He, M September 11, 2012 Volume 15 Number 3 ISSN 1094-5296 Education Review/Reseñas Educativas is a project of the National Education Policy Center http://nepc.colorado.edu Follow Education Review on Facebook Harold Rugg, the Engineer, and the Social Studies O. L. Davis, Jr. The University of Texas at Austin Evans, Ronald W. (2007) This Happened in America: Harold Rugg and the Censure of the Social Studies . Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing, Inc. Pp. 306 ISBN 978-1593117658 Citation: Davis, O. L., Jr. (2012 September 11) Harold Rugg, the Engineer, and the Social Studies. An Essay Review of This Happened in America; Harold Rugg and the Censure of the Social Studies . Education Review, 13(12). Retrieved [Date] from http://www.edrev.info/essays/v15n3.pdf This review was accepted under the previous Editor for English, Gene V Glass. Social studies teachers, really no different in this regard from teachers of other school subjects, appear not to know the history of teaching in their specialty. Consequently, because they have inadequate knowledge of previous, but derailed bandwagons, they are prey to lures of all manner of advocated reforms or, defensively, they prematurely reject novel, even exciting notions about elements of the school curriculum that they teach. Fairness, however, admits that most teachers’ colleagues and administrators neither expect nor encourage them to think historically about what and how they teach. Moreover, most teachers in these days are de- skilled to the extent that they have little time and insufficient interest to study and analyze possible changes in their personal work that education review // reseñas educativas editors: david j. blacker / gustavo e. fischman / melissa cast-brede a multi-lingual journal of book reviews http://www.facebook.com/pages/Education-Review/178358222192644 Education Review http://www.edrev.info 2 differ from their efforts to prepare their students to take (and to pass) state tests. American social studies teachers reasonably may have missed the sea change in recent historical scholarship about their field. Fresh inquiries about the teaching of social studies include attention to different organizations of curriculums in all social studies offerings, analyses of shortcomings as well as solid advances, ways of teaching strikingly different from conventional procedures and biographies of leaders in the field. Availability of this new knowledge contributes to teachers’ personal insights and power. It can spark serious attention to their analyses of and decisions about their own teaching of their own students in their own classrooms in a particular time and place and not in hypothetical schools with hypothetical students and resources and under hypothetical political and management situations (Schwab, 1969). Illustrative of much of the changed landscape of the history of the social studies is Ronald Evans’ This Happened in America: Harold Rugg and the Censure of the Social Studies (2007). Evans’ book was published to thoughtful approval (Brooks, 2008). It deserved this recognition; it merits more. The book brings brilliant attention to the vicious, hateful, unrelenting, and successful campaign to censure a series of popularly used social studies textbooks in America’s new junior high schools of the 1920s and 1930s. It also does much more. It highlights Harold O. Rugg, the books’ author and his commitment to a new type of school social studies in the post- World War I years. The story of Rugg, his vision of a solid social studies offering, and his books underlie the over-all account of the brutally hostile censure efforts. This public opposition to Rugg’s books likely was the most brittle and rancorous of any such controversies in the history of American schooling. Not even close to the virulent attacks (including Nazi-like burning) of Rugg’s books were the 1960s’ and 70s’ belligerent, nasty, and outraged opposition to Man: A Course of Study, for example, and the sustained and scathing criticism of the popular 1930s’ and 1940s’ series of reading textbooks that featured Dick and Jane. Harold Rugg’s vision of a renewed and invigorated social studies as well as the controversy surrounding his textbooks elevated him and his victimization to iconic status in the general field of education. Icon or not, awareness of Rugg and his concerns largely have disappeared from the contemporary social studies scene. Now, due Education Review http://www.edrev.info 3 in large measure to author Evans’ very interesting, well-researched, and stimulating book, Rugg and his work can be recovered and fruitfully known. Especially important, this very good book adds materially to the emerging history of the social studies field. Moreover, I believe that every professional social studies educator should read and mindfully engage this book’s portrayals and interpretations. This book surely merits accessibility in every college and university library and inclusion on every substantial bibliography that relates to the history of the social studies or