The purpose of this paper is to trace some of the educational developments in British India which later shaped the thinking of educators in Pakistan and to discuss the educational aspirations of Pakistan within the broader context of Pakistan society. The first section contains a description of some educational reform plans prepared in pre-independence India. The second section deals with the circumstances of the partition of the Indo-Pakistan sub-continent from the standpoint of Pakistan and with the political and economic conditions which appeared to influence educational reforms in Pakistan. In the final section, some salient recommendations for educational advancement in Pakistan are examined and it is noted that the government of Pakistan has conceived of its schools as instruments for the reconstruction of Pakistani society.

An unpublished ninth-century document which has apparently survived in a single copy has pertinence for historians of education as a prototype of licensing examinations. The document reports the results of an oral examination administered in the empire of Charles the Great in A.D. 809. Although a number of textbooks, some in catechistic form, have survived from the period of the Carolingian revival of learning, I know nothing else of this kind. For all save the few historians of early medieval mathematics, it needs a brief historical and technical introduction.

It is sometimes helpful, in this age of mass education with its attendant anxiety over and concern for any and all pedagogical techniques that will aid the learning process, to remember that no age has been without such concern nor without teachers who have attempted to solve such problems. There were a number of teachers in the early middle ages who realized that students and teachers alike could profit from advice in such matters and who accordingly devoted themselves to assisting either students to learn or teachers to present subject matter in such a way that students could profit accordingly. Two such individuals were Augustine of Hippo and Hugo of St. Victor who, though separated from his predecessor and objet d'admiration by at least 700 years, nevertheless followed him to such a degree that he was known as the “alter Augustinus.”

The education of southern Negroes during the Civil War period should be a significant part of the history of education in the United States. Unfortunately little has been written on that topic despite the existence of voluminous manuscripts and documents. Beyond a narrow circle of Negro scholars, even the name of Mary S. Peake is unfamiliar. Mary S. Peake is significant because she was the first day school teacher during this period. Her school, however, was not the only one of its kind from the beginning. On September 24, 1861, Lewis C. Lockwood, the sponsor of Peake's school, sponsored a similar school at Fortress Monroe under the instruction of another free Negro woman, Mrs. Bailey, assisted by Miss Jennings with James, a bright boy as monitor. About Mrs. Bailey and her school, little was known except that Union Premier was used and a Rev. Palmer Litts sent by the American Missionary Association eventually replaced her. Lockwood also established a “private” school for adults and children at Hygeia Hospital instructed by a crippled Negro. Between his own arrival on September 4, 1861 at Fortress Monroe and the end of the year, Lockwood had established at least three day schools between Fortress Monroe and Hampton. In this beginning effort, by circumstances or by choice, Lockwood relied on local resources to launch an inconspicuous but significant educational movement.

The publication of Lawrence Cremin's The Transformation of the School, which is subtitled Progressivism in American Education, 1876–1957, was a noteworthy occasion for students of American culture in general and of American education in particular. This volume marked the conclusion of the first thoroughgoing attempt to study progressivism in American education. Such an attempt is welcomed by those who have long hoped to see a work which considers progressive education as a significant contribution to American thought and character, rather than as an anti-intellectual and irresponsible hocus-pocus, as many of its detractors and caricaturists would have us believe. For those who would read history instead of the over-simplified and often downright irresponsible caricatures and detractions of progressive education, there is in Cremin's study ample evidence to demonstrate that “the word progressive provides the clue to what it was: the educational phase of American Progressivism writ large.”