Seventeenth-Century England was a “one-class society,” characterized by a tiny minority of men—at best four or five percent of the population—who “owned most of the wealth, wielded the power and made all the decisions, political, economic and social for the national whole.” Admission to this charmed circle was open to those who could “live without manual labour” and could “bear the port, charge and countenance of a gentleman.” This included not only those of noble blood and ancient riches, but “whosoever studieth the laws of this realm, who so abideth in the university giving his mind to his books, or professeth physic and the liberal sciences.” The physician, as a student of the liberal sciences and a member of an ancient and venerable profession, was accorded gentle status, unlike the great majority of gentlemen, because of his intellectual qualifications, his mastery of the art and science of healing the sick—and much else. If we would begin to understand this somewhat unusual relationship between education and social status, a question that still engages the sociologist and historian of modern society, the practitioners of London, especially the fellows, candidates, and licentiates of the Royal College of Physicians, provide a valuable focus, for it was from these men that the most fruitful medical advances of the century came and it was they who served as models for the physicians of the English towns and countryside for many years to come.

When the American war for Independence began, William and Mary was the only college located in the Southern colonies. By 1800 seventeen Southern schools held charters authorizing them to grant baccalaureate degrees, and eight of them had done so. (1) At least one college had been chartered in each of the Southern states, and collegiate instruction was being offered in localities that in 1760 had scarcely supported a writing master. Freed from the restraining hand of British authority, as soon as the fighting ended a number of Southerners set out to establish colleges. But in 1800 five of the seventeen schools chartered had not yet managed to open their doors to students or had already failed. (2) The intellectual and financial plight of the others was deplorable. Not a college in the South showed real promise of leadership. So profuse a sprouting of colleges in the early spring of America's independence is sure evidence that the ground for collegiate establishment had been prepared well before the Revolution; the quick shriveling and stunted growth of the new schools reveal that they were not deeply rooted in Southern soil. Thomas Jefferson tried to avoid this legacy of weakness when he used his influence to create an entirely new institution to be the University of Virginia. Unfortunately no single action could surmount the general condition, and the role of the college long remained a limited one in the South. When, during the Revolutionary generation, Southerners initiated a sudden burst of college founding but acquiesced in an equally sudden withdrawal of public financial support for them, they made decisions that determined the function higher education would have in Southern society. Why they chose as they did requires explanation.

The progressive idea of reform developed through years of experimentation in St. Louis and achieved success in the 1897 School Board reorganization. As early as 1877 the tendency to treat the city as a separate entity became apparent when a new charter separating the city from the county was effected. Previously there had been both a city and a county government in the same area, each with two legislative houses and the power to tax. The “dual double-headed system then in force,” one critic argued, “was anomalous and absurd.” The two bodies, both of which levied taxes, did not really represent the people, since neither was elected at large. The new charter, although retaining the two-house City Council, required one house to be elected at large; efficiency was increased through extended terms for most officials and an increase of administrative powers for the mayor.

The Rush of the Gentry into English schools and universities during the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries has been well documented. An Elizabethan writer, William Harrison, was merely reiterating a familiar complaint when he wrote of the universities that although they had originally been founded for poor men's sons “the rich do so incroch vpon them, and so farre hath this inconueience spread it selfe that it is in my time an hard matter for a poore mans child to come by a felowship (though he be neuer so good a scholer & woorthie of that roome.)”

The social reconstructionist educators within the progressive education movement were only one of the many groups to emerge in response to the depression of the thirties with the promise that their plan would regenerate society. Compared to Upton Sinclair's “End Poverty in California” program, the Minnesota Farmer-Labor Party and the large followings of Huey Long, Father Coughlin and Francis Townsend, their movement seemed insignificant indeed. Yet they were taken seriously by political groups on both the Left and the Right. This was in marked contrast to the large body of classroom teachers, who remained indifferent to the Promethean role they were being called upon to perform. The extreme Left was forced to consider the social reconstructionists because the revolutionary role they assigned to the school represented a direct challenge to the orthodox Marxist position. Conservative groups responded to the program of the social reconstructionists out of fear that the minds of the young were being filled with un-American ideas and values. While the latter created a louder clamor, it was the Communists who were most deeply affected by social reconstructionism.

