In 1917 a delegation of negroes went before the Board of Education in Atlanta, Georgia, to demand equal facilities for colored school children. This marked the beginning of the work in Atlanta of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. The youthful branch secretary who sparked this drive, Walter Francis White, called this “our first fight and our first victory and … we have only begun to fight.” Despite his enthusiasm, Atlanta moved at a glacial pace toward parity in the dual school systems.

Controversy over the issue of school segregation in the North is nearly as old as the history of American public education. Negroes have protested repeatedly against separate schools and classes, and on occasion in the past they even engaged in what would today be called direct action. In 1899 and again in 1905–1906 East Orange, New Jersey, was the scene of Negro protest against public school segregation. In the 1905 instance the colored citizens staged a boycott and established a counterpart of today's “freedom schools,” rather than permit their children to attend separate classes.

Historically, the status of the Negro has presented our nation with complex and challenging problems. Alexis de Tocqueville observed:

The Negroes may long remain slaves without complaining; but if they are once raised to the level of free men, they will soon revolt at being deprived of almost all their civil rights; and as they cannot become the equals of the whites, they will speedily show themselves as enemies.

“There is need for a shift of emphasis in the CCC. The whole concept should be that the CCC is an essential part of the American educational structure.” This statement by Clarence S. Marsh in May 1940 expressed one side of a significant controversy in American education during the 1930's and the early 1940's. The quarrel concerned the educational program of the Civilian Conservation Corps, a New Deal agency established to provide jobs for youths and to aid in efforts to preserve the natural resources of the nation. Opponents of Marsh feared by the late 1930's that the school program of the CCC was an attempt to achieve federal control over the schools in an indirect and deceptive manner.

The cutting edge of a popular drive for educational reform during the early years of the French Revolution was a demand for an abolition of the old royal academies. The attack upon such established institutions of learning grew out of their own backwardness, a new insistence on equality, and the revolutionary determination to put an end to the privileged corporations that were believed to have limited opportunity and discriminated against able men in the arts and sciences. As early as 1789, Louis David was leading a rebel group seeking to reform the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture from within. This institution held a monopoly in the arts and was cordially hated by struggling artists. Ultimately, in order to abolish it, David led his fight into the Jacobin clubs, the Paris Commune, and into the National Assembly itself.

The strange course taken by the fame of Johann Friedrich Herbart is a fascinating tale. At his death in 1841 he had few disciples and very little influence. Then, twenty years later, Ziller, largely through his book, Foundation for the Doctrine of Educative Instruction, revived interest in Herbart and made Herbartianism an international educational movement. As such it came to the United States about 1890 as Charles DeGarmo and the McMurry brothers made it into the best organized and most vocal educational force of the period. The National Herbart Society for the Scientific Study of Teaching was organized in 1895. Then five short years later the Herbart Society died, and after 1905 literature on Herbart or Herbartianism scarcely appeared in the United States. At present, to most educators Herbart is little more than a name, vaguely associated with catch-phrases like “the five steps” or the “apperceptive mass” or the “threshhold of consciousness.”