Reflections on History and Quality Education
Abstract
"This essay questions the commonly held assumption that schoolstoday are worse academically than they were in the past. It argues
that schools have seldom been chiefly interested in intellectual inquiry.
Nor have they ever been committed to providing a quality intellectual
education to all students. We argue that if history has
anything to tell us about quality education today, it is not that we
must try to recapture a lost age of academic excellence but that we
cannot create truly excellent schools without addressing the inequities
that have long been embedded in them or without understanding
how those marginalized by the educational system have
struggled to confront inequities."