100 books like Democracy and Education

When I met Jerry Bruner in the summer of 1965, I had expected to become a clinical psychologist or perhaps a psychoanalyst. However, the chance to work as a research assistant for Bruner as he was developing a social studies curriculum for middle schools was transformative: I decided to become a cognitively oriented developmental psychologist with a focus on the arts.

Both the ideas that Bruner introduced me to and the way in which he interweaved the humanities and social sciences in his writings are never far from my literary consciousness. I am glad that my children had a chance to attend schools where Bruner’s ideas were taken seriously.

In the view of many—including me!—early childhood education in Reggio Emilia, a city in Northern Italy, constitutes the gold standard, combining the genius of American and European approaches. While the ideas were developed primarily in Reggio Emilia, the long-term collaboration between Reggio and Project Zero at Harvard University made the practices clear to the rest of the world.

Interestingly, both Jerome Bruner and I spent many years visiting these schools, trying to understand them, and writing about them for both educators and the general public.

A small group of scholars and educators have taken the ideas of progressive education seriously and made them available to ambitious and adventurous educators worldwide.

In his explanations of why Finland has become among the most admired systems in the world, with three editions of this “instant classic,” Sahlberg has provided an important and timely model for progressive educators worldwide.

Among professors of education of our time, Lee Shulman stands out as a thinker, a speaker, and the adviser and role model of scores of excellent researchers and practitioners.

Shulman is primarily a writer of powerful essays. The educational world is fortunate that this volume collects his best thinking and writing. I wish that every teacher and every researcher would read and absorb Shulman’s vision of good education.

There is a cottage industry of historical and analytical books attempting to explain where, exactly, our educational norms, structures, and strictures came from. Many of these are terrific, but Lagemann’s An Elusive Science is the best of the bunch for exploring how nineteenth and twentieth-century scientific research influenced modern educational practice. The author is the source of a line oft-quoted in ed circles: “I have often argued to students, only in part to be perverse, that one cannot understand the history of education in the United States during the twentieth century unless one realizes that Edward L. Thorndike won and John Dewey lost.” This is the book that explicates and explores this almost primordial dichotomy, and how different philosophies of science became aligned with complementary philosophies of educational practice. A piercing, impeccably researched, enjoyable read. 

American economics in the Progressive Era (usually dated from the later 1800s to World War I) is quite fascinating.

Mary Furner’s book is an excellent discussion of the developing American social sciences in this period.

American universities developed rapidly along with the professionalization of the social sciences. At the same time, rapid US industrialization created a raft of new economic and social problems that demanded a response.

This created a tension between the desire for professional “scientific” standing and the demand to respond to obvious social problems by advocating for particular policy responses.

Furner pays particular attention to the work and career of economist H. C. Adams, who was a teacher to a number of the later institutionalist group. In the institutionalist literature, this tension is expressed in the conjoined goals of “science and social control.” 

For institutionalists, the solution to this problem was found in the pragmatic and instrumental… show more.

This classic book hooked me on page one. Björn Kurtén’s curiosity soon becomes your curiosity and before long you are thinking like a paleontologist. It may be an old book, but the author’s thinking remains modern. Indeed, a recent review of cave bear research suggests that our knowledge of these animals hasn’t changed all that much since Kurtén’s day. I love old geology books. Beautifully written, they enable you to discover, imagine, and ultimately to care about an animal that exists only as a pile of bones. This book proved to be very influential.

Where did the concept originate that there is a form of thinking, distinct from knowledge and wisdom, unique enough to be called “critical.” As it turns out, “critical thinking” has its origin point in this 1910 book by America’s most famous philosopher of education, John Dewey. In How We Think, Dewey identifies the kind of thinking – which he calls “reflective thinking” – required for citizens in a democracy to properly make decisions and perform their civic responsibilities. He also talks about how the development of reflective thinking skills (today called “critical thinking skills”) can be incorporated into the education process. If you are interested in improving your own thinking or teaching others to reason more effectively, John Dewey’s How We Think is Ground Zero for any critical-thinking project.  

It’s impossible, as a parent, not to marvel at the miracle of learning that occurs in very young children. Indeed, parents have experienced this sense of awe for time immemorial, and some have gone so far as to venture explanations for how it works. John Dewey, the American philosopher and psychologist, argued at the dawn of the twentieth century that children are like young scientists as they go about their day, subtly testing the things and people around them to see how they work. We now know, in no small part due to the work of researchers including The Scientist in the Crib author Alison Gopnik, that Dewey was right. Children are compelled to experiment; what’s more, they make the most of the limited data they produce with a powerful logic invisible to the untrained eye. Parents—but also anyone with a sense of wonder—will find answers to deep mysteries in… show more.

Jeffrey Sklansky is that rare academic with a writer’s literary imagination, which serves the reader well in engaging The Soul’s Economy, a riveting and dense intellectual history of the market’s emergence as the organizing principle of not only economic life, but of a distinctly new moral sensibility between 1820 and 1920. 

Sklansky explores this far-reaching turn of events through a series of dedicated readings of America’s leading philosophers and pundits of the times, ranging from Ralph Waldo Emerson to John Dewey, who collectively recast the pursuit of wealth into an ethic of personal rectitude and even the source of society’s general welfare.