Less than a minute into his 1931 Fisk University commencement speech, Woodson had already insulted his audience. “The large majority of Negroes who have put on the finishing touches of our best colleges,” Woodson said, “are all but worthless in the uplift of their people.” With this sweeping indictment of the teachers, lawyers, doctors, and other black professionals assembled before him, Woodson proceeded to catalog the inconsistencies, shortcomings, and abject failures of “Negro education.” The result was a caustic and uncompromising litany that seemed to go on forever. Negro education, Woodson charged, clung to a defunct “machine method” based on the misguided assumption that “education is merely a process of imparting information.” It failed to inspire black students and did not “bring their minds into harmony with life as they must face it.” Theories of Negro inferiority were “drilled” into black pupils in virtually every classroom they entered. And the more education blacks received, the more “estranged from the masses” they became.

Before we expound on our brief “farewell” essay, we wish to extend our deepest gratitude to those colleagues who contributed as authors, reviewers, associate editors, and editorial board members in sustaining the high quality of scholarship in the history of education. You have been indispensable in this process. I hope you realize the extent to which your role as reviewers serves as a means of mentoring, in contributing to the development of a community of scholars through your topical expertise. The majority of authors, junior and senior faculty alike, shared how appreciative they were of the thoughtful and lengthy feedback offered by the reviewers. They did not view the critiques in a punitive way but rather as a place for creating dialogue. This spirit of collegiality is what also helps our field to thrive.

I want to start these remarks by thanking the members of the History of Education Society for the honor of electing me to serve as president and especially my colleagues—faculty and graduate students—at New York University who have made NYU such an extraordinarily collegial home to study the History of Education. Finally I want to say a word of gratitude to my own teacher and mentor, Lawrence A. Cremin, who introduced me to this field and guided my early work. In the course of these remarks, I will be critical of him at points, but Larry Cremin remains my role model as a teacher, scholar, and kind friend. I suspect I may be—though one never knows—the last of a long line of Cremin students to preside over HES. But I do so proudly.

Suburban public schools have become the predominant form of American education in the past fifty years. As a number of commentators have noted, however, historians have devoted relatively little attention to the development of these educational systems. This is surprising, given the importance of schools in the development of many suburban communities, especially during the postwar era. Education became a critical element in suburban struggles to create distinctive local identities in the wake of metropolitan development and liberal reform. Neighborhood schools were sites of political conflict over these issues in Southern California and elsewhere, as suburbanites asserted their independence as property owners. Recent studies have documented how this contributed to a widespread “tax revolt” during the latter 1970s, and a sharp conservative turn in politics that accompanied it. Little has been written, however, about how the rise of such “localism” in suburban political culture affected the schools.

In 1969, the discipline of Ethnic Studies emerged and was implemented at a handful of colleges throughout the country, most notably at San Francisco State College where the first School of Ethnic Studies was established that year. The idea of devoting space within traditional educational institutions to the study of a particular race or ethnicity has existed since at least the 1920s when Carter G. Woodson proposed Negro History Week and encouraged the study of African American history. While Black Studies is thus the oldest of such fields within American education history, its establishment within higher education is tied to the establishment of the larger discipline of Ethnic Studies. Ethnic Studies encompasses the critical study of racial and ethnic histories and cultures and it incorporates a wide variety of methodologies. The course of the discipline throughout the past forty years has resulted in a variety of approaches to this study, thus generalizing about the field as it exists today is complicated. One thing that may be said about Ethnic Studies in its current iteration, however, is that it bears little resemblance to the proposals that ushered it into existence.

During the long history of the Civil Rights Movement, public education was a significant battleground in the struggle for racial equality. As the courts ordered officials to dismantle a system of educational apartheid, whites resisted, bringing blacks and whites together in ways that disillusioned many African Americans. Hoping to transcend what he called “the trauma of desegregation,” in 1977, North Carolina Governor James B. Hunt proposed that all students be required to pass a minimum competency test (MCT) to receive a high school diploma. Hunt was part of a generation of moderate New South politicians who crafted a new racially neutral educational discourse that emphasized accountability and achievement rather than equality and access. Capitalizing on the perception that the quality of education had declined, these New South moderates built biracial coalitions that established high school MCTs in every southern state by 1986, replacing a civil rights agenda of opportunity with an accountability agenda of individual student responsibility.

