Bending the Future to Their Will

Reviews / Votes

Bending the Future to their Will provides an invaluable account of a group of women educators who were deeply concerned with questions of democracy and citizenship. In recovering the lives of these women from historical obscurity, this collection not only restores these women to their rightful place, it challenges us to rethink the accepted history of democratic educational thought in the United States. -- Kathleen Weiler, Tufts University; author of Women Teaching for Change Historians of education and women, curriculum theorists, and social studies educators should read Bending the Future. We should heed the editors' advice to continue resurrecting educators lost to history and to continue asking what is left out of the social studies curriculum. As importantly, we should heed Hertzberg's recommendations that historians and social studies experts stop criticizing each other and start cooperating, discussing how to create a curriculum that effectively integrates these disciplines and teaches diversity without divisiveness. This book is a fine source to ignite that discussion. * History of Education Quarterly * This volume is an important contribution to the history of education for democracy in the United States. The book is also an important contribution to the history of women and the history of ideas in the United States by restoring these women to their roles as public intellectuals in an important debate on democracy. * The Annals Of Iowa * Thanks to Crocco and Davis, we have a significant set of new heroines for social education in the US. This is narrative women's history at its best, stories told with strong undercurrents of gender and feminist issues. Contributors' chapters are so compelling that the text reads as a page-turning series of all too brief mysteries. I found myself exclaiming over and over, I didn't know that! Indeed from the scholarship and activism of Salmon, Wright, Taba and others, the field of social studies is now re-written. -- Lynda Stone, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; editor of The Education Feminism Reader