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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... issues; it also time and again has deflected attention from their structural origins and from the difficult and uncomfortable responses they require. Through the history of welfare (or relief, as it used to be called), urban poverty ...
... issues—historical or policy related—raised by these excursions into the history of social policy and reform. Although, in part, this reflects my own limitations, at points the historical evidence compli- cates my own inclinations (as ...
... issue; it does not resolve it. Other tensions emerge from attempts to define the limits of local- ism. As a historian of bureaucracy, I know the stultifying impact that centralization exerted on public education. I have written of the ...
... issues always face a “last chapter” problem. Readers expect them to extract clear lessons from history, offer ... issue can lead in very different policy directions. How then should one conceptualize the role of the historian in ...
... issues and institutions far better than I ever will. I offer them no concrete suggestions. One reason is the limits of my expertise; equally important is my conviction that experts telling people what to do is part of the problem, that ...