Journal of the History of the Behavioral SciencesVolume 61, Issue 2 e70017 BOOK REVIEW Raised to Obey: The Rise and Spread of Mass Education by Agustina S. Paglayan Princeton University Press, 2024. 384 pp. $32.00 (paper). ISBN: 978-0-961-26127-0 Thomas Fallace, Corresponding Author Thomas Fallace [email protected] orcid.org/0000-0002-5417-7077 William Paterson University, Wayne, New Jersey, USASearch for more papers by this author Thomas Fallace, Corresponding Author Thomas Fallace [email protected] orcid.org/0000-0002-5417-7077 William Paterson University, Wayne, New Jersey, USASearch for more papers by this author First published: 31 January 2025 https://doi.org/10.1002/jhbs.70017Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onEmailFacebookxLinkedInRedditWechat No abstract is available for this article. References Boli, J., F. O. Ramirez, and J. W. Meyer. 1985. "Explaining the Origins and Expansion of Mass Education." Comparative Education Review 29, no. 2: 145–170. 10.1086/446504 Web of Science®Google Scholar Green, A. 2013. Education and State Formation: Europe, East Asia, and USA ( 2nd ed.). New York: Palgrave Macmillan. 10.1057/9781137341754 Google Scholar Volume61, Issue2Spring 2025e70017 ReferencesRelatedInformation

In this historical study, the author explores the racial views of Maria Montessori as expressed in her largely forgotten 1913 book, Pedagogical Anthropology. As a physician and physical anthropologist, Montessori espoused three racial beliefs that were in wide circulation during the late nineteenth century: biological racism, racial determinism, and craniology. Montessori combined these beliefs to warrant the underlying conviction that the races of the world were organized hierarchically with the White races at the top and the races of colour at the bottom, and that, even within the broader White race, there were numerous racial types that could likewise be organized hierarchically based on their physiological features and intellectual potential. The author demonstrates how Montessori expressed these racist beliefs in Pedagogical Anthropology, how she connected them to her famous pedagogy and curriculum, and how they fit into the racial discourses of contemporaneous educators and anthropologists.

This article offers a critical review of the literature on how race played into the historical development of pedagogical progressivism in the late-19th and early-20th-century United States. While many historians have focused on the overt/covert racism inherent in much of progressive pedagogy as espoused by White educators, others have highlighted the ways in pedagogical progressivism supported movements toward liberation and social justice, especially when taken up by Black educators. Thus, the historical treatment of pedagogical progressivism is becoming more nuanced by incorporating the work of Black scholars, school leaders, curriculum designers, and teachers.

Background/Context: Historical studies of this volatile period in educational history (1960–2003 tend to focus on educational policy and/or curriculum, but rarely address changes in learning theory. Numerous historical studies have traced how psychologists, psychometricians, policymakers, and social scientists have dismissed the intellectual potential of Black students over the course of the 20th century, but these studies have completely overlooked the controversial Black learning style idea and how the idea interacted with the educational and racial discourses of the period. Purpose: This intellectual history traces the rise and fall of the controversial idea that there was a Black learning style. Research Design: Hollinger (1985) defines intellectual history succinctly as the “discourse of intellectuals” (p. 131). Often described as thinking rather than thought, an intellectual history focuses on contingencies, contradictions, and inconsistencies in a discourse; contextualizes the discourse in evolving historical, political, and social contexts; and explores how these changing contexts affect the development of the ideas. Conclusions: The Black learning style and cultural mismatch theories both emerged from the research of psychologist Herman Witkin in the 1950s. The idea was further developed by Rosalie Cohen, Asa Hilliard III, and Janice Hale in the 1970s and 1980s. By the late 1990s, many scholars considered the Black learning style idea to be dangerous and stopped directly referencing it. Despite its eventual rejection, the Black learning style idea inspired many lines of inquiry about the ways that race, culture, and ethnicity impact learning that are still being pursued today. This intellectual history traces the origins, emergence, and fall of the idea that Black students had a different learning and/or cognitive style that clashed with that of White teachers, standardized testing, and American schools.

