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Democracy and Education appeared amid intense debate over the relationship between school and work. This debate revealed a stark contrast between Dewey's idea to educate young people to understand the complex relationships of modern industry and the ideas of educators who equated vocational education with training fourteen- to sixteen-year-olds for maximal productivity, a view written into the Smith-Hughes Act of 1917. Whereas Dewey favored integrating vocational education with “a new kind of general education,” his antagonists assailed advocates of the “general” or “academic” curriculum as reactionaries who infected public education with impractical theories that only served those with time and money to indulge their interest in cultural values detached from daily life. Significantly, Dewey did not respond with a defense of theory over practice but with an assertion that his opponents’ thought was permeated by theories, ironically drawn from some of the same sources that influenced mainstream advocates of the “new” education. Understanding how combatants could derive conflicting conclusions from the same sources illuminates the paradoxes and aids in explaining the timing and scope of the Progressive movement.

This book traces the history of adult education in America from its roots in the popular tradition of self-improvement, to present day education outside a college or university setting. The author persuasively links developments in the realm of popular self-improvement to cultural and social forces, and explores the reasons why ordinary citizens turned to the cultivation of knowledge. He aims to unravel the knotted connections between education and society, by focusing on the voluntary pursuit of knowledge on the part of those who were both older and more likely to be gainfully employed than the school-age popoulation. By emphasising the importance of audiences, he sheds new light on the reasons for the shift from ideal of culture (as defined by Matthew Arnold) to such typical twentieth-century motifs as vocational education and public service.

This volume consists of ten essays, of which Kaestle is the sole author of three and coauthor of the remainder. In the first two chapters (part 1), Kaestle surveys the historiography of literacy and reading, a field that resembles a gigantic railroad station. Arriving on trains from various origination pointsancient, medieval, early-modern, and modern history-some historians have stayed in the station only long enough for a quick tour, during which they have expected to find answers to interpretive questions in their luggage. But others have found the station itself interesting. Forgetting the questions in their luggage, 'they discover new ones, prolong their visit, check into the local hotel, and even become permanent residents. Until the last few decades, most of the interpretive issues in the history of literacy and reading were drawn from European history, especially the earlymodern period. The Protestant Reformers of the sixteenth century had themselves insisted on a relationship between literacy and the Reformation, so it was natural for historians to pursue the issue and hardly surprising that they tossed the relationship between the Reformation and the commercial revolution of the sixteenth century into the interpretive pot. Many of the interpretive issues that generated interest in the history of literacy in Europe, however, seemed to be of only tangential concern to Americanists. Protestant, commercial, and seemingly literate, Puritan New England bore little apparent resemblance to early-modern Europe. Only in the late 1960s, when Kenneth Lockridge and others began to emphasize the premodernness of Puritan villagers, did literacy come on the colonialists' agenda; Lockridge himself followed his study of Puritan Dedham with an investigation of colonial literacy. More recently, Gordon Wood and others have investigated the diffusion of print culture in their effort to assess the radicalness of the American Revolution. As Kaestle makes clear in chapter 2, "The History of Readers," the field

During the last two decades scholars have thrashed out such issues relating to the history of aging as whether veneration and/or respect for the aged has declined and, if so, when and why. David Hackett Fischer, W. Andrew Achenbaum, and Carole Haber disagreed over whether colonial Americans attached respect to age as such or merely to the wealth and power held by the aged, but all agreed that critical changes occurred somewhere between the Revolution and the early 1900s.1 Fischer, who maintained that colonial society venerated the wisdom of the aged, found evidence of a revolution in age relations between 1770 and 1820 in the decline of the custom of seating in meeting houses by age, in the enactment of laws compelling the retirement of public officials, in changing styles of dress that flattered youth, and in the waning of the custom of naming children after grandparents. By the Age of Jackson the sobriquet "Old" had just become a way to cut statesmen down to size: Old Hickory, Old Rough and Ready. Achenbaum identified a similar focus on youth, but one that began in earnest only after 1865. In this respect, Achenbaum's study complemented the history of retirement by William Graebner, who identified a matrix of conditions in late-nineteenth-century capitalism that generated age discrimination: a competitive economic system preoccupied with high-speed machinery and alert workers to maximize production.2 For her part, Haber, who doubted that respect was ever attached to age as such, saw social, medical, and ultimately institutional segregation of the aged as the dominant developments of the period from roughly 1820 to 1920. The trend toward a more contracted spacing of children and fewer children gradually severed the ties between the elderly and their mature children; medical opinion in the late nineteenth century came to espouse the view that aging resulted from specific diseased conditions and required special treatment by experts; pension plans and heightened stress on efficiency eased the aged out of the workplace.

