Lawrence A. Cremin

Lawrence Arthur Cremin (October 31, 1925 – September 4, 1990) was an American educational historian and administrator.

Biography Cremin attended Townsend Harris High School in Queens, and then received his B.A. and M.A. from City College of New York. His Ph.D. is from Columbia University in 1949. He began teaching at the Teachers College, Columbia University in New York City. He married Charlotte Raup, the daughter of two other Columbia professors: educational psychologist Robert Bruce Raup of Teachers College, and economist Clara Eliot of Barnard College.

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.

Cremin was a member of both the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society.

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

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

Debates The historiography of education turned bitter in the 1960s, as New Left radical historians denounced the history of American education as a failure when it came to promoting democracy and equality. Cremin avoided the debates, although in 1977 he did make clear his support for the traditional liberal interpretation. While admitting that occasionally educational institutions, being human, “have been guilty of their full share of evil, venality, and failure" he argued: Contrary to the drift of a good deal of scholarly opinion during the past ten years, I happen to believe that on balance the American education system has contributed significantly to the advancement of liberty, equality, and fraternity, in that complementarity and tension that mark the relations among them in a free society....The aspirations of American education have been more noble than base, and that its performance over the past two centuries has been more liberating of a greater diversity of human energies and potentialities than has been the case in most other eras and in most other places.

Interviews

Does Going to School ‘Interrupt’ a Child’s Education? - The Open Mind - April 4, 1976 Teacher in America, Part I - The Open Mind - May 21, 1988 Teacher in America, Part II - The Open Mind - May 21, 1988 High Tech and Our 'Education President''' - The Open Mind - January 22, 1989 Popular Education and Its Discontents - The Open Mind - March 17, 1990

Publications The American Common School: An Historic Conception. New York: Bureau of Publications, Teachers College, Columbia University, 1951, OCLC 01330861

The Wonderful World of Ellwood Patterson Cubberley: An Essay On The Historiography of American Education. New York: Bureau of Publications, Teachers College, Columbia University, 1965. The Genius of American Education. University of Pittsburgh Press, 1965. LCCN 65–28146