cover image Schooling for All: Class, Race, and the Decline of the Democratic Ideal

Schooling for All: Class, Race, and the Decline of the Democratic Ideal

Ira Katznelson. Basic Books, $19.95 (258pp) ISBN 978-0-465-07233-0

A ""memorial to public education as the guardian of a democratic and egalitarian public culture in the United States,'' this book examines the history of class and education in terms of the changing, troubled relationship between public schooling and the American working class. The dwindling of equal access to education as a civil right is traced by Katznelson, a professor at the New School for Social Research in Manhattan, and Weir, a program coordinator at the University of Chicago. They focus on two major public school systems, Chicago and San Francisco. The case for the revival of democratic civic culture is extensively documented in this scholarly study with material from the earliest years of the republic to the troubled present. December 10