Reading summary: Common Schools

I thoroughly enjoyed reading this first section of the book and it has be invigorated to read on.  Other than the readings we have done thought this program, I have never really studied the history of my profession.  There were a few things that I found specifically  interesting.   First was that I saw a cyclical nature to education reform.  The discussions which took place in the early days of our country reminded me of our debate about the importance of national standards last summer.  The notion that education needs to be more standardized and the reasons for doing so has been a age old argument.  I believe the basic arguments in favor of it then can still be used to argue in favor of the CCS today.  Another thing I found interesting was the rural resistance for formal education.  Notion that farmers producing food now was more important than farmers getting an education.  It is astonishing that this remains true in many rural areas to this day though I found the idea to be quite short sighted.  The last observation that jumped out at me, though not significant, was that the public school desegregation movement started in Boston.  The only reason this surprises me is my knowledge of the resistance to desegregation of the Boston professional sports teams which were some of the last to employee black athletes and whose teams are often composed of  larger numbers of white athletes than the league averages.  Perhaps this only came to mind because game six of the NBA finals is tomorrow night.   Hopefully I can find some time to do some reading during halftime!