On Volume IV. This issue completes Volume IV of the Quarterly. Thanks to the support of our subscribers, the Society, and the University of Pittsburgh, the Quarterly has taken solid roots as a scholarly publication. The bibliography for Dr. Paul Nash's summation of recent research in the history of education (Review of Educational Research, February, 1964) gives evidence that the Quarterly has become the leading outlet for publication in this field.

For some time I have believed we owed it to ourselves to have a more rational discussion of the role of Dewey's thought in American education. His thinking is too firmly embedded in our tradition for us to profit from attempts to hide his works with a shroud, or to exorcise his spirit with clichés. This is as foolish as reiterating his words endlessly as if on a Tibetan prayer wheel.

William Cobbett has been called “the spokesman of the common people” of England in the early nineteenth century. It was Cobbett who was the most important advocate of the cause of the worker on the land and in the factory during a time when conditions in England were changing more rapidly than ever before. The principal reason for this change was the new means of production, which was transforming the country into the first industrial state. Yet, while profound alterations were taking place in the economy of the nation, political and social organization were slow to respond. England, which was outstripping the rest of the world in the production of goods, was governed in almost the same fashion as it had been 100 years before when it had had a self-sufficient agricultural economy. This situation, plus the manifold effects of the wars against France, meant suffering for the most defenseless part of the population. It was this suffering which roused Cobbett to fury and led him to dedicate his powerful pen to the restoration of the materially abundant and socially tranquil conditions which he believed to have existed in his youth. It is within this policy of advocating a return to an England which was simpler and purer that we must consider his views on education.

Earliest efforts to provide some form of federal aid to education can be traced to the days of the Northwest Ordinance of 1785. The century following provided many precedents in legislation and judicial interpretation and witnessed the long heritage of interest by various groups in such proposals. Gordon Lee has carefully examined this background and has analyzed the first major efforts to obtain federal aid for the schools during the years 1870–1890. During the twentieth century there has been a continuous and increasing interest in proposals for federal aid to elementary and secondary schools. More than a dozen bills have received serious consideration by Congress between 1900 and 1945 and since then federal aid bills have been introduced regularly in every session. Congress, however, has failed to pass any of them.

The history of education is that branch of history which deals with the development of thought, practice, matériel, personnel, administration, and organization and other aspects and problems of schools and other agencies of society, such as religious organizations, which instruct the young and the mature. A more narrow and more functional interpretation of this term is the development of all matter pertaining to instruction in the family and in the school. This does not mean that the accounts of the history of educational institutions or ideas can ignore the other phases of society. Since there is an interaction and interrelationship between the school and the rest of society, the educational historian must take this fact into consideration when he constructs and presents his narrative. It is not accurate or safe to write about education without reference to the wider social and cultural context of which it is a part.

At the 25th Anniversary of Western Colleges held at Pomona College in Claremont, California, on March 25, 1949, Dr. Robert Glass Cleland asked Ernest Moore who he thought were the leading educators in California's past. Moore replied that he would not hesitate to head the list with “John Swett, the maker of the California School System….”

It is not, of course, for his work as a teacher in the Academy that Plato is remembered most in the history of education but rather for his Utopian plan for education, a plan which had a profound influence on the education of antiquity. This may explain why so little is known of the internal functioning of this famous school.

In recalling the name of Malthus at this time, as we approach the bicentennial of his birth, it is well to remind ourselves that this eminent thinker has won a place of honor for himself in demography, economics, and sociology; perhaps also in biology, remembering the testimony of Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace, regarding the way in which a reading of the Essay on the Principle of Population, helped to bring about the statement of the theory of natural selection. But rarely, if ever, does one think of Malthus as a contributor of significant ideas on the theme of education. Even the specialist does not point to him for enlightening concepts on educational purpose, policy, or content.

Textbooks have always held a peculiarly important position in public schools in the United States, hence their selection has been significant. In the early days of the Republic and long afterward the quality of the textbook was more likely to effect education of high quality than any other factor, including the often poorly educated teacher. The first part of this essay deals with the struggle in Florida for uniformity of textbooks, the second with the fight for diversified instructional materials. Sources for the data have been chiefly primary, including the minutes of the selected county school boards, the annual and biennial reports of the state superintendents of public instruction, the laws of the State, and the minutes of the State Courses of Study Committee, with supplementary use of secondary sources, such as publications of the Florida State Department of Education and the Florida Education Association.

After 1900 demands for a more functional education in the secondary schools were argued with growing fervor as efforts to extend and perfect the ideal of universal educational opportunity were intensified. In pamphlets, at association meetings, and through a variety of other media, one proponent after another reiterated the traditional arguments: universal education would minimize social cleavage and keep equality of opportunity open; it would bring enlightenment to the republic; it would reduce crime; and it would serve to induct an increasingly heterogeneous and growing immigrant population into American society. These arguments reflected an increasing effort to expand the common school ideal to meet the changing needs of American life.

