Jonathan Zimmerman

Innocents abroad : American teachers in the American century

* Acknowledgments * Introduction: Aboard the USS Thomas I. American Dilemmas * The American Method * he American Curriculum * Schooling for All? II. American Critiques * Teacher Professionalism and Its Critics * Church-State Relations * The Problem of Empire * Epilogue: American Teachers in a Global Age * Notes * Index

The Case for Contention: Teaching Controversial Issues in American Schools

room décor, he also notes the irony of teenagers’ increasing reliance on the ephemera of consumer culture — including pinups and posters, advertisements, pop and beer cans — used to supposedly express their own personal identity. Get Out of My Room! could benefit from a deeper examination of the relationship between the teen bedroom and notions of sexual development and sexual experience. As Marie Louise Adams has argued, domesticity was a key facet of Cold War containment, increasing adults’ desire to see adolescents develop what were described as normal heterosexual relationships.3 Educational films from the period — few of which are examined in Reid’s book — may have shed light on experts’ views on the bedroom’s role in the sexual maturation process. Also unaddressed is the question of sexual violence in teen bedrooms. Given the often-close relationship between victim and perpetrator in cases of rape and sexual abuse, it is worth asking how often these crimes were committed in teen bedrooms, and whether experts and families were concerned about them. Police and court records might be one way to explore the role of teen bedrooms in these tragic, but important, events. Nevertheless, Get Out of My Room! is a valuable addition to the history of childhood and youth because it clearly demonstrates the central role that autonomous teen bedrooms have played in American culture, child-rearing and family relations, development psychology, and residential architecture. Reid successfully argues that the teen bedroom has been both an intensely personal and intimate space, as well as the frontline for debates about children’s development, autonomy, and rights in American society.

Simplified Spelling and the Cult of Efficiency in the “Progressiv” Era

At the height of the Progressive Era, a small circle of scholars and educators launched a zealous but failed effort to reform American spelling. Bankrolled by Andrew Carnegie, the Simplified Spelling movement epitomized the eras much-chronicled passion for “efficiency”: By replacing words like through and although with thru and altho , the simplifiers said, citizens would save both time and money. Yet the rapid demise of the campaign also highlights the limits of Americas efficiency craze, even during its supposed heyday. Although some critics invoked the efficiency idiom against Simplified Spelling, questioning its utility and practicality, others denounced efficiency itself. Even if simplification made spelling more efficient, they said, Americans should retain their older forms in the name of higher values: beauty, habit, and tradition. Their rejection of Simplified Spelling stood as a standing rebuke to the gospel of efficiency, which never quite gained the full-throated worship that its high priests imagined.

The controversy over controversial issues

Avoiding the discussion of controversial topics in U.S. classrooms deprives students of an important part of their learning. Jonathan Zimmerman and Emily Robertson, authors of The Case for Contention: Teaching Controversial Issues in American Schools (University of Chicago Press, 2017) say Americans are terrible at having informed, reasonable debates in part because schools do not prepare students for such exchanges. Although our policies encourage or even require instruction about controversy, we do a poor job of preparing and supporting teachers to ensure that they can provide such instruction. Teachers need both the prestige to lead the discussion of controversial issues and the protection to do so consistently. In addition, Americans need more education about exactly what constitutes a controversy, which is itself a controversial issue.

The flight from cool: American men and romantic love in the 1950s

The article uses love letters to re-analyze current notions about men and romantic love in the 1950s. Examining advice literature as well as evidence from fiction and film, European and American historians generally describe the 1950s as an era of emotional “formalization” or suppression. A newly analyzed set of 300 love letters by over a dozen American men suggests a much more nuanced view. Some of their letters support scholarly accounts of “remasculinization” in the 1950s, displaying a hard-boiled, tough-guy quality to compensate for challenges to mens roles in the workplace and family. Other men, however, openly expressed their passions, fears, and other feelings. Since these letters were written to the authors mother, they also suggest new potentials and opportunities for “personal” research. Given the paucity of love correspondence in postwar archives, professional historians might find personal collections useful evidence to study the character and dilemmas of modern romance.