The Petersburg Benevolent Mechanics' Association (PBMA) was founded on 4 January 1825 by a group of mechanics “for a closer union, for mental improvement, for the promotion of mechanical arts and sciences and for benevolent and charitable purposes.” PBMA members worked in a vibrant, burgeoning economy; by 1830, Petersburg, Virginia, was a wealthy, diverse manufacturing town, with a population of 3,440 whites, 2,032 free blacks, and 2,850 slaves. It was the fourth largest city in Virginia and one of the larger towns south of the Mason-Dixon line.

At the turn of the century, European settlers, officials, and missionaries in Southern Rhodesia were apathetic about promoting African girls' schooling. By the late 1920s, however, all sectors of the European community—settlers, officials, and missionaries—were debating whether, and for what reasons, girls should attend mission schools. Europeans discussed girls' and women's schooling as a strategy for coping with problems in the social and economic development of the region. Some Native Commissioners hoped that disciplined moral education would encourage women to remain in rural areas and take responsibility for their families, supporting the system of migrant labor. Many missionaries hoped that domestic education could train women to build peasant households in rural areas and Christian havens for educated African men. Some settlers called for servant-training programs as ways of enlisting African women's support of European society. These educational strategies for coping with tensions caused by social change proved highly contradictory, however. Ultimately, the rhetoric of social engineering was more prominent than the results in the education of girls and women in Southern Rhodesia.

The history of school reform has continuously fascinated historians of education, but their study of the subject has acquired a new urgency in the last quarter of a century as national political discussions have given an increasingly important place to educational policy. The recent publication of Tinkering toward Utopia: A Century of Public School Reform (Harvard University Press, 1995), by David Tyack and Larry Cuban, offers the latest comprehensive study of the subject. We have invited four distinguished scholars to comment on the book. They are Robert L. Hampel of the University of Delaware, William R. Johnson of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, David N. Plank of Michigan State University, and Diane Ravitch of the Brookings Institute. Professors Tyack and Cuban have, in turn, agreed to respond to the comments.