A major activity engaged in by educators between 1910 and 1918 which provides evidence of their increasing tendency to think and act in a business-like way was their action in handling the problems of retardation, elimination, and promotion. In this instance genuine educational problems did exist and they needed attention. But in the age of efficiency with an economy-minded public breathing down their necks some administrators dealt with these problems in a mechanical, financial way in order to defend themselves and demonstrate their efficiency. That the problems were perceived and treated in this manner was due largely to the way they had been presented and publicized by Leonard Ayres.

During the past 150 years England has been ruled largely by leaders who were educated in the English Public Schools. A knowledge of the dominant values and atmosphere of these élite schools is therefore an important clue to understanding the nature of English leadership, and hence the “tone” of English life. Vital to an understanding of the Public Schools is a knowledge of the methods by which their values have been inculcated and discipline maintained. The most distinctive single feature of these methods is the prefect-fagging system. A study of this system should therefore shed light upon some significant aspects of English history and society.

Jonathan Swift's plan of education in Book I of Gulliver's Travels is both a picture in little of Swift's temperament through the whole four books—analytic, commonsensical—and a brief chapter in the history of Renaissance education—an ideal coolly reexamined and reformed.

Among the several new religious orders founded during the sixteenth century, the Society of Jesus, from the viewpoint of education, was the most important. Ignatius of Loyola (1491–1556) arrived at the College of Montaigu of the University of Paris in 1528. He was thirty-six years old. His heroic resolve to further his education was the result of his spiritual conversion at Manresa in Spain in 1522. He desired an education, not to teach nor found schools, but to prepare for the priesthood. He continued at St. Barbara's in Paris his philosophy and arts course, with theology later at the Dominican Convent of St. James.

In The Revolution in Education Mortimer J. Adler and Milton Mayer devote some pages to the development of the modern concept of universal education. In this connection they make brief reference to the thought of J. J. Rousseau, in a passage which is so misleading that some comment is required.

The widely used reference work, Famous First Facts, states without qualification that “the first Bachelor of Music degree was granted June 7, 1876 by Boston University, Boston, Mass., to Charles Henry Morse,” and refers for authority for this statement to the Fourth Annual Report of Boston University.

Regardless of the ups and downs of modern civilization, we are reasonably certain of the continued existence of public education for the rest of this century. During the past one hundred years the public schools have developed into one of the basic institutions in western culture. This is true for the totalitarian nations as well as for those which still claim allegiance to the democratic way of life. The effect of the public school program can no longer be thought of as being individualistic in nature, for the public school is the major agency for the transmission of the cultural heritage and for maintaining social order, as well as for offering the individual opportunity in the struggle for existence. In short, education has become institutionalized.

In a noteworthy address delivered to the Fulton County, New York, Teachers' Institute in 1869, Miss Julia Colman, a temperance writer, stressed the need for school temperance instruction. During the next few years other spokesmen made similar appeals, and in 1873 the National Temperance Society officially advocated the introduction into public and private schools of a physiology textbook that would discuss the origin, nature, and effects upon the human system of alcohol. Between 1874 and 1878 the Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) actively attempted to further the scientific temperance campaign by creating numerous departments and committees of work. Not until Mrs. Mary Hanchett Hunt assumed leadership, however, did the campaign receive disciplined direction.