In this book Peterson interprets the history of American schools by placing major educational reformers in the context of their times and relates their thinking to our own era by scrutinizing the often unanticipated consequences of their commitments and ideas. These extraordinary individuals provided the critical ideas and articulated the ideals that motivated many others to search for ways to save the schools from the limitations in which they were embedded: Horace Mann, John Dewey, Martin Luther King, Al Shanker, William Bennett, and James S. Coleman. The drive to centralize was pervasive despite repeatedly expressed reform desire to customize education. Peterson argues that education has become an increasingly labor intensive industry that must reverse direction and become more capital intensive or it will descend in quality. Fortunately, technological change is making it possible radically alter the way in which education services are delivered, providing a new chance to save our schools.

“Part memoir, part investigative reporting . . . a richly layered and ultimately balanced account of the decades-long trend of sexual abuse at Horace Mann.” —Sarah Saffian, author of Ithaka In June 2012, Amos Kamil’s New York Times Magazine cover story, “Prep-School Predators,” caused a shock wave that is still rippling. In his piece, Kamil detailed a decades-long pattern of sexual abuse at the highly prestigious Horace Mann School in the Bronx. After the article appeared, Kamil closely observed the fallout. While the article revealed the misdeeds of three teachers, this was just the beginning: an extraordinary twenty-two former Horace Mann teachers and administrators have since been accused of abuse. In gripping detail, Kamil and his coauthor, Sean Elder, relate what happened as survivors of abuse came forward and sought redress. We see the school and its influential backers circle the wagons. We meet Horace Mann alumni who work to change New York State’s sexual abuse laws. We follow a celebrity lawyer’s contentious efforts to achieve a settlement. And we encounter a former teacher who candidly recalls his inappropriate relationships with students. Kamil and Elder also examine other institutions—from prep schools to the Catholic Church—that have sought to atone for their complicity in abuse and to prevent it from reoccurring. “Great is the truth and it prevails” may be the motto of Horace Mann, but for many alumni the truth remains all too hard to come by. This book is essential reading for anyone trying to understand how an elite institution can fail those in its charge, and what can be done about it.

In this full-scale critical biography of Horace Mann, Jonathan Messerli has provided the first comprehensive portrait of the humanitarian reformer who helped lay the basis for the American public school system. Looking behind the father-of-the-system legend, Jonathan Messerli shows us the man himself in the context of his era, with its tensions and fears for the future of society. Mann's legal and political careers involved him in virtually every reform movement of his time -- a period when the poor, the intemperate, the enslaved, the illiterate, the imprisoned, the insane were seen by reformers not merely as objects of pity and benevolence, but as distressing challenges to the growing optimism of "the American way of life." Mr. Messerli shows Horace Mann on a one-man crusade to modify human nature through moral indoctrination of the young and systematic training in literacy and citizenship. Writing voluminously, lecturing across the country, Mann worked tirelessly to establish a public-based system of education that he would, he hoped, usher in a millennium of enlightened ethics, patriotism, brotherhood, and affluence. -- From publisher's description.

Tharp collection.

A classic essay on the knowledge and characteristics a teacher should have, the skills needed for teaching, and the importance of developing the character as well as the mind.

In Black Scholar, Wayne J. Urban chronicles the distinguished life and career of the historian, teacher, and university administrator Horace Mann Bond. Urban illuminates not only the man and his accomplishments but also the many issues that confronted him and his colleagues in black education during the middle decades of the twentieth century. After covering the major events of Bond's youth, Urban follows him from his student years at Lincoln University and the University of Chicago through his work for the Julius Rosenwald Fund to his subsequent administrative leadership at several black institutions, including Fort Valley State College, Lincoln University, and Atlanta University. Among the many details Urban discusses are Bond's prodigious early output of scholarly books and articles, his enduring concern about the biases of intelligence testing, his work on preparing the NAACP's court brief for the Brown v. Board of Educationi case, and his career-long interest in what he felt were the affinities between modern-day Africans and African Americans--the one struggling to break free from colonialism, the other from segregation.