In March 1711, Cotton Mather declared that, “A lively Discourse about the Benefit and Importance of Education, should be given to the Countrey.” “The Countrey,” he asserted, “is perishing for want of it; they are sinking apace into Barbarism and all Wickedness.” Mather was convinced that formal education was being neglected in eighteenth-century Massachusetts, and for two centuries after Mather's death historians accepted his verdict. As early as 1835, Lemuel Shattuck described the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries as a “dark age” of learning. Later historians used similar phrases. By the close of the nineteenth century, Edward Eggleston wrote the epitaph for early eighteenth-century education, “a period of darkness and decline.”

The study of professions and professionalization has received great impetus in recent years, particularly in English-speaking countries, but generally overlooked is the importance that universities have always had in determining which groups came to be recognized as professions. In fact institutionalization of training within the university seems to have been the key to professionalization from the very beginning of the modern concept, and those areas which first were regarded as “graduate” subjects (medicine, divinity, and law) early came to be looked upon as professions.

After comparing the development of public education in the South to its development in other regions, most students of Southern history have concluded that the people of the South cared little about education. In this paper I will show that the South's educational backwardness cannot be attributed to any lack of interest in education on the part of the people of that region; rather, this educational underdevelopment was due to the lack of interest and/or commitment to public education by those who exercised political power in the South.

The early educational efforts of Massachusetts in establishing the publicly supported school are a well-known chapter in the history of American education. Not so well known are the missionary attempts carried on by the Puritan clergy to educate the Indians inhabiting the Massachusetts Bay Colony. One such effort was begun by John Eliot in 1646. Eliot had no narrow vision of quickly converting his copper-colored brethren, when in October 1646, he applied at the entrance to the wigwam of the Indian Waauban. Yet, even he did not envision the huge program which resulted in founding 14 Indian villages, complete with their own unique form of government and educational system. In effect, these villages became centers of adult education, making the Indians as much like their Puritan neighbors as was possible.

By the Fall of 1902, in their search for a new college president, the trustees of the City College of New York had become particularly interested in John Huston Finley, a Princeton University Professor, who had earlier served as President of Knox College in Illinois. Alexander Stewart Webb, who had long presided over CCNY (founded as the Free Academy in 1847), (1) made clear his intention to retire. It was not easy to replace him. Administering the busy College in the midst of the bustling metropolis demanded a man of ability. Yet the presidency of an institution that could hardly boast of being a center of scholarly distinction had limited appeal. To be sure CCNY functioned well as an avenue for the social mobility of New York's lower-middle class. Especially to children of recent immigrants, the free-tuition College represented a hospitable America in which dreams and ambitions could be realized. But not everyone appreciated this function.

A major problem with Lawrence A. Cremin's The Transformation of the School is the neglect of one aspect of progressive political ideology and one stream of educational thought during the pre-World War I period. The neglect of these two movements was probably caused by a failure to give a coherent statement as to the nature of educational reforms during this period and the use of a rather vague definition of progressive political and social change. What Cremin calls “progressive education” during the pre-World War I period appears to be a conglomeration of educational changes with no particular common bonds except that they represented something new. This lack of clarity gives the impression that a strange combination of people were called “progressive educators.” Under the roof of this title is mixed the free atmosphere of Marietta Johnson's Organic School with the well ordered air of the platoon system of the Gary Public Schools. The title also houses the educational elitist and test-oriented Edward L. Thorndike with Caroline Pratt's Play School. This confused picture of educational change is a function of an equally obscure definition of progressive political and social change. Cremin vaguely defines “American Progressivism writ large” as social and political change designed to improve the lives of individuals, a valueless definition since it literally includes everyone.

“For the great dramatists of the late nineteenth century,” writes the critic, Eric Bentley, “a play was a bomb to drop on the respectable middle classses.” In the winter of 1890–1891, the young playwright Frank Wedekind created his bomb, the explosive drama, Spring's Awakening (Frühlingserwachen), in which he bitterly attacked the moral hypocrisy of his day. In dealing with the sexual problems of adolescence, Wedekind harshly condemned middle-class prudery and an education that taught German children the facts of German history, but not the facts of life. In one frank scene after another, he explored the tragedy of this situation. Fourteen-year-old Wendla becomes pregnant without ever discovering how she conceived. She finally dies from the effects of “abortion pills.” Her lover, Melchior, searches for answers to his sexual questions and finds dishonor instead. He commits suicide. His friend, Moritz, is unable to help and wanders in despair at the final curtain. Only the self-righteous parents and teachers, who have crushed “spring's awakening,” survive.

