Lawrence A. Cremin

Lawrence A. Cremin
Born	Lawrence Arthur Cremin (1925-10-31)October 31, 1925 Manhattan, New York
Died	September 4, 1990(1990-09-04) (aged 64) New York City)
Alma mater	Columbia University City College of New York
Institutions	Teachers College, Columbia University
Main interests	American educational history

Lawrence Arthur "Larry" Cremin (October 31, 1925 in Manhattan, New York – September 4, 1990) in New York City was an educational historian and administrator.

Biography

Cremin received his B.A. and M.A. from City College of New York, and his Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1949, after which he began teaching at the Teachers College, Columbia University in New York City. In 1961 he became the Frederick A. P. Barnard Professor of Education and a member of Columbia's history department, directing the Teachers College's Institute of Philosophy and Politics of Education in 1965-1974 before becoming the college's 7th president in 1974-1984, after which he returned to teaching and research.

He was noted for trying to close the intellectual gap between Teacher's College as a trade school, and the university as a research center. At the Teachers College Cremin broadened the study of American educational history beyond the school-centered analysis dominant in the 1940s with a more comprehensive approach that examined other agencies and institutions that educated children, integrating the study of education with other historical subfields, and comparing education across international boundaries.

In 1985 while remaining on the Columbia and Teachers College faculties, he assumed the presidency of the Spencer Foundation, a Chicago-based educational research organization.

Cremin won the 1962 Bancroft Prize in American History for his book The Transformation of the School: Progressivism in American Education, 1876–1957 (1961), which described the anti-intellectual emphasis on non-academic subjects and non-authoritarian teaching methods that occurred as a result of mushrooming enrollment. He was awarded the 1981 Pulitzer Prize for History for American Education: The National Experience, 1783-1876 (1980).

In 1990 Cremin published Popular Education and Its Discontents before dying of a sudden heart attack.

Debates

The historiography of education turned bitter in the 1960s, as New Left radical historians denounced the history of American education as a failure when it came to promoting democracy and equality. Cremin avoided the debates, although in 1977 he did make clear his support for the traditional liberal interpretation. While admitting that occasionally educational institutions, being human, “have been guilty of their full share of evil, venality, and failure" he argued:

Contrary to the drift of a good deal of scholarly opinion during the past ten years, I happen to believe that on balance the American education system has contributed significantly to the advancement of liberty, equality, and fraternity, in that complementarity and tension that mark the relations among them in a free society....The aspirations of American education have been more noble than base, and that its performance over the past two centuries has been more liberating of a greater diversity of human energies and potentialities than has been the case in most other eras and in most other places.

Publications

• Transformation of the School: Progressivism in American Education, 1876-1957. Knopf. 1961. OCLC 175047.
• American Education: The National Experience, 1783-1876. Harper & Row. 1980.

Further reading

• Cohen, Sol. "Lawrence A. Cremin: Hostage To History," Historical Studies in Education (1998) 10#1-2 pp 180–204.
• Finn, Chester E. "Traditions of American Education, by Lawrence A. Cremin," Commentary June 1, 1977, review essay
• Parker, Franklin. "Lawrence Arthur Cremin (1925-90), US Educational Historian and President, Teachers College, Columbia University (1974-84): Contributions to Higher Education." (ERIC 1993). online
• Rury, John L. "Transformation in perspective: Lawrence Cremin's Transformation of the school." (1991): 67-76. in JSTOR

External links

• "Popular Education and Its Discontents", The Open Mind, 1990 – via Internet Archive (video of interview with Cremin)