It can quite safely be asserted that no broad analytic work exists which deals with the schooling of the rich variety of social and ethnic groups in the varied history of South Africa. At best, the very limited number of publications are either mainly concerned with describing White education in its administrative and organisational dimensions or, at worst, frighteningly quaint in their prejudicial accounts. The best of the former would be E. G. Malherbe's earlier work, Education in South Africa 1652–1927 and the worst of the latter genre would be E. G. Pells', Three Hundred Years of Education in South Africa.

The unmarried female schoolteacher may qualify as the most written about, yet least understood, figure in the history of modern education. She emerged in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century as a literary stereotype defined by the likes of Miss Priscilla Batte, that “shapeless yet majestic” matron of Dinwiddie Academy in Ellen Glasgow's Virginia, the Cabot sisters in Joseph Lincoln's Mary-Gusta, or the ever vigilant Miss Dorothy Gibbs, head of the Female Institute in Thomas Aldrich's Story of a Bad Boy. Stiff, humorless, and punctillious to the end, these grim products of the literary imagination were construed to typify an entire profession that seemed peculiarly vulnerable to caricature. Until World War I, at least, teaching and “spinsterhood” were synonymous in the public mind. And the self-denigration that accompanied acceptance of the “old maid” stereotype presumably blunted the creative urge to write. As several American historians have noted, there is a remarkable paucity of memoirs and autobiographies, through which the subject could speak for herself; thus, we know little about the proverbial lady who stood in front of the chalkboard.

During the past decade college student enrollment has encompassed increasing numbers of students older than the traditional age range of seventeen to twenty-three. A historical review of college student age suggests that this is not a new precedent and that students in the colonial colleges spanned a wide age range, from early adolescence to adults over thirty. This age span persisted in various forms at many institutions but finally compressed to the traditional age pattern for the most part, with the formation and growth of American high schools beginning in 1880. The following discussion of student age follows a rough chronological and geographic pattern beginning with New England colonial colleges and ending in the latter 19th century at midwestern state universities.