Douglas M. Sloan

Douglas M. Sloan--for three decades a professor of history and education at Teachers College, Columbia University—is a curriculum theoristand author. He is a proponent of anthroposophy-based education.

His 1971 book The Scottish Enlightenment and the American College Ideal, which argued that American education owed its roots to influential Presbyterian Scots who never feared an educated populace unlike their counterparts in the Anglican church, was a contribution to a larger ongoing intellectual discussion about Scottish and American relations (e.g., Ian Charles Cargill Graham's 1956 Colonists from Scotland: Emigration to North America, 1707-1783 and Andrew Hook’s 1975 Scotland and America: A Study of Cultural Relations, 1750—1835). In the mid-1980s Sloan edited the collection of essays published as The Computer in Education: a Critical Perspective (Columbia University Press, 1985). His 1994 book Faith and Knowledge: Mainline Protestantism and American Higher Education focuses on the rise and fall of various mainline American Protestant churches' engagements with higher education, noting that this now almost forgotten and often overlooked theological renaissance—begun by evangelicals of neo-orthodoxy in the 1930s—would fully blossom in March 1953 with the launch of an essentially new journal The Christian Scholar. Its morph into the journal Soundings fifteen years later would signal the renaissance's abrupt end.