7: Teacher Education, Knowledge Most Worth, and Ellwood P. Cubberley

Over 150 years have passed in which to settle ontological questions about the historical conjunction between capitalism and the American system of public school education. Progress by educational historians toward congruent explanations of the relations between public school education and economic and political relations, however, is inconclusive. For example, in American Education: A History,Wayne Urban and Jennings Wagoner, Jr. (1996), write that

As Urban and Wagoner (1996) present them, these opposing historical explanations of the role of public school education in American society are subjective interpretations. The issue between one and the other is rhetorical, such as, which is the more persuasive text. What must decide the issue between one interpretation and the other is now a question of internal textual coherence, coherence with other texts established within the discipline of educational history, and, perhaps, coherence with the teacher candidate's understanding. A historical social reality independent of the texts and interpretive arguments is absent, and what remains is a collection of more or less inscrutable texts of which the historian and/or teacher candidate endeavor to make sense. This is relativist and constructivist history. Teacher candidates are left to form their own opinion about the merits of one or the other argument in the discussion, because what cannot be done under these terms of discourse is to say this or that argument is true. Indeed, although Katz's excavation of the history of public schools in society is surely not the same as that of his critics, Urban and Wagoner reduce these very different ontological explanations of history to equivalents. In other words, what properly should be settled by an examination and explication of actual socioeconomic circumstances is instead reduced to what one thinks.