Hebrews 11:1 (KJV)

First, I would like to thank all of the people who placed me in this position. What you did not know was I had no idea I would actually be in this situation. So, I come before you today with what is on my mind and in my heart. Many years ago, my husband Dr. Lewis A. Randolph told me I would be in this spot. Of course, I doubted him. But I thank him because he had more faith in me than I had in myself at that time concerning my trajectory in the field of the history of education. But here I stand as a child of God before you. I hope what he has given me to share with you spurns your thoughts, ideas, and your heart to continue to develop and uncover the history of African-American education.

“Recommendations in the report,” stated Charles S. Johnson, “have implications for our own educational system, and perhaps for our own society.” Johnson, a sociologist and Fisk University's first African-American president, addressed the 1948 South Central Forum in Chicago discussing the fundamental inconsistencies existing between democracy recommended in occupied Japan's education system and the democracy practiced in America's education system. The report Johnson's speech refers to was the product of the Education Mission to Japan: a twenty-seven-member American committee selected for their expertise as educators and scholars. Charged with an advisory role to the Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers (SCAP) and the Japanese Ministry of Education (JME), the committee's primary objective extended from SCAP's overall mission: to democratize and mollify postwar Japan. Johnson, a civil rights advocate and race relations scholar, was the sole African American and only nonwhite member of this committee.

On August 27, 1862, the much-loved crown prince and heir apparent to the throne of the Kingdom of Hawai'i died tragically and inexplicably at the tender age of four. Prince Albert Edward Kauikeaouli Kaleiopapa, the beloved child of a long line of chiefs, was the only son of Alexander Liholiho (Kamehameha IV) and Emma Na'ea (Queen Emma). He was believed to be the last child to be born to a reigning Hawaiian monarch and the last hope of the Kamehameha Dynasty. Adored by the Hawaiian public, his birth was celebrated for days throughout the islands. Likewise, his untimely death was mourned for years to come as it left his parents heartbroken and the Hawaiian nation without a constitutionally recognized heir. One of the Hawaiian newspapers is quoted as saying, “The death of no other person could have been so severe a blow to the King and his people.” The following year, the King himself died of grief and despair.

In the Fall of 1962, high school seniors Leon Zachery and Deitra Caul submitted applications for the Philadelphia City Scholarship competition. Both students excelled in high school, but both Zachery, whose mother worked in childcare, and Caul, whose mother did clerical work for the Presbyterian Life Magazine, feared that without outside assistance they would not be able to afford college tuition. In the letter supporting his application, Zachery's biology teacher at West Philadelphia high school described him as a “serious young man” who “knows a great deal about various subjects that is not required study… [and] seems to have become well-read from his intensive study.” “He is an exceptional boy [who] I feel should go to college or it would be a dreadful waste,” the teacher concluded. Caul's guidance counselor, William Cannady, offered a similar appraisal. Cannady, one of the first black high school teachers in Philadelphia, noted that Deitra Caul graduated first in her class at Gratz high school and “participated extensively in extra-curricular activities without any loss in academic status.” “It would be tragic,” Cannady wrote, “if Miss Caul had to forgo college because of a lack of finances.” With stellar academic records and demonstrated financial need, Zachery and Caul were among the forty-nine City Scholarship winners in 1962–1963, and the only two African-American students so selected.

Since the late 1930s, cinematic depictions of schooling have generally affirmed the necessity of school as a social institution and underscored the importance of formalized education for children and youth. Movies ranging from Goodbye, Mr. Chips (1939) to Dead Poets Society (1989) have represented school as a place of tradition and order, and films such as The Corn Is Green (1945); Blackboard Jungle (1955); Good Morning, Miss Dove (1955); Up the Down Staircase (1967); and Stand and Deliver (1988) have portrayed teachers as heroic figures. It could seem that the film industry has always portrayed schooling in idealistic terms. But that is not the case. This essay examines the familiar cultural genre of films about schooling, but it does so by looking backward before Blackboard Jungle, even before Goodbye, Mr. Chips, to the first four decades of cinema—a period when schooling was rendered not as a necessity, but as a joke.

Even though fraternity men glorified their duels with swords, a series of frivolous pistol duels with deadly ends led students to organize a movement against pistol duels that swept German universities in 1902 and 1903. Students argued that pistol duels violated the rules of reason, morality, and religion—and were thus also purportedly un-German. Male students organized assemblies, made passionate speeches, and passed resolutions in opposition to the pistol duel. They then sent these resolutions to the War Ministers in Prussia, Bavaria, and Saxony. Burschenschaft fraternity men built on their long tradition of liberal political activism and convened assemblies in Berlin, Bonn, Breslau, Freiburg, Giessen, Greifswald, Halle, Kiel, Königsberg, Leipzig, Marburg, Munich, Rostock, and Tübingen and passed resolutions inspired by the movement. Some of these assemblies drew large numbers of students, for example, 600 students in attendance in Leipzig, 1,500 in Munich, and 1,500 in Freiburg. In Berlin, leaders of 67 organizations representing 2,400 members signed petitions against the pistol duel. Other universities not included were majority Catholic institutions, such as Münster or Würzburg, where the opposition to all forms of the duel was even stronger as a result of the Catholic Church's prohibition against dueling. Reaching universities throughout Germany, this movement united students from across the political spectrum.

