Any serious student of American educational history is fully cognizant of the fact that in the last fifteen years his field has undergone a major reawakening. It all began when Bernard Bailyn asked the first of all questions: What is education? He had his own answer, of course, and suggested that historians view education as the “entire process by which a culture transmits itself across the generations.” He then went on to say that once the historian begins from this point he “is prepared to see great variations in the role of formal institutions of instruction, to see schools and universities fade into relative insignificance next to other social agencies.” Finding Bailyn's definition of education too broad in its failure to distinguish between socialization and education, Lawrence A. Cremin has sought to restrict it while at the same time retaining Bailyn's insight of conceiving education in broader terms than the institution of the school. Cremin, in a recent work, has come to view education as the “deliberate, systematic, and sustained effort to transmit and evoke knowledge, attitudes, values, skills, and sensibilities.” But while Cremin is more concerned with the deliberateness of educational efforts than is Bailyn, he still regards it as the proper concern of the educational historian to ask “what agencies, formal and informal, have shaped American thought, character, and sensibility over the years and what have been the relationships between these agencies and the society that has sustained them.” Thus, in recent years our entire conception of what constitutes educational history has been substantially enlarged. This essay is in that tradition.

The past decade has been a tumultuous one for Japanese higher education with faculty pitted against students, students against government, and government against both in an often chaotic and seemingly incessant search for an answer to the question “Who governs Japan's universities?” The answer given by many analysts is “no one”—that the conflict between these three bodies have rendered Japanese universities ungovernable. Failure to achieve consensus and implement needed reforms in higher education has been attributed largely to the decentralized internal organization of the leading universities and the tradition of deep-seated hostility between academic intellectuals and the Japanese government. Although the more violent and dramatic of the conflicts in the late 1960s and early 1970s have received considerable attention by observers outside Japan, the long tradition of conflict over university governance which provides such a significant part of the intellectual and political context for those caught up in the contemporary debates has received far less attention. The purpose of this essay is to provide an historical perspective on this conflict by sketching in the prewar background that constitutes the heritage of academic self-government at Japan's oldest and still foremost universities, the imperial universities of Tokyo and Kyoto.

Any time anyone mentions Dewey's disciples, the most obvious person associated with that description is Dr. William Heard Kilpatrick. Known by many as the great interpreter and popularizer of Dewey's theories, Kilpatrick has been both criticized and applauded as the leading defender of progressive educational practices. Often the impression has been given that, as the Apostle Paul carried the teachings of Christ to the pagans, Kilpatrick's major role in life was to carry the teachings of Dewey to the educators. Seldom is Kilpatrick's name mentioned without the notation that during his lifetime he touched the hearts and minds of over 35,000 students who attended his classes, learning the gospel of Dewey.

Kliuchevskii's essay, “Dva vospitaniia” is the pioneering work in the history of childhood and of the family in Russia, and it has been sorely neglected. V.O. Kliuchevskii wrote this piece as a public lecture which was given on February 1, 1893, for the Moscow Committee on Literacy. In it he contrasts the educational values of traditional Muscovite society of the sixteenth century with those of Ivan Ivanovich Betskoi, Catherine the Great's principal educational advisor during the first years of her reign. More precisely, he compares two documents. The first was the Domostroi, the “House-orderer,” of the priest Sil'vestr. He, Metropolitan Makarii, and Aleksei Adashev were the principal advisors of Tsar Ivan IV in the early years of his active reign after 1547. They were the creators of the new ideology of the Muscovite state based on the dream of unified Orthodox Tsardom. They compiled a single all-Russian paterikon, a new unified law code, a unified ecclesiastical rule, and an official geneological history of Russia's rulers. The regimentation of personal behavior represented by the Domostroi was an essential part of the campaign for standardization and codification, which saw the origins of printing in Russia as well. In the sixteenth century these precepts had the same official sanction and status as did Catherine's legislation two hundred years later, especially the Statute of her boarding schools.

The Congregational Library, located in downtown Boston, possesses an important collection of papers related to the history of American education in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries which deserves the attention of historians. The Library has long served as a principal repository for the historical records of American Congregationalists, well known for their broad support of education. In 1965, as a result of the earlier merger of Congregational-Christian and Evangelical Reformed churches into the United Church of Christ, the files of the Congregational Board of Homeland Missions were deposited at the denominational library in Boston. These materials included the manuscript records of all the national educational societies of the denomination.