@article{Socialization:4865,
      recid = {4865},
      author = {Bauer, Lawrence},
      title = {Raising Small Citizens: Schooling and the Progressive  Political Socialization Project},
      publisher = {The University of Chicago},
      school = {Ph.D.},
      address = {2022-08},
      pages = {272},
      abstract = {This dissertation suggests an alternative way of thinking  about American public schools and school reform in the late  nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. While the  scholarship on schools and schooling in Progressive Era is  extensive, most studies approach the subject in the context  of concurrent social and cultural changes—focusing on the  role schools played in helping to assimilate immigrants and  discipline a growing population of industrial workers.  Themes such as nationalism, and Americanization figure  prominently in the historiography, which emphasizes the  state building that occurred in tandem with the  systematization of education on the United States and the  professionalization of the teaching profession. I examine a  different aspect of formal education by considering the  school environment—the classrooms, corridors, and  schoolyards where pupils spent their days—as sites of  political socialization. Focusing on the project of a small  coterie of political activists and good-government  reformers who hoped to revolutionize citizenship education  through civic role-play in schools, I describe the  emergence and spread of a student self-government movement,  examining the letters and published words of its leaders  and its supporters among progressives generally, written  accounts of teachers and principals who applied  self-government methods, and the testimonies of pupils  themselves, who wrote both about their experiences as  “citizens” in their schools and about what they learned  from those experiences. I argue that the theatrical  democratization of American classrooms in the Progressive  Era—a precursor to the student governments and student  councils that remain a part of the school scene  today—constituted an attempt by progressive civic reformers  to create an ideal public, one that was embedded with may  of the same problematic characteristics of the adult public  that sprang out of the Progressive Era.},
      url = {http://knowledge.uchicago.edu/record/4865},
      doi = {https://doi.org/10.6082/uchicago.4865},
}