Jurgen Herbst traces the debates, discussions, pronouncements and reports through which Americans have sought to clarify their conceptions of the goals and purposes of education beyond the common school.
The Once and Future School argues that to make sense of the current trials of secondary educational system and to maintain any sense of direction and vision for its future, we need a clear understanding of its path in the past and of its setting in a multi-national world. From their beginnings in colonial America to the present day, Jurgen Herbst traces the debates, discussions, pronouncements and reports through which Americans have sought to hammer out and clarify their conceptions of the goals and purposes of education beyond the common school.

This book represents the result of recent historical research by German and American scholars on German influences on education in the United States during the nineteenth century. The authors deal with all aspects of education, from kindergarten through primary and secondary education to universities. In analyzing German educational influences on the United States, the essays are concerned with reports of American visitors to Germany, as well as with accounts and activities of German educators in the United States. The book shows that in the context of an immigrant culture, the question of influence needs to be considered in an interdisciplinary setting. At the same time, the account recognizes that both Germany and the United States were mutually affected by the development and progress of their relevant educational theories and practices.

This book represents the result of recent historical research by German and American scholars on German influences on education in the United States during the nineteenth century. The authors deal with all aspects of education, from kindergarten through primary and secondary education to universities. In analyzing German educational influences on the United States, the essays are concerned with reports of American visitors to Germany, as well as with accounts and activities of German educators in the United States. The book shows that in the context of an immigrant culture, the question of influence needs to be considered in an interdisciplinary setting. At the same time, the account recognizes that both Germany and the United States were mutually affected by the development and progress of their relevant educational theories and practices.

To lend weight to his charge that the public school teacher has been betrayed and gravity to his indictment of the educational establishment for that betrayal, Jurgen Herbst goes back to the beginnings of teacher education in America in the 1830s and traces its evolution up to the 1920s, by which time the essential damage had been done. Initially, attempts were made to upgrade public school teaching to a genuine profession, but that ideal was gradually abandoned. In its stead, with the advent of newly emerging graduate schools of education in the early decades of the twentieth century, came the so-called professionalization of public education. At the expense of the training of elementary school teachers (mostly women), teacher educators shifted their attention to the turning out of educational "specialists" (mostly men)-administrators, faculty members at normal schools and teachers colleges, adult education teachers, and educational researchers. Ultimately a history of the neglect of the American public school teacher, And Sadly Teach ends with a plea and a message that ring loud and clear. The plea: that the current reform proposals for American teacher education-the Carnegie and the Holmes reports-be heeded. The message: that the key to successful school reform lies in educating teacher's true professionals and in acknowledging them as such in their classrooms.