During the last fifteen years a modest revolution took place in the historiography of education. Historians rejected both the metaphor and the method which had characterized the record of the educational past. The method had divorced inquiry into the development of educational practices and institutions from the mainstream of historical scholarship and left it narrow, antiquated, and uninteresting. The metaphor portrayed education as a flower of democracy planted in a rich and liberating loam which its seeds continually replenished.

Since the appearance of Bernard Bailyn's provocative essay, Education in the Forming of American Society, scholars have been acknowledging their debt to him with the most enduring form of flattery: they have heeded his call for a re-examination of the meaning of education in American society. In the years since his work appeared students have rewritten the history of different schools, of eminent educators, and of the host of goals and purposes for education. Yet, in an important way some of the questions raised by Bailyn's work still have not been addressed. What new socializing roles did educational institutions perform as the family shed itself of old functions after 1700? This essay will attempt to deal with that question as it inquires into the social function of eighteenth-century college education.

That the seizure of power by Adolf Hitler in January 1933 began a revolution of virtually every phase of German life is a well known fact. What is not so well know, however, is that an educational revolution of an astonishing dimension accompanied the transformation of the Weimar Republic into the Third Reich. Most historians of the educational development of Nazi Germany have focused primary attention on the purging of Jewish and Liberal teachers, the burning of anti-Nazi books, and the imposition of racist and militaristic curricular and methodological innovations. Concentrating on ideology, these authorities have long contended that the Nazi educational revolution consisted largely of an attempt to create a “new man” for the totalitarian regime through adoption of its ideology in the schools that functioned in an authoritarian manner after the introduction of an absolute leadership principle or Führerprinzip. By emphasizing official decrees and ideological proclamations without examining what was actually happening in the schools, these scholars have ignored a vital aspect of the history of National Socialist Germany: that there occurred something of a youth rebellion conducted largely by Nazi students enrolled in the Hitler Youth and directed against the educational structures and authorities of Germany. Moreover, that rebellion transcended the mere alteration of the Weimar system and continued without abatement even against Nazi controlled schools until 1945.

The scant support which the British government gave to English universities in the nineteenth century is well known. As late as 1900, only £25,000 in exchequer funds went to universities and university colleges in England, which were allotted grants ranging from £500 to £1,800 each per year. Although there were significant increases in later years, it was not until the interwar period that large-scale government financing was undertaken. Unfortunately, in this as in other branches of history, there has been a tendency to identify “English” with “British”, thereby obscuring the far greater aid which was given to the four ancient Scottish universities over the same period.

Historians of American education have begun to explore an ever increasing variety of topics. In the last few years, these scholars have turned away from biography and intellectual history in favor of studies of the status and role of teachers, the child welfare movement, the growth of educational psychology and the education of minorities; they seem less interested in the philosophy and ideas of American education and are more concerned about the motives of school reformers and the impact of schooling on American society. In order to explore these issues more fully, educational historians have appealed to archivists and manuscript curators to locate and preserve the wide variety of source materials that document the history of education.