Arthur Bestor

Who was Arthur Bestor?

Arthur Eugene Bestor, Jr. was a historian of the United States, and during the 1950s a noted critic of American public education.

Bestor was born in Chautauqua, New York, the eldest son of Arthur E. Bestor and Jeannette Lemon. Arthur E. Bestor [sr.] was the president of the Chautauqua Institution, an educational and religious community in western New York State.

Bestor was raised and educated in Chautauqua and New York City, where he attended the Horace Mann School. He received his undergraduate and graduate degrees from Yale University, where he received the John Addison Porter Prize.

His early research was on the history of 19th-century American utopian and communitarian experimental settlements. Bestor's study of New Harmony was published as Backwoods Utopias. In 1946, he received the prestigious Albert J. Beveridge Award of the American Historical Association for this work.

In the mid-1950s he became well known in educational circles as a critic of then common educational doctrines; Educational Wastelands was his manifesto about declining educational standards.