Americans have had a long history of wanting to remake others in their own image. The Puritans' modest efforts to convert native Americans were merely the first of many efforts to mold people of another culture. Later generations used the educational system to “Americanize” successive waves of immigrants, Blacks, Southwest Indians, and Hispanics. Some would add post-Civil War reconstruction in the South to the list. For a few short years we even heeded Kipling's call to pick up the White Man's Burden, although the Philippine experience quickly soured most Americans on imperialism. At all times in our past Americans have felt the urge to reeducate other groups of people.

“Teaching is by common consent a profession,” begins a 1917–18 Parliamentary report on teachers' salaries. But, the report continues,

From the beginning of direct action work in the South, the student civil rights movement constantly evolved new programs and tactics. While the goals of the programs were always to work toward desegregation and voter registration, the programs often stressed varied approaches to those goals and had different tactical components.

The ideological atmosphere has been highly charged recently in the study of American educational history. Hot debates center on the altruistic or self-serving motives of public school reformers, the liberating or oppressive effects of schools, and the relationship of educational history to present policy. Historians of American education are often most readily identified by ideological labels like “radical” or “Whig”. Thus it seems incongruous to me that members of this subfield have paid so little systematic attention to the ideology of the people we write about, and in particular, to the ideology of school reformers. This inattention to the concept of ideology and to the substance of particular ideologies is true of American social historians in general, with some important exceptions. Most often, one encounters the term in a casual reference, where the writer has apparently taken for granted the meaning of the term and the constituency of the ideology mentioned. Nancy Cott refers variously to “early nineteenth-century ideology”, to “ideology in reawakened Protestantism,” and to “nineteenth-century sexual ideology.” Linda Kerber refers to “republican ideology” without defining either term, and Stephen Thernstrom refers not only to the “ideology of mobility” on which he focused, but to a “total reigning ideology,” of which it was a part.

The third and fourth decades of the nineteenth century witnessed nationwide agitation for public schools. While our understanding of this movement is far from complete, it is apparent that the receptivity of American communities to this institution varied considerably. Theoretically, large cities experiencing the shift to capitalist modes of production and the accompanying social disorder should have been most receptive to the common school idea. Indeed, in some cities undergoing these dramatic socioeconomic changes, the proposal to introduce a system of uniform, publicly controlled and operated schools which would instruct children from all classes in the community was adopted with considerable public approval and a minimum of opposition. Stanley Schultz's study of Boston, for example, demonstrates that the 1818 proposal to institute a system of primary schools that would prepare all children in the city for entrance to its well-established public schools met resistance from only a few members of the town's elite, whose protests failed “because an aroused public demanded action.” Carl Kaestle's account of the New York City experience shows that the Free School Society also encountered little opposition, with the exception of its dispute with the Bethel Baptist Church, as it evolved into the Public School Society in 1825, assuming all of New York City's state funding for education and opening its schools to children of all classes in the city.

Of American secular faiths, perhaps none has been more resilient than the belief in higher education as a means to a more fulfilling life. The land-grant college movement, initiated by the Morrill Act of 1862, has stood historically as one very tangible article of this faith. Rightly recognized as a revolutionary influence upon American education, this public college movement gave profoundly important impetus to tendencies that were apparent within the nation. A revolt against classical schooling was already under way. Belief in the efficacy of the sciences was gaining momentum. There were simultaneous demands for more “practical” learning that would emphasize agricultural and mechanical arts instruction. And pervading each of these tendencies was the growing insistence upon the democratization of educational opportunity.

During 1832 to 1833, the faculty and trustees of Western Reserve College in Hudson, Ohio, were embroiled in a controversy over immediate abolition. The faculty advocated immediate abolition and the establishment of biracial equality in the United States; the trustees urged gradual abolition and the colonization of freed slaves in Liberia. The controversy at Western Reserve College raises the question of why some people adopted immediate abolitionism while others of similar background remained colonizationists? Although the case of Western Reserve College provides no Rosetta Stone to unravel the mystery of motivation, there were notable differences in age, in relationship to the community, and in enthusiasm for the evangelical doctrine of the immediate repentance of sin that distinguished the main protagonists among the faculty and the trustees from one another.

In the past few years there has been renewed evaluation of Allied educational policies during the post World War II occupation of Germany. Over the quarter century since the end of occupation, assessments of U.S. educational efforts in Germany have primarily focused on the early years of military occupation and have ranged from highly commendatory to severely critical. By limiting analysis to the earliest period of occupation, however, critics have missed much of the significance of U.S. policy making gained by assuming a broader longitudinal perspective.

In their 150-year history the Mormons have undergone a metamorphosis. From a position where they were considered moral pariahs, they have emerged as the very models of social decorum and moral respectability. In the nineteenth century their founder, Joseph Smith, was martyred in Illinois; they were driven from Missouri under a governor's extermination order; hundreds were jailed as “prisoners of conscience” in Utah for refusal to abandon polygamy; and their prophets were pursued by federal marshals as fugitives from justice. The popular attitudes towards these 19th-century “social outcasts” are a far cry from the image reflected by the activities of some prominent Mormons in the 20th-century: Secretary of Agriculture, Ezra Taft Benson; Michigan Governor, George Romney; Secretary of the Interior, Stewart Udall; Secretary of the Treasury, David Kennedy; U. S. Commissioner of Education, Sterling M. McMurrin; the current Secretary of Education, T. H. Bell; and Florida's Senator Paula Hawkins, the second woman ever elected to the U. S. Senate. Other Mormons who have caught the public eye (and ear) include television inventor, Philo Farnsworth; Harvey Fletcher, developer of stereophonic sound; Henry Eyring, recipient of the prestigious “Priestly Medal” in chemistry; and such heroes of middle America as the Osmonds and Merlin Olson, defense tackle for the Los Angeles Rams. The perception of the Mormon educational point-of-view has also shifted: once considered proponents of ignorance and gullibility, they are now seen as unalloyed supporters of educational advancement.

