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American schools of education get little respect. They are portrayed as intellectual wastelands, as impractical and irrelevant, as the root cause of bad teaching and inadequate learning. In this book a sociologist and historian of education examines the historical developments and contemporary factors that have resulted in the unenviable status of ed schools, offering valuable insights into the problems of these beleaguered institutions.David F. Labaree explains how the poor reputation of the ed school has had important repercussions, shaping the quality of its programs, its recruitment, and the public response to the knowledge it offers. He notes the special problems faced by ed schools as they prepare teachers and produce research and researchers. And he looks at the consequences of the ed school's attachment to educational progressivism. Throughout these discussions, Labaree maintains an ambivalent position about education schools-admiring their dedication and critiquing their mediocrity, their romantic rhetoric, and their compliant attitudes.

What do we really want from schools? Only everything, in all its contradictions. Most of all, we want access and opportunity for all children—but all possible advantages for our own. So argues historian David Labaree in this provocative look at the way \"this archetype of dysfunction works so well at what we want it to do even as it evades what we explicitly ask it to do.\" Ever since the common school movement of the nineteenth century, mass schooling has been seen as an essential solution to great social problems. Yet as wave after wave of reform movements have shown, schools are extremely difficult to change. Labaree shows how the very organization of the locally controlled, administratively limited school system makes reform difficult. At the same time, he argues, the choices of educational consumers have always overwhelmed top-down efforts at school reform. Individual families seek to use schools for their own purposes—to pursue social opportunity, if they need it, and to preserve social advantage, if they have it. In principle, we want the best for all children. In practice, we want the best for our own. Provocative, unflinching, wry, Someone Has to Fail looks at the way that unintended consequences of consumer choices have created an extraordinarily resilient educational system, perpetually expanding, perpetually unequal, constantly being reformed, and never changing much.

This book is a comparative history that explores the social, cultural, and political formation of the modern nation through the construction of public schooling. It asks how modern school systems arose in a variety of different republics and non-republics across four continents during the period from the late eighteenth century to the early twentieth century. The authors begin with the republican preoccupation with civic virtue – the need to overcome self-interest in order to take up the common interest – which requires a form of education that can produce individuals who are capable of self-guided rational action for the public good. They then ask how these educational preoccupations led to the emergence of modern school systems in a disparate array of national contexts, even those that were not republican. By examining historical changes in republicanism across time and space, the authors explore central epistemologies that connect the modern individual to community and citizenship through the medium of schooling. Ideas of the individual were reformulated in the nineteenth century in reaction to new ideas about justice, social order, and progress, and the organization and pedagogy of the school turned these changes into a way to transform the self into the citizen. Daniel Tröhler is Professor at the Faculty for Language and Literature, Humanities, Arts and Education at the University of Luxembourg. He is editor and annotator of the critical edition of the complete letters written to Pestalozzi, chief editor of the journal Zeitschrift für pädagogische Historiographie [ Journal of the Historiography of Education ]. His research interests include the analysis of educational and political languages, republicanism, pragmatism, and methodological problems of historiography. Thomas S. Popkewitz is Professor and former Chair in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction, The University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA. His studies in the US and comparatively are concerned with the systems of reason that govern educational reforms and research in teaching, teacher education and the sciences of education. David F. Labaree is a professor and associate dean for student affairs in the Stanford University School of Education (USA). His research focuses on the history of American education. He was president of the History of Education Society (USA) in 2004-2005 and vice president for Division F (history of education) of the American Educational Research Association (2003-06). His books include: The Making of an American High School (1988), How to Succeed in School Without Really Learning (1997), and The Trouble with Ed Schools (2003). Entry