The City as Teacher: Historical Problems
1969; Cambridge University Press; Volume: 9; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.2307/366910
ISSN1748-5959
Autores Tópico(s)School Choice and Performance
ResumoFIFTEEN YEARS AGO the songwriter John LaTouche turned the Odyssey on its head when he wrote the musical Golden Apple. Instead of sending his returning veterans on an unfortunate tour of a primitive inland sea, he dropped them into a modern city, to experience the varieties of novelty and disillusionment. To the corrupting politician character who plotted these experiences, he gave the line, The city itself will be our strategem. Ordinarily, of course, we don't see the city as quite so deliberate, so conspiratorial a kind of teaching strategy. Instead, we think of it as intruding into the learning process as a kind of Automatic Teaching Environment-poorly and chaotically programmed, but effective for all that. In one way or another, people have recognized this for a long time, if only in the traditional fear of the city as a place too morally corrupt for the educating of the young. (i) But it has figured quite positively too. psychological demands of the city were recognized in 1824 by Josiah Quincy, the first mayor of Boston when it was raised from the status of town to city. He described the qualities that were needed in citizens-efficiency, discipline, punctuality, order, regularity-and he stood ready to help shape the Boston schools in ways that would fit these qualities. (2) Men of his generation recognized, too, that schools were not essential in this process: the quickness or cleverness of the unschooled juvenile vagrant became a cliche of social commentary. (3) In our own generation, the most important example of this kind of thought has been a more scientific, empirical kind: the long
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