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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... role. Of all options, education has shone as the preferred solution for social problems by compensating for inade- quate parenting, shaping values and attitudes, molding character, and imparting useful skills. Added to its other ...
... role of government. My work on the history of education has criticized government. Actions by state and local governments, I argue, created an excessively bureaucratic, remote, self-serving, intellectually inadequate, inequitable educa ...
... role is to analyze and explain the prob- lem; I have no special expertise in devising solutions—although hon- est, rarely satisfies. When historians tack on a set of conclusions, more often than not they appear utopian, banal, not very ...
... role of government and the sources of pov- erty that, over and over again throughout American history, have led to attempts to solve social problems by changing the behavior of poor people. Each chapter begins autobiographically, with a ...
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