Harold Silver

This book analyses the parallel, different and related aspects of the discovery of poverty in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and the role of education in the American 'war on poverty' from 1964, and in Britain from the appointment of the Plowden committee on primary schools. It examines changes in policy emphases, the relationship between research and policy, and the transatlantic interactions and silences involved. Based on archival and interview material the book offers new insights into the role of the Plowden committee in shifting attention from social class to poverty, and it discusses in both the American and British contexts the concepts and theories involved in the changing fortunes of the educational war on poverty in the 1960s and 1970s. An Educational War on Poverty represents a major contribution to the study of the recent social and educational history of Britain and the United States, and the range and depth of research, will make it an essential reference source for scholars and policy-makers on both sides of the Atlantic.

Aims to rescue a usable interpretation of the vocational theory in higher education by describing the historical and policy frameworks of the debate.

Robert Owen was one of the most extraordinary Englishmen who ever lived and a great man. In a way his history is the history of the establishment of modern industrial Britain, reflected in the mind and activities of a very intelligent, capable and responsible industrialist, alive to the best social thought of his time. The organisation of industrial labour, factory legislation, education, trade unionism, co-operation, rationalism: he was passionately and ably engaged in all of them. His community at New Lanark was the nearest thing to an industrial heaven in the Britain of dark satanic mills; he tried to found a rational co-operative community in the USA. In everything he contemplated, he saw education as a key. This selection of his writings on education illustrates his rationalist concept of the formation of character and its implications for education and society; also his growing utopian concern with social reorganisation; and third, his impact on social movements. Silver's introduction shows Owen's relationship to particular educational traditions and activities and his long-term influence on attitudes to education.