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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... poverty, was written for the centennial of the Henry Street Settlement in New York. I appreciate the honor conferred by the invitation to lecture at the centennial celebration of an institution with such a rich legacy. My work on poverty ...
... poverty to drink, laziness, and other forms of bad behavior, many nineteenth-century reformers tried to use public policy and philanthropy to improve the character of poor people rather than to attack the material sources of their ...
... poverty, and deemed to be more in need of improvement than cash. As a strategy, improving poor people consistently has awarded education a starring role. Of all options, education has shone as the preferred solution for social problems ...
... better reasons than sentiment or precedent. This book offers data useful for more realistic, less ideologically driven or nostalgic approaches to the public/private issue; it does not resolve it. Other tensions emerge from attempts to ...
... poverty as the undeserving poor to the underclass; the emergence of public education through the radical school reform movement now at work in Chicago. In each chapter, I consider the implications of the story for confronting major ...