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Storm Over the Schoolhouse: Exploring Popular Influences Upon the American Curriculum, 1890-1941 by Jonathan Zimmerman — 1999Recent histories of the American curriculum have shown how citizen groups influenced
local course offerings and state requirements during the early twentieth century. Using
case studies of three subject areas—history, military training, and foreign languages?
this article demonstrates that lay activists also affected the content and even the enroll-ment
of these courses. The article illustrates the enormous range of citizens who entered
curricular disputes, the diversity of strategies they employed, and the disparate results of
their efforts. It also suggests a new explanation for the decline of the traditional ? R’s?
and the rise of a more “practical,?differentiated curriculum between the turn of the cen-tury
and World War Two. Hardly the pawns of school officials, laypeople had their own
“practical?reasons for embracing this trend: it opened the door to whatever new agen-das
they hoped to inject. Across the ideological spectrum, then, citizen groups joined
hands to condemn old-fashioned, academic curricula. Not until the late 1940s would
conservative activists rally around the 3 R’s, sparking a new school war that still rages
today.To view the full-text for this article you must be signed-in with the appropropriate membership. Please review your options below:
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- Jonathan Zimmerman
New York University
E-mail Author
JONATHAN ZIMMERMAN is assistant professor of educational history, New York University. He is the author of Distilling Democracy: Alcohol Education in America’s Public Schools, 1880-1925. (University Press of Kansas, 1999).
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