of curriculum in American schools. So characterized, university scholars and graduate students likely will find it particularly useful to the expansion of their personal understandings of social studies programs of past and contemporary times as well as to analyze proposals for contemporary and future social studies programs. Especially and perhaps more importantly, they as well as a number of teachers and supervisors should become acquainted with Harold Rugg and his associates who sought practical implementation of his vision of an integrated social studies during an era too casually labeled progressive. Candidly, I hope that this book sells well enough that its publisher will seek a “second and improved” edition. Under this condition, I encourage author Evans to attend to some, but not so many, important matters in his current account that merit closer scrutiny and more serious analytic attention. One dimension of this need has to do with Evans’ personal vision about what he believes the social studies should be and mainly is not. His rendering of the story of Rugg the person appears to me to be near-hagiographic, but I believe that Evans can remedy this flaw. I want to illuminate, at this point, several matters of substantive significance that I believe that this new book has ill-attended. My remarks here do not intend to hedge my belief in the general value of Evans’ analyses. Nevertheless, my concerns are serious. I still do not understand as well as I want to know how Harold Rugg made the transition from a minimally qualified engineer cum unseasoned educational psychologist and statistician to national prominence as an authority in social studies education in American schools. Evans, to be sure, addresses this situation albeit obliquely, but his attention, at least to me, is altogether too thin and unconvincing. Alternative views merit consideration. Admittedly, Rugg’s movement from educational scientist to a school social studies curriculum maker occurred in the mid-1920s, a period long removed from the present times. At least three developments appear to have enabled Rugg’s transit between professional roles. Some years before the dawn of the twentieth century, American schooling had become captive of (dependent upon or impressively influenced by) the claims of psychology. By 1920 when Rugg joined the faculty of Teachers College, Columbia University, he had donned the cloak of psychologist and educational scientist. Having taken no courses in history and in other social disciplines (e.g., economics, geography) except Education Review http://www.edrev.info 4 for sociology, Rugg certainly was inadequately qualified by his academic background to be a social studies educator. Years later, his burgeoning associations with individuals whom he understood to be “frontier thinkers” appeared to increase his interest and commitment to a new social studies in schools, but these relationships offered him little if any academic respectability within the social disciplines. His doctoral dissertation about mental discipline, to be sure, was set within the teaching of the social studies. Prior to that research, he had coauthored with William Chandler Bagley, his doctoral advisor, a study about American history content in grades seven and eight. Rugg may have been prototypic of the “new academic” in school improvement, but his credibility in the social studies essentially appears to have been asserted rather than substantiated. In another development, American school superintendents, already holding pride of hierarchical place in schools and communities, embraced the concept of professionalization. If anything, this concept asserted an advanced degree (commonly an M.A., only later a Ph.D. degree) as an appropriate standard of admission to or continuance in the superintendency. It also insisted on the existence of a science of education based on psychological and business management research and that “professional school men” could and should utilize the power of this science as the justification of the grand panoply of educational practices (e.g., Callahan, 1962; Lagemann, 2000; Tyack, 1974). Many of these professional school men, consequently, could accept Rugg’s scientism and, as well, his asserted claims about his vision of the social studies. Rugg, assuredly, was not a “school man.” He never taught any subject to pupils in the schools of the nation. Further, as noted earlier, he held no substantial scholarship in history or other social disciplines. At Teachers College, he professed apart and at a distance from the college’s own professors in history and social science departments. He possessed, however, a major compensating virtue. For the times, he held a rare Ph.D. degree. He was an educational “scientist” and a minimally qualified educational psychologist who also had authored a book on the use of statistics in education. Crucially importantly, he taught courses to the individuals (to be sure, almost all men) who would become accredited education professionals (current and future school