Search Results

Chapter One explores the emergence of three 20th Century foundations that promoted southern education reform, the General Education Board, the Rosenwald Fund, and the Negro Rural School Fund (Jeanes Fund). The annual Conference for Education in the South began at Capon Springs, West Virginia in 1898 and brought together an assembly of leaders in farming, business, church, and school, but quickly became an important venue for far-reaching collaboration between reformers, university scholars, northern businessmen, and southerners who represented state interests. The foundations involved in southern education developed from the extensive collaboration that these meetings produced. This chapter argues that education reform was instrumental to the broader goal of state building, and foundation programs specifically targeted state and local governance capacity. An effective public system of education required governance structures that could provide sufficient oversight, integrate a range of state and local agencies, and promote the organization and participation of local communities. Schooling promoted those administrative structures and helped to organize rural black communities. Foundation programs extended black educational opportunity and strengthened local governance capacity, but restricted the quality of education that would be available. Yet, their programs also had the potential to affect black agency over the longer term.

This chapter considers five films from among the rich and diverse archive of French documentaries devoted to school experience from the past twenty years. The filmmakers included are Denis Gheerbrant, Nicolas Philibert, Régis Sauder, Pascale Diez, and Julie Bertucelli. This collection of films by a diverse mix of filmmakers examines life in an equally diverse mix of schools and classes. They share an interest in configuring the space of the school in terms of experiential relationships rather than expository argumentation. They invite viewers to explore a particular space and develop a sense of co-presence with its inhabitants, resulting in a sense of ecological connection within a shared ecosystem rather than identification with, or mastery of, the subjects in the film. The films highlighted in this chapter are considered within the context of contemporary debates about the “school crisis” in France, and viewer responses to two of the films are studied in detail.

This chapter explores and challenge the perception that immigrant parents demonstrate a kind of caring and advocacy that differs from dominant majority parents. It situates the case of one Salvadoran parent in the larger context of research that documents the differing communication practices of immigrant parents and teachers who teach their children. Teachers may misinterpret communication practices and participation in school events as a lack of caring. Using the story of Margarita, a Salvadoran parent of three children, the chapter demonstrates the experiences of one immigrant parent interacting with rural teachers to show how Latina/o parents are involved and actively advocate for their children’s academic futures. It concludes with a call to educators to adopt new visions of working with immigrant parents in jointly constructed activities where both parents and teachers assume shared roles of learning to solve problems, and to learn to work across diverse experiences.

Using the 1937 Appalachian marriage of nine-year-old Eunice Winstead and twenty-two-year-old Charlie Johns, and the subsequent international attention it received as a prism, this chapter focuses on the persistence of very youthful marriage in the rural southern United States. During the Great Depression, when rates of marriage were down and the age of first marriage increased, minors continued to marry at very high numbers in rural southern states. This chapter argues that isolation, poverty, child labor, poor schooling, and the lack of age consciouness that was its consequence, account for this trend. In communities where calendar age had far less meaning than it did among the middle class and urban residents, white, black and Latino Americans in rural America continued to countenance child marriage in part because they did not see it as noteworthy. Urbanites voiced their horror for the practice in newspapers, magazines, and in film using a language of civilization to condemn those they perceived as backwards barbarians.

This chapter attempts to explore the relevance of Mono-grade methodology for teaching-learning processes in primary schools, considering their contextual and spatial specificities. The analyses employ the findings from fieldwork done in rural schools of the Rishi Valley Education Centre (RVEC), Andhra Pradesh and government primary schools in the Uttarkashi district of Uttarakhand, investigating the meaning of Mono-grade methodology and RVEC’s Multi-Grade Multi-Level (MGML) methodology. These comparative meanings are informed by the promise and practice of MGML in RVEC and primary schools that function amidst the precarity induced by disasters and low-cost private schools in Uttarkashi. In conclusion, it locates the possibilities of context specific teaching-learning process in schools outside the paradigm of standardized Mono-grade teaching-learning processes in primary schools in India.

Medical care at the end of the eighteenth century, like that in any period, was determined by the state of medical knowledge and the available types of treatment. Some useful knowledge existed, but most of medical practice was characterized by scientific ignorance and ineffective or harmful treatments based largely on tradition. The empirical nature of medical practice made apprenticeship the dominant form of medical education. Toward the end of the century medical schools were established to provide the theoretical part of the student’s education, while apprenticeship continued to provide the practical part. The scientifically valid aspects of medical science in the late eighteenth century comprised gross anatomy, physiology, pathology, and the materia medica. Gross anatomy, the study of those parts of the human organism visible to the naked eye, had benefitted from the long history of dissection to become the best developed of the medical sciences. This enabled surgeons to undertake a larger variety of operations with greater expertise. Physiology, the study of how anatomical structures function in life, had developed at a far slower pace. The greatest physiological discovery up to that time, the circulation of the blood, had been made at the beginning of the seventeenth century and was still considered novel almost two centuries later. Physiology was a popular area for theorizing, and the numerous physiologically based theories of disease were, as a physician wrote in 1836, “mere assumptions of unproved, and as time has demonstrated, unprovable facts, or downright imaginations.” Pathology at that time was concerned with pathological or morbid anatomy, the study of the changes in gross anatomical structures due to disease and their relationship to clinical symptoms. The field was in its infancy and contributed little to medicine and medical practice. Materia medica was the study of drugs and drug preparation and use. Late eighteenth century American physicians had available to them a substantial armamentarium of drugs. Estes studied the ledgers of one New Hampshire physician from 1751 to 1787 (3,701 patient visits), and another from 1785 to 1791 (1,161 patient visits), one Boston physician from 1782 to 1795 (1,454 patient visits), and another from 1784 to 1791 (779 patient visits).

During the early nineteenth century, medical practice became professionalized and medical treatment standardized as medical school training became more popular and medical societies and journals were organized. Dispensary and hospital care increased with the growth in urban populations. Medical students became dissatisfied with the theoretical training in medical schools and turned to private courses from individual physicians and clinical instruction at hospitals and dispensaries. By mid-century, private instruction had become almost as important as medical school training. Because little progress occurred in medical knowledge during the first half of the nineteenth century, the quality of medical care remained low, although it became more standardized due to the greater popularity of medical school training. Diagnosis continued to be unsystematic and superficial. The physical examination consisted of observing the patient’s pulse, skin color, manner of breathing, and the appearance of the urine. Physicians attributed many diseases to heredity and often attached as much credence to the patient’s emotions and surmises as the natural history of the illness. Although the invention of the stethoscope in France in 1819 led to the use of auscultation and percussion, the new diagnostic tools contributed little to medical care in the short run because more accurate diagnoses did not lead to better treatment. Few useful drugs existed in the materia medica and they were often misused. According to Dowling, the United States Pharmacopoeia of 1820 contained only 20 active drugs, including 3 specifics: quinine for malaria, mercury for syphilis, and ipecac for amebic dysentery. Alkaloid chemistry led to the isolation of morphine from opium in 1817 and quinine from cinchona bark in 1820. Morphine was prescribed with a casual indifference to its addictive properties and quinine was widely used in nonmalarial fevers, where it was ineffective and produced dangerous side effects. Strychnine, a poisonous alkaloid isolated in 1818, was popular as a tonic for decades, and colchine, another alkaloid discovered in 1819, was widely used for gout despite its harmful side effects. Purgatives and emetics remained the most widely used drugs, although mineral drugs replaced botanical ones among physicians trained in medical schools because their actions were more drastic and immediate.