20th century. The urbanization of the United States, the social and industrial complexities of the technological age made far-reaching demands on education. The author cites the variety of institutionalized responses to new needs but maintains ""there was the ubiquitous and incessant education implicit in the very nature of metropolitan life,'' which has effects reaching far beyond our continental confines. Cremin's historiographical mode makes important educational history accessible to a wide audience. (March)