This chapter begins by examining America's civic crisis and the failure of civics in K-16, with remedies proposed including the national-consensus approach of the Educating for American Democracy 2021 study and the renewal efforts in higher education, including public university reforms that establish departments of Civic Thought and Leadership. It then turns to three sections: (a) Franklin’s warning and Lincoln’s: America’s crisis and our civics failure; (b) Rediscovering America’s reflective, discursive patriotism; and (c) American Hopefulness and Exemplars Sustaining the Republic (introducing Washington, Douglass, Lincoln, Stanton, Anthony, and King)

A national conference on Americanization in April 1918 evidenced how social and political concerns mattered in wartime. Many regarded the global war as an unhoped-for opportunity to patch up the American nation and bring together the various ethnic groups living in the United States. Across the United States, ethnic enclaves existed and hyphenated Americans oscillated between pledging allegiance to the Stars and Stripes and being loyal to their homelands. Assimilationists seized the opportunity to foster American ideals in children. They consistently rallied politicians in their crusade against the hyphen and eventually defeated progressive integrationalists.

As the war ended, politicians and educationalists saw the American Junior Red Cross as a means to promote American ideals abroad. Consequently, the American Junior Red Cross shifted its focus on a new form of Americanization, using children as part of a cultural diplomacy that positioned the United States as the global Good Samaritan. Children reached out around the globe, waged war against diseases, dedicated much of their spare time to rescue foreign "brothers" and "sisters," and sponsored children overseas.

Across the nation, children were urged to become “soldiers of the soil,” members of the United States School Garden Army, an initiative created in February 1918 by the US Bureau of Education to promote local gardening. Federal authorities urged local communities to feed themselves while the United States fed the Allies and other nations dependent on the US food supply. The more food civilians grew, the better the United States could feed the world. Children thus became part of a large pool of unpaid labor, serving the interests of both politicians and educationalists: as youth helped to increase food production, they learned skills and habits of self-reliance. Through the United States School Garden Army, children hooverized and learned to change their diet and eat with moderation. Gardening taught them the meaning of sacrifice.

In organizing a juvenile division of the American Red Cross – the so-called American Junior Red Cross – in September 1917, Woodrow Wilson attempted to mobilize the nation’s twenty-two million schoolchildren. Consequently, the American Junior Red Cross became the first federal youth-focused organization to be specifically dedicated to mobilizing American youth in wartime. In designing this first national youth-focused organization, Wilson impeded radical interventionists and quelled educationalists’ concerns. While directing children’s energy to altruistic humanitarian tasks, the organization opened schools to federal oversight of efforts to instill loyalty and deter dissent. Federal authorities attempted to control teachers and relied upon the educational structures to instill loyalty in the future generations of Americanyouth.

This chapter argues that the relationship between the online world and the classroom remains a contentious issue. Popular culture, and the increasing use of social media by young people and children has seen many traditionalists lament how our culture has declined, and worry about how educationally corrupted our schools have become. Its absence has been used to suggest that our schools are out of touch with their primary constituency – children and young people. The keen-eyed among you might note that this chapter is full of false binaries... perhaps this tells us something about the nature of the topic. This is not a simple issue to address; even the notion of ‘culture’ itself is subject to considerable disagreement. This is not even a simple chapter to write; the references will likely be outdated by the time I finish writing this sentence. So read on with a little grace, and a little humor.

This chapter unpacks the complex and changing relationship between gender and education. In order to accomplish this, it links each of the most common myths in the area with one of the three waves of feminism that characterised the twentieth century. As with the arguments surrounding social class, it will ultimately be suggested that explanations relying upon a master discourse – not ‘the economy’ again, but rather patriarchy, a unified system of male domination – are outdated. Similarly, it is argued that the view of gender as a binary of man/woman based on anatomy at birth has had its day.

There are all sorts of dilemmas when it comes to technology and education. How much should be allowed in schools? Do teachers have to worry about students’ data security and privacy? Is it ok for you to ask a computer to write your essay for you? Are we ruining the eyesight and attention spans of an entire generation thanks to excessive screen time? This chapter looks at the debates that exist when it comes to digital technology and education. It will be argued here that the interplay between technology and education is highly complex – and changing – at a pace that is almost unimaginable.

