BackStory

The following links and documents relate to the BackStory episode “School Days: A History of Public Education”, originally broadcast in September of 2009. You can listen to the entire episode here.

All Centuries

• Op-Ed by Jon Zimmerman in the San Francisco Chronicle.
• PBS Documentary School: The Story of American Public Education.
• Preview of the Historical Dictionary of American Education

18th Century

• Thomas Jefferson’s “bill for the more general diffusion of knowledge.”
• Article on the successes of the early Common School Movement.
• The Wren Building, America’s “oldest academic structure still in use”

19th Century

• School registers and images from post-Civil War freedmen’s schools
• Information and documents about freedmen’s teachers
• 19th century schoolbooks including digital copies of McGuffy Readers.
• Essays on education by John Dewey and Horace Mann

20th Century & Beyond

• The Commission on Excellence in Education’s 1983 report A Nation at Risk
• Transcript of President Eisenhower’s November 13, 1957 address, “Our Future Security”
• Interviews with students at Native American boarding schools
• NPR story of the 1950s school segregation protests led by Barbara Johns in Prince Edward County, VA, plus pictures and documents about race and education in Prince Edward County.
• The latest American Education Statistics
• Project Discovery, a 1965 documentary about the educational film movement
• An overview of desegregation in Virginia schools