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The Wisconsin Idea and Business Progressivism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 January 2009

Stuart Morris
Affiliation:
University of Manchester

Extract

‘The curriculum’, write Richard Hofstadter and C. de Witt Hardy, ‘is a barometer by which we may measure the cultural pressures that operate upon the school.’ These pressures are of many kinds, economic and intellectual, and they make schools and universities social, and even political institutions sensitive to external needs and demands. In the United States, where education has become one of the main secular goals of society, the history of schools and universities deserves to be an integral part of the social history of the country. Lawrence A. Cremin has shown how such an integration can be achieved. And now that ‘B schools’ in the vanguard of Le Défi American are spreading outwards from Manila to Manchester the time is ripe to study a phenomenon which most historians and sociologists, if they have not despised, have preferred to ignore.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1970

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