W. E. B. DuBois once argued that the proper education for oppressed groups such as African Americans had a special, critical purpose. He knew, as have all serious educators since Socrates accepted his cup, that education was always and everywhere political. For the oppressed, the political role of schooling had to be aimed precisely at finding the means to end the oppression. In 1930, speaking before the graduating students at Howard University, he put the issue this way: “Let there be no misunderstanding about this, no easy going optimism. We are not going to share modern civilization just by deserving recognition. We are going to force ourselves in by organized far-seeing effort—by outthinking and outflanking the owners of the world today who are too drunk with their own arrogance and power successfully to oppose us, if we think and learn and do.” It is clear from his own life's work that to “think and learn and do”—the “outthinking and outflanking”—required schooling.

About a century ago, the private boarding school movement began in earnest in the United States. What are today considered among the best, if not the best, boarding schools were founded between 1883 and 1906: Lawrenceville (1883); Groton (1884); Woodbury Forest (1889); Taft (1890); Hotchkiss (1892); Choate (1896); St. George's (1896); Middlesex (1901); Deerfield (1903); and Kent (1906). Other schools launched earlier, were enlarged or their character altered during this quarter century: Phillips Andover (1778); Phillips Exeter (1783); Episcopal (1839); Hill (1851); St. Paul's (1856); and St. Mark's (1865). This is the “select sixteen” identified by E. Digby Baltzell in The Protestant Establishment. Baltzell should know—being a Philadelphia mainliner, a graduate of St. Paul's, and for years professor of sociology at the University of Pennsylvania.

When Boniface VIII issued the constitution Cum ex eo in 1298, he was attempting to address a problem that had long preoccupied church leaders—the education of the parochial clergy. His plan to provide higher education for parish priests—outlined in Cum ex eo—was fairly straightforward: an unordained parochial rector, with episcopal license, could be absent from his parish and use the fruits of his benefice to finance his studies at a studium generale for up to seven years, provided that he proceeded to the order of subdeacon within a year from his institution to his benefice, that he was ordained to the priesthood within a year following the expiration of his license, and that he left his parishioners in the care of a suitable curate.