A History of Education for the Many

A History of Education for the Many offers a window into the history of US education that challenges long held beliefs that the historical development of education reflects either the flourishing of democracy, or a ruling class project designed to reproduce structural inequalities. While it has more in common with texts that celebrate the agency of poor and oppressed people's efforts at challenging unjust educational policies, the book is unique in that it looks to the global balances of forces as the primary factor shaping the history of US education. In a country notorious for educating its people with an inability to see beyond its own borders A History of Education for the Many offers a timely corrective. Drawing on Marx's dialectic combined with W.E.B. Du Bois' challenge to 19th-century historians that dismissed the role of the enslaved in ending slavery and bringing forth all progressive reforms in the South, Curry Malott is thus able to demonstrate how the mighty agency of the worlds' poor and oppressed have forced the hand of US imperialists in not only foreign policy, but in domestic education policy. As US imperialism declines in the 21st century, Malott points optimistically and realistically toward a history of education for the many--