Stories of the Eight Year Study

by Craig Kridel and Robert V. Bullough, Jr.
Albany: SUNY Press, 2007

With Adventurous Company invites readers to join the rich conversation about pedagogy that took place in the hard times of the Great Depression and the early years of World War II. Skillfully blending intellectual history with biographies of leaders in reform, Kridel and Bullough give a balanced and persuasive account of the aims and achievements of progressive pedagogy at that time. And issues they raise about collaboration in reform, belief in democracy, trust in teachers, and faith in inquiry have powerful echoes in policy debates today.
David B. Tyack, Stanford University

Stories of the Eight-Year Study: Re-examining Secondary Education in America
reviewed by Joseph Featherstone — January 16, 2007

Craig Kridel and Robert Bullough, Jr. have performed an important act of scholarly reclamation; the sort we inhabitants of the United States of Amnesia sorely need. Stories of the Eight-Year Study: Re-examining Secondary Education in America (SUNY Press, 2007) introduces one of the most fascinating and least appreciated educational experiments of the 20th century.  . . . The resulting project proved to be a burst of creative educational thought and practice. Kridel and Bullough have resurrected an extraordinary conversation on the part of gifted scholars and classroom practitioners. Rendering social and intellectual history in quick, deft strokes, they follow Emerson's dictum that all history is biography, telling the story through nine vivid short biographies of the educators who contributed the most to the Study, including well-known figures like Ralph Tyler, as well as lesser known, but important scholars like Harold Alberty, Boyd Bode, V.T. Thayer, and Eugene Smith, as well as a handful of colorful, fascinating classroom teachers, like Margaret Willis. The names of the young staff members of the Study read like a Who's Who of U.S. social thought in the mid-twentieth century: Tyler, Erik Erikson, Margaret Mead, Peter Blos, Ruth Benedict, Helen Lynd, and Benjamin Spock, among many others.