Choosing between “studies” and “stories,” as Herbert Butterfield couched the alternatives in 1959, has aggravated historians for years. He preferred an exit. With structure and narrative combined, Butterfield thought, “one may gain a profounder insight into both the ways of men and the processes of time.” Difficult as that approach may be, Karl Jacoby cautioned, it only balances a false dichotomy. Like the event in Apache history he reconstructed, some episodes lie hidden, wholly or in part, in silences not broken by documents or statistics. Adding American Indians to the mix of U.S. history, he argued, illustrates ways to resolve the dilemma and lead “toward a deeper revisioning of the American past.” Jacoby proposed “spotlighting the fraught relationship between storytelling and historical evaluation” to loosen the stubborn knot of history. The essential aim is not merely to fill a knowledge gap, an easier undertaking, but to evoke an episode's meanings, then and later. Undeniably, the past has legs, its tracks detected or hypothesized along divergent, sheltered, and sometimes surprising courses. Historians happen upon them more often along the way than at the outset, however careful and comprehensive the research design. Leaving room for possible interpretations tests its adequacy for reducing unknowns and finding new ones. They may use a compass of sorts to begin, if only to chart a general direction, but other research tools are essential for exploring details of unfamiliar territories. There, enhanced capacities for seeing and listening can help avoid unfounded claims and other epistemological disasters. For Jacoby, such are the risks historians run upon entering the places of American Indians' pasts.

Alone in her last phase of life, Sarah McComb copied a poem onto the back of a postcard that read, “And now… what wait I for? No home, no welcome, nobody who needs me; no love, to which in my loneliness I can turn. And now… what wait I for?” She died in January 1937, not long after she “fell and broke her thigh” the previous December. She was ninety-one years old. Her hospital bills and funeral invoice, like most of her expenses, were sent to her brother's daughter. Her old-age dependency on extended kin, however, was not inevitable. As a single, childless, white middle-class woman, Sarah had supported her independence through itinerant teaching, traveling the American west including Alaska, with additional adventures to Guatemala and Cuba. As she approached her sixties, she pursued alternative strategies for income, intensifying her efforts to earn a profit through business ventures while continuing to teach for as long as she could. Despite her determination, Sarah faced old age without savings of her own; she would not be able to finance her independence once she stopped teaching. When that time finally came, she was seventy-six years old and had to turn to her brother for help. Securing his support, however, was a proposition fraught with familial tension and personal anxiety. Although women like Sarah valued their independence, they struggled to carry this independence into old age.

Writing from her position as the Office of Indian Affairs (OIA) Superintendent at the Potrero School on the Morongo (Malki) reservation in southern California in 1909, Clara D. True concluded an article on her experiences as an Anglo teacher working with American Indian populations in the United States:

In the early 1860s, the Ruhr Valley town of Dortmund had no schools for girls beyond the elementary level with the exception of a few private establishments that trained domestic servants. This dearth of educational opportunities is hardly surprising in a town of just 25,000 people at a time when even many larger German cities were bereft of secondary schools for girls. By 1914, however, when Dortmund's population had grown tenfold to well over 250,000, girls or their parents could choose among numerous types of institutions beyond the basic elementary school—several secondary schools, middle schools, and a variety of vocational and commercial institutions, most of them under municipal control.

In the 1850s, at St. Mark's training college in Chelsea, London, ten students regularly violated the “lights out” rule in the evening at the end of long, exhausting days. Desirous of increasing their culture and general knowledge, they gave over half an hour every evening before sleep to what they styled, after the working-class clubs of the same name, “a mutual improvement society” in which they took turns giving lectures on a wide range of topics. They were not alone: throughout the second half of the nineteenth century, teachers-in-training across Britain supplemented their already daunting workload by writing poetry, reading novels, discussing Shakespeare, and holding debates about pressing social and political questions. From the perspective of many Victorian observers and historians today, this anecdote is an anomaly, an aberration that carries little weight in telling the story of the training colleges in which the majority of teachers in Victorian Britain eventually came to receive an education. For them, training colleges were the sites of rote memorization and pedagogical learning. Though some educationalists called for a more liberal curriculum for teachers, according to this view, teachers' education only began to emphasize expansive reading, original thinking, the cultivation of the individual, and general curiosity beginning in the 1890s with the rise of day training colleges affiliated with universities.