In the eighteenth century France did not have a system of secondary education. Instead, municipalities, teaching orders, and universities operated individual collèges (secondary schools) on their own initiative and largely free from government control. The universities and the teaching orders, especially the Society of Jesus and the Congregation of the Oratory, provided a uniform administration for their respective collèges. The administration of collèges founded by municipalities varied. Many municipal officials simply had turned over their schools to religious orders and had subsidized their operation. Others had administered their schools independently, with varying degrees of control over the principals and teachers. The situation changed somewhat, however, after 1763, when the government of Louis XV created boards throughout France to administer many collèges, especially those which the Society of Jesus was no longer permitted to operate and which no other religious order could be persuaded to take over. In the establishment of these boards and in the subsequent supervision of them, the royal government and at least one law court attempted to create a loose educational system.

Paul Monroe's Cyclopedia of Education is now well over 50 years old, and no work of comparable scope exists at the present time in English. Although periodic requests have been made for a new encyclopedia of education in English, it is unlikely that Paul Monroe's Cyclopedia will ever be truly supplanted or its continuing value diminished. The importance of the Cyclopedia lies not only in its unchallenged comprehensiveness and scope, but preeminently in the unique contribution it made at a point in time of critical importance in the history of American education.

If he is alert to avenues of advancement, an educator (a term here applied to all college teachers) will heed the dictum “publish or perish.” Indeed, if he is in the fullest sense of the word an educator, he will have developed or be developing ideas and information he wants to share with readers somewhere. Unpublished material is of little benefit to a waiting world; obviously, information must appear in print to help either the reader or the educator-writer. For a person who has information to communicate, the problem of finding readers cannot be considered acute today. The beginner, whether he considers himself a specialist or a generalist, should find a measure of encouragement in the simple fact that there are literally scores of publications available to him.

The average middle-class American contemplated the turn of the twentieth century from his farmhouse or his home on the city's fringe with a smug complacency. The United States had just defeated what Americans viewed as the archetype of “backward” Europe—monarchical and Roman Catholic Spain—in a war that had led to easy victory, empire, and a vastly increased self-esteem and world esteem for the United States.

To offer all individuals of the human race the means of providing for their needs, of assuring their welfare, of being acquainted with and exercising their rights, of understanding and fulfilling their duties; to assure to each individual the capacity of perfecting his labour, of making himself fit for the social functions to which he has the right to be called, to develop the whole extent of the talents that he has received from nature and, by this means, of establishing among citizens a de facto equality and also to make real the political equality recognized by the law; this must be the first goal of national education and, from this viewpoint, it is a duty of justice for public authorities.

Condorcet (1792)

William the Taciturn's right hand, Marnix, Sieur de Ste. Aldegonde, is best known for his religious satire La Ruche, which is the author's own translation of De Bienkorf, wherein Catholics are mercilessly satirized for their superstition and rapacity. Considerably less well known is his educational treatise for princelings, written in 1584, but published only in 1615 by Sixtus Arcerius, a lecturer at the University of Franeker in Friesland. There are only three known copies extant, one of which is at the University Library of Leyden, one in the Bibliothèque Nationale, and one in the Royal Library in Brussels. The work first became available to the public when Marnix's collected works were published in 1857–1860 by Van Meenen and Lacroix, whose translation in French is not always accurate, although it gives us enough of an idea what Marnix's intentions were.

What kind of explanation does history promote? Does history give us an advantage in dealing with current as well as bygone problems? These two different questions assume very similar burdens when historians defend the “usefulness” of their writing and research. The demand that history be “useful” impinges especially hard on the profession today in the areas of educational and black history. The reasons are, or should be, obvious. What is less obvious at the moment is which of the many meanings of “useful” do historians find most compelling. In the past, the professional and educational role of the historian has been largely affected by the questions he poses to deal with in the “usefulness” of his discipline.