If I may give a personal turn to Karl Jasper's cosmic phrase, the year 1959 marked an “axial year” in my thinking about the history of education. It was in that year that I came back to Teachers College from a period of educational service in India. I had taken leave from the teaching of the history of education to take part in one of the new technical assistance programs being launched by AID in key spots around the world. To put it briefly: I will never be the same. The axis of my academic interests and professional concerns had been basically altered. No one who has not lived, worked, and grappled with the staggering problems of a people seeking to become modern yet faced with the mountainous forces of tradition can fully know what I mean. This is not only a phenomenon historic in its present importance; it is a part of a long historical process.

History of any sort connotes, for me, searching, exploration, and increasingly complex designs. I think of what Henry James spoke of as a “fineness” of insight and perception, of what he described in Portrait of a Lady as expanded consciousness, the pursuit of a larger, “more plentiful” life. Isabel Archer in that novel is a kind of exemplary figure—one who “carried within herself a great fund of life”—whose “deepest enjoyment was to feel the continuity between her own soul and the agitations of the world. For this reason she was fond of seeing great crowds and large stretches of country, of reading about revolutions and wars, of looking at historical pictures—a class of efforts to which she had often committed the conscious solecism of forgiving them much bad painting for the sake of the subject….”

Education in Illinois followed the pattern of other states in the Northwest Territory from 1818 when statehood was granted. There was the usual school fund from the Ordinances of 1785 and 1787. Nathaniel Pope, the Illinois territorial delegate, managed to reserve three fifths of the revenues from the sale of public lands for school use. Nevertheless public support for education was almost nil in Illinois during the first struggling years of statehood and a very inadequate effort was made by private venture and charity schools. Yet in 1825 Illinois passed a bill that briefly put the State far in advance of others in the formation of a system of public schools.

In recent years scholars representing the various academic disciplines have taken over the task of curriculum revision. These committees of scholars have produced such nationally influential and widely adopted curriculum revisions as the School Mathematics Study Group's modern math and the Audio-Lingual foreign language revisions. Is it advisable to wrest the task of curricular revision away from committees composed of teachers in the local schools? Should the teacher be involved in the curriculum-making process? The historian of education can help to answer these questions by examining how the classroom teacher first acquired the responsibility for planning the curriculum. In what follows the school system of Denver is taken as an historical case study of teacher participation in curriculum revision.

General histories of the Progressive Era have by and large ignored educational reform even though it was an integral part of the Progressive Movement. Lawrence Cremin, who has done much to remedy this oversight, has described Progressivism in education as “a many-sided effort to use the schools to improve the lives of individuals.” To the Progressives, according to Cremin, this meant “broadening the program and the function of the school to include direct concern for health, vocation, and the quality of family and community life … applying in the classroom the pedagogical principles derived from new scientific research in psychology and the social sciences … [and] tailoring instruction more and more to the different kinds and classes of children who were being brought within the purview of the school.”