How much, if any, religion ought to be taught in the State schools? Are State schools to be preferred over private schools—or vice versa? In education, is a State that is allied with the Church to be preferred over one that is separated from it? Aren't the aims and objectives of modern education based, as they ought to be, on reason, contradictions of Catholic education based, as it must be, on faith? These questions, which Italians continue to discuss with both emotion and intelligence, were as real during the Risorgimento as they are today.

The Social Frontier, a hybrid of political radicalism and progressive educational theory, appears as an anomaly when viewed from the perspective of American educational history. This union of education and politics also has made certain features of the journal's history difficult, if not impossible, to interpret. Although it was sponsored by many of the more influential leaders of the progressive education movement, its platform failed to attract a large following among classroom teachers. The John Dewey Society for the Study of Education and Culture and the Progressive Education Association were both affiliated with the journal, but the latter constantly found it a source of embarrassment. Even the wide variety of intellectuals—e.g., Eric Goldman, Harold Laski, John Herman Randall, Jr., and Leon Trotsky—who contributed an occasional article, thus giving the journal wider intellectual interest, were not aware of its educational philosophy. The journal appealed for educators to unite with the labor movement, but the labor unions—including the teachers' union—made no effort to encourage the supporters of the journal or to endorse their philosophy of social reconstruction. The journal's strong declaration of purpose and impressive list of directors and contributors created the impression of organizational stability and purpose, even though the former was partly illusory and the latter eroded away.

No series of American textbooks enjoyed so long and popular circulation as the McGuffey Readers. Most of the many biographies and articles written about the McGuffeys and their Readers give most credit for this to the original authors. It is not the purpose of the writer to belittle the great contribution made by the McGuffeys, but an analysis of the facts needs to be made to obtain a true picture of the matter.

In protest against the ruthless capitalism of the late nineteenth century, Edward Bellamy wrote Looking Backward, a novel of social reform. In his book, Bellamy transported a wealthy, young, nineteenth-century Bostonian, Julian West, on a fictional journey to the Year 2000. West, Bellamy's fictional citizen of 1887, witnessed the wonders of the new social order, an industrialized utopia. The citizens of this new world had abolished profit, greed, competition, and poverty under the leadership of a national industrial army. This familiar theme has been recounted in numerous social and literary histories. Despite the literary imperfections and unsophisticated style of this work, many readers have looked beyond it as a mere period piece and viewed it as an influential document of American utopianism.

Historians of education are today often reluctant to condemn the post-Civil War college for its resistance to the mercantile spirit or the university idea. The “inflexibility” of James McCosh, Noah Porter, or Woodrow Wilson receives recognition as a struggle “… to preserve the western cultural heritage and to inculcate a respectable form of mental discipline.” Departure from the common learning of mathematical and linguistic disciplines becomes a story of increasing disagreement and uncertainty concerning the basic principles of higher education. In the more conventional narrations sympathetic to the revolution in higher education after 1870 the revolution develops as a sharp break from the old collegiate regime rather than in continuity, context, and dialogue with that old regime. Actually, the very wealth of arguments offered by each side—whether by Noah Porter or by William Graham Sumner—suggests depth of intellectual resources within the traditional college rather than rigid inflexibility or a state of bankruptcy ripe for unthinking flight to untried novelties. In this paper an attempt is made to depict the argumentation accompanying the reception of history and science in the curriculum—the two subjects which in the judgment of William T. Harris were the most comprehensive novel forms of learning which were threatening the traditional curriculum of classics, logic, mathematics, metaphysics, theology. Familiar ideas from the classical and theological traditions played important roles in domesticating historical and scientific knowledge in the curriculum. As in the case of William Rainey Harper, the same men who pioneered in building universities could be Cassandras on the price to be paid for specialization. Both resistance and welcome offered by classics men need to be differentiated from resistance and welcome having theological roots.

William Seward was elected governor of New York State in 1838. Economic depression and distress resulting from the Panic of 1837, a strong political machine engineered by Thurlow Weed, and the editorial talents of Horace Greeley produced a Whig landslide and the election of Seward by ten thousand votes. Very early in January 1839, Seward delivered his first annual message to the state legislature. After carefully submitting his recommendation for internal improvements within the state—a subject which held high priority in all of Seward's messages—the Whig governor turned his attention to the progress of education in New York State. Although the state's system of public instruction was by no means unsuccessful, the governor thought “that its usefulness is much less than the state rightfully demands, both as a return for her munificence and a guaranty of her institutions.” Superior educational facilities were imperative if Americans were to achieve an enlightened understanding of responsible citizenship and cherish the legacy of their republican heritage. Seward was convinced that only a first-rate education could effect “the improvability of our race”—an elevation which was infinite in dimension. Careful not to deprecate the past merit of New York's educational system, Seward tempered his critical remarks by noting that “all that is proposed is less wonderful than what has already been accomplished.” Lest his legislative audience misconstrue his educational observations as mere platitudes doomed to oblivion amid more important priorities, the chief executive forewarned that “education is the chief of our responsibilities.” In fact, Seward prophesied that during his administration “improvement in our system of education will be wider and more enduring than the effects of any change of public policy.”