The influence of higher education on the history and development of eighteenth-century Colonial America greatly exceeded the small existing institutions and the relatively few scholars which they enrolled. When the American Revolution erupted in 1775, there were but nine scattered collegiate schools within the colonies, and only two of them had been in existence for over thirty-five years. Most of these colonial colleges operated under the restrictive limitations of poor plant facilities, inadequate libraries, little or no endowments, sectarian domination, an authoritarian discipline system and a curriculum which was largely a carry-over from sixteenth- or seventeenth-century Europe. By 1775 the combined enrollment of all these institutions was less than thirteen hundred students and their alumni totaled less than one percent of the entire population. Yet the importance of the end product of the higher educational system in the colonies far outweighed its limited quality or its few participating members. College-trained theologians generally dominated religious thought; their pervasive importance was apparent in the social, economic and intellectual circles of their respective colonies, and their influence in political affairs was illustrated by the fact that one third of the signers of the Declaration of Independence were graduates of a colonial college.

David Kinley, President of the University of Illinois from 1918 to 1930, was by nature, philosophy and inclination a conservative. He viewed the new and untried with marked suspicion, and he was equally distrustful of the gaudy, the common and the exuberant. Thus, his use of the new jazz age medium of radio to publicize his University seems somewhat ironic. In any case, Kinley rose to the height of his academic career in America's gaudiest, most exuberant decade—the Roaring Twenties. It was an age of frenzy and boredom; a period when a restless nation demanded to be entertained.

George F. Kneller is a capable philosopher, with a particular interest in the bearing of anthropology upon education. Both by training and personal inclination he is uncomfortable in the presence of untidy formulations and innvalid reasoning. It was most fitting, therefore, that he be invited to respond to R. Freeman Butts' paper, “Civilization-Building and the Modernization Process: A Framework for the Reinterpretation of the History of Educatoin” (H.E.Q., Summer 1967).

The traditional historian's view of eighteenth-century English education is that it was an era moribund in both educational ideas and practice. “It is a dark picture” in William Boyd's phrase; “a dull and barren record”; or in J. E. G. de Montmorency's term, “a century of educational sleep.” Studies of the dissenting academies and charity schools by Irene Parker and Herbert McLachlan and others, however, have suggested that there was at least some restlessness in the sleep. More recently Nicholas Hans in New Trends in Education in the Eighteenth Century maintains that the era was in fact the beginning of “modern” education in England: “Many of the ideas of the nineteenth and even the twentieth centuries, which at the time were declared to be radical innovations, were enunciated and practiced in the eighteenth century.” The private academy especially, Hans points out, was a seminal institution. The academy masters, he states, “… were able and efficient teachers who must be considered as pioneers of modern education.”

My interest in collecting old textbooks began about thirty years ago when I was teaching a late afternoon graduate course in the history of American education. One afternoon while discussing the Colonial Period, I mentioned the hornbook, the New England Primer, Dilworths' New Guide to the English Tongue and Websters' so-called Blueback. After class a county superintendent of schools, who was a member of the class, waited for me and asked if I would like to have some old school books. (My knowledge then of the above-mentioned books was merely from reading about them in a history of education textbook.) My reply was “yes.” Several weeks later he brought me an old copy of a Union Spelling Book. That aroused my interest in collecting other old textbooks. But where would I secure them?