Improving Poor People: The Welfare State, the "Underclass," and Urban Schools as HistoryPrinceton University Press, 02/04/1997 - 191 من الصفحات "There are places where history feels irrelevant, and America's inner cities are among them," acknowledges Michael Katz, in expressing the tensions between activism and scholarship. But this major historian of urban poverty realizes that the pain in these cities has its origins in the American past. To understand contemporary poverty, he looks particularly at an old attitude: because many nineteenth-century reformers traced extreme poverty to drink, laziness, and other forms of bad behavior, they tried to use public policy and philanthropy to improve the character of poor people, rather than to attack the structural causes of their misery. Showing how this misdiagnosis has afflicted today's welfare and educational systems, Katz draws on his own experiences to introduce each of four topics--the welfare state, the "underclass" debate, urban school reform, and the strategies of survival used by the urban poor. Uniquely informed by his personal involvement, each chapter also illustrates the interpretive power of history by focusing on a strand of social policy in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: social welfare from the poorhouse era through the New Deal, ideas about urban poverty from the undeserving poor to the "underclass," and the emergence of public education through the radical school reform movement now at work in Chicago. |
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The Welfare State, the "Underclass," and Urban Schools as History Michael B. Katz. Introduction. THERE ARE places where history feels irrelevant, and America's inner cities are among them. Those historians engaged with the problems of ...
... American education an extraordinary—indeed, impossible—load, which is one reason why with regularity since the third quarter of the nineteenth century critics have alleged the failure of public schools. As the history of education shows ...
... history of recent decades illustrates, these, too, form important strands of history, and, in this book, I try to ... American history, leaving them more social and political constructions than fixed spheres. However defined, their ...
... American history or an intensification of old patterns. Failure to appreciate the novelty of the current situation, I argue, has inhibited effective responses. Clearly, though, history has meaning for women and men on 7 INTRODUCTION.
... America today. The first three of this book's four chapters focus on the history of policy. They emphasize the protean definition of public and private, the influence of the structure of government on the development of social ...