superintendents) and acknowledged leaders in the nation’s schooling enterprise. Professional school administrators apparently accepted Rugg’s compensating attributes to warrant his easy movement from one to another educational emphasis. The separateness of and special university preparation to practice or profess in sub-specialty “fields” of education (e.g., reading, social studies, the elementary school principalship, the curriculum), pioneered by Charles H. Judd at the new University of Chicago, quickly spread to Teachers College, Columbia University, at which it flourished and became popular in colleges and universities across the nation. In a profound sense, Rugg appears to have asserted himself into the social studies Education Review http://www.edrev.info 5 because he correctly perceived a major academic and financial opportunity. His reading of works by a number of public intellectuals whom he called “frontier thinkers” could not substitute for his lack of substantive background in the social disciplines, a situation that neither served him nor the emerging social studies field well. That he claimed a new vision of appropriate social studies for American children and youth as well as a competence to produce curriculum materials consistent with his vision provided him a passport into the social studies field. Importantly, Rugg’s transition was simplified if not made possible by his decision to focus his attention to social studies in elementary schools. Exceedingly important, his curriculum construction efforts never directly challenged the hegemony of separate history and geography offerings in the nation’s high schools. Rugg’s general writing about the need to reconstruct school social studies was vague and non-confrontational enough to escape most overt opposition from high school advocates of and specialists in history and other social disciplines. In the crucible of a real elementary school, however, his (and his team’s) efforts failed to construct a satisfactory new social studies program. Fortuitously, Rugg realized that the junior high school movement was enjoying a rapid expansion and, in particular, that these new schools lacked curriculums specific to their claimed purposes and student age levels. He quickly abandoned his intentions to work on social studies programs for young children and converted his ideas, frameworks, and energy to the construction of a new social studies program for junior high schools. Rugg was not the only TC professor to perceive the needs and opportunities for newly developed curricula in the new junior high schools. For example, TC professors wrote among the first needed textbooks for use in junior high school courses in mathematics, general science, and other subjects. For the most part, the newly developed curricula took the form of textbooks asserted by the authors to be appropriate to junior high school pupils. Harold Rugg recognized this need in the social studies and immediately set to work on the practical invention of a new social studies program for use by students at the junior high school level. He lacked plans, specifications, even outlines for the chapters and books that he wanted to include in the new series. So, he began to draft plans using blank sheets of paper and a pen. In order that these new texts would be based on “educational science,” he encouraged a small group of his doctoral advisees to direct their dissertation studies to some special and very important practical questions related to the books. Illustrative are the studies by Matthews (1926), Hockett (1927), and Shaffer (1930). As these and other studies were completed, the research team consciously attended to the relationship of the results to the books’ text and illustrations. These associates followed Rugg’s notes and emerging outlines and drafts – some written under immense pressure in the shop at which they were printed – to help produce initial versions (as pamphlets) of Rugg’s desired textbooks. Education Review http://www.edrev.info 6 The “research team,” with Rugg leading the work, spent more than a few entire nights in the print shop in which written text was converted into hot type, proofs read and corrected, and text was written and typeset. Then, single proof sheets were pulled from forms filled with type for each page of the pamphlet, yet again were proof-read and, if the NYC team had been tedious enough or lucky, it could see the very first version of the new pamphlet before the dawn of the next day. Rugg’s promise of delivery of the new materials to superintendents who had ordered them simply had to be fulfilled. Production demands meant that he and his associates seemed always to be racing the calendar. But his team seemed always seemed to be “on time.” Pamphlet after pamphlet and, later, book after book, came to light reasonably on schedule. Rugg’s efforts to construct his new social studies relied mainly on a team of experienced teachers, some of whom were his doctoral advisees, to help him produce the new text- type materials. In less than one