The most notorious controversy in the history of woman's education began modestly, virtually in private, on a December afternoon in 1872. The occasion was the regular monthly meeting of the New England Woman's Club, a group that numbered Julia Ward Howe and Lucy Stone among its members and that, like them, was inclined toward literate discourse, genteel reform, and the moderate wing of the woman's rights movement. The precipitatingincident was a guest lecture given by Edward Hammond Clarke, a prominent Boston physician. The ultimate result was debate so bitter that years later G. Stanley Hall referred to it as a “holy war.”

Addressing the Atlanta Board of Education at its January 1898 meeting, Superintendent William F. Slaton called for the adoption of a regulation to “prevent children of dull minds and weak intellects from remaining 3 or 4 years in the same grade.” Their presence, Slaton stated, was leading “to the annoyance of the teacher and detriment of the grade.” This call to deal with low achieving students was not the only recommendation to alter existing school policies and programs that the city's Board of Education heard that year or the next. In his annual reports for both 1898 and 1899, Slaton called on the Board of Education to introduce vocational education into Atlanta's course of study to meet the needs of high school students who, as he put it, “are bread-winners early in life and subsequently heads of families.” And during May 1899, the Board of Education received proposals urging it to introduce physical education into the curriculum and to establish kindergarten classes in several of the city's schools. Here were the first stirrings of Progressive educational reform, which would lead in Atlanta, as in other urban school systems, to a differentiated program, including vocational education and guidance, kindergartens, junior high schools, and special classes for handicapped children.

In May 1930, at the peak of his public campaign to discredit federal Indian policy, John Collier charged that widespread brutality existed at government boarding schools. As executive secretary of the American Indian Defense Association, Collier persuaded the U.S. Senate to investigate charges of flogging and other forms of excessive punishment. At the center of the controversy stood the Phoenix Indian School, its administration accused of crass brutality, whippings, beatings, and even death—a prime example of what seemed to be wrong with federal Indian policy in the United States. As sensational as this case became for a brief time in 1930, it was primarily a politically staged event that Collier sought to use to his own advantage in bringing down the current administration of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. An examination of this incident reveals the nature of Collier's feud with old guard government employees and how the inflammatory issue of corporal punishment became a key tool in discrediting government Indian schools. The 1930 controversy over flogging provides an excellent case study in the dynamics of the Collier-led reform movement's challenge to the old order.