DRAFT: This module has unpublished changes.

Conrad Johnson

Education 355-001

Dr. Diaz

February 15, 2011

 

Journal

Tyack Part II and III

From Village School to Urban System:

Bureaucratization in the Nineteenth Century

 

            After reading part II of Tyack’s book has enhanced my horizon on the educational system back then. He stated that most urban educational systems of the nineteenth century began as loosely-structured village schools. Was this type of school that restricted the children that you had to live in a certain village to attend the school? However they were convinced that there was one best system of education for urban populations, leading educators sought to discover it and implement it? But what exactly did they consider to be the “one best system”. Who was to say their type of a one best system was what everyone wanted, including the students. Tyack mentioned that in short they tried to create a more bureaucratic system. Which meant to me that they were trying to urbanize it to a new uniform value, norms, and education? With being said achieved through the rightly structured education system.

            In the text it states that “they struggled with the daily tasks of housing, classifying, teaching, promoting and keeping records on the thousands of children crowding the classrooms. To me this was showing demographic and population shift that transformed the educational philosophy. In the text it said that “the creation of efficient and uniformed polices paralleled the movement to standardize schooling”, this was another point that demographic played a role in education bureaucracy. While I was reading, I found something interesting to me, it stated that a single standard by which to judge and compare the output of each school, positive information, in black and white, to replace the intuitive and often superficial written evaluations of oral examinations. I thought to myself was this comparing to our standardize testing in our country to date.  A part in the text I thought they needed to be more sane with humanity was when Tyack stated, in the view of most urban schoolmen of the late nineteenth century, schools should inculcate obedience to bureaucratic norms overtly and with zest.

            In the third part of the book it shadows the same problems we face today that they were facing during the 1800’s. In the text, Philbrick believed that the paradise for which the teacher prays is a job in which he owes his position to his merit and not to favor … sure that his efforts will be appreciated and recompensed. I feel that in the last few decades they have hired on merit now they need to hire people on will just do the job.

 

DRAFT: This module has unpublished changes.