year, this team wrote portions, collected and assembled and edited information in various forms and, all the time, under a severe time schedule. Some large numbers of school superintendents, some of them Rugg’s TC summer students, ordered the preliminary materials for their schools on the basis of Rugg’s pledge to develop them on time for use during the next school year. For the most part, Rugg’s team fulfilled his pledge and the new pamphlets immediately found entry into hundreds of junior high schools throughout the nation. Rugg’s vision of a new program was saved. The reality was simple. In the absence of competing programs for use in the new junior high school social studies offerings, Rugg’s materials were the only ones available. Subsequent revisions of the early pamphlets into proper textbooks increased their attractiveness for use in schools. Also, they were issued by a well-known publishing company that utilized a national sales force to promote sales. Very importantly, sales soared. The books’ continued wide-spread adoption and Rugg’s becoming a wealthy man became only matters of a short time. Most social studies professionals and no few historians of this field consider Professor Rugg’s rationale and new textbooks for his new social studies to constitute a fruitful as well as a prominent landmark in the field’s development. I sense, on the other hand, that his series both merited and did not deserve this too generous praise. To be sure, Rugg succeeded in the development of a new rationale and curriculum materials (e.g., textbooks, guides) consistent with that rationale. His work demonstrated that stand-alone social studies courses, ones separated from other school courses that were bound to separate intellectual social disciplines (e.g., history), could be developed and find acceptance in schools, at least for a short time. These newly created courses were based on sequences of studies of social problems and issues and not “burdened” by emphases on national presidents and their achievements nor about sequences of diplomatic and military events . . . all distant from and mainly irrelevant to the real worlds of the intended pupils. Education Review http://www.edrev.info 7 Rugg’s rationale, however appealing to school administrators and teachers interested, even committed, to his favored broad concepts (e.g., peace, governmental provision of social services to all citizens), seems to be flawed hopelessly and inadequately for study by young and older students in schools. Having studied such problems (e.g., read about them, identified and discussed their features, constructed charts and graphs, made presentations about findings), his materials called for junior high adolescents to reach reasonable conclusions, even “solutions” to major societal problems. Even if these students unlikely might “solve” those problems, ones that had frustrated attempts by adults “to solve” them, students also were in no position to make decisions to act on their decisions, that is, really to do any but some trivial thing (e.g., write a letter to their city alderman or the president of a steel mill) about “their solutions.” This type of instructional enterprise could have concluded only with students “all dressed up but no place to go.” Of course, such study of problems can interest and can motivate pupils to learn more about those issues and concerns, as well as they can learn specific, related knowledge that they can find principally but not exclusively in the social disciplines. Rugg’s curriculum organization, on the other hand, held little promise that pupils would even attend to specific knowledge and means of inquiry rather than to express superficial opinions about the social problems chosen (by Rugg and his staff) for their study. Indeed, dependent largely upon their age and their personal involvement with the selected social issue, pupils could find the study every bit as irrelevant or foreign as might be their study of most conventional topics set in remote times and places. Moreover, Rugg’s rationale appears to be utterly inconsistent with the analogy of productive study and resolution of problems in the real world by competent, educated, and experienced adults. I claim here that a school curriculum should not presume that pupils should “solve” real social problems in a society. Almost all such problems in the real world seem never to be solved . . . even by well- meaning, competent adults. Only sometimes are such problems possibly resolved or accommodated and, then, for only reasonably short periods of time. The fractious and deeply frustrating efforts of Congress and President Obama to raise the federal debt ceiling in July-August 2011 serves as a vivid recent example of such a real problem that was only perhaps “resolved” for a few months rather than “solved” by the decision reached and actions taken. Students in school could (and likely would profit) from an intense study of this contemporary problem. However, their engagement in such a study with the hopes that they actually would “solve” the