“The deaths of great men in national and political history are commemorated by song, story and memorial days,” Aaron Gove told his fellow school superintendents in 1900. “Only in secluded family circles, and midst the personal friends, are the works and lives of heroic schoolmasters recorded and remembered.” To this day, historians have largely neglected those who probably did more than any other individuals to shape the day-to-day operation of American public education—the superintendents of school districts. Not entirely neglected, of course: we have Raymond Callahan's important, path-breaking work; several scholars have enlightened us about changing metaphors of leadership and the ideologies of administrators; early historians have traced the administrative duties of school chiefs; and we have a number of narratives about individual superintendents. But we are still just beginning to understand the character of educational leadership in the past. We need to focus especially on superintendents in the local districts, where the chief decision-making power resided for most of American history rather than at the state or federal level (a statistic illustrates this point: in 1890 the median size of state departments of education was two persons, including the superintendent.)

One of the conventional justifications for the existence of large private philanthropic foundations in the United States has been their role as creative, innovative promoters of social change. Built on the fortunes of such industrial entrepreneurs as Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller, foundations early in this century were granted extensive legal privileges and immunity from government regulation in exchange for “voluntary” charitable support of science, medicine, and education, which like religion, theoretically existed in a private, non-governmental domain. Until the emergence of the federal government after World War II as the chief source of funding, private foundations played a predominant part in fostering educational and scientific innovation. Foundation support for social and institutional change, however, was not without inherent problems. The educational program of John D. Rockefeller's General Education Board during the decade of the 1930's illustrates the extent of these problems.

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.

Delegates to the 1907 Catholic Educational Association in Milwaukee expressed a remarkably optimistic mood. The twentieth century seemed to portend the fulfillment of American Catholic educational dreams. The Catholic Church had a magnificent educational past, declared the Reverend William Turner (1871–1936), scholar, religious journalist, professor and librarian at Catholic University, and future bishop of Buffalo, but it had long been distorted by anti-Catholic historians. There was desperate need for an accurate history of Catholic education written by a scholarly Catholic and “from the sources themselves.” Though it was obvious that an historian should write this history, it was even more obvious that this historian also be a professional educator. For “unless the person who writes a history of education has a knowledge of pedagogical methods and has some practice and experience, the history, I think, had better not be written.”

A guarded optimism seems to govern most appraisals of Tudor and Stuart education. Some writers have been so impressed by the achievements of the period, especially of the years 1560 to 1640, that they see not only an educational ferment involving an increase in the number of schools but also an expansion of opportunities which brought schooling within reach of the hitherto deprived lower members of society. The expansion of printing as well as the expansion of education leads R. D. Altick to suggest, “that in the Tudor and Stuart eras the ability to read was more democratically distributed among the English people than it would again be until at least the end of the eighteenth century.” W. A. L. Vincent asserts in The Grammar Schools; their continuing tradition 1660–1714 that, “the first sixty years of the seventeenth century was a period when the grammar schools of England and Wales flourished, and when education of the sort preparatory to the university was available to all who wished to avail themselves of it.” Even more enthusiastic in this vein is W. K. Jordan, who claims, in The Charities of Rural England, that by 1660 “a widespread and well-endowed system of education has been created within the reach of any poor and able boy who thirsted for knowledge and who aspired to escape the grip of poverty.”

One topic that has been largely neglected in the “renaissance” of educational history in the past two decades is the teacher. This essay seeks to remedy that neglect through a consideration of some organized teacher activities in three cities during the Progressive Era. Previous studies of progressivism and progressive education such as Lawrence Cremin's volume or the recent revisionist collection of essays by Clarence Karier, Paul Violas, and Joe Spring have paid little or no attention to teacher activities.

Ever since Nina Vandewalker wrote the first comprehensive history of the American kindergarten in 1908 historians of education have thought of the 1890s as a period of transformation in the theory and practice of kindergarten pedagogy. Historians agree that progressive kindergartners inspired by the child-centered psychologies of G. Stanley Hall and John Dewey initiated a critique of the Froebelian pedagogy upon which the kindergarten curriculum had been based since its introduction into the United States in the 1860s. Historians also agree that by 1920, after a long and sometimes bitter struggle, progressives emerged as victors in the battle with Froebelians for control of the curriculum. What historians have not agreed upon are the social import and educational consequences of this struggle.

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.

Very few of the American students who studied in Germany up to 1870 claimed perfection for German institutions and values. Virtually every one of them realized that American institutions had to grow out of American values. Thus, any historical account that explains the development of American universities purely in terms of German “influence” must be highly suspect. The American universities were not constructed from simple blueprints shipped over on the Hamburg Line. And American scholars were anything but imitations of their German teachers.

It has become increasingly clear in recent years that historians need to devote more effort at presenting the perspective of those who have been the recipients or victims of policies. Yet, except for a few testimonials and oral history presentations, evidence from the recipient's perspective is rare. On the other hand, published reports, correspondence, and other documentary evidence produced by policy makers and implementors is available through conventional sources. In the case of Indian education these sources are hardly overworked, and in spite of the limited view from the top down which they reveal, they say much about the policy makers purposes, and the policies themselves.

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.