To kick off the 2023 History and Social Sciences Symposium, Dr. Daniel Moak, assistant professor of government at Connecticut College, will deliver the talk “The Pitfalls of Faith in Education: The Liberal Origins of Punitive Education Policies,” at 7 p.m. February 9, via Zoom. The lecture is co-sponsored by the Department of History and African American Studies.
Abstract:
Moak’s lecture tells the story of how liberals in the Great Society positioned education policy as both the root cause of—and potential solution to—a number of social problems including poverty, unemployment, and racial inequality. Moak explains how a vision of education as a panacea for society’s flaws led us to turn away from redistributive economic policies and down the path to market-based reforms, No Child Left Behind, mass school closures, teacher layoffs, and other policies that plague the public education system to this day.
Moak is an assistant professor of government at Connecticut College and was previously assistant professor of African American Studies at Ohio University. Moak’s work examines how social policy developments have shaped the incorporation of different groups, the scope of the broader social welfare state, the experience of citizenship, and the conceptualization of democracy in the United States. Moak’s book, From the New Deal to the War on Schools: Race, Inequality, and the Rise of the Punitive Education State was published in 2022 by the University of North Carolina Press. His work has appeared in a number of outlets, including the Journal of Policy History, Social Science Quarterly, and African American Political Thought: A Collected History.
Those interested can watch the lecture here.
