Parents and School: The 150 Year Struggle for Control in American Education. . - Reviews - book review

Journal of Social History, Winter, 2001 by Stephen Lassonde

Parents and schools have alternated between advocacy and contestation of one another's aims since the founding of public schools in the United States. While the closing decades of the last century have been marred by recrimination and adversarial relations, Cutler suggests that the balance wheel may be turning back in the other direction once again, ushering in a new era of cooperation among the nurturers of children's aptitude, development, and well-being. Cutler has identified a frontier in the history of education in the United States and produced an excellent (and very readable) baseline account of the primary institutional locus of the relationship between parents and schools. Yet it is necessary for historians to explore further the multiple histories of parents' attitudes towards teachers, schools, and schooling so that we can gain a more rounded, nuanced sense than now exists of how parents have mediated children's capacities to succeed in and out of school.

ENDNOTES

(1.) New Haven, Conn, Annual Report of the New Haven Board of Education (New Haven, Conn: 1871), 20-1.

(2.) See, e.g., Viviana A. Zelizer, Pricing the Priceless Child: The Changing Social Value of Children (New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1985.)