After the 1966 mass shooting at the University of Texas at Austin, student counseling services at the University of Texas (UT) were redesigned around a framework of psychopathology that attempted to prevent future violence through speculative assessments of dangerousness, or the capacity to harm oneself or others. This article explores how UT’s leadership and Texas politicians marshaled the disciplines of psychiatry and psychology to restore a sense of safety on campus despite their inability to accurately assess threats of violence. As a result, updates to the counseling center led to an escalation of campus surveillance, increased pressures on students and faculty to conform to UT’s values, and a proliferation of guns in the hands of campus police. The cost of attempting to eliminate danger by expanding mental health care at UT was an environment of heightened security and control that had questionable impact on campus safety and student mental health.

This article examines the role of playing Indian in the development of progressive education in the U.S at the turn of the twentieth century. Experiential education provided an important incubator for a particular type of playing Indian, what I dub pedagogical playing Indian. The site of this analysis is the Laboratory School at the University of Chicago, overseen by John Dewey from 1896 to 1904. Here Indian play aligned linear historicism and genetic psychology with Dewey’s emerging experimental method. The central role of Indian play was epitomized by the school’s history curriculum, where instructors encouraged students to imagine themselves as an Indian tribe through use of a sand table. In an ironic historical twist, Estelle Reel, superintendent of Indian Schools, then introduced the sand table and other Deweyan insights into federal Indian schools. This entanglement, effaced by the innocence of play, complicates the legacy of Dewey’s educational innovations with the dispossessive logic of Indian schooling.

Drawing on a sample of seven students (three Black, four White) from schools in the North before the Civil War, this article examines how schooltime writing—compositions, letters, and diaries—helped young women navigate social expectations and assert intellectual agency. While Black and White students’ expressions reflected different positionalities, both critiqued confining ideals of domesticity. White students challenged assumptions that their futures lay only in the home as wives and mothers, while Black students reimagined their place in intellectual and civic life, articulating visions of liberation and belonging that confronted racism and sexism. Building on Saidiya Hartman’s framework of everyday negotiations of power and William Reddy’s concept of emotives, the article shows how affective writing worked as a subtle mode of social critique. In doing so, it contributes to scholarship on women’s education and the history of emotions.

This study analyzes 191 popular cultural artifacts referencing New Math and shows that broader cultural themes of the postwar era, including the urgent need and potential of technological progress, align with widespread beliefs about New Math. The analysis reveals that the public knew little about New Math and regarded it as a mysterious, powerful new technology that would empower the next generation. The study suggests that the public’s perceptions of New Math, and likely other educational reforms, were shaped in a social dialogue among producers and consumers of culture as much as by the content of those reforms.

Although many historians have explored the theoretical relationship between progressive education and the teaching of Black students in segregated schools during the interwar years, far less is known about what pedagogical progressivism looked like in Black schools, why Black teachers chose to adopt and implement these new methods, and how their methods and goals evolved over time. In this article, the authors trace the origins and development of pedagogically progressive experiments by Black educational leaders and classroom teachers. We argue that Black educators introduced progressive methods that fused academic and practical content not only to better engage their students with a relevant curriculum, but, more importantly, to protect the academic content from White educators’ pressure to focus the curriculum exclusively on manual training. This approach later expanded to include the development of democratic dispositions toward the fight for racial advancement.

Spain’s greatest modern philosopher, José Ortega y Gasset (1883-1955), wrote about many aspects of education including its aims; the education of children, nations, and elites; types of pedagogy; the reform of the university; and the challenges facing educators in an era of “triumphant plebeianism.” The article examines all aspects of Ortega’s educational thought, with a particular focus on his ideas about elites and their education, drawing on writings unavailable in English, including texts not published during his lifetime. At the heart of his writing is a vision of the qualities needed to enable individuals to make what he called a “project” out of their lives along with a powerful advocacy of the non-utilitarian and Socratic pedagogies that would help achieve that vision. The article looks at the balance of radical and conservative elements within Ortega’s educational thought and its relation to earlier “progressive” thinkers, and concludes with an evaluation of his legacy.