The things to which we give abstract names, liberty, justice, truth, actually are incapable of yielding up their essence, to be bottled, labeled, scrutinised. The qualities dwell in a thousand concrete things, in the accidents and transiencies of day-to-day living….

In 1883 Illinois passed an “Act to secure all children the benefit of an elementary education.” Between then and 1910 the compulsory education law was amended seven times. The Act was seemingly effective: by 1930 approximately 97 percent of the 7–13 age cohort attended school. But what is of greater interest is the increasing level of school attendance of children over 14. As Table 1 indicates, for the 14–15 age cohort, school attendance of native white children of native parentage increased from 80.6 percent to 96.3 percent; for native white children of foreign or mixed parentage, from 66.3 to 94.4 percent; for white foreign-born children, from 54.9 to 94.3 percent; and for blacks from 80.1 to 93.1 percent. A similar upward trend, equally as dramatic, was exhibited by the 16–17 age cohort: for native white children of native parentage school attendance increased from 41.4 percent in 1910 to 64.2 percent in 1930; for native white children of foreign or mixed parentage increased from 22.6 to 54.7 percent; for white foreign-born children, from 12.9 to 50.4 percent; and for blacks, from 38.9 to 56.9 percent. While it is true that for both age cohorts significant differences existed in 1910, and some differences still existed in 1930, what is perhaps more striking is the identical upward tendency in all groups. The question then, is, why? Why did more and more children, irrespective of population group, stay on longer and longer at school?

During the first two decades of the twentieth century an educational awakening stirred the American South. Stimulated by Northern philanthropists and their Southern agents, the region experienced a remarkable expansion of its public educational system. In many states laws were changed to strengthen the constitutional basis of public education. The value of schoolhouses increased, illiteracy rapidly decreased, local taxes multiplied, school terms were extended, and teachers' salaries increased considerably. Historians generally view this organized school campaign as the official launching of the Southern education movement. To be sure, white missionaries and black leaders had campaigned for universal education in the South since the Reconstruction era, but in the dawn of the twentieth century white Southerners made their first vigorous, large-scale efforts to improve the region's schools. The success of the Southern education movement was a result of the combined efforts of industrial philanthropists and Southern white educators. These two groups formed a powerful new force in the struggle to determine the purpose of Southern education for both whites and blacks. The alliance between Northern businessmen-philanthropists and Southern white school officials was ratified by the creation of two major educational organizations, the Southern Education Board in 1901 and the General Education Board in 1902. The policies and programs formed by these boards profoundly shaped Southern black public education during the first half of the twentieth century.

Most historical descriptions of the relationship between tutors and students in early American higher education have tended to emphasize elements of consensus and community. Historians such as Morison and Smith have suggested that the relationship was basically close and cordial, characterized by shared values and fostered by the small, homogeneous nature of the institution. While not discounting the basic validity of this description, current research has begun to examine what one scholar has characterized as the “rising curve of collective student disorder.” By focusing on conflict as opposed to consensus new insights are provided about collegiate institutions, their modes of reaction to and acceptance of change, and a truer picture of their effectiveness as agents of society emerges. Moreover, by this approach students themselves must be taken seriously as more than passive recipients but rather as a force in their own right of institutional and even societal change.

The relations between the origins of public educational systems and school attendance remain far from clear. For instance, the proportion of children receiving some sort of formal education did not increase automatically with the extension and elaboration of school facilities. Carl Kaestle has argued that proportionally as many children attended school in New York City in 1750 as in 1850. Elsewhere he and Maris Vinovskis have shown the surprisingly high rate of attendance of children in rural New York and Massachusetts in the early nineteenth century, prior to the so-called common school revival. And our own work has demonstrated that in at least one industrializing city the upward curve of school attendance among adolescent young people was not secular. School attendance, of course, was a differential process. It varied according to place, age, sex, class and ethnicity. However, the exact nature of that variation still has not been delineated. In an earlier article Katz showed why it is important to understand patterns of school attendance and outlined some of the principal ones he had uncovered in Hamilton, Ontario, in 1851 and 1861. Davey developed the analysis much further in his study of working-class school attendance in Hamilton in the latter part of the nineteenth-century. However, both examinations used entirely descriptive statistics, primarily cross-tabulation, and it is possible that some of the relations we uncovered appeared significant only because we had not controlled for other variables. Moreover, our method made it difficult for us to rank with certainty the importance of the various factors that affected school attendance. One major study by Kaestle and Vinovskis has attempted to unravel the complexities of school attendance with multivariate analysis, but their results are rather inconclusive. Indeed, the principal finding is the rather obvious point that age was the most important factor.

