In 1891, an Ohio school journal sponsored a teachers' roundtable about the state's most recent curricular requirement: Scientific Temperance Instruction. The exchange began with an anonymous letter from a self-proclaimed teetotaler, who nevertheless feared that STI's screeds against alcohol and tobacco would sap parental authority. “It is hard to know just what to say when dear little Johnny looks up in your face and says: ‘“Why, my papa smokes,”’ another contributor acknowledged, suggesting four possible responses that could promote abstinence without obstinance:

A 1930 report of a rural New York Child Study Club meeting conveys the dubiousness with which many mothers have regarded using books to raise babies. In the words of the group's secretary: “One mother, at a certain point in the discussion, quoted, half in fun, the much-abused ‘Spare the rod and spoil the child,’ adding, That's in the book.’ (We have had quite a bit of fun about things being or not being ‘in the book.”) ‘Oh, but that's in the old Book,’ some made answer, and to that another said, ‘I guess you have to mix the two!”” This ironic dialog highlights women's ambivalence and confusion about the use of the “book” in child-rearing and about the sources of expert advice which have contended for authority in the child-rearing enterprise. Before the twentieth century, mothers who raised “baby by the book” were often ridiculed, with the assumption being that the care of children constituted common knowledge; however, in this century, middle-class mothers have avidly consumed child-rearing manuals. American parents have been inundated with baby books, from the free Infant Care pamphlets dispensed by the U.S. Children's Bureau in the early decades of the century to Dr. Benjamin Spock's 35-cent paperback Baby and Child Care, which was distributed to millions of mothers by physicians and nurses in the 1940s and 1950s.

When Fritz Ringer published The Decline of the German Mandarins in 1969, the history of education and of the professions occupied a very modest position in the historiography of modern Germany. In the Federal Republic, the reprinting in the mid-1960s of Friedrich Paulsen's History of Scholarly Instruction in the German Schools and Universities and German Universities and University Study, both dating from the turn of the century, highlighted the lack of more recent scholarship, although it also heralded a major revival of interest in the field. In the United States, the experience of the two world wars had almost completely eroded the older admiration for aspects of German education ranging from the kindergarten to the research seminar. The search for the roots of National Socialism had led many historians to criticize German schools and universities for their teaching of authoritarian, militaristic, nationalistic, and even völkisch values. Yet during the two decades after World War II, a brief condemnation of the universities by the German exile Frederic Lilge was the only book-length study on any area of German educational history in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to appear in the United States.