Americans have had a long history of wanting to remake others in their own image. The Puritans' modest efforts to convert native Americans were merely the first of many efforts to mold people of another culture. Later generations used the educational system to “Americanize” successive waves of immigrants, Blacks, Southwest Indians, and Hispanics. Some would add post-Civil War reconstruction in the South to the list. For a few short years we even heeded Kipling's call to pick up the White Man's Burden, although the Philippine experience quickly soured most Americans on imperialism. At all times in our past Americans have felt the urge to reeducate other groups of people.

In the past few years there has been renewed evaluation of Allied educational policies during the post World War II occupation of Germany. Over the quarter century since the end of occupation, assessments of U.S. educational efforts in Germany have primarily focused on the early years of military occupation and have ranged from highly commendatory to severely critical. By limiting analysis to the earliest period of occupation, however, critics have missed much of the significance of U.S. policy making gained by assuming a broader longitudinal perspective.

The advent of sophisticated new weaponry in the Second World War brought science and technology into a prominent position in the minds of military and political planners for a postwar world. Both the Russians and the Americans perceived science in newly demanding terms, and wanted to insure that the treatment of science in defeated Germany would serve their own ends.

Throughout Europe in the second half of the nineteenth century, advocates of expanded educational opportunities for girls and women faced numerous obstacles. Not only did they have to overcome the widespread opinion that women did not need and could not master advanced education, but they also had to find ways to integrate their proposed reforms into existing educational systems. This latter problem proved to be particularly troublesome in Germany, where access to the universities and to the professions depended on fixed educational prerequisites, but where, in the 1880s and ‘90s, the classical Gymnasium that had traditionally prepared boys for the universities was being severely criticized from many quarters. Did the pursuit of equality for women require acceptance of the unpopular curriculum of the Gymnasium? Would insistence on a separate curriculum for girls mean that female education would continue to be perceived as being second-rate? Was there a third way?

The aim of kindergarten founder, Henriette Schrader-Breymann—“to exalt women to spiritual motherhood, as mothers to society and not just to their own households”—was supported by the overwhelming majority of German feminist leaders during the nineteenth century. “The educational calling of women,” insisted another kindergarten advocate, Henriette Goldschmidt, “should no longer be left merely to instinctive feelings and behavior, but, like the male professions, demands scientific training.” When fully trained, feminists argued further, woman's special talent for nurture would benefit not only her immediate family but a society which they perceived as sorely in need of the enlightened and compassionate female influence. The doctrine of “spiritual motherhood” (as this general view of the female mission may conveniently be termed) grew out of nineteenth century women's search for autonomy, defined as