ABSTRACT
From the time of the nation’s founding in the late eighteenth century to the present day, generations of U.S. teachers have organized group learning settings designed to cultivate the intellectual, moral, civic, and social capacities of their students. In the course of nearly two centuries, the schools within which these educators have worked have become ever more elaborate and complex institutions. They have served larger and more diverse educational publics, schooled greater numbers and more diverse types of students, engaged students for increasingly longer periods of time, and transmitted more complex and varied educational fare (Cremin, 1964, 1980; Cuban, 1993; Finkelstein, 1985, 1989b, 1991; Hamilton, 1980; Hogan, 1989, 1990, 1996). Within this evolving context, teachers have consistently acted as agents of communication, mediating between the symbolic world of informal conversation at home and the more structured one of books in schools. They have served as organizers of learning, linking text and student, deploying instructional paraphernalia, scheduling instructional time, and manipulating space. They have cultivated power relations among and between students by designating high and low achievers, competency levels, and intellectual hierarchies. They have acted as cultural mediators by broadcasting gender roles, privileging particular cultural habits, and defining relationships between families, schools, and society. Finally, they have functioned as purveyors of opportunity who help to shape the aspirations of students and mirror the possibilities of the marketplace.