This chapter argues that the issue of ‘truth’ has played a foundational role, not only within the discipline of philosophy but also within many different aspects of Australian culture. However, there seems to be little agreement on what it really is, and while some philosophers contend that truth is a meaningless concept – a linguistic mirage – most would argue there’s something of importance there, but what is it? Even if we struggle to determine the real nature of truth – as we did with the real nature of right and wrong in Chapter 14 – at least we structure our culture, our knowledges and our school curricula around stuff we know to be unequivocally true … or do we? Arguably, many of the assumptions we make, often derived from five centuries of European colonialism, do not stand up to close scrutiny. They are often ‘truths’ that suit particular interests of the powerful, and subtly act to reinforce their worldview.

While debates may rage around issues of sexuality, sexual identity and sexuality-based rights, if we are to believe what we hear from some of our political leaders and sections of the media, concerns over sexuality itself are to be settled outside of schools. Sexuality, they would argue, is too mature, too controversial and quite simply a biological fact that has no relevance to schooling. However, there are disturbing stories and statistics that point to the significant challenges faced by students, and these surely warrant attention. With this in mind, this chapter examines some of the questions that often arise when talking about sexualities: Are gender and sexuality the same thing? Is sexuality ‘all about sex’? And what has school got to do with any of this? By unpacking some of the emergent literature in the field, the chapter suggests that dominant discourses around sexualities – in this case, heteronormativity – are up for challenge.

This book began with specific goals in mind. The first was to address the issue of mass education in ways that had something to offer a range of different readers. This book is not aimed specifically at undergraduates, any more than it is directed at practising teachers or university academics. Each chapter has been organised with a progressive layering of complexity and density, such that readers with differing levels of knowledge and expertise should still be able to get something out of it. This has not been written as a textbook, with bitesized pieces tailor-made for tutorial digestion. This book was put together for a range of reasons: it is a summary of the current state of play within Australian (and global) theories of education; it is a resource book for those interested in assessing the weight of different conceptual approaches to mass schooling; it is an analysis of various issues within contemporary society as they relate to education; it is a (relatively) gentle critique of reductionist analyses of our schooling institutions and their outcomes; and it is a call for us not to forget the value of philosophy within the broader play of the social sciences.

Chapter 1 opens with a discussion of the foundational importance of classical education in Roman society and politics, and how it served as a basis for both office-holding and elite Roman identity and self-fashioning. The chapter also provides a prosopographical sketch of the teachers and students that are visible in the historical record from the fourth to early sixth centuries in Gaul, showing that identifiable teachers and students begin to fade from the sources from the later-fifth and early-sixth centuries. It discusses the marked shift in the visibility of these individuals, the changing nature of our sources for education throughout the period, the limitations of our sources, and what we can learn from those limitations. The chapter argues that, while classical education largely disappears from the historical record by the early sixth century, this by no means indicates that classical education ceased to exist entirely. Rather, it shows that classical education was no longer a ‘public’ institution as it had been under the Roman empire, and that it did not occupy that specific place within politics, society, and culture that allowed it to be visible and take a prominent place in the technical and literary texts of the period.

The chapter opens with comments on autobiographical writings by Petrarch, Augustine, Uriel da Costa, Franciscus Junius, Ludvig Freiherr von Holberg, Jan Amos Komenský, and Leibniz. There are seen as attempts to make sense of one’s own life circumstances, while aware that absolute knowledge of one’s own life is not possible. This is particularly salient when it comes to understanding one’s sufferings. Following this, there is a discussion of the concepts of public and fatherland, comparing contemporary times to olden times, primarily Greek and Roman antiquity. The public is understood as a kind of collective moral and legal arbiter, and language plays an important role in its existence. This is seen to be particularly important for what is called a public of the Hebrews. The contemporary public is that of Christianity, but also of commerce, schools, and universities. A fatherland is explained in terms of familial bond to a community and a link in the chain of humanity. This is followed by a discussion of Machiavelli, Hugo Grotius, and Leibniz.

This chapter focuses on the practical aspects of education, such as the organisation and funding of the classical schools. It traces the status of classical education as a public institution in the late imperial period, during the transformations of the fifth century, and within the early barbarian successor kingdoms. The chapter begins by establishing the extent of direct involvement of the imperial government in education, arguing that cities and individuals had always played a far more important role in patronising and funding classical schools. It then considers opportunities for ‘graduates’ of classical schools in late and post-imperial Gaul, the crucial difference between literacy and literary education, and emphasises the important connection between classical education and structures of power that promote and demand literary training.

The introduction sets out the approaches, sources, and scope of the book. It acquaints the reader with the main features of classical education and places the book within the modern historiography.