Looking Back and Thinking Forward: Reexaminations of Teaching and Schooling

This book is a forward-looking, rather than retrospective, collection of the influential writings of Lillian Weber. These essays - many of which are being published here for the first time - represent the mature thinking of a progressive educator who, after 20 years of teaching young children, initiated dramatic changes in the public schools of New York City. This important text reclaims the importance of teachers being seen - by themselves and by others - as intelligent, capable, central, and committed to children's growth; confronts the issue of equity for minority students and shows how it can be interpreted in the approach both to curriculum and to the school's role in the community; probes the meaning of educating all children and of what education should be in a democracy; looks at the school, teachers, parents, and community as elements of the ecology of the child's educative experience; and offers an original approach to the question of morality in education.

Lillian Weber (1917-1994) was Professor of Elementary Education at City College of New York.