“Should women learn the alphabet?” asked a nineteenth century feminist, intending irony, and suggesting what we all know, that education can lead to unforeseen and unintended consequences, social and personal. If schools accomplished only their announced purposes, if pupils learned only what they came to learn, the work of the historian of education would be easier than it is.

Young women who left their parents and homes between 1837 and 1850 to enroll at Mary Lyon's Mount Holyoke Female Seminary were beginning to plan consciously for a new kind of life. Their social origins indicate that their decisions to attend Mount Holyoke were schemes to widen their life chances. Their diaries and letters revealed what planners they were; their calculations seemed a necessity.

Historians of nineteenth-century common school reform have noted that the feminization of teaching meant expanded professional opportunities for women, but within a limited social and economic context. Schoolmen like Horace Mann seized on the rhetoric of popularizers of sentimental womanhood and declared that teachers should consider themselves mothers away-from-home. Writers and reformers alike emphasized women's nurturing qualities — gentleness, patience, and kindness with young children — and glorified the function of female “moral influence” in the purification of home and nation. But despite this inflated rhetoric, women teachers received less pay than their male counterparts, and they were denied positions of administrative authority in local and state school systems. Based on both “morality” and financial “efficiency,” the argument for female teachers was a powerful one; by the late Nineteenth Century (earlier in New England), women dominated the common school teaching force.

The institutional setting in which formal education occurs is of interest both in terms of its potential effects upon the school population and its broader social implications. As the sociologist Robert Dreeben has argued, analyzing the structural properties of the modern American public school, What is Learned in School derives not only from the curriculum but also from the institutional setting in which the activity occurs. In structuring individuals' activities in regular ways, he has argued, the organizational properties of institutions are themselves educative, fostering an acceptance of norms congruent with the requirements of institutional life. These norms may then be applied to other life situations. Thus changes in the institutional setting in which an activity such as education occurs may both reflect and promote broader changes in behavioral norms and social values.

The importance of universal education to the emergence of today's world is obvious to anyone, but its history is often unknown. For example, the story of how large parts of modern society made the journey from widespread illiteracy to almost total literacy is a tale yet to be told. In this article a small beginning will be undertaken, based upon sources dealing with several small countries of Germany which espoused Luther's Reformation during the sixteenth century. This will uncover an unsuspected concern for the education of girls as well as of boys, and, incidentally, evidence which reveals that German history is distorted when it is studied exclusively under the aspect of the evolution of the Prussian state.