The work here explores the voices of Ontario's humanist educators, who advocated for the preservation of a curriculum theory rooted in faculty psychology, mental discipline, and the classics in the face of progressivist revisions to the province's public school organization. A great deal of scholastic sweat has been poured over the subject of progressive education, its meanings, and its purposes. Much less has been said about the critics of progressivist reform, who are referred to here as humanists; this term follows from the work of Herbert Kliebard, who characterized humanists as one of four competing interests in an epic struggle over the curriculum in the United States. Theodore Christou dubbed humanists “foils” to the progressivist reformers who succeeded in overturning Ontario's Programmes of Study for the public schools. Kliebard defined this group as:

With the regularity of commencement, colleges and universities today conduct annual solicitations of alumni and multiyear comprehensive fundraising campaigns. These now commonplace practices constituted radical innovations in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. The former originated at Yale University in 1890; the latter at Harvard University between 1915 and 1925. It was through these two innovations that higher education began to assimilate the new phenomenon of “mass giving” and “people's philanthropy” which arose in American society between 1890 and 1920.

In June 1948, Wisconsin Superior Court Judge Roy H. Proctor sentenced four University of Wisconsin students to one year probation for “participating in abnormal sexual activities.” The four students were among a group of twelve men on and off campus who had been arrested by city and university police. Their sentence was mild, given that the judge could have put them in prison for up to five years. Judge Proctor warned them that if there was a second offense, they should not expect leniency. “Each and all of you should feel deeply ashamed,” Proctor told them; “your conduct has caused an indelible mark to be placed against you. Certainly you will have to watch your step in the future, not only to avoid becoming second offenders, but to allay all suspicions of your becoming involved again.” Indeed, when one of the young men tried to move on with his life, university administrators made sure that the “indelible mark” followed him.

By the waning years of the 1940s America had lost much of what remained of its postwar optimism as fears of Communism came to dominate the national political conversation. Left-leaning citizens had particular cause for disillusionment as politicians continued to trample many vestiges of New Deal programs and ideals in their rightward trek. The passage of the antilabor Taft-Hartley Act in 1947 and Progressive Party presidential candidate Henry Wallace's abysmal failure at the polls in the 1948 election hammered more nails into the coffin of leftwing activism. What ultimately caused the Old Left to retreat from mainstream political discourse was, of course, the new ideological war that loomed on the horizon. While U.S. foreign policy focused on containing Communism abroad, local and federal governlnent agencies and civilian vigilante groups rallied to fight suspected communists at home, Government agencies and private organizations compiled lists of alleged subversives, such as Red Channels: The Report of Communist Influence in Radio and Television that the right-wing publication Counterattack released in 1950. The attacks on those in the media and government were well documented, as news sources reported the trials of iconic groups like the Hollywood Ten and televised the Army-McCarthy hearings. At the same time that anticommunists focused on rooting out subversives in the State Department, organized labor, and the entertainment industry, they also turned their attention to education. Many political leaders, both liberal and conservative, viewed education as the “key factor” in securing American victory in the Cold War; as a result, between the end of WWII and the 1960s, anticommunists devoted an unprecedented amount of scrutiny to public schools, administrators, and teachers.

A few days before Thanksgiving in 1908, the home economist Mabel Hyde Kittredge initiated a school lunch program at an elementary school in Hell's Kitchen, serving soup and bread to hungry children in the infamous Manhattan neighborhood. The following year, she founded the School Lunch Committee (SLC), a voluntary organization composed of home economists, educators, physicians, and philanthropists dedicated to improving the nutritional health and educational prospects of schoolchildren. By 1915, just seven years after the initiative began, the SLC was serving 80,000 free or low-price lunches a year to children at nearly a quarter of the elementary schools in Manhattan and the Bronx. Most of the schools were located in the city's poorest districts, and experience showed that the lunches were reaching those most in need at minimal cost to the organization. All the food served was inspected by the Health Department, and the meals were nutritionally balanced and tailored to the ethnic tastes and religious requirements of different school populations. Sparse but compelling evidence indicated that the program had reduced malnourishment among the children who partook, and teachers and principals at participating schools reported reductions in behavioral problems, dyspepsia, inattentiveness, and lethargy.

