A year ago, at this occasion, Clarence Karier closed his address with the observation that “our need today for a broader, more sophisticated educational history, comprehensively conceptualized on sound, structured ideas derived from free minds, playfully interacting with each other and the primary sources perhaps has never been greater, nor given today's social climate, more difficult to produce.” Nothing has happened during the past twelve months that would lead me to change this assessment. As before we stand in need of free minds; minds which are committed to comprehensiveness and rigor in their scholarly labors; minds which excel and delight in the play of intelligence with ideas and sources. As before, too, we are distraught by the indifference, even hostility, which our society, caught now in its own economic and moral crisis, manifests towards our concern for a more comprehensive, a more sophisticated understanding of our educational past; an understanding which, we hope, could be more adequate, more helpful for and in assessing our educational present.

In recent years scholars representing various academic disciplines have carried on government sponsored research to determine the impact of integration on black and white students. These scholars have produced such nationally influential and widely adopted studies as the first “Coleman Report.” Nevertheless, the research has made little reference to the history of integration and has therefore called into question whether such practices are best for every school system. Moreover, the studies have had broad foci, rarely concentrating on specific school grades or areas of student growth and development. Using the secondary schools of Chicago, both high schools and junior high schools, this essay will examine the historical integration-segregation dilemma from the passage of the first Illinois school law in 1825 to the solidification of the segregation era in the 1930s. It will also provide information on the structural impediments to black students' academic advancement as well as identify the forces which sought to establish a vocational caste system to limit the employment opportunities for these students.

In the modern history of West Malaysia, people from four of the world's major cultural traditions—Malay, Chinese, Indian, and British—have met, settled, clashed and sought to co-exist. Although the British who came as colonizers have now gone, the complex relationship between the formal educational system of the colonial era and the divisive pluralism of contemporary West Malaysian society continues to attract considerable academic and political attention. Recently published monographic studies on aspects of West Malaysian educational history have focused on the period following British “Intervention” in the Peninsular Malay States of Perak and Selangor in 1874, and one of these studies explicitly attributes the “seeds of separatism” in contemporary West Malaysian society to the educational policies implemented under British colonial auspices during the period between 1874 and 1940. Since this article is concerned with an earlier period than the recent monographic studies, it cannot be employed to test or disprove the arguments of these works. The article does, however, examine the origins of West Malaysia's cultural pluralism in the century prior to 1874 and portrays this pluralism as the consequence of a multiplicity of circumstances, not merely British educational policies.