Public School and the Private Vision: A Search for America in Education and Literature »

Maxine Greene is the William F. Russell Professor in the Foundations of Education (emerita) at Teachers College, Columbia University. She lives in New York City. Herbert Kohl is the National Book Award-winning author of more than forty books. He lives in San Francisco.

Maxine Greene, one of the leading educational philosophers of the past fifty years, remains "an idol to thousands of educators," according to the New York Times. In The Public School and the Private Vision, first published in 1965 but out of print for many years, Greene traces the complex interplay of literature and public education from the 1830s to the 1960s—and now, in a new preface, to the present. With rare eloquence she affirms the values that lie at the root of public education and makes an impassioned call for decency in difficult times, once again a key theme in education circles. A new foreword by Herbert Kohl shows how the work resonates for contemporary teachers, students, and parents.

Series foreword   Herbert Kohl     ix
Foreword   Herbert Kohl     xi
Preface   Maxine Greene     xv
The Search Begins: Education, Literature, and the Dream     1
Enlightenment Ideals and "Common Men": From Jefferson to Mann     7
Transcendentalists, Utopians, and Reformers: The Challenge to "Establishment" and School     25
The "Balance Wheel" and the Public School Campaigns     44
Nathaniel Hawthorne's "Peep-Hole" View     57
The Classroom at Walden Pond     73
Masses, Melting-Pots, and Monitors: "Rote" Teaching and Lancastrian Schools     83
"...High Time to Go to Sea...": Melville's Vision of America     92
The Songs of Selfhood: En Masse and the Ideal     106
The Predicaments of Freedom: The Negro, the Farmer, and Huck Finn     120
The Child and the Dynamo: Schooling in a "Gilded Age"     137
"...Tomorrow We Will Run Faster..."     153
Bibliography     165