Lawrence Arthur Cremin (October 31, 1925 – September 4, 1990) was an American educational historian and administrator.
[4][5] In 1985 while remaining on the Columbia faculties, he assumed the presidency of the Spencer Foundation, a Chicago-based educational research organization.
[1] Cremin won the 1962 Bancroft Prize in American History for his book The Transformation of the School: Progressivism in American Education, 1876–1957 (1961), which described the anti-intellectual emphasis on non-academic subjects and non-authoritarian teaching methods that occurred as a result of mushrooming enrollment.
Cremin avoided the debates, although in 1977 he did make clear his support for the traditional liberal interpretation.
While admitting that occasionally educational institutions, being human, “have been guilty of their full share of evil, venality, and failure" he argued: