America's founding fathers seemed to agree: one of the best means to secure a virtuous new republic would be through the education of the upcoming generation. Even as faction gave way to party divisions, few disputed the importance of educational institutions. America's most promising youth would complete their training in citizenship and preparation for governmental leadership in college. The optimism of this vision for American schooling was perhaps best displayed in the prize-winning essay of University of Pennsylvania graduate and Jeffersonian newspaper editor Samuel Harrison Smith. In his anonymous 1797 essay for the American Philosophical Society, Smith identified the benefits of education for both the individual and society. The citizen would learn to protect liberty for himself and others: “(He) will be a free man in its truest sense. He will know his rights, and he will understand the rights of others.” If Americans could collectively concentrate on the science of government, they might achieve its perfection: “No circumstance could so rapidly promote the growth of this science as a universal illumination of mind. The minds of millions centering in one point could not fail to produce the sublimest discoveries.” In its perfected state, America would truly serve as a city upon the hill: “She would soon become a model for the nations of the earth.”

During the New Deal a new federal bureaucracy emerged as an important and problematic component in the history of policy making. The national emergency of the Depression began a sector-by-sector response to problems beyond the means of states or locales. This new role reversed a longstanding tradition of local initiative and state authority in democratic decision making, a tradition particularly cherished in the history of American public schools. Setting federal standards and procedures, particularly in areas where local leaders deemed it impolitic to act, produced consequences that some may have deemed necessary but which were not always predictable or desirable. By the 1960s politicians along the ideological spectrum recognized the political advantage of professional assessment and independent research into federal policy making. Particularly in education, so familiar yet so controversial, reliable and accurate knowledge would not only serve the needs of elected lawmakers; it would provide the legitimation for both the federal role and a new conception of enlightened citizenship.

In a now infamous visit to the city in 1987, Secretary of Education William Bennett declared “Chicago's public schools are the worst in the nation.” There was no objective means of verifying such a statement, of course, but the remark reflected the sentiments of many people in the greater Chicago area and across the country, particularly those who lived outside big cities. Indeed, as a measure of public opinion, Bennett's assessment might have been applied by many to any of the nation's large urban school systems. In Boston, Detroit, Los Angeles, Miami, New York, and nearly every other major city, public education was widely believed to be in a state of crisis—or at least besieged by very large problems. The big city schools just were not doing what they were supposed to do—provide the coming generation with the learning and skills necessary to cope with living and succeeding in a modern world. Or at least this was the perception fueled by comments such as Bennett's.

In 1864 the Regents of the University of the State of New York announced their intention to develop a system of competitive examinations for students at academies and high schools across the state. Aimed both at strengthening those institutions and at stimulating the ambitions of students, the exams would provide “positive evidence of actual merit” in learning and instruction. On the basis of the exams the Regents would then distribute state funds to institutions and award “promotions and honors” to students. Thus New York launched the first state-wide system of standardized examinations and performance-based credentials in the country.

Contrary to philosopher A.N. Whitehead's assertion that “the antithesis between a technical and a liberal education is fallacious,” a distinction between intellectual studies and the learning of manual and vocational skills has marked curricular discussions and structures at least since the ancient Greeks. Both Plato and Isocrates, although at odds in many ways, attacked the sophists' marketing of persuasive technique while venerating studies that cultivate the intellect, virtue, and contemplation of higher truth as the only learning befitting the free citizen with leisure. Similarly, Aristotle contrasted manual labor and related technical arts that “tend to deform the body… and degrade the mind” with liberal studies that prepare one for decision making and other civic duties. By the fifth century C.E., the seven liberal arts (grammar, rhetoric, dialectic, music, geometry, arithmetic, and astronomy) had emerged as the normative curricular expression of the classical liberal ideal—a course of study that would dominate the schooling of clerics and non-religious scholars for the next thousand years. Meanwhile, technical learning remained separate from the liberal arts and schools, yet the core of commercial and craft apprenticeships as well as a central component of chivalric education for medieval secular elites.

Historical study of the age-grade efficiency movement which took firm root in North America and the Antipodes during the early 1900s, in particular the preoccupation of education authorities with “the retardation problem” (the number of scholars over-aged for grade in consequence of their failure to make “normal” annual progress through the course of instruction), importantly contributes to understanding the age-grade homogeneity of modern elementary schools. The following account of mid-twentieth century developments in South Australia seeks to provide comparative insights into measures adopted to reduce retardation in the interests of preserving school order, enhancing pedagogical and bureaucratic “efficiency,” improving access to secondary courses, and alleviating the costs of “laggards” to the state.

During the past two decades scholars from North America, Europe, and Australia have significantly altered our understanding of the lives and work of women teachers. Qualitative data regarding this female workforce, including diaries, letters, and school records have yielded a fuller and richer portrait. Some quantitative work has supplemented this research, providing more information on the social class origins of teachers and their career trajectories. The typical teacher of the mid-nineteenth century was a young, unmarried, rural woman who stepped into one of the classrooms of the expanding public schools of the northeastern and midwestern United States. A quiet but significant revolution was taking place in the urban centers of the country during the nineteenth century, however, transforming whom taught and changing teaching into a career rather than a stopgap between family and marriage.

In 1890, William Sellers, leader of Philadelphia's mechanical community, signaled the end of the nineteenth-century system of workshop apprenticeship. Speaking before the Engineers’ Club he declared that “The crafts which once supplied the comforts and even the luxuries of life have been so divided and subdivided, that few masters of an art… could now find the occasion to practice it; the system of apprenticeship, which had theretofore provided a succession of skilled workmen, became impracticable with the vast army that required to be taught the special details of an art only.” The search for an alternative system started in the 1870s as owners of advanced machine works contemplated a horrifying world in which the city's youth roamed free without the steadying hand of an employer or grounding in vocational skills. In 1878 the Baldwin Locomotive Works, in association with the Spring Garden Institute, pioneered a new system of industrial training—a radical departure from nineteenth-century apprenticeship. Apprentices received instruction in the full range of manual skills from an experienced journeyman on the shop floor but, with the new system, training took place in the shop and classroom under the direct charge of the firm. Sociologist Harry Braverman suggested that the division of labor under industrial capitalism split the work of skilled mechanics by separating conception and execution of tasks. In the sphere of education, a parallel force led to the demise of apprenticeship and the triumph of industrial training. The classroom conquered the workshop.

The provision of universal primary education in nineteenth-century Europe is generally associated with processes of state building. In the wake of the French and Industrial Revolutions, compulsory school systems became important tools by which national governments could ensure political loyalty and encourage skills that would lead to economic growth and productivity. Nowhere is this more true than in France, where successive regimes from the Revolution to the Third Republic attempted to centralize educational resources and set national norms. By the early 1880s, when anticlerical Republicans achieved power, they made universal primary schooling central to their political objectives and identity, envisioning a well-regulated Republic in which schoolchildren learned patriotic and practical lessons from nationally trained, secular, schoolmasters and mistresses in newly built schoolhouses, preferably located next door to the Republican town hall.

In 1997, the last school for girls over the age of twelve in the Netherlands was forced to close. There was no protest, not even from feminists. Considerable attention, but little regret, was shown in the media. Similarly, some thirty years earlier the abolition of the Middelbare Meisjesschool (the MMS)—the Dutch secondary school for girls—had provoked no serious protest. This article offers an historical explanation for the absence of either protest or regret. In order to do so, we will have to go back to the formative years of the Dutch secondary educational system, around 1900. While neighboring countries preferred separate instruction, the Dutch seem to have been at ease with girls and boys together in one classroom relatively early.

Historians have tended to view the 1920s and 1930s as a bleak educational interlude before the catalyst of the Second World War and the radical 1944 Education Act. However, fierce and very public battles raged over the funding, facilities, and curriculum of state-aided schools and, indeed, over the ownership of many of them. These battles embraced every aspect of the nation's political, social, and religious life. This article contends that those decades were ones of complex, even dramatic, change with the inter-war period possessing its own dominant values and perceptions of how problems should be met and resolved. While some traditions were considered sacrosanct, others were cast aside. It was not a period of stagnation; indeed, to many the times bordered on the revolutionary.

Many of us who teach the history of American higher education likely experience an uncomfortable moment at the beginning of each collegiate term when we order for our classes a book first published in 1962: Frederick Rudolph's classic The American College and University: A History. Of course, we are somewhat heartened by choosing the 1990 republished version with its fine new introduction by John Thelin, as well as by requiring Lester Goodchild and Harold Wechsler's recently revised compendium of articles, The History of Higher Education. Nonetheless, choosing a textbook as old as Rudolph's for a basic overview of the field feels awkward to historians who are witnessing a surge of work in the history of American higher education.

Historians of United States education know well the business metaphors for schooling but not as well the military ones. A brief exploration of a contemporary educational term, the dropout, illustrates the complexities in linguistic genealogies of our school metaphors and the hazards of asserting a clear ancestry for specific educational tropes. David Angus, David Tyack and Elisabeth Hansot, Joseph Kett, Richard Altenbaugh (with David Engel and Don Martin), and Sherman Dorn have written of the rising and falling concerns about adolescent school-leaving over the past century. What has concerned this venture, in a minor way, is pinning down the first appearance of “dropout” (or similar phrases) in reference to schooling. The question of when dropping out became a recognized social problem was central to Dorn's research, but Altenbaugh et al., Stephen Lassonde, and Tyack and Hansot have also discussed the use of the word itself.

In 1991 historian F. Michael Perko offered a literature review, “Religious Higher Education in America: An Historiographic Survey,” that provided a solid analysis of the state of historical work on religion and higher education, as well a discussion of issues facing historians wishing to apply that lens to collegiate history. Perko was discouraged as he reviewed the field, noting “the present bleak state of the enterprise,” where many authors “failed consistently to situate their subjects within broad frames of reference, and have ignored, for the most part, the interpretive dimensions that give historical study purpose and life.” During the 1990s, however, there has been a minor explosion in solid, creative work on various historical aspects of religion and higher education that begins to provide interpretive depth and scope. This essay extends Perko's review by discussing recent developments in certain aspects of the history of religion and American higher education.

What we choose to read from the past matters enormously in how we assess history. Many of the most serious debates about the revolutionary and founding eras of the United States hinge on texts, and if some historians have revised their interpretations of American history it is in no small part due to the reevaluation of the relative importance of one set of writings against another. In the last three decades we have seen many texts move from background to foreground, from Bernard Bailyn's exhaustive study of revolutionary pamphlets which challenged the conventional wisdom that the revolution was an exclusively Lockean enterprise to Pauline Maier's recent look at the Declaration of Independence, situating that document in the context of the many, many declarations of independence put forward before July of 1776 and challenging prevailing assumptions about the intellectual influences on the colonies’ break with England. These endeavors reveal the human touch in historiography because it is always the decision of individual scholars to point our attention to recently discovered or newly reinterpreted texts.

This essay represents an effort within this larger historiographical conversation to examine how historians of higher education have addressed institutions, specifically, the public community college. With an institutional lens providing the focus, it examines current efforts in the field and speculates on directions scholarship appears to be taking. Even with an array of institutions before them, from research universities and comprehensive colleges to two-year schools and specialized institutions, historians of higher education have tended to use the research university as the means for understanding United States higher education in its institutional form. This essay asks, should we pare down historical analysis of higher education to one institutional type? What have we lost by focusing so narrowly on that level? Further, can we learn the nature of United States higher education in its institutional form by also considering the community college?