The course will examine historical perspectives on the relationship between public schooling and the promotion of democratic ideals. Students will explore some of the central goals and purposes of American public education over the past two centuries, and the historiographical debates about those goals and purposes. In the second half of the course, students will the relationship between schooling and civic education, and between schooling and specific communities, in order to ask whether the goals of schooling might promote or contradict the goals of particular groups who seek to benefit from public education, and ways in which education does not promote democratic ideals.
Liberal Arts Core/CORE Equivalent - satisfies the requirement for Society & Social Sciences
