In February 1899, the Committee of Physical Culture of the Chicago Public School Board approved an intensive “anthropometric” study of all children enrolled in the city's public schools. The study was a detailed attempt to measure the height, weight, strength, lung capacity, hearing, and general fitness of Chicago's student population. Through 1899 and 1900, thousands of Chicago's primary, grammar, and high school students had their bodies closely scrutinized, measured, weighed, tested, and, in a few cases, diagrammed. What the School Board members wanted to know was the “fitness” of the student body. Were Chicago public school students—many recently arrived immigrants from eastern and southern Europe—vital and vigorous children who could become energetic modern workers and citizens (Figure 1)?

A 1964 television series, “Profiles in Courage,” based on the late President John F. Kennedy's Pulitzer prize-winning book, featured the life of Mary Stone McDowell, a quiet, yet strong, teacher. Within peace circles, McDowell was a well-known figure. It was not unusual to see her marching in peace demonstrations or handing out antiwar literature at street meetings in the rain, snow, sleet and hot days in the summer. It was not out of the ordinary to read her editorials urging war tax resistance and certainly not surprising to those who knew her to draw strength from her courage and convictions. Yet what captured the interest of the show's producers was the stand she took during World War I. This quiet, unassuming Phi Beta Kappa graduate from Swarthmore College, and Quaker public school teacher in New York City, became the first educator in American history to test the constitutionality of the newly enacted loyalty oaths on religious, rather than political, grounds.

During the twenty to twenty-five years after World War II, children in the United States were increasingly taught to understand their nation, its history, and its economic greatness—as an “economy”—rather than in social, moral, philosophical, or political terms (i.e., as a society, a community, a republic, etc.). Equally powerful was its message that the U.S. economy was an unprecedented marvel of productivity and a facet of Americanness of which to be proud and to defend. During this time period, not only did an economics education movement emerge, but economics increasingly was taught as part of social studies, history, or other classes, and a huge amount of curricular material was developed and disseminated for classroom use.

The struggle to provide primary education for the Catholic poor in England and Wales dominated the agenda of English Catholic leaders in the last half of the nineteenth century. This effort occurred within the larger framework of a national educational revolution that slowly pushed the government into providing public education for the first time. Although state education grants at the elementary level began in 1833, lingering problems forced the government to establish a new era of educational provision with the controversial Education Act of 1870. This act created a dual education system consisting of the long-standing denominational schools operated by the different churches and new rate-supported board schools, operated by local school boards, providing no religious instruction or nondenominational religious instruction. In the closing years of the nineteenth century, the dual system grew intolerable for Catholics because local rates (property taxes) only supported the board schools and gave them almost unlimited funding while Catholic schools struggled to make ends meet on school pence and shrinking state grants, which Catholics had only had access to beginning in 1847.