Harvey J. Graff is a comparative social historian as well as a professor of English and History at Ohio State University. His writings on the history of literacy have been published in eight countries and he is acknowledged internationally for his contributions to urban studies and urban history. Some of his more notable works include two books entitled The Literacy Myth and Conflicting Paths: Growing Up in America.
Written in 1979, this book studies 19th century educators who supported the "literacy myth", as Graff calls it, which is the assumption that literacy translates to economic, social, and cultural success. Graff suggests that this myth views literacy as a necessity for success, and a means to an economic, social, or political end. His research contradicts this, suggesting “that connections between schooling and social mobility are not natural ones". He goes on to say that reality contradicts inborn assumptions correlating literacy and success.
''Conflicting Paths: Growing Up in America''
The assumption has been made by scholars and the general populace alike “that children have followed in the paths marked out for them by adults, and the possibility that they developed their own reactions and behavior in the course of their maturation has been ignored”. Basically, while social scientists are familiar with normative behavior, little is known about the actual behavior of children as they mature. Conflicting Paths looks at over five-hundred narratives dating from 1750 to 1920 to try and follow the actual process of growing up in America and, if it has, how it has changed over time as well as the effects of factors such as class, gender and ethnicity.
Published by Johns Hopkins University Press in 2015. According to the description provided in Google Books: "Interdisciplinarity — or the interrelationships among distinct fields, disciplines, or branches of knowledge in pursuit of new answers to pressing problems — is one of the most contested topics in higher education today. Some see it as a way to break down the silos of academic departments and foster creative interchange, while others view it as a destructive force that will diminish academic quality and destroy the university as we know it... Graff presents readers with the first comparative and critical history of interdisciplinary initiatives in the modern university. Arranged chronologically, the book tells the engaging story of how various academic fields both embraced and fought off efforts to share knowledge with other scholars. It is a story of myths, exaggerations, and misunderstandings, on all sides."
