Upton Sinclair, famous for exposing social injustice, turns his investigative eye on education in The Goslings: A Study of the American Schools. In this muckraking work he argues that American schools were dominated and distorted by business interests, political pressure, and conformity, to the detriment of genuine learning and independent thought.
Written in Sinclair’s vigorous, polemical style, the book marshals examples and case studies to support its sweeping critique of the educational system. It belongs to a series in which Sinclair examined major institutions of American life. While unmistakably one-sided, it remains a provocative document of early twentieth-century reform thinking and a forceful challenge to complacency about the purposes and control of public schooling.