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.
Police officer sitting at the front of a classroom of kids.

Police Used the DARE Program to Get Inside of U.S. Schools

It was never very effective at preventing drug use.
Cover page of an AP Psychology exam

Bankrupt Authority

Advanced Placement testing is "a money-making racket that lets states off the hook for underfunding education."
Robert Smalls.

What a Teacher's Letters Reveal About Robert Smalls, Who Stole a Confederate Ship to Secure Freedom

Harriet M. Buss' missives home detail the future congressman's candid views on race and the complicity of Confederate women.
Image from the filmstrip, showing a grieved woman with her head in her hands, being comforted by a man standing beside her

Uncle Tom’s Cabin in the Hands of the Red Scared

Again and again, a fervant British anticommunist's filmstrip of the novel shows images of women in states of distress.
Illustration of hands signing the fingerspelling alphabet

Unlocking Reason: How the Deaf Created Their Own System of Communication

Exploring Deaf history, language and education as the hearing child of a Deaf adult.
Painting of the Mexican railway

On the Shared Histories of Reconstruction in the Americas

In the 19th century, civil wars tore apart the US, Mexico and Argentina. Then came democracy’s fight against reaction.
A statue of Martin Luther King Jr. stands larger than life in the center of the frame; two small figures view it in the foreground

The Struggle for Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Memory

How political misappropriations of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s legacy fuel right-wing movements.
Children in a kindergarten classroom at the Horace Mann School, Tulsa, Okla., 1917.
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Yes, Schools Should Teach Morality. But Whose Morals?

Belief that schools must teach moral values is older than public schools themselves. But whose morals?
Scene from "Schindler's List."

How 'Schindler's List' Transformed Americans' Understanding of the Holocaust

The 1993 film also inspired its director, Steven Spielberg, to establish a foundation that preserves survivors' stories.
Black residents of Natchez, Miss., walk alongside a railroad track in August 1940.

One of the Biggest U.S. Slave Markets Finally Reckons With Its Past

Natchez, Miss., is beginning to highlight the history of its enslaved people—including at a Black-owned bed and breakfast in former slave quarters.
Harvard University President Drew Gilpin Faust in 2009.

The Bleak, All But-Forgotten World of Segregated Virginia

Former Harvard President Drew Gilpin Faust’s extraordinary memoir recalls painful memories for her--and me.