Although the lofty rhetoric accompanying the founding of the major American graduate schools seemed to indicate that they would be open to both sexes, the first women applicants quickly learned that this access was often not available. Their eventual admission and first degrees, which came as early as the 1870s at Boston University and as late as the 1960s at Princeton University, was the result of a series of skirmishes at several European as well as American universities, at least two major strategies, a large cast of participants, and the active support (financial and otherwise) of a few women's groups, especially the young Association of Collegiate Alumnae (ACA).

The advent of sophisticated new weaponry in the Second World War brought science and technology into a prominent position in the minds of military and political planners for a postwar world. Both the Russians and the Americans perceived science in newly demanding terms, and wanted to insure that the treatment of science in defeated Germany would serve their own ends.

The Enunciation of the tripartite slogan of “Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and Nationality” by Count S. S. Uvarov in December of 1832 provided a brief but ill-defined slogan for the reign of Nicholas I (1825–1855). These words served as a convenient prescription for policies in all fields and affected all the peoples of the empire, but Uvarov, as Minister of Public Instruction from 1833 to 1849, possessed particular advantages in translating his own theory into educational policy. The first two terms of the motto caused little conceptual confusion; few inhabitants in the Russian Empire misunderstood the rock-hard meaning of Orthodoxy or autocracy. Nationality (narodnost’) supposedly meant the promotion of those elements which made Russia unique among nations. But what elements were to be singled out and what means should be employed to promote them? In practice, official nationality encompassed the other two terms by training the citizens of the empire to serve the church and the state, promoting Russian patriotism, and emphasizing Russian national culture. In Uvarov's scheme, the school became a tool of official nationality.

“Between the time of leaving school and entering the barracks, during those dangerous years of adolescence when the passions are aroused, when the temptations of the cabaret and the street beckon, the youth, left to his own devices, runs the risk not only of forgetting what he has learned, but of losing any sense of morality.” That call to alarm, sounded in 1904 by Gabriel Séailles, professor of philosophy in the Sorbonne, echoed throughout the French business, political, and intellectual establishment at the turn of the century. Those Frenchmen self-appointed to defend the republican order had good reason to be alarmed. In their view, young workingclass men, cut loose from secure familial moorings and only partially integrated into the world of industrial labor, were easy pickings for those socialists and syndicalists who worked to subvert order. The “social question” dominated French political life and, for many, popular education appeared to offer the best chance of coming to grips with it. For Léon Bourgeois, “the social problem” was, “in the final analysis, a problem of education.” Séailles drew attention to a relationship and to a choice in the subtitle of his pamphlet: “Education and revolution.”

Throughout Europe in the second half of the nineteenth century, advocates of expanded educational opportunities for girls and women faced numerous obstacles. Not only did they have to overcome the widespread opinion that women did not need and could not master advanced education, but they also had to find ways to integrate their proposed reforms into existing educational systems. This latter problem proved to be particularly troublesome in Germany, where access to the universities and to the professions depended on fixed educational prerequisites, but where, in the 1880s and ‘90s, the classical Gymnasium that had traditionally prepared boys for the universities was being severely criticized from many quarters. Did the pursuit of equality for women require acceptance of the unpopular curriculum of the Gymnasium? Would insistence on a separate curriculum for girls mean that female education would continue to be perceived as being second-rate? Was there a third way?

The aim of kindergarten founder, Henriette Schrader-Breymann—“to exalt women to spiritual motherhood, as mothers to society and not just to their own households”—was supported by the overwhelming majority of German feminist leaders during the nineteenth century. “The educational calling of women,” insisted another kindergarten advocate, Henriette Goldschmidt, “should no longer be left merely to instinctive feelings and behavior, but, like the male professions, demands scientific training.” When fully trained, feminists argued further, woman's special talent for nurture would benefit not only her immediate family but a society which they perceived as sorely in need of the enlightened and compassionate female influence. The doctrine of “spiritual motherhood” (as this general view of the female mission may conveniently be termed) grew out of nineteenth century women's search for autonomy, defined as a complementary but equal female role and often contrasted to emancipation, the assimilation of male behavior and values. Although the ideology of spiritual motherhood was invoked in support of a great variety of causes, it was most systematically developed by the kindergarten movement which was concerned from the outset not only with preschool children but with the education and status of the women to whom their care was entrusted. “Women and children are the most oppressed and neglected of all,” remarked Friedrich Froebel, founder of the kindergarten movement, in 1848. “They have not yet been fully recognized in their dignity as parts of human society. If progress and a greater degree of freedom depend largely upon the degree of universal culture, then it is women, to whom God and Nature have pointed out the first educational office in the family, on whom this progress depends.”