Download or read book Schooling for "good Rebels" written by Kenneth Teitelbaum and published by . This book was released on 1993 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the first two decades of this century, American socialists organized weekend schools for children to foster social justice, working-class consciousness and solidarity, and activism. Kenneth Teitelbaum explores the historical development, organization, institutional characteristics, and curricula of these alternative educational settings, particularly those in New York City, Rochester, and Milwaukee. In his discussion of this historic effort to contest the dominant messages of capitalist culture, the author highlights the political nature of school curriculum and relates the Socialist Sunday School project to current efforts to promote a more socially responsible curriculum. Through interviews with former students and teachers of the Socialist Sunday schools, as well as research into radical newspapers, archival papers, and other written materials of the period, Teitelbaum is able to provide the first detailed study of American socialist efforts in the area of childhood education. He presents the actual curricula used with children in radical school settings and discusses the various teaching methods that ranged from recitations of socialist catechisms to class discussions, stories, songs, and plays. It is estimated that more than 10,000 children, ages five to fourteen, attended approximately one hundred Socialist Sunday schools in sixty-four cities and towns throughout the United States between 1900 and 1920. In their attempt to combat the overly individualistic, competitive, nationalistic, militaristic, and anti-working-class themes that seemed to prevail in contemporary social institutions, the teachers of Socialist Sunday schools directly challenged the version of "reality"taught to children in public schools and underscored the political nature of schooling. Teitelbaum clarifies how particular values, beliefs, and meanings that have in large part been selected out of the public school curriculum were concretely addressed by radical educators at the beginning of this century, and he shows how this contestation of dominant ideologies relates to hotly debated educational issues today.