Robert Knapp

COMMUNITY OF LEARNING (ETC.) - is a very long title for a very tiny slice of the history of education in the United States. Beginning very broadly with the first inklings of public schools and education for all in early America, author Robert Knapp quickly gets down to business with his specific subject of the first Normal schools in Michigan, established for training teachers and issuing certificates to teach in rural, one-room schools. EMU was the first, but Central, Western and Northern soon followed. Knapp, a 1968 CMU alum, who later went on to a distinguished career in writing and teaching Greek and Roman history at UC Berkley, guides his readers through the development and lengthy life of the Teacher Training/Laboratory School at Central Michigan, as it evolved from a Normal school to a Teachers College to a College and University. Knapp worked on and off on this book for twenty years, mining the stacks of CMU's Clarke Historical Library and other sources, and conducting hundreds of interviews with surviving teachers, staff, administrators and students of the Lab School, which thrived from 1895 to 1970, educating literally thousands of K-8 students. Since Knapp himself was a student at the school in the 1950s (his father was a CMU prof), he combined many of his own memories with those of other former students, faculty, student teachers and others, and somehow managed to fold them all into the official history and university records to form a delightfully readable, often quite personal account of this important part of the history of teacher education in Michigan. The book is further enhanced by dozens of photographs, charts and other visuals placed throughout the narrative. There are pictures from Central that date back over the past hundred years and more. One particular picture, of the first Training School burning to the ground in January 1933, brought to mind stories my mother told. She was a freshman at Central that year,and watched the fire from her dorm window in Ronan Hall.

As a CMU alum myself (BA 1969 & MA 1970), I enjoyed the heck out of Knapp's book and will recommend it highly to other alumni. Bravo, Robert and thank you for writing it all down. CMU owes you.

- Tim Bazzett, author of the memoir, BOOKLOVER… (mais)

In this fascinating book, Professor Knapp weaves together “non-elite” sources such as inscriptions, papyri, fortune-telling manuals, and ancient novels and romances to create the “inner life” of invisible Romans. To the author, invisible Romans are the ones who do not appear in elite literary sources—the slaves, the working class, merchants, gladiators, etc. When these classes do appear in the literary evidence, the sources almost always are dismissive or derogatory. But what did the commoners in this hierarchical society actually think?

Professor Knapp begins by insisting that in a highly stratified society the deck was always stacked against the lower orders. Yet there were cracks that allowed people to move up or down within the non-elites. Slaves could become freedmen, tradesmen merchants. The army offered substantial pay and some social privileges to those who made it to retirement. Using funeral epitaphs, fortune-telling manuals and a variety of other sources, the author succeeds in illuminating the lives of lower class Romans and provincials.… (mais)

Robert Knapp focuses in this book on the non-elite, "invisible" Romans—the vast majority of the Roman population who lived and died without leaving much of a trace on the historical record. Knapp uses a variety of different records—inscriptions, graffiti, religious texts, literature—to reconstruct what daily life might have been like for the average Roman.

Some of these reconstructions are more useful than others—the use of texts on dream interpretations to tell us about regular people's concerns, their "mind worlds", is an inventive and rich use of these sources. However, there are some obvious problems with the ways in which Knapp uses his sources, often seeming to ignore the variations which time and geography inevitably produced across an area as large as the Roman Empire. In terms of the demands of agricultural subsistence living, comparisons may hold true across much of the Mediterranean at least—but cultural values? Sexual mores? Here the comparisons seem more nebulous. Still, a useful book on Roman social history that will find readers among a general audience, and which teachers will no doubt find useful to mine for case studies and sources.… (mais)