This study traces the long early history of the visual, auditory, and kinesthetic (VAK) learning style typology. The VAK distinction and vocabulary originated with the psychology of mental imagery and word recall in the 1910s. It was further developed by researchers on remedial reading instruction for students with learning disabilities between the 1920s and 1950s, the teaching of urban youth in the 1960s, and culminated with the construction of formal learning style assessment instruments in the 1970s. By the 1980s, the VAK learning style typology began to get covered in the mainstream media, despite the objections of critics. By the 2000s, the internet made VAK-based assessments available to teachers for free. The author argues the application of the VAK learning style typology from remedial reading to all subject areas was unwarranted and only partially supported by the research. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

In this historical study, the author traces the contents of classroom materials and methods textbooks published between 1916 and 1966 that endorsed the discussion and deliberation of social issues to demonstrate how these materials consistently evaded racial justice as a social issue. As a result, the materials designed to inspire classroom discussion and deliberation of social issues ended up reinforcing the racial status quo through an approach that valued balance and open-ended discussion of racial issues over a commitment to racial justice and the affirmation of Black perspectives.

In this intellectual history, the author traces the refashioning, fall, and re-emergence of the reception of Dewey's work between 1960 and 1988 by student-centred radicals, de-schooling advocates, neo-Marxists, critical educators, and feminist pedagogues-scholars collectively known as the New Left. New Left scholars rejected the assimilationist, bureaucratic, and elitist ideas of the 1940s and 1950s and espoused existential, participatory, and localized educational alternatives. Educators cast Dewey as a subversive in the 1960s, a corporate liberal in the 1970s, and a critical and feminist educator in the 1980s. Many of the argumentative strands of the New Left ignored one another and, as a result, scholars have failed to fully address some of the unresolved ambiguities and paradoxes in Dewey's work.

In recent years, researchers have questioned the legitimacy of the so-called myth of learning styles and expressed confusion about exactly when and why the idea first emerged. This historical study traces the origin and emergence of the learning style idea. The author argues that the learning style idea originated in the 1960s as part of a broader effort to reach inner-city African American youth that certain educators deemed culturally deficient. By the time scholars developed learning style inventory instruments for mostly white children, they removed the race-specific language, and educators quickly forget the ethnocentric origins of the learning style idea.

Writing Women into Progressive Education - Rebecca S Montgomery. Celeste Parrish and Educational Reform in the Progressive South. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2018. x + 237 pp. $47.50 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8071-6978. - Volume 18 Issue 4

Bernard Bailyn's Education in the Forming of American Society represents, perhaps, the most significant text in the history of the field. In this essay, I argue that Bailyn's classic text can, and should, be contextualized in the post-World War II intellectual milieu of consensus liberalism that overtly rejected ideological commitment. Bailyn and other postwar consensus liberals considered academic research, conducted free from political ideology, to be the best antidote to the totalitarian thought of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. Bailyn's famous text reflected the values of postwar consensus liberalism by rejecting the ideological commitments of the interwar period and embracing the objective, scientific values of the 1950s as reflected in the new intellectual and cultural history. Bailyn's emphasis on cultural-intellectual history as the best corrective for totalitarian thinking reflected the aspirations, hopes, and fears of his own moment in time, in the same way the progressives' focus on conflict and reform reflected theirs.

Regardless of whether the initial discourse was limited or more substantial, the formal and direct teaching of the Holocaust to Jewish students did not begin until the 1960s, and Holocaust education in US public schools did not begin until the early 1970s. The rise of Holocaust consciousness, memory, and education in the United States since the 1960s is well documented. The parallels and practices can be accounted for in terms of the centrist intellectual environment of the postwar years, which encouraged American educators to avoid controversial discussions. By the end of the 1930s, leading American scholars recognised the persecution of the Jews in a vague sense, and made passing references to it. Although Myrdal avoided universalising the Holocaust by applying it to American blacks, he accurately predicted that African American leaders would make this connection. The most prominent educators addressing race prejudice and antisemitism in the US were affiliated with the cultural gifts–intercultural education movement.

This historical study explores how educators in the United States responded to the rise of fascism between the World Wars. By considering and then ultimately rejecting the fascist approach to education and philosophy, American educators defined democratic education in contrast to fascist/totalitarian approaches to education by rejecting indoctrination and propaganda. The author argues that fascism provided a catalyst for pushing epistemological issues surrounding propaganda, indoctrination, relativity, and absolutism to the center of their collective consciousness in ways that parallel the controversies of today over fake news and alternative facts.