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Freedom School students sitting in a circle on the ground.
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60 Years Later, Freedom Schools Are Still Radical—and Necessary

The Freedom Schools curriculums developed in 1964 remain urgently needed, especially in our era of book bans and backlash.
Longshoremen on their lunch hour at the San Francisco docks.

Jack London, "Martin Eden" and The Liberal Education in US life

In Jack London’s novel, Martin Eden personifies debates still raging over the role and purpose of education in American life.

American Exchanges: Third Reich’s Elite Schools

How the Nazi government used exchange student programs to foster sympathy for Nazism in the United States.
Black children learning in a classroom

What’s Missing From the Discourse About Anti-Racist Teaching

Black educators have always known that their students are living in an anti-Black world and that their teaching must be set against the order of that world.

The Long History of Parents Complaining About Their Kids’ Homework

“The child is made to study far, far beyond his physical strength.”

In Its First Decades, The United States Nurtured Schoolgirl Mapmakers

Education for women and emerging nationhood, illustrated with care and charm.
Illustration of  Laura Bridgman sitting at a desk engaged in writing the manual alphabet on her left hand

Nineteenth-Century Schools for the Deaf and Blind

A primary source set and teaching guide created by educators.
A broken pencil lays on top of a standardized testing answer sheet
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What Today’s Education Reformers Can Learn From Henry David Thoreau

Snobbish elitism will hurt their cause.

Your Child Care Conundrum Is an Anti-Communist Plot

Red-baiters deserve at least part of the blame for the shortage of affordable, high-quality pre-K.

There's No Erasing the Chalkboard

Blackboards will endure as symbols of learning long after they’ve disappeared from schools.
Photo of Laura Bridgman wearing opaque eyeglasses.

The Education of Laura Bridgman

She was Helen Keller before Helen Keller. Then her mentor abandoned their studies.
A standardized test and a pencil, with answers bubbled in.

The Rotting of the College Board

Testing is necessary. The SAT’s creator is not.
Norma Gabler gives a press conference on July 20, 1977 holding up books in her hand.
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The Woman Who Gave Today's Book-Banning Moms a Blueprint

Norma Gabler's work in the 1960s, '70s, and '80s foreshadowed today's campaigns.
A monkey listening to a radio with headphones.

The Scopes Trial and the Two Visions of US Democracy

A new history revisits “the Trial of the Century” and its legacy in contemporary politics.
The original cover sketch of "Cars and Trucks and Things That Go," by Richard Scarry, with cartoon animals in vehicles.

On Richard Scarry and the Art of Children's Literature

Scarry’s guides to life both reflected and bolstered kids’ lived experience, and in some cases even provided the template for it.
Costumed man and tourists in Colonial Williamsburg.

Where MAGA Granddads and Resistance Moms Go to Learn America’s Most Painful History Lessons

Welcome to Colonial Williamsburg, the largest living museum that is taking a radical approach to our national divides.
Drawing showing teacher in front of the blackboard while students look bored in the back of the classroom.

Why Professors Can’t Teach

For as long as universities have existed, academics have struggled to impart their knowledge to students. The failing is fixable—if Washington demands it.
A view of a hallway inside of an archive lined with bookshelves.

On the Dark History and Ongoing Ableist Legacy of the IQ Test

How research helps us understand the past to create a better future.
Melinda French Gates and Bill Gates speak during the 'Gates Foundation' press conference at the Annual Meeting 2009 of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, January 30, 2009" by Remy Steinegger.

Philanthropy’s Power Brokers

An in-depth reckoning with the Gates Foundation as a discrete actor is long overdue.
Wilbert E. Longfellow being saved from the water by a female lifeguard.
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Women Have the Daring to Be Real Life Savers

How a tragedy in New York City convinced Americans to learn how to swim.
Mississippi Freedom Summer activists and contact list.

What the Civil Rights Act Really Meant

An overlooked effect of the legislation, passed 60 years ago this week, was its powerful message of hope for Black Americans.
Syntactic trees filled with words and numbers.

American Grammar: Diagraming Sentences in the 19th Century

A pre-history of the sentence diagrams that were once commonplace in the American classroom.
A drawing of a tent underneath stylized constellations depicting a growth chart, a graduation cap, and a dollar sign.

Summer Camp and Parenting Panics

Camps once sold a story about social improvement. Now we just can’t conceive of an unscheduled moment.
A magnifying glass sitting on top of "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" by Thomas S. Kuhn.

What Was the “Paradigm Shift”?

When Thomas Kuhn coined the term, he wasn’t referring simply to “out of the box” thinking.
Disabled children learning in a classroom at Washington Boulevard School.

Disabling Modernism

During the first decade of the New Deal, modernist architects designed schools for disabled children that proposed radical visions of civic care.
Stanford Law School.

Why the Right’s Mythical Version of the Past Dominates When It Comes to Legal “History”

They’re invested in legal education, creating an originalist industrial complex with outsize influence.
Nell Irvin Painter.

Nell Irvin Painter’s Chronicles of Freedom

A new career-spanning book offers a portrait of Painter’s career as a historian, essayist, and most recently visual artist.
Iodized salt.

How the Arrival of Iodized Salt 100 Years Ago Changed America

On May 1, 1924, the first iodized salt appeared on shelves, quickly solving an iodine deficiency crisis that plagued the northern U.S. “goiter belt.”
Marlon Brando on the set of 'One-Eyed Jacks,' 1961.

Brando Unmatched

The legendary actor left a mark in both film history and an industry fraught with self-regard.
Hazel Ying Lee (right) and fellow pilot Virginia Wong (left).

This Chinese American Aviatrix Overcame Racism to Fly for the U.S. During World War II

A second-generation immigrant, Hazel Ying Lee was the first Chinese American woman to receive her pilot's license.

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