Lawrence Cremin
The Herodotus of American Education. I see him leaving Teachers College on his way to meet John Dewey to eat Chinese food at the Old Shanghai Restaurant on 125th and Broadway.
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His scholarship has the breadth of scope and expansiveness. Education as intergenerational. A commonality it is not by chance he shares with Margaret Mead. He left us with an ecological way of looking at education. What Boyer called integrative scholarship; a holistic view for looking at ways that are comprehensive, relational and public. A model.
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Education must be looked at whole, across the entire life span, in all the situations and institutions it occurs. To be concerned solely with schools, given the world we live in, is to have a kind of fortress mentality in contending with a very fluid and dynamic situation....To think comprehensively about education we must consider...a wide variety of institutions that educate, not only schools and colleges, but libraries, museums, day-care centers, radio and television stations, offices, factories, and farms. (Public Education and the Education of the Public)
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He is a kind of cosmopolitan Herodotus, whose scholarship was the diligent work of documenting and explicating how we become human citizens. Son of Dewey.
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