My title is taken from a poem, “Tanto viro locuturi,” by the renowned satirist, Walter of Châtillon, who flourished in the latter part of the twelfth century (his dates are circa 1135–1203), that is, just at the time when the first universities were being formed at Paris, at Bologna, and at Oxford. “Quid dant artes nisi luctum et laborem?” reads the complete line: What do the arts give other than trouble and toil? Walter's poem is the bitter lament of a poor scholar unable to find a job and questioning the value of his years of hard study, expense, and self-denial. It is a lament, of course, that echoes through the ages, that we hear no less frequently in our own universities than the contemporaries of Walter of Châtillon seem to have heard it when the institution was first coming into being. Nowhere, perhaps, is it truer than in the tradition-bound institution of the university that “plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.” There is one obvious difference between the lament of Walter's poor scholar and our own. His is addressed to the pope. We know the power and the purse strings controlling our careers lie elsewhere than Rome.

Friedrich Froebel, founder of the kindergarten, like other prophets was honored chiefly outside his own country. When the kindergarten, which had become a popular cause among the liberal reformers of 1848, was banned in Prussia in 1.851, kindergarten activist Bertha von Marenholtz-Bülow wrote, “We must seek to gain over foreign countries, so that we may open the way from them for the cause in Germany…. How sad that this is so, and that there is so little independence in our own country.” The foreign country to which this German idea was most successfully transplanted was the United States. After some initial hesitation, the public school authorities in most American states proved quite hospitable to the kindergarten, and by 1914 most American urban school systems had incorporated kindergarten classes on a public, though noncompulsory, basis. In the land of its origin, by contrast, the kindergarten had found far less acceptance. “A great disadvantage,” lamented Eleonore Heerwart, president of the German kindergarten teachers' organization in 1897, “is the isolation of the kindergarten; it gets little help from parents and no help at all from the schools, while in other countries its incorporation into the school has occurred quite naturally.” How can we explain the fact that the kindergarten, in theory and in practice, found greater support in America than in Germany?

Students at Hyde Park High School set up the Theta chapter of Gamma Sigma fraternity in May 1896. Within two years they had a “small but comfortable” chapter house near the school on Kimbark Avenue; within three they were publishing a monthly journal, The Index. By 1908, when the fraternity's thirty-ninth annual convention was held in Chicago, the Theta chapter was involved in a four-year-old legal battle with the Chicago Board of Education, which was trying to get fraternities and sororities out of the high schools.

This is a study of how Intelligence Quotient testing, which was always controversial, became a tool for one of the nation's most advanced and progressive school systems, the Los Angeles public schools. Rather than considering what advocates said about intelligence testing, this essay focuses on the actual testing in schools. It argues that teachers never completely accepted I.Q. tests as the unambiguous instruments their designers had claimed. Instead, teachers immediately detected the cultural biases in the tests, and administrators recognized that they did not provide the revolutionary, educational, or diagnostic tool that had been expected. This essay does not suggest that I.Q. testing played no role in “tracking.” What it does demonstrate is that the test generated far more confusion and frustration for teachers and administrators than historians have thought. Educators initially expected that the test would provide a clear-cut pattern for separating students by intelligence. When they discovered that the test was unreliable, many looked for alternatives. Ability grouping in Los Angeles public schools in the 1920s and early 1930s depended less on I.Q. testing than historians have led us to suppose.