Newsweek ran an article on “The Homosexual Teacher” in December 1978. At the end of a tumultuous two-year period framed by Anita Bryant's anti-gay campaign in South Florida and John Briggs' proposition to bar gay and lesbian educators from working in California public schools, reporters concluded, “Most homosexual teachers are deeply plagued by job anxiety.” That observation likely came as no surprise.

Faced with demands for racial desegregation of its public schools, and grasping at half measures to appear responsive, New York City's Board of Education took action in 1967 by ending medical discharges for unwed pregnant students and authorizing the curriculum “Family Living, Including Sex Education.” Approving sex education in part to avoid action on school desegregation, Gotham's school board relied on a resolution written by a parent advocacy group in 1939—a resolution the 1939 school board had rejected following months of debate on the merits of providing instruction on mammalian reproduction for junior high biology students. By the time the Board of Education revisited the issue of sex education in the 1960s, popular understanding of sexuality and sex education had changed considerably. Yet the resolution supporting sex education, submitted by the city's United Parents' Associations (UPA), had not changed at all.

Due to its ascendancy as the administrative and commercial center of early modern England, London experienced sustained growth in the latter half of the sixteenth century, as waves of rural immigrants sought to enhance their material conditions by tapping into the city's bustling occupational and civic networks. The resultant crowded urban landscape fostered mounting demand for medical services, since injuries and ailments, ranging from consumption to contusions, proliferated within the city's teeming streets and markets. Due to consistently strong patient demand and the conventions of English common law, which stipulated that legal authorization to practice medicine was solely contingent upon patient consent, peddling medical services to the city's ill and infirm became an increasingly appealing—and potentially lucrative—venture. Consequently, London's largely unregulated medical marketplace—characterized by competition for patients, the mounting influence of print culture, and the emergence of small commercial networks—attracted a diverse array of practitioners, including university-educated physicians, who focused on treating ailments of the inner body by prognosticating and prescribing medicine; guild-licensed surgeons, who treated ailments ranging from broken bones to venereal disease through direct manual manipulation of the body; and a medley of specialist and itinerant practitioners, who were neither licensed by city authorities noraffiliated with established livery companies.

Lurking in the shadows of education history are networks of human interaction, transcultural encounters, forms of global connection, and dispersed sites of cultural teaching and learning that are barely visible in the master narratives of education history. This is no surprise really. Who would have thought a half-century ago that we would become witnesses and participants in an increasingly interconnected world, bound together by global systems of commerce, transnational structures of communication, tsunami-proportion migratory flows, and ever more complex and puzzling transcultural encounters? Who could have imagined that a rising generation of globally conscious, mobile, and empowered young people—the progeny of Marshall McLuhan, Bill Gates, and Mark Zuckerberg—could refashion social and cultural networks, produce novel communicative and linguistic forms, mobilize worldwide social movements, inspire political action, unravel regimes of governance, and shape the contours of cultural life worldwide? Who could have imagined that historians of education would need to situate education history in relationship to newly evolving educational contexts of dazzling and unprecedented diversities: where encounters between total strangers from around the globe are the stuff of daily life in schools; the contours of community life and bonds of affiliation are trans-local, poly-focal, and subject to negotiation; where time-honored habits of heart, mind, and association are multitudinous and deeply challenged; where the languages of instruction, communication, and daily discourse are continually shifting and fusing; where designations of insiders and outsiders are manifold and fluid? Who could have imagined that sites of teaching and learning could become geographically unbound, disentangled from life in face-to-face communities, and the traditional boundaries of nation-state and imperial empire?

In the process of promoting an agricultural appropriation bill in the 1914 legislative session, members of Congress engaged in a vigorous debate about the appropriateness of public-private collaboration in the federal government. They had discovered that the Department of Agriculture had been receiving funding directly from the General Education Board (GEB), a philanthropy established with funds from the Rockefeller family, for staff hired to engage in agricultural extension services. Representative William Kenyon of Iowa explained to his fellow Congressmen that employees “were on the pay roll of the Government; and, as I understand, the man who is at the head of the farm demonstration work received $1 per month from the Government and $625 per month from the Rockefeller Fund.” While Senator John Sharp Williams of Mississippi generally supported the use of private funding, he expressed the sentiments of many of his colleagues with his concern that it was “a very bad thing to get the employees of the Federal or of the State or of a city government in the habit of relying upon rich men and corporations for aid and assistance, because it brings around… a certain, perhaps dominating, influence upon the officials themselves that might be and probably would be finally detrimental to the public service or to self-respect and interest of the masses.”

In the autumn of 1939, Poland was invaded and divided in half by the Third Reich and the Soviet Union. Nazi Germany took over western Poland, while the U.S.S.R. took over the southeast. The Soviet invasion of eastern Poland on September 17, 1939, pursuant to provisions of the secret protocol of the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact, came as a complete surprise to Poland's thirteen million residents and to diplomats around the world. In the months that followed, the Soviets imposed a complex administrative system in the region, with the goal of “Sovietizing” conquered territories. The dismantling of local religious institutions and the creation of Soviet schooling for millions of Polish, Ukrainian, Jewish, and Belorussian children were all part of this program. Additionally, starting in February 1940, the Soviet authorities carried out four punitive waves of deportation of some 320,000 Polish citizens (men, women, and children) into the interior of the U.S.S.R.

