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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... serving, intellectually inadequate, inequitable educational system. At the same time, I have praised the achievements of America's welfare state, despite its limits, as evidence of government's capacity to tackle major social problems ...
... or of the relations between education and society. My conviction as a historian is that all grand theories simplify and distort by imposing a false consistency on the past. Social institutions have served multiple, often 8 INTRODUCTION.
... served multiple, often contradictory purposes; coalitions with widely divergent interests and goals have sponsored reform and policy. The story of American social policy has identifiable themes and recurrent patterns. Still, like all ...
... served them. The story begins at the end of my undergraduate years with the almost accidental process through which I became a social historian. ·. ·. ·. ·. ·. IN 1961, I intended to study for a doctorate in American intellectual history. A ...
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