Educational historians have come to accept fully the importance of relating changes in formal schooling to changes in aspects of social structure. Perhaps the most successful recent studies have been those which have analysed the growth of elementary education in nineteenth-century Canada and the United States in terms of the total experience of growing up. Employing developmental theory and concepts of life-cycle, their work suggests that formal education was only one aspect of a series of psychological and behavioural stages through which children and youths passed on their way to adulthood. The nature and pattern of these stages are said to have been determined by family and household characteristics as well as demographic, economic and cultural factors.

In April 1891, the Journal of Education published a symposium on teachers' pensions, the first national attention the issue had received. The honor of opening the symposium went to U.S. Commissioner of Education W.T. Harris, who presented the case against pensions — even then, a minority view, shared by only six of the fifteen symposium participants. A general system of teachers' pensions, Harris argued, would bring undesirable persons into the profession, prevent the formation of habits of thrift, and reduce salaries, which were, Harris emphasized, rising. “Consequently,” the Commissioner said, “the teacher with an equal amount of thrift or personal economy may provide for his old age just as well as the mass of the community.” This last remark must have seemed as hollow to public school teachers as it did to a number of symposium participants, for at no time in the half century after 1870 did teachers receive more than minimal compensation. Chicago teachers argued before the Board of Education in 1895 that their salaries were much the same as they had been in 1877. A deflationary economy eased the teachers' plight somewhat through most of the late nineteenth century, but after 1900 this protection was not available. In 1905, E.G. Kimball, President of the District of Columbia Teachers' Annuity and Aid Association, appealed to Andrew Carnegie for subsidy. The situation he depicted might have been of any of hundreds of school districts across the nation—low salaries, a rising cost of living, a heavily female population bound to the city by family ties and thus unable to pursue higher salaries elsewhere. Several years later, the National Education Association (NEA) presented data revealing that in forty-four of forty-eight cities, salaries of elementary teachers were below those of laborers. Averaging only forty years of age in 1913, urban teachers had become bitter over their inability to save. Active or retired, Boston's women teachers were predominantly unmarried, burdened by the need to spend a portion of their earnings in the care of dependents, and having very limited savings or none at all.

In October, 1832, William C. Woodbridge noted with alarm a phenomenon that was “producing in our own country, at this moment, a scene of contest, and slander, and falsehood, and violence, which should make the patriot tremble, and the Christian weep.” The source of this catalogue of evils was the encouragement of competition — or “emulation,” as it was then termed — in American schools. The most dangerous form this encouragement took was the awarding of prizes for scholarship. Woodbridge, though more alarmed than most, was not alone in his denunciation of emulation; the effects of competition were discussed in the new journals of education, in manuals for teachers, at teachers' institutes, and finally in normal schools throughout the 1830's and 1840's.

On September 2, 1858 fifteen thousand persons converged on a small village in central New York to celebrate the laying of the cornerstone of a new college. In the ceremonies at the building site the college's president, Amos Brown, explained the new institution's name.

Evaluations of both literacy and education have tended to focus on their ostensibly revolutionary consequences. Urbanization, industrial growth, the rise of a middle class and a more democratic society, and a world view attuned to the need for and inevitability of change, are classed among the results. No matter which effect is seen as most critical, education and literacy are interpreted primarily in terms of their impact over the medium- to long-term.

The past decade has witnessed a marked revival of interest in the role of the Catholic Church in nineteenth-century French education. Several scholarly works have examined this subject from a variety of directions. This essay presents a detailed comparison of career-preferences of graduates of the two most prestigious Jesuit schools of the period. Studying the progress of alumni of the Collège de l'Immaculée-Conception (popularly referred to as “Vaugirard”), and of the Ecole Sainte-Geneviève de la rue des Postes, permits an examination of similarities and differences between the two schools. It also provides a statistical basis for conclusions regarding the impact of these institutions on French society.

The history of social work education reflects the dilemmas of a profession which promises simultaneous attention to the social well being of individuals and of society as a whole. Necessarily social work is affected by society's value system, by the country's socio-political structure, and by economic and technological conditions. All contribute to changing definitions of “social well being” and lead to decisions about ways in which well being will be sought at any one time. Schools of social work have recognized a dual obligation: They have undertaken to educate professionals to the complexities of both individual and institutional change processes. Writing in 1945 one leading educator put the matter this way:

Several years ago, my then graduate students David O. Justice, David Kelly and I took random samples of the major biographical encyclopedias for Germany, France, England and the United States. The entries we considered were those for males born 1810 to 1899, who might have reached advanced educational institutions between about 1830 and 1930. What we were chiefly interested in is the level and type of education enjoyed by these eminent men; but we also looked at their fathers' occupations and at a number of other characteristics.