Lawrence A. Cremin

Lawrence A. Cremin
Born	Lawrence Arthur Cremin (1925-10-31)October 31, 1925 Manhattan, New York
Died	New York City)
Alma mater	Columbia University City College of New York
Institutions	Teachers College, Columbia University
Main interests	American educational history

Lawrence Arthur "Larry" Cremin (October 31, 1925 in Manhattan, New York – September 4, 1990 in New York City) was an educational historian and administrator, the most influential American historian of education of the post-World War II era.

Biography

Cremin received his B.A. and M.A. from City College of New York, and his Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1949, after which he began teaching at the Teachers College, Columbia University in New York City. In 1961 he became the Frederick A. P. Barnard Professor of Education and a member of Columbia's history department, directing the Teachers College's Institute of Philosophy and Politics of Education in 1965-1974 before becoming the college's 7th president in 1974-1984, after which he returned to teaching and research.

At the Teachers College Cremin broadened the study of American educational history beyond the school-centered analysis dominant in the 1940s with a more comprehensive approach that examined other agencies and institutions that educated children, integrating the study of education with other historical subfields, and comparing education across international boundaries.

In 1985 while remaining on the Columbia and Teachers College faculties, he assumed the presidency of the Spencer Foundation, a Chicago-based educational research organization.

Cremin won the 1962 Bancroft Prize in American History for his book The Transformation of the School: Progressivism in American Education, 1876–1957 (1961), which described the anti-intellectual emphasis on non-academic subjects and non-authoritarian teaching methods that occurred as a result of mushrooming enrollment. He was awarded the 1981 Pulitzer Prize for History for American Education: The National Experience, 1783-1876 (1980).

In 1990 Cremin published Popular Education and Its Discontents before dying of a sudden heart attack.

Quotations

"When the Russians beat us into space, the public blamed the schools, not realizing that the only thing that had been proved was that their German scientists had gotten ahead of our German scientists."