Sylvia Ashton-Warner's Teacher, published in 1963, fascinated educators and the American public with its view of the education of the Maoris, an aboriginal people in New Zealand.

Claude Brown's 1965 autobiography of his education in Harlem before its infestation with drugs, Manchild in the Promised Land, was an important document about life and learning in a black urban environment in the 1940s and 1950s.

The Process of Education by Jerome Bruner in 1960 helped redefine learning by arguing that intellectual activity is the same whether at the frontier of knowledge or in third grade; he claimed the difference is in degree, not in kind.

The decades-long argument about phonics versus sight reading was the subject of Jeanne Chall's landmark 1967 Harvard Educational Review essay, "Learning to Read," in which she reviews all the research and makes the case for a "code...