problem can be seen only as a frivolous undertaking and a mockery of decision-making. Without the power to act on their recommendation, moreover, every group in such a situation can be credited only with participation in a game of trivial pursuits. Moreover, social problems in the real world seem to be productively studied mainly by competent individuals (i.e., specialists in some relevant academic discipline or practical endeavors) who are expected to use their prior Education Review http://www.edrev.info 8 and specialized knowledge as they engage some worthy or important social problem. That is, engagement in the authentic study of major social problems calls for competent individuals to bring their already acquired knowledge to the problem study rather than discovering that they have no specialized knowledge relevant to the study. For students who lack substantial prior knowledge relatable to a real social problem (e.g., housing, world- wide competition for new computer chips, the relation of polls to election results) can only be frustrating to the students concerned as well as to the study process itself. To depart from the study in order to acquire or locate additional knowledge, to be sure, is appropriate inasmuch as few or no individuals actually possess enough knowledge sufficient for the serious study of most important social problems and deliberation to act about that problem. On the other hand, given the inadequate knowledge held and/or gained by young students in their study, the level of their intellectual analysis probably should be assumed to be low. Even so studied, without a decision to act on the study’s deliberations (again, not to solve the problem), students may well recognize that the study itself is phony and unworthy of their time and efforts. In addition, Rugg seemed not to understand logical differences and pedagogical distinctions between “facts” and “generalizations.” His emphasis on generalizations, for example, was simplistic and near-vacant because the abundant facts supportive of (or generative to) the generalization were overlooked, down-played, or unavailable in his books. Even Rugg’s proper concern for the development of students’ abilities to use specific graphic illustrations (e.g., timelines) seemed not to differentiate carefully enough between substantive knowledge and procedural knowledge or, as Gilbert Ryle and other analytic philosophers distinguished the three powerful epistemologies, “know that”, “know how”, and “know to” (Ryle, 1949; Smith and Ennis, 1961). My analysis, however incomplete and absent additional examples, nevertheless highlights several disturbing aspects of Rugg’s advocacy of the study of social problems as the core of his new junior high school curriculum. Some scholars pointed out dimensions of this inadequacy at the time, but Rugg shrugged off such pesky comments. Also, evidence of any use of these books in schools that served predominantly black or migrant or poor students appears conspicuously absent. How can this type of omission be explained? Indeed, are any (even a few) accounts extant that describe the teaching of Rugg’s social problems and/or use of his textbooks in real classrooms with real teachers and students? Or, are descriptions of the use of these books, to the extent that they exist, limited to students who were intellectually bright and from upper middle class backgrounds? Troubling, as well, is the lack of evidence that most junior high school social studies teachers who used textbooks in his series may not have used them in any way except as a “class reading textbook” and not as Rugg intended their use. A too simplistic interpretation, as well, is that teachers of the 1920s and 1930s were subject specialists who also were not convinced of the efficacy of teaching young adolescents to study or to solve the nation’s and world’s Education Review http://www.edrev.info 9 social problems. Maybe so, but probably not. Teachers’ subject specialization is powerfully important, but it is a wobbly and insufficient notion. Teachers and students who used the books, however, surely were not the political critics who stirred their concerns about Rugg’s books into a national, raging controversy. In my view, Rugg should have expected the savage opposition that his books attracted, but he did not. He also did not anticipate the intensity or the power of the public critics. He was surprised that “patriotic groups” (e.g., American Legion posts) would gather copies of these books and burn them as had the contemporaneous German Nazis who sought to remove “objectionable” books from schools and universities. Maybe he anticipated that the stature of the “frontier thinkers” whose insights were fundamental to the nature and character of the textbooks would calm what little criticism that most dissidents might invent. He perhaps believed that the quality of the textbooks was so very substantial that it would deflect criticisms. If he did, he reasoned recklessly and near- arrogantly. And twenty years after this miserable anti-democratic