How did the challenge and the timetable of America's westward expansion affect American medical practice? What have the principles and obligations of American democracy brought to the character of American medicine? How have America's geography and climate, as well as its racial and economic diversity, led to differing outlooks on health and medicine? Medicine in America James Cassedy explores America's medical "distinctiveness" and follows medical and health-related matters from colonial times to the present. Through four chronological chapters, Cassedy focuses on broad aspects of the American medical scene: the work and ideas of the "orthodox" physician and the formation of America's medical establishment; non establishment health activities, including self-medication, therapeutic sects, and organized movements to promote nutrition and fitness; the health-related sciences, along with their institutions and accomplishments; governmental involvement in medical care, licensing, research, sanitation, and public health; and the varying "health environments" of rural, small town,urban, and transient populations. As he examines events in the context of political, social, economic, industrial, and other historical realities, Cassedy shows the rise of orthodox medicine in the United States through its increasing professionalization and the establishment of medical institutions. He follows the expanding role of government in the advancement and regulation of health care, and the explosion of public health problems that accompanied urbanization. He also explores how regional, racial, social, and economic differences determined access to healthcare. Medicine in America is a valuable introduction that links the history of medicine, health, and disease in the United States to the larger events in U.S. social history.

Sixty million Americans have relied at some point in their lives on osteopaths, chiropractors, folk or religious healers, naturopaths, homeopaths, and acupuncturists; millions more employ alternative psychological systems, unorthodox diet and fitness programs, and a range of self-help treatments. Yet until recently, most historians and social scientists of medicine have assumed that unorthodox movements were of comparatively minor significance in the study of medicine and society. In "Other Healers" Norman Gevitz and eight other authors explore the most significant alternatives to orthodox medicine to have gained a place in American society from the early 19th century to the present. Neither advocating nor debunking these alternatives, they explore phenomena that range from Thomsonism, the early botanical system that was progenitor of the first native American sects,to the faith-healing of contemporary pentecostals and charasmatics; from the Water Cure Movement, which provided important support for the efforts of early feminist reformers, to osteopathy, whose practitioners are now licensed to offer the same range of services as M.D.'s.

For over half a century academic psychologists have linked the concept of precocity to that of the intelligence quotient; to study precocious children has been to study "gifted" children, those marked by IQs of 140 or over.1 As a rule of thumb, the more recent the publication, the less will it reflect alarm or even curiosity about the dangers that face precocious children. In contrast, prior to 1930 most experts believed that precocious children were born losers. Lewis Terman's demonstration (Terman et al. 1926) that gifted children were physically healthier, socially better adjusted, and likelier to emerge as leaders than their less talented peers initially ran against the grain and only gradually gained acceptance. It was ironic that it fell to Terman to assail the customary association of precocity and early decay, for he had done his graduate work at Clark University, where President G. Stanley Hall had elevated the axiom "Early ripe, early rot" to a scientific doctrine. Child prodigies were in bad repute at Clark University, Terman wrote, "because of the prevailing belief that they were usually psychotic or otherwise abnormal and almost sure to burn themselves out quickly or to develop postadolescent stupidity" (1965, p. 10). On one level, this downgrading of precocity was an offshoot of the genetic psychology which Hall enthroned at Clark and which influenced H. H. Goddard (Ph.D., Clark, 1899) and Arnold Gesell (Ph.D., Clark, 1906). The implications of genetic psychology for intelligence, and indirectly for efforts to stimulate precocious development, were straightforward. Patterns of learning and behavior were thought to unfold more or less automatically as a function of mental development. Clark psychologists inclined to the view that intelligence was fixed or nearly so, a mere secretion of somatic cerebral structure. In addition, they thought that mental development was genetically determined. Goddard, who first brought the Binet-Simon intelligence scale to America, was an ardent hereditarian, and in his writings he gave mental testing a linkage to hereditarianism that endured beyond HalFs death in 1924 (Hunt 1961, pp. 11-14, 43-44, 65). Hence attempts to accelerate early intellectual development were doomed to failure because they infracted natural laws of growth. Yet on another level the animus of Hall 1 In practice, school systems often admitted children with IQs much lower than 140 to special programs for the gifted; see Goddard (1928, p. 49). ? 1978 by The University of Chicago. 0002-9602/79/8407-0006$02.28