Editor's note: The essays below are the product of an exchange between two scholars who have studied the impact of the Dartmouth College case on American higher education. The first essay is by John S. Whitehead, professor of history at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks; the second by Jurgen Herbst, professor of history and educational policy studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

In the opening decades of the twentieth century, the idea of using schools to prepare young people for work blossomed into a major campaign to integrate the school more closely with the economy. Reformers across a wide spectrum of opinion became convinced that in place of the seemingly haphazard manner in which young people left school and drifted into the labor market the school should mediate between youth and the workplace, or as one proponent put it, “act as a transmitter between human supply and industrial demand.” It was the central task of the school, they argued, to train youth for jobs and to direct them into occupations that suited their talents and interests and matched the economic needs of their communities.

William Ballantyne Hodgson stands as a typical, but also a special Victorian. His unheralded but important essay, “Exaggerated Estimates of Reading and Writing as Means of Education,” also combines the typical with the special. It informs our understanding of nineteenth-century attitudes toward education, adding a complexity and a critical edge usually not accorded to reformers. It also reveals a special depth to that most Victorian of obsessions: the faith in the power and efficacy of schooling for the improvement of society and of the individual within it. The document, reprinted here, not only has a historical value which should be apparent to readers, but it may also be seen as speaking to concerned persons of the late twentieth century.