episode of censorship, Rugg continued to be mystified by his Teachers College colleagues who failed to support him during the outrageous personal attacks on him and his work. Whatever reactions that he anticipated from public pressure groups he failed to get; rather, he reaped whirlwinds. Additionally, the blazing controversy over Rugg’s books was not so much directed at the social studies as a field of study as it targeted the perceived unacceptability of his books. The “social studies” term, if “censured” as Evans’ claims, actually appears to have been affected only very little or none at all. This broad-fields term remains ensconced in the language of educational discourse as the name of a bundle of school offerings drawn from the intellectual social disciplines in both secondary and elementary schools. Indeed, “social studies” as a name and organizational structure in elementary schools flourished during and long after the demise of the controversy about the Rugg junior high school books. As well, history and geography maintained their high status as elementary school offerings. And solid evidence simply is unavailable to support the thesis that “social studies offerings” were substituted for history courses in American high schools. Put differently, history courses were never seriously at risk of eviction from the high school curriculum, no matter the recent extravagant claims of Diane Ravitch and others (Davis, 1993). To be sure, the advocacy of a professionally popular social studies course named “Problems of Democracy” never gained significant purchase in the school curriculum even if some small number among thousands of American high schools reported the offering of such courses for a number of years. Asserted simply, the Rugg controversy never became a “censure of the social studies.” Rugg’s censors crippled his textbook series, but it had little if any effect on the social studies as one of the broad fields (e.g., language arts, music) and as a “label” in the school curriculum. I encourage Evans and others to consider my objection as a fair appraisal of the real situation. Education Review http://www.edrev.info 10 Rugg’s development of his social science books constituted his one developmental foray into school social studies. Why did he abruptly leave the field? Harsh, rough, strident, undignified criticism? A reduction and subsequent cessation of royalty income? We don’t know. Other social studies textbook writers, e.g., Peabody College’s historian Fremont Wirth, suffered abuses, but they revised their books in ways that their intellectual respectability was not obliterated and they enjoyed steady, even rising incomes. Did Rugg recognize that he was a Lonesome Stranger in the land of scholarship populated by intellectual giants in history and other fields of social inquiry? Did he even sense the inadequacy of his advocacy that junior high school students without their solid grounding even in school history and other social fields should be set real-world problems that knowledgeable adults had never solved or resolved? To what extent did the economic depression of the 1930s contribute to the brutal attacks on him and his books? To what extent and why did individuals wrapped in the gauze of American patriotism find the Rugg books such an easy target? Were publishers of this series of books unaware of the rise of belligerent opposition to the books that they failed to undertake due diligence with their investment? In general, American school textbooks never have enjoyed exemption from criticism of many varieties since the foundation of the Republic. As good as is Evans’ treatment of the bitter controversy, I encourage him to return to his boxes of evidence and to deal with a number of practical issues that probably underlay the overt campaign to rid the schools of Rugg’s books. My short list of questions begs for expansion and serious additional inquiry. Other readers of Evans’ book will generate additional questions, other concerns. These wonderments do not seem trivial to me. They lie at the heart of the social studies field. Furthermore, raising such matters complement the quality of Evans’ book. They also encourage a deeper and more nuanced understanding of Rugg, his vision, his books, and his times. Evans’ penetration of the convoluted viciousness of the attacks on Rugg’s book clearly is his book’s major achievement. These attacks were not criticisms. Attacks are intended to destroy, even obliterate some specific enemy. Criticism, even quite hostile criticism, offers the possibility of intellectual discourse between affected parties. Evans, almost 70 years after the Rugg books went out of print, brings together an intelligent and fair depiction of the bitter hostility of individuals and organizations (especially by the American Legion and the national Chamber of Commerce) toward these school books. Evans, to be sure, is a Rugg loyalist throughout, but his bias does not enfeeble his portrayal nor does it cancel his interpretations. I read this part of the book quite as if