“The value of the Art Education becomes more and more apparent as a means of honorable support and of high culture and enjoyment,” stated the catalog of Ingham University in western New York State in 1863. The Art Department there would prepare “pupils for Teachers and Practical Artists.” This statement reveals some of the vocational options for women that were concomitant with the increased popularity of music and art education in the middle decades of the nineteenth century in the United States. Practical vocational concerns, along with notions of refinement and respectable entertainment, all were aspects of the impetus for music and art education. Preparing young women for occupations, whether as teachers of art and music or as commercial artists or musicians, was a particularly prominent component of education for women in the mid-nineteenth-century United States.

Attempting to establish an agenda for one's own research is often challenging; trying to do so for a broad swath of one's field is even more so. I accepted the invitation to propose one in the hope that graduate students and younger colleagues—especially those willing to put in the work to obtain at least reading fluency in foreign languages—might benefit from the suggestions of potentially fruitful research topics from someone who has been reading widely in modern European educational history for almost forty years. Such an agenda is partial in both meanings of the word: it does not come close to exhausting all possible topics, and it necessarily reflects my own areas of expertise and interest. That means a focus primarily on the nineteenth century, with more attention both to secondary than to either elementary or university education, and to girls’ schooling than to boys’. As a caveat, I may not be cognizant of all that has been published or is in the works even for the themes suggested.

The involvement of the United States in World War I, from April 1917 to November 1918, marked a high point in the history of American internationalist thought and engagement. During those nineteen months, President Woodrow Wilson and his administration called on Americans to aid European civilians and to support Wilson's plans for a peacetime League of Nations, defining both as civic obligations; many responded positively. The postwar years, however, saw a significant popular backlash against such cosmopolitan expectations. In 1920, Congress failed to ratify the Treaty of Versailles and rejected U.S. participation in the League. A growing chorus for 100% Americanism and immigration restriction, meanwhile, offered evidence of a U.S. public that was becoming more insular, more withdrawn from the world. Yet such trends were never universal. As scholars have begun to acknowledge, many Americans remained outward looking in their worldviews throughout the period, seeing engagement with and compassion for the international community as vital to ensuring world peace.

“There are few if any more significant events in modern educational history than the developments which have recently taken place in methods of mental measurement,” Lewis Terman wrote in 1923 about the intelligence testing movement he did so much to pioneer in American schools throughout the 1920s. Indeed educational historians, particularly Paul Chapman, have shown that the rise of intelligence testing provoked large and relatively swift changes in public education, enabling school systems to sort and stream their students by ability on an unprecedented scale. “By 1930,” Chapman writes, “both intelligence testing and ability grouping had become central features of the educational system.” Less often talked about are the effects of intelligence testing and the concept of intelligence quotient (IQ) on early special education classes, and on the pupils who attended them. In fact, Terman recognized the significance of IQ testing to special education as well. In 1919, he wrote that IQ tests would help to turn the existing logic of learning problems on its head by proving that “the retardation problem is exactly the reverse of what it is popularly supposed to be.”

Publishing deadlines can be a nuisance for an author. For example, in 1972 when the editor of Rolling Stone magazine pressed Truman Capote on why he had promptly cashed his advance payment check yet had failed to submit his manuscript more than a month after the publishing deadline, Capote replied, “Do you want an article that is timely or timeless?” Much to Capote's chagrin, the editor replied, “Both!” Capote's response was “Neither”—and the project fell apart. Little wonder, then, that I was pleasantly surprised to receive the invitation from the History of Education Quarterly to explain to colleagues what topic I would choose if I were to have the luxury of writing forever. After the exhilaration of being both timely and timeless wore off, I realized the invitation was problematic.

The president assembled the students shortly before they were to leave for winter break. He had a major announcement to make. Earlier that fall, the students had petitioned the president to develop an intercollegiate football program, and he had appointed a faculty and student committee to study the matter. He now was prepared to tell the gathered students whether he agreed to lead his college fully into athletics. He started slowly and told the students that their college was only six years old, much had been accomplished in that time, and many were tired and now hoping to “lie down on the new lawn under one of those new trees out there and bask in the glory that is Sacramento State College.” The president, however, was more amused than tired, as he continued. “But no! The dust blew and the rains came and then the fog! And out of the quietness and the thickness of the fog—a shout—a clamor: We want football!” The college already had an athletic program, and he tried to understand why the students would clamor for more. But, the fact remained that they had asked for football, and he now had to tell them what would become of their petition.

Schooling for racial, ethnic, or religious minorities presents a challenge in the American democracy. Such groups, insofar as they are equal citizens, have the right to maintain their identities. As such, they have often used separate educational institutions to transmit distinct traditions, values, and mores. To the extent that the American experiment is a pluralistic one, the decision to remain different from dominant groups is a valid one.

I want to divide this essay into two sections, one indicating things I might have added to a few earlier works, and a second indicating a project or two that I did not do but would like to have done.

This essay is an exploratory history of American educators as viewed through the lens of disability studies. By this I mean that I am looking at the history of school teachers with disability as the primary marker of social relations, in much the same way that I and others have looked at the history of education through the primary lens of race, gender, ethnicity, age, religion, and sexuality. Looking at the history of teachers through the analytic framework of disability studies allows us to see first, how educational systems, practices, values, and professional norms have developed in a way that excludes people with disabilities from educational employment, or assigned them to parallel and marginalized institutions of special education and second, how notions of normality have defined the work and identity of all educators. It is this latter point that is my greatest interest here: how cultural concepts of ability and disability have shaped all educators' occupational identity and experience over time.