One week before the 1908 U.S. presidential election, the women of the Hesperian Literary Society at the State University of Iowa (SUI, now the University of Iowa) presented “a unique program” in the form of a mock political rally. Imagining that they lived in a town where women had “been honored by the legislature with the ballot,” the “Hep” members divided into clubs that supported various candidates and causes. Several women formed the Utopian Club, which promoted William Jennings Bryan's presidential candidacy, while the members who comprised the Women's Culture Club supported William Howard Taft. Heps who pretended to belong to the Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) argued for prohibition. Portraying the era's political dynamism, other Heps represented anarchists, socialists, and independents. A woman from each group spoke in support of her cause in front of a crowd that included “a lot of” college men. SUI senior and Hep member Ione Mulnix described the rally in a letter to her parents: “[T]he speeches were of course very ridiculous. The reasons why each was the best were very feminine and would hardly convince a man.” She explained that the Utopian Club representative “argued for Bryan because he was the best looking.” The Heps ended their program by setting loose a toy mouse, causing the actors to scream and scatter. Finding the fictitious rally “awfully funny,” Mulnix noted that the Hep women “acted their parts to perfection” and that the college men “seemed to appreciate it immensely.”

In May 2009, the Arikara returned to the land of their ancestors along the Missouri River in South Dakota. For the first time in more than a half century, a Medicine Lodge was built for ceremony. The lodge has returned from its dormant state to regain its permanent place in Arikara culture. This event will be remembered as a significant moment in the history of the Arikara because it symbolizes a new beginning and hope for the people. Following this historic event, Arikara spiritual leader Jasper Young Bear offered to share his experience and deep insight into Arikara thought:

Dallas T. Herndon, the first director of the Arkansas History Commission and State Archives in Little Rock, opened his short study on the conditions of Arkansas's mountain schools in the 1910s by writing that he was “fully convinced… that no such extreme backwardness in reality exists anywhere in Arkansas as to be found in the most isolated parts of such states as Georgia, North Carolina, Tennessee and Kentucky.” Herndon followed this statement with a comical story he had heard about a conversation between a Georgia mountaineer and a “traveler from the outside world.” The traveler, he told, asked the mountaineer if he knew who President Woodrow Wilson and John Slayton, the governor of Georgia, were. The mountaineer openly replied that he did not. Taken aback by such ignorance, the stranger then asked the mountaineer if he knew God. The Georgia mountaineer answered, “Yes, I think I'se heard uf him; his last name be's Damn, ain't it?” Herndon was sure that in the Arkansas hills, no one could find a “man, woman or child who is quite so ignorant as that Georgia mountaineer…”

In 1901, Miss M. C. French contacted Hawai‘i's superintendent and inquired about teaching positions in the islands. “As the prospect for a principalship seems possible only upon removal by death and that at an extreme age in most of the middle west towns,” she wrote, “I look to the west as a field of great promise.” Not only, in French's estimation, did teaching positions in the West offer opportunities for career advancement, but she also observed, “the west remunerates well for modern school work.” French's letter of application indicated that she had normal school training and teaching experience totaling nine years in Chicago, Salt Lake, and Des Moines, the last under future Seattle Superintendent Frank Cooper. She highlighted skills in “geography, language, and grammar.” In closing her application, she remarked, “My strong point has seemed to be discipline, which however is a natural, not acquired, talent.”

“This is what college is supposed to be like!” That is what I thought before I was too far along in my EPS 201 course, “Social Foundations of American Education,” at the University of Illinois. I was a transfer student, and it was my first semester at the university. The professor was Paul Violas and my teaching assistant (TA) was Steve Tozer; the course was a survey of the history of education in the United States. I recall one day we had a guest lecture by Professor James Anderson, who drew material from a new book he was working on. What we learned in EPS 201 was substantial. It was, far and away, the most meaningful course in my undergraduate education. It was, also, the most significant preparation I had as a secondary school mathematics teacher.

In an earlier work I provided quantitative evidence for the claim that the recent historiography of American education is characterized by an increased emphasis on the recent past to the detriment of the colonial, early national, and even antebellum eras. In that piece I noted offhandedly that there has been next to no work done on the history of American education before the arrival of Europeans. This article is my attempt to initiate the process of filling this appalling gap. Anyone so foolhardy as to hazard a history of education before European contact in the land that is now the United States, however, must deal at the outset with at least four theoretical and methodological concerns.

This study discusses Merze Tate, a black woman faculty member at Howard University from 1942 to 1977, and her efforts throughout her tenure at the institution to obtain gender equity for women faculty. This study also discusses Tate's decades-long battle with Rayford Logan, chair of the history department of Howard. Both Harvard PhDs, their difficulties reflect both gender differences as well as professional jealously. Tate was the first black woman to earn a degree from Oxford University (International Relations, 1935) and the first black woman to earn a PhD from Harvard in the fields of government and international relations (1941). She joined the faculty at Howard University in 1942, as one of two women ever hired in the history department. She remained on the faculty until her retirement in 1977. Tate is significant not only for her academic accomplishments and her advocacy on behalf of women but also as one of the earliest tenured women faculty members at Howard. In addition, she was a part of a very small group of highly accomplished black women academics who devoted their lives to the education of black youth. In a 1946 study of black doctorate and professional degree holders, Harry Washington Greene noted that of the three hundred eighty-one recipients, only forty-five were women. Black women were overwhelmingly enrolled and graduated from teacher training colleges that were unaccredited and/or did not provide the curriculum to attend graduate school without taking an additional year of undergraduate studies. The time and cost factor were prohibitive and many black women attended summer schools for years to take courses to prepare them for a graduate degree program.