I were reading a stirring le Carre tale or a detailed analysis of the WWII US Navy cryptographers’ exploitation of the Japanese Navy code at the Battle of Midway. I’m sure that I exaggerate here, but I know that I wanted to know more about the story even Education Review http://www.edrev.info 11 before I turned the pages. More often than not, my interest was rewarded. Additionally, Evans’ very careful and tedious search for evidence is admirable. He found enough information in easily accessible books and journals to offer a solid overview of Rugg’s textbook series and major criticisms of it. He also uncovered rare documents in strange places as well as the usual categories of evidence in a variety of archives and collections. He pieced together facts, some minor and others almost larger than life and, then, wove strands of accounts into an impressively credible story about Rugg and the attacks on him and his books. His is an easily read history about the creation of both Rugg’s new although contested vision for the social studies and about the junior high school textbooks that he authored that were consistent with that vision. Congratulations to Ronald Evans! He has explored trails barely noticed by others, but followed in substantial detail only by him. I hope that he will continue to attend to Professor Rugg and his work and that other researchers will follow his lead. All of us social studies teachers, in schools and universities as well as throughout our curricular field, are beneficiaries of Evans’ endeavors. We know more than we did before we read this book and that realization is good. References Brooks, S. (2008). Biography as a means of exploring enduring issues of social studies education. Theory & Research in Social Education, 36(3), 278-281. Callahan, Raymond E. (1962). Education and the cult of efficiency: A study of the social forces that have shaped the administration of public schools. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Davis, O. L., Jr. (1993). Theoretic storms over practical reality; the non-productive dispute between school history and the social studies, The International Journal of Social Studies, 8 (Spring), 23-30. Hockett, J. A. (1927). The determination of major social problems of American life. New York: Bureau of Publications, Teachers College, Columbia University. Lagemann, Ellen Condliffe. (2000). An elusive science: The troubling history of education research. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Matthews, C. O. (1926). The grade placement of curriculum materials in the social studies. New York: Bureau of Publications, Teachers College, Columbia University. Ryle, Gilbert (1949). The concept of mind. London: Hutchinson. Schwab, Joseph J. (1969). The practical: A language for curriculum. School Review 78: 1-23. Shaffer, L. F. (1930). Children’s interpretations of cartoons. New York: Bureau of Publications, Teachers College, Columbia University. Smith, B. Othanel, and Ennis, Robert H. Eds. (1961), Language and concepts in education. Chicago: Rand McNally. Education Review http://www.edrev.info 12 Tyack, David. (1974). The one best system: a history of urban education. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. About the Reviewer O. L. Davis, Jr., is Catherine Mae Parker Centennial Professor of Curriculum and Instruction, Emeritus, The University of Texas at Austin. He holds a Ph.D. (1958) from George Peabody College for Teachers. Throughout his professional career, Davis has focused his attention on curriculum development, practice, theory, and history, and on social studies education. In addition to his teaching, he has consulted with school systems, state departments of education, and other agencies in a number of states. An author or co-author/editor of more than 30 books and almost 200 reports of research or essays, he also has supervised more than 160 Ph.D. dissertation students. He served as Associate Editor, American Educational Research Journal for one term and as Editor, Journal of Curriculum and Supervision, for twelve years. He has been President of the 170,000 member Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development; Society for the Study of Curriculum History; Kappa Delta Pi, international honor society in education; the American Association for Teaching and Curriculum, and the Organization of Educational Historians. Among Davis’s honors are his election to the Laureate Chapter of Kappa Delta Pi in 1994 and his receipt of the 1974 NCSS Citation for Exemplary Research in Social Studies Education, the 1996 AERA Lifetime Achievement Award for Outstanding Contributions for Curriculum Studies, and the 1996 NCSS Distinguished Career Research in Social Studies Education Award. Education Review http://www.edrev.info 13 Copyright is retained by the first or sole author, who grants right of first publication to the Education Review. http://www.edrev.info Editors David J. Blacker blacker@edrev.info Gustavo Fischman fischman@edrev.info Melissa Cast-Brede cast-brede@edrev.info Gene V Glass glass@edrev.info