In my book, The Rise and Fall of an Urban School System, I argue that at key periods in history, the politics of education in Detroit either foreshadowed or directly paralleled developments in American politics writ large. During the early 1930s, for example, educational politics in Detroit fractured along lines that looked very much like what would become the national political realignment over the New Deal. Similarly, during the late 1940s and early 1950s, Detroit witnessed the formation of a liberal-labor-black coalition whose membership paralleled the larger civil rights movement in the nation. This coalition came to power in Detroit almost a decade before Lyndon Johnson's massive electoral triumph in 1964, and its successes and failures, particularly in the area of school desegregation, foreshadowed the rise and fall of liberalism in the latter part of the 1960s. Indeed, in the early 1960s, some political commentators who tracked school elections in Detroit and Michigan, had already identified conservative voting trends among the white working-class, trends that eventually produced the “Nixon-” and later “Reagan-Democrats.” Finally, the collapse of the liberal-labor-black coalition in Detroit in 1970 signaled what would be the larger crack-up of American liberalism, a collapse whose repercussions still reverberate in American politics today.

Eighteenth-century European writers showed a heightened awareness of childhood and children, expressed frequently in sentimental or romantic terms. Historian Hugh Cunningham lists key aspects of this sensitivity to children, which had its roots in the Renaissance and Reformation and emerged in the mid-nineteenth century's “ideology of childhood.” He includes: “a belief in the importance of early education; … a concern for the salvation of the child's soul; … a growing interest in the way children learn; and … a sense that children were messengers of God, and that childhood was therefore the best time of life.” An exemplar of this type of thinking was Nikolaus Ludwig, Count von Zinzendorf, the leader of the Moravian church in the eighteenth century. Emphasizing the child's connection to the divine and portraying childhood as a special stage of life, he wrote in 1739: “Children are little royal majesties. Baptism is their anointing, and from then on they should be treated as none other than a king by birth.” Zinzendorf wrote numerous religious works for children and about child-rearing, demonstrating a deep concern for early education.

It is only recently that the power of the drama as a living force in daily life has been appreciated. Not only is it an educational force along intellectual and spiritual lines, but it offers first hand to the individual, a vision of the possibilities of self development and self equipment for the positive business of everyday existence…. It is of great educational value to witness the acting of a good play, but to walk upon the stage, to speak to hushed audiences is to awake to a consciousness of power generally unsuspected within the self.