Full Transcript

Guests Include:

• Jon Zimmerman, Professor of History and Education at New York University and author of Small Wonder: The Little Red Schoolhouse in History and Memory
• Alicia Lugo, who graduated from an all-black Virginia high school in 1959; taught in Charlottesville’s segregated school system; and went on to run that city’s school board

Web Exclusives

Little Red Schoolhouse Brian talks to education historian Jon Zimmerman about why we romanticize the Little Red Schoolhouse. Listen here.
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Further Reading

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