The gap that for many seems to separate modern knowledge from human values has become by now a rather well-worn topic. Let us leave aside, for the moment, the question to what extent this is an actual or only a seeming gap. The more immediate question is whether there remains anything of worth to be said about the subject, which has not already been said and scrutinized in myriad form by countless observers. And what might the historian of education in particular stand to gain by staring once more into this yawning abyss? My contention in this talk will be that as educators, and as historians of education, we have yet to engage fully some of the major issues in the relation between knowledge and values, and that to do so holds promise for us, whether our interest is that of the historian only, or of the historian also concerned with present educational understanding and endeavor.

Over the past few decades, scholars have often considered many of the professions to be the natural offspring of the global processes of modernization. Countless studies relate professional development to the broader currents of technological change or structural differentiation. Moreover, since the professions were seen as having a common parentage, much research has been devoted to identifying the characteristics and developmental patterns that all of them shared.

Received tradition in America has identified the Puritans with the “detestation of idleness” and tended to denigrate them as the originators of this value judgment. Although scholars have written extensively about the Puritan work ethic and the theological framework undergirding the stress on diligence in one's calling, little has been said about the conceptual and cultural background for Puritan opposition to idleness. According to historian Perry Miller, a likely source for such views is England rather than New England. Miller has asserted that, when considering Puritan culture as a whole, “ninety per cent of the intellectual life, scientific knowledge, morality, manners and customs, notions and prejudices, was that of all Englishmen.” The sixteenth-century courtesy literature, that body of treatises intended for the instruction of the aristocracy, confirms that abhorrence of idleness was indeed a hallmark of the ideal advocated for the English Renaissance gentleman. The courtesy treatises demonstrate that the Massachusetts Bay settlers had inherited from their English ancestors a century-old written tradition, wherein idleness had been defined and its sinful consequences unequivocally denounced by those who assumed the task of educating the well-born and the governing classes. Concurrent with the denunciations, courtesy treatises exhorted the gentlemen to good stewardship of time, i.e., to a life primarily of worship and work. Hours spent in recreation were approved, he was told, only for “honest” pastimes taken in moderation. An analysis of these sixteenth-century conceptions begins with a review of the educational ideals portrayed in the courtesy literature.

In recent years, statistics for Elizabethan and Stuart literacy levels, compiled by David Cressy, have challenged the familiar image of the period as a golden age of educational opportunity. These figures can serve as the foundation for a new analysis of social mobility in the period, particularly among those below the level of the gentry. Yet the most striking figure among them is the one which is consistently the highest of all, regardless of the population sampled: the illiteracy rate for women. The number of women of all classes unable even to sign their names hovers around 90% and rises as high as 95 ± 3%; Cressy's figures obviously do not even consider complex reading comprehension or extensive writing ability, skills commonly associated with the spread of Renaissance culture through education.

Moral education for many years has been one of the most talked-about school topics in the English-speaking world; there has been a profusion of studies on various approaches to teaching morality or promoting moral “development.” During the years that this interest flourished, few curriculum areas were less evident in popular talk about education than history. While historians have shown a continuing interest in the role and status of their field in general education, many historians recently have lamented the current decline of historical studies.

Ferrer's modern school movement has recently been brought to the attention of English-speaking educational historians in the scholarly work of Paul Avrich on American Anarchism and (in a somewhat more popular vein) in the writings of Joel Spring. However, apart from a considerable range of contemporary and near-contemporary biographical accounts, the majority of which are either uncritically sympathetic or overtly hostile, there still exists no “definitive” and scholarly biography of the martyred Spanish libertarian or “philosophic Anarchist,” Francisco Ferrer y Guardia. Several good critical studies dealing both with Ferrer and Ferrer's Spain have now thrown new light on certain aspects of Ferrer's work and influence, notably the Escuela Moderna of Barcelona and its significant antecedents in turn-of-the-century Spain; the activities of Ferrer's International League for the Rational Education of Children during 1908–9; and the Ferrer-inspired schools and colonies in the United States, especially those at New York and Stelton. It is questionable whether any complete synthesis or comprehensive analysis of the Modern School movement and of Ferrer's career could ever be accomplished. There are considerable lacunae in the scattered sources directly pertinent to the activities of the Modern Schools, which were established in places as diverse as Milan, São Paulo, Liverpool and New York; moreover, the Anarchist, libertarian or Socialist groups and personalities in various ways identified with them in many cases remain obscure.

Since the 1970s the history of educational development has become the object of scholarly research once more. Within the context of recent educational history, the post-war period has aroused particular interest in educational historiographers. This period of educational development was the central topic of a recent conference of Historical Commission of the German Society for Educational Sciences. That symposium sought to find points of reference or precursors in the post-war era of the reforms in the 1970s. In contrast, the development during the 1950s and 1960s has not yet been investigated in detail, a gap which is explained by its close proximity to the present.

Education, wrote Margaret Mead in 1943, creates a “drama of discontinuity” between parents and children in modern life. By encouraging children to be different from their parents, education holds forth the possibility, unknown to traditional societies, of introducing new values, even bringing new worlds into being. The dark side of this possibility is that education can degenerate into “techniques of power,” teaching through indoctrination and locking the future into coercive relations of superiority and inferiority while conditions of life change in other respects. To avoid such a prospect, she argued, education should be placed at the service of learning instead of manipulation, spontaneity instead of control. A proper use of the discontinuity between parent and child would be to “devise and practice a system of education which sets the future free.”

The central issue of twentieth-century Mexican historiography is the effect of the Mexican Revolution (1910–1920) on the society. The official interpretation holds that the Revolution was a true social revolution that not only ended the neocolonialist society governed by Porfirio Díaz but also institutionalized social change. Hence, Mexican Revolution is always capitalized and the government's political party is the Institutional Revolutionary Party. Critics see the Revolution and the society it produced in a different light. Some assert that the Revolution changed little except to bring a different clique to power. Others argue that the Revolution died in 1940 when reformist president Lázaro Cárdenas turned the presidential office over to a conservative successor. Those using Marxist analysis deny that the Revolution was a revolution; to them, Mexico was and is a capitalist society operated for the benefit of the national and international bourgeoisie.

It has long been known that the early fourteenth century was one of the most distinguished periods in the history of the University of Oxford. For medieval Oxford it was the intellectual high point, excelling briefly (in the 1330s) even Paris in the areas of physics and theology. One has only to recall the names of William of Ockham, Walter Burley, and Thomas Bradwardine to be reminded of some of the leaders of that academic productivity. In fact, our view of what was happening educationally and intellectually at Oxford in that period has rested primarily on the most prominent names of theologians and natural philosophers, and a limited number of their works as well.