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From Vacation to Summer School: The Transformation of Summer Education in New York City, 1894–1915

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 February 2017

Kenneth M. Gold
Kenneth M. Gold*
Affiliation:
College of Staten Island/CUNY
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Extract

A noted but rarely explored axiom of the history of American education is that public school practices often originate in private sector settings. As David B. Tyack suggested in his influential study The One Best System, “Many of the innovations designed to offer differentiated schooling in the nineteenth century stemmed not so much from career educators as from wealthy philanthropists, merchants, and industrialists.” Certainly the very organizational structure of many urban school systems grew out of a network of private charity schools formed in the early nineteenth century. After the Civil War, new educational features like kindergartens, manual training, and vocational counseling all began as charitable endeavors but soon worked their way into urban public schools. By the century's end, vacation schools offering summer recreation and industrial education to the children of the urban, immigrant poor became yet another philanthropic program to enter the public school domain. What happened to vacation schools in New York City as a consequence of public administration is the focus of this article.

Type
Articles
Information
History of Education Quarterly , Volume 42 , Issue 1 , Spring 2002 , pp. 18 - 49
Copyright
Copyright © 2002 by the History of Education Society 

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