A compelling history of the learning style concept and how it was shaped by shifting ideas in psychology, anthropology, and education.The widely embraced notion that we all process information in one of three distinct modes—visual, auditory, or kinesthetic—has informed educational practices for decades. In recent years, however, numerous studies have questioned the effectiveness of aligning instruction with the alleged learning styles of individual students. So, wh...

A compelling history of the learning style concept and how it was shaped by shifting ideas in psychology, anthropology, and education.The widely embraced notion that we all process information in one of three distinct modes—visual, auditory, or kinesthetic—has informed educational practices for decades. In recent years, however, numerous studies have questioned the effectiveness of aligning instruction with the alleged learning styles of individual students. So, wh...

In the Shadow of Authoritarianism explores how American educators, in the wake of World War I, created a student-centered curriculum in response to authoritarian threats abroad. For most of the 20th century, American educators lived in the shadow of ideological, political, cultural, and existential threats (including Prussianism, propaganda, collectivism, dictatorship, totalitarianism, mind control, the space race, and moral relativity). To meet the perceived threat, the American ...

This penetrating historical study traces the rise and fall of the theory of recapitulation and its enduring influence on American education. Inherently ethnocentric and racist, the theory of recapitulation was pervasive in the social sciences at the turn of the 20th century when early progressive educators uncritically adopted its basic tenets. The theory pointed to the West as the developmental endpoint of history and depicted people of color as ontologically less developed than their whi...