This work examines the Arthurdale School, which was created during the Great Depression and dedicated to the purpose of building community and preparing students for participation in democratic society.

This book chronicles the school envisioned by Eleanor Roosevelt in 1933 to serve Arthurdale, the New Deal government-created community in north-central West Virginia. Arthurdale was founded to house unemployed miners and their families and provide them with opportunities to receive healthcare and obtain gainful employment. Roosevelt had a particular interest in the education of children, feeling that education and social life were profoundly intertwined within a community. With that in mind, in 1934, she hired Elsie Ripley Clapp—an educator and leader in the Progressive Education movement—to design and implement the school, as well as oversee the social life of Arthurdale as a whole. In addition to covering the Arthurdale School's birth, life, and dissolution, Rosenberg discusses how the lessons of the school might serve the culture of education today, especially as an element of a comprehensive approach to community revitalization.

How New Deal economic policies played out in the small town of Arthurdale, West Virginia Today, the U.S. government is again moving to embrace New Deal-like economic policies. While much has been written about the New Deal from a macro perspective, little has been written about how New Deal programs played out on the ground. In Back to the Land, author CJ Maloney tells the true story of Arthurdale, West Virginia, a town created as a "pet project" of the Roosevelts. Designed to be (in the words of Eleanor Roosevelt) "a human experiment station", she was to create a "New American" citizen who would embrace a collectivist form of life. This book tells the story of what happened to the people resettled in Arthurdale and how the policies implemented there shaped America as we know it. Arthurdale was the foundation upon which modern America was built. Details economic history at the micro level, revealing the true effects of New Deal economic policies on everyday life Addresses the pros and cons of federal government economic policies Describes how good intentions and grand ideas can result in disastrous consequences, not only in purely materialistic terms but, most important, in respect for the rule of law Back to the Land is a valuable addition to economic and historical literature.

In August 1933, Eleanor Roosevelt visited the impoverished coal communities of north central West Virginia. Suffering from the effects of the Great Depression, these coal families looked to the First Lady for help out of the devastating economic times. Her visit spurred the creation of Arthurdale, the nations first New Deal Homestead Community. Arthurdale quickly became known as Eleanors Little Village because of the First Ladys involvement with the project. She visited the community often to dine, dance, and converse with the homesteaders and to attend high school graduations. In addition to the creation of new housing, Arthurdale featured a community business center, state-of-the-art school buildings, a craft industry, an industrial factory, and home-based agricultural production. Although not a financial triumph for the federal government, the social success of the community is immeasurable.

A provocative collection that explores how intentional ignorance seeps into formal education. Honorable Mention for the PROSE Education Theory Award of the Association of American Publishers Ignorance, or the study of ignorance, is having a moment. Ignorance plays a powerful role in shaping public opinion, channeling our politics, and even directing scholarly research. The first collection of essays to grapple with the historical interplay between education and ignorance, Miseducation finds ignorance—and its social production through naïveté, passivity, and active agency—at the center of many pivotal historical developments. Ignorance allowed Americans to maintain the institution of slavery, Nazis to promote ideas of race that fomented genocide in the 1930s, and tobacco companies to downplay the dangers of cigarettes. Today, ignorance enables some to deny the fossil record and others to ignore climate science. A. J. Angulo brings together seventeen experts from across the scholarly spectrum to explore how intentional ignorance seeps into formal education. Each chapter identifies education as a critical site for advancing our still-limited understanding of what exactly ignorance is, where it comes from, and how it is diffused, maintained, and regulated in society. Miseducation also challenges the notion that schools are, ideally, unimpeachable sites of knowledge production, access, and equity. By investigating how laws, myths, national aspirations, and global relations have recast and, at times, distorted the key purposes of education, this pathbreaking book sheds light on the role of ignorance in shaping ideas, public opinion, and policy.

During the New Deal, three governmental agencies planned, constructed, and managed about a hundred small communities of various types in all parts of the country, hopefully laying the foundation for a new world of tomorrow—a planned world of co-operation and economic security. Mr. Conkin traces the development and implementation of this complex concept through the minds of many men and the struggles of the different agencies in one of the first detailed histories of a specific New Deal program.

What is the mission of American public education? As a nation, are we still committed to educating students to be both workers and citizens, as we have long proclaimed, or have we lost sight of the second goal of encouraging students to be contributing members of a democratic society? In this enlightening book, John Puckett and Michael Johanek describe one of America's most notable experiments in "community education." In the process, they offer a richly contextualized history of twentieth-century efforts to educate students as community-minded citizens. Although student test scores now serve to measure schools' achievements, the authors argue compellingly that the democratic goals of citizen-centered community schools can be reconciled with the academic performance demands of contemporary school reform movements. Using the twenty-year history of community-centered schooling at Benjamin Franklin High School in East Harlem as a case study-and reminding us of the pioneering vision of its founder, Leonard Covello-they suggest new approaches for educating today's students to be better "public citizens."