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. |
من داخل الكتاب
... historians as of little use other than as entertainment. Instead of advancing social reform, do historians, in fact, distract attention from children killing each other, jobless men, homeless families, failing institutions, and ...
... historians remains striking the balance between persistence and discontinuity. Because some ideas, preoccupations, and responses do indeed run throughout the last two centuries, historians often overemphasize precedents, parallels, and ...
... historian of bureaucracy, I know the stultifying impact that centralization exerted on public education. I have written of the repeated failures of top-down educational reform efforts and ... Historians can convey both sides 6 INTRODUCTION.
... Historians can convey both sides of the story, as I have tried to do, but a clear resolution remains elusive. I offer no concrete solutions. Historians and other social scientists who offer interpretative accounts of social issues ...
... historian lies. It is to rebut presumptions of inevitability by rejecting the idea that present circumstances result from inexorable, irresistible forces, such as the logic of industrialization or modernization. Instead, if the history ...