From the late nineteenth century through the first decades of the twentieth century, New York City housed two contrasting models of professional education for teachers. In 1870, the Normal College of the City of New York opened in rented quarters. Founded to prepare women to teach in the city's public schools, in just ten weeks the tuition-free, all-female college “filled to overflowing” with about 1,100 enrolled students. Based upon a four-year high school course approved by the city's Board of Education, the “chief purpose” of the college was to “encourage young women… to engage in the work of teaching in elementary and secondary schools.” Vocationally oriented and focused on practical skills, the Normal College stood in contrast to the School of Pedagogy at New York University and Teachers College, Columbia University founded in 1890 and 1898, respectively. The Normal College's neighbors situated their work within the academic traditions of the university. According to a School of Pedagogy Bulletin from 1912, faculty sought to,

On the evening of May 17, 1946, more than 1,200 festive supporters streamed into the Brooklyn Academy of Music to honor a New York City teacher who had survived, by the skin of her teeth, charges of “un-American” teaching. Since 1935, New York City's public school teachers faced the threat of investigation and dismissal for potentially subversive radical political beliefs or affiliations. Tonight, however, the audience breathed a collective sigh of relief that the Board of Education hearing had turned out well and that the teacher in question would retain her position.

Over two centuries after the invention of blackboards, they still feature prominently in many American classrooms. The blackboard has outlasted most other educational innovations and technologies, and has always been more than an aide memoire. Students and teachers have long assumed inscriptions on its surface made mental processes visible. As early as 1880, in fact, the A.H. Andrews & Co. catalog described the blackboard as a “mirror reflecting the workings, character, and quality of the individual mind.” The blackboard's ultimate origins are unclear but in North America one institution, the United States Military Academy at West Point, New York, played a particularly important role in establishing the device within classrooms. The blackboard's use at West Point in the first years of the nineteenth century garnered the novel tool notice and by the Civil War, the blackboard's place had been so firmly established in American schools as to be easily overlooked in importance; it was simply part of the physical and intellectual architecture of the classroom, Subsequent changes in construction and production have affected cost and appearance, but the basic idea of a vertical surface on which erasable inscriptions are made has remained.

In its truest sense, higher education is aimed at fostering academic achievement and educating students for good and productive citizenship. With this purpose in mind, over the past few decades there has been a proliferation of research on civic engagement. Although substantial in size and reach, the civic engagement literature is limited in terms of depth and scope. Many scholars working in this area have sought to define civic engagement as well as service learning; service learning is believed to lead to greater civic engagement and to increase educational attainment by some scholars and practitioners. Of note, this scholarship aims to defend civic engagement by providing a philosophical justification for it, reclaiming the historic civic purpose of higher education, or providing an assessment of student outcomes, including participation in protest, voting knowledge and behavior, and the impact of service learning. The civic engagement literature also demonstrates the level of engagement among undergraduate students and provides in-depth case studies of college and university initiatives to engage local communities throughout the nation. Scholars of civic engagement have focused on many different types of majority institutions, including small private colleges, state universities, land grant institutions, and private research universities. Most of these studies draw on how the unique histories of these various sectors of higher education position them for civic engagement work as well as the institutional efforts to engage local communities.

Samuel M. Cart, superintendent of the recently opened federal boarding school in Santa Fe, New Mexico, sat down at his desk in September 1891 to write the commissioner of Indian affairs regarding his recent recruiting tour through the pueblos under his jurisdiction. The recruiting trip was in preparation for the first full school year of Santa Fe Indian School's (SFIS's) existence. Though Cart had only recently arrived, his would-be pupils belonged to communities who had lived in the region for over millennia. The Pueblos among whom Cart had just traveled had established successful agricultural committees in the arid region and developed complex social and cultural means to order and influence the world that Cart's countryman now called the American Southwest. And for generations, they had educated their children in order that their communities would survive. Now Cart, and men and women like him, had traveled to the Southwest to convince the Pueblos (and other Native American groups) that their way of life was inferior, their social–cultural complex was immoral, and their methods for educating their children were insufficient.