To every thing, said the Preacher, there is a season, a time to be born and a time to die. But sometimes the students of Life misread its signs and prematurely bury one whose time has yet to come. Historians no less than journalists sometimes write obituaries when they should be appraising the tenacity of age. Over the past twenty years historians of American higher education have fallen deeply into the trap of prematurity; the obituary they wrote reads something like this:

Washington, D.C., 2 July 1862. The American Liberal Arts College died today after a prolonged illness. It was 226 years old.

Charity students at New England colleges before 1800 always had depended on individual patrons and small institutions to provide the kind of financial assistance which more fortunate students received from their families. Every year a few orphans and impoverished young men who had distinguished themselves as village scholars were sent to college as wards of prominent townspeople or as beneficiaries of their church charity funds. Since most patrons and churches could support only one or two students at irregular intervals, the scale of patronage in the eighteenth century had made it possible to think of student aid in familial terms: patrons, churches, local charitable societies, and even college officials—who rarely had funds to offer—all assumed an intimate, paternal watchfulness over these adopted sons. The rise of the American Education Society after 1815 altered these old assumptions. No longer did indigent students depend solely upon small sources of charity in their own communities, or experience the kind of paternal watchfulness that had always accompanied the charity they received, for they could turn instead to an institution too large to function like a family. As the number of A.E.S. beneficiaries climbed toward 1,000, totally new arrangements for student aid appeared, transforming the situation of indigent students in the nineteenth century, creating an organization of unprecedented size and influence over the American student population.

In 1873 John M. Kohler, an immigrant from western Austria, settled in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, a small town near the shores of Lake Michigan about forty miles north of Milwaukee. There he founded the Kohler Company. Initially the company manufactured agricultural implements, then expanded to the production of enameled kitchenwares, and finally enameled plumbing fixtures. The manufacture of agricultural implements and kitchenwares was early discontinued and today the company is widely known for the production of plumbing fixtures.

In the decades after the Civil War, no individual did more to popularize the kindergarten in America than Elizabeth Palmer Peabody. First acquainted with the new institution for childhood through Mrs. Carl Schurz in 1859, later followed by a European tour to see Friedrich Froebel's work, Peabody spent the next thirty-five years of her life proselytizing for the emancipation of the child. The kindergarten, she believed, was not simply a method of education but a movement of mystical significance. Her advocacy was an “apostolate,” kindergartening a religion, a “Gospel for children.” Like Froebel, Peabody spoke of absolutes and universality. She dealt with Truth, the Child, the Home, Family, and Motherhood, and offered to stem the hedonistic tendencies of childhood. All children, Peabody and her associates believed, were self-centered. In their earliest years they discover their bodies, senses, and power to act. Their mothers' tenderness heightens their impulses toward selfishness. They demand immediate satisfaction. Without an agency external to the family in which socialization among peers and to society's mores occurs, childhood would thus ultimately become self-destructive. It was here that the kindergarten became necessary, allowing the child “to take his place in the company of his equals, to learn his place in their companionship, and still later to learn wider social relations and their involved duties.” “A kindergarten, then,” Peabody wrote, “is children in society—a commonwealth or republic of children—whose laws are all part and parcel of the Higher Law alone.”

The independent nations of Africa now face the task of reevaluating and reshaping those institutions imposed on them by the former colonial powers. The educational institutions these emerging nations inherited are not linked to the realities of present-day African needs.

The numbers of native young men who began flooding American cities in the 1840s and 1850s were faced with a bewildering array of problems. Opportunities they had been led to believe were available for the asking appeared more difficult to lay hands on. Employers were unexpectedly reluctant to hire them and they themselves began to realize how unsure they were about what they wanted to do in a strange environment.

Both the 1918 Education Act (the Fisher Act) and the 1944 Education Act (the Butler Act) are of interest to the English social or education historian as major signposts along the road to the English welfare state. The acts are even more striking when juxtaposed, because their developments follow similar patterns. This paper will suggest that the evolution of both acts involved the following pattern: First, the ideational components of each act were produced by the Board of Education and by the consultative committee of the Board of Education in the years before the world wars. In both cases the ideas out of which the acts were constructed were merely the conventional wisdom of the prewar educational establishment. Second, the crystallization of these ideas was the result of wartime events. Third, because in each case the energizing force for the articulation of the conventional wisdom into legislative enactment was the war, it was inevitable that the disappearance of the source of energy (the war) would produce an eventual diminution of educational momentum. In both cases a postwar educational “slump” was the result.

American Colleges during the half century after the Civil War — usually small, under strong religious influence, and located away from cities — have been largely neglected by historians of higher education, although used as foils to set off the merits of new universities. This survey of how early university presidents viewed the colleges cannot right the historiographical balance, but it may reveal certain slogans of our academic Whig history in their original setting and thereby provide critical distance.

The general contours of nineteenth-century collegiate development, as found in the histories of American higher education, probably need substantial reexamination and extensive reshaping. Traditionally, colleges associated with various denominations are characterized largely in terms of sect-like religious zeal and are assigned the early nineteenth century as their period of importance. The few monographic studies of late nineteenth-century colleges and the more numerous works on the emergence of universities are correspondingly cast in a framework of increasing secularism in higher education. It seems more likely, however, that the current historical conception of the denominational college more closely coincides with realities of institutional development after rather than before 1850. In terms of support, control, and functions, there is evidence of a strong and increasing denominationalism in a large majority of late nineteenth-century colleges. For most of the institutions with founding dates prior to 1850 this degree of denominationalism is a departure from the primary role played by localism in founding and nurturing these educational enterprises during their earliest years. Although additional research will be necessary to confirm this contrast, there is good reason to anticipate that the traditional generalization concerning a basic trend from sectarianism toward secularism, when applied to American collegiate history during the nineteenth century, will have to be inverted.

Harold Rugg IS usually remembered as one of a group of professor-reformers (sometimes referred to as the “reconstructionist wing” of the progressive education movement) whose educational philosophy included the tenet that the school ought to be in the vanguard of social change. The nucleus of this group — which in addition to Rugg looked to John Dewey, Boyd H. Bode, William H. Kilpatrick, and John L. Childs, among others, for its intellectual leadership — was located at Teachers College, Columbia University, and reached the peak of its influence during the 1930s, notably in the pages of the journal, The Social Frontier.

During the 1840s and 1850s the transformation of schoolkeepers into a professional corps of educators hinged more on the efficiency of contemporary revivalist strategies than on any conception of scholarship or systematic pedagogy. At best, theories and ideologies of instruction generally offered only supplementary argumentation to justify immediate practices and experiments. Little educational activity seems to have been inspired directly by any ideological treatises on learning, although professional schoolmen of the ante-bellum period freely invoked Pestalozzi, de Fellenberg, Rousseau, Lancaster, and the European educational systems as models of various educational practices. In New England the effective plan behind the call for professional educators came not from adaptations of foreign instruction, but rather from already proven measures which had been applied and perfected by religious evangelicals of the 1830s. The major institution for educational improvement in the ante-bellum period was the teachers' institute which operated as a kind of revival agency. The origin, spread, and eclipse of this institution for professional teachers, both in its conceptual and institutional features, illuminate the shifting contours of educational policy and practice in New England before the Civil War.

In England during the last thirty or forty years of the eighteenth century, a body of political theory was gradually developed in support of government action in the field of education. With the realization of the social consequences involved in the changes taking place in industrial life came a recognition of the obligations of the state to provide for the education of its citizens. Many political and religious leaders expressed themselves on the advantages of education, indicating that the improvement of the mind would bring men closer to the goals of perfection in which these leaders believed: continued progress, moral purity, stable government, and economy.

“There have been three silent revolutions in England,” asserted Samuel Taylor Coleridge in 1832, “first when the professions fell off from the church; secondly, when literature fell off from the professions; and, thirdly, when the press fell off from literature.” A striking illustration of what Coleridge had in mind by his second and third “silent revolutions” is afforded by an examination of the development of periodicals for women in the late eighteenth century. Moreover, a study of the origin and nature of these magazines raises the question of the actual and potential uses of literacy, an educational problem that has acquired a special significance in the twentieth century.

The United States Bureau of Education was never popular with Southerners, who saw it as a potential instrument of federal intervention into state affairs. But in spite of Southern opposition in Congress, the bureau grew in size and influence after its creation in 1867.

Within the small buildings and gatherings of young men at New England colleges in the early nineteenth century, a social transformation began to work that would alter the experience of being a student. Unlike the conscious reforms introduced by the rise of universities after the Civil War, the transformation of the early nineteenth century proceeded without plan. No theorist designed it according to conscious pedagogical aims, and no institution either anticipated or really controlled the changes between 1800 and 1840. Only after 1840, when New England colleges already had assumed new forms, did a consciousness arise concerning what had transpired. The material conditions of collegiate life, the old communal arrangements that had controlled the behavior and intellectual activity of students through most of the colonial period had been demolished, creating a new disorder. Only after 1840 did plans arise for dealing with this disorder, a consequence of social changes sweeping over every New England institution of higher education. Long before the rise of universities, antebellum colleges had become places of dynamic change through the needs and workings of the student population itself.

Biography, if it is done well, reveals to the reader the subject's times as well as the details of his life. Institutions are what men make them, and as men are influenced by their past and by their circumstances, any understanding of an institution's development must be made from a knowledge of the interplay of man and institution, society and man. These excellent biographies of two eighteenth-century presidents of Yale present a vivid picture of academic education and an insight into the social and intellectual world two centuries ago. The scene is at once antique and familiar; it is as though one were to find in a collection of Hanoverian portraits the face of a friend. Wars, student tumults, graffiti, “irrelevance” of curricula, desperate need for endowment, fights with the state legislature, all of this was as much a part of colonial and federal college life as it is in the current time. One finishes these two volumes endowed with a knowledge of the past and an insight into the present.

There was for many years a well-established generalization in American historical scholarship which assumed a direct relationship between the demands of workingmen for free public schools and the establishment of free public schools in certain eastern states in the early nineteenth century. Within the last decade the labor-education thesis has undergone some modification, so that more recent statements allow room for the role of the upper middle class in the building of free schools. Evidently what had been a relatively well-accepted thesis underwent extensive revision within a decade.

To scholars in pursuit of Africa's past, the written record is a scarce and treasured resource. Among the primitive black cultures on this continent most history is oral history in the truest sense. Knowledge about the past passes by word of mouth from generation to generation, and not only must the scholar capture it but he must also try somehow to filter the significant from the inconsequential as well as the truth from the exaggerated. And yet historians in modern technological societies often face the same problem. In America today events of great importance are more and more receiving less and less documentation. Men can use the telephone or even the airplane to speedily carry their messages or themselves to desired correspondents, and frequently that revealing letter so important to the historian never gets written.

This paper seeks to determine, in effect, why educational psychology as it professionalized and assumed the mantle of “science” after 1905 rejected the social point of view that characterized the thought of so many of the period's educational reformers and practicing educators. The principal components of this social point of view were the efforts to broaden the concept of education from training in academic disciplines to education for life in the community; to see education as a part of a larger social process and to shape educational policy accordingly; and to see education in general and schooling in particular as engines for reforming American society. This cluster of attitudes —which I will group under the term socialized education, following Jane Addams, emerged in the progressive era as the foundation underlying both Dewey's efforts to ally the school and society and, to take a single example from the other side of the coin, David Snedden's commitment to using education to promote social efficiency. But the leading educational psychologists of our period did not share this expanded educational point of view; indeed they can be said to have reverted to the view that education was predominantly the teaching of academic disciplines in schools. The questions that occur to me are “why?” and “so what?” I have no sure answers to either question, but I do have some suggestions that I hope will be provocative.