Read about the history of Head Start.
How to best serve preadolescent students remains an unsettled issue. Critics charge that the middle school philosophy focuses on the self-exploration, socialization, and group learning to the detriment of academics. These charges are fueled by poor showings of eighth graders on national and international tests where they rank lower than fourth graders, suggesting that they are losing ground as they progress through the middle grades. Some research suggests that these students would be better served in K–8 schools (Meyer, 2011). You are likely to be engaged in discussions about the value of middle schools as you proceed through your teaching career.
Early Childhood Education
Throughout history, some mothers have had to work to support their families. Almost always, they have had to leave their children with someone, often a relative or a neighbor. Some women in the neighborhood watched several children, but organized schools with child care providers were not available until the 19th century. Robert Owens opened the first known child care center at a mill in New Harmony, Indiana, in 1825–1826 with more than 100 children (Ranck & NAEYC’s History & Archives Panel, 2001).
| Noah Webster | Author of spellers and textbooks that influenced the elementary school curriculum from 1783–1875. |
| Emma Willard | An early feminist who opened the Troy Female Seminary in 1821 where women prepared for a certificate to teach. |
| Reverend Samuel Hall | Established the Columbian School in Vermont in 1823 for preparing teachers. |
| Robert Owens | Welsh social reformer who opened the first known child care center at a mill in New Harmony, Indiana, in 1825–1826. |
| Horace Mann | First secretary of the Massachusetts Board of Education and father of the common school movement. |
| William Holmes McGuffey | Wrote the McGuffey Readers that were used between 1836 and 1960. |
| Friedrich Froebel | Established the first kindergarten in 1837 in Germany that served as the model for early kindergartens in the United States. |
| Samuel Chapman Armstrong | Founder of Hampton Institute in 1868 to prepare African American teachers who paid for their education through manual labor. |
| Booker T. Washington | Educator and author who served as the first president of Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute in 1881 and promoted preparing African Americans for the trades and their appropriate roles in the Jim Crow South. |
| W. E. B. Du Bois | Sociologist, historian, professor, author, and civil rights activist who challenged the oppressive southern economy and argued that African Americans should have a classical education to prepare them to be leaders. |
| John Dewey | Philosopher and professor who established a laboratory school in Chicago in 1896 to test his progressive ideas about a child-oriented curriculum. His ideas have been very influential in education and social reform. |
| William James | Harvard philosopher and psychologist who found that the stimulus-response concepts of learning could be used to help children develop desirable habits. |
| G. Stanley Hall | Psychologist who established child development and child psychology as fields that influenced education at the end of the 19th century. |
| Margaret Haley | Activist teacher who was an early member of the Chicago Federation of Teachers and later an organizer for the American Federation of Teachers. |
| Catherine Goggin | Along with Margaret Haley, she helped affiliate the Chicago Federation of Teachers with organized labor. |
| Edward Thorndike | Professor at Teachers College, Columbia University and author of Educational Psychology (1903). He promoted behaviorism and testing, which was widely used by the military. |
| Mary McLeod Bethune | An educational leader who opened a school for African American girls in 1904 in Daytona Beach, Florida, that evolved into Bethune-Cookman University. Also served as an adviser to President Franklin D. Roosevelt. |
| William Chandler Bagley | Professor and author of Classroom Management (1907), which was the primary guide for preparing effective teachers for many years. |
| William Heard Kilpatrick | Teachers College, Columbia University professor who supported progressive education and introduced in 1918 the “project method” in which students direct their own learning. |
| Thurgood Marshall | U.S. Supreme Court justice who had argued Brown v. Board of Education in 1952–1953. |
| Theodore Sizer | Education reformer who wrote Horace’s Compromise and founded the Coalition of Essential Schools in 1984 to create a group of high schools based on the progressive tradition. |