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.”

An unpublished ninth-century document which has apparently survived in a single copy has pertinence for historians of education as a prototype of licensing examinations.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.

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.

In a recent publication of Columbia Teachers College's Institute of Higher Education, Earl J. McGrath charges that graduate education “has had a direct and profound, and on balance a harmful, effect on liberal education and the institutions society believes it has established to provide such education.” That the emerging graduate schools did exert a direct and profound effect on the American undergraduate college of the late nineteenth century, nobody will deny. That the effect has been “on balance” harmful, I believe, is open to questions.

The most interesting problem faced by the Spanish conquerors in the early years of Mexico was the cultural assimilation of the native population. Although from the very first the Spanish policy was to bring the Indian into the new social order, his status in this society was undoubtedly contingent on the amount of his assimilation. Thus the Indian stood as one of the most controversial puzzles. What were his mental capacities? Would he be able to absorb the new culture? These questions and many others about the natives arose as one of the greatest challenges in the colonization of Mexico.

The death of Abraham Flexner on September 21, 1959 at the age of ninety-three ended a remarkable career. Here was an educational researcher and later a foundation executive who made significant contributions to American education. His report in 1910 of medical schools in the United States and Canada had a phenomenal result. It practically remade medical education and helped it achieve the respected status it now enjoys. How did he do it?

Probably the first published directory of American colleges is found in the issue of the Connecticut Journal, a five-column weekly newspaper, for July 29, 1817. This periodical was published at New Haven for fifty-three years from 1767 to 1820. The list gives brief information concerning thirty-nine colleges in seventeen states and the District of Columbia. It occupies two-thirds of a 2 1/2-inch column on the first page of the Journal. It is reproduced on the next page with original spelling, capitalization, and punctuation.

Historically speaking, the idea of university autonomy has existed since the Fourth Century A.D. when St. Augustine taught in Carthage. Throughout this long span of time, encompassing some 1500 years, the most consistent characteristic of autonomy has been its mutability. The basic reason for this propensity to change has been the constant onslaught of redefinitions which have been superimposed upon it by a continuous flow of political and social innovation. In his confessions, Augustine noted that students were allowed to rush insolently about at random into a classroom of a teacher with whom they were not enrolled. He commented further on the foul, unrestrained license among students and then stated, “They break in boldly and, looking almost like madmen, they disrupt whatever order a teacher has established for his students' benefit. Augustine condemned them the more because they thought they acted with impunity, and he stated that their recklessness and injurious acts would have been punished by law, except that they had custom as their patron. Augustine felt that the students hurt themselves far greater than they did others by this form of irresponsibility; however, his greatest complaint was that as a teacher he was forced to suffer manners he did not wish for himself when he was a student. Primarily as a result of this abuse, Augustine decided to take a teaching position in Rome where he “had heard that young men studied in a more peaceful way and were kept quiet by the restraints of a better order and discipline.” This comment was footnoted to the effect that in Rome there were laws governing students; however, he failed to elaborate as to their exact nature.

A great deal is being said and written about the importance and significance to contemporary society of liberally educated people. But few pause to define the term “liberal education” or “liberal arts.” Implicit in the words of their advocates is the assumption that people are generally agreed as to the content which the terms comprehend, and that this content is much the same now as it has been in the past. Historically this supposition is inaccurate; nor does it correctly picture the current temper of thought. The liberal arts curriculum and its product the liberally educated man, changed, albeit more slowly, as society changed. As we shall see, they represented something quite different in past ages, or even a century ago, from that with which they are invested by varying current opinions.

The England of 1880–1902 saw the final flowering of Imperialism and the beginnings of its collapse in the South African War of 1899. It was a period of tremendous optimism, when society as a whole appeared prosperous and ebullient, but in which social injustice and rank poverty were widespread. The Education Act of 1870, the democratization of government made possible by the enlargement of the franchise, the coming of the popular press, and the reorganization of local government were the pointers to a new conception of the Great Society (as one of Graham Wallas's books was entitled). The searching analysis of social organization made in the 1840's by Marx and Engels, combined with the liberal ideals inherited from the French Revolution and the American War of Independence, took a more kindly and acceptable form in the intense yet essentially gentle collectivist doctrines of post-Utilitarianism, Fabian Socialism, and organized Labor—movements in which John Stuart Mill, Sidney Webb, H. G. Wells, Graham Wallas, and Keir Hardie were prominent. A. V. Dicey, in his great book on the origins of the British welfare state, underlines the fact that essential reforms were made possible by the climate of opinion, especially after 1870: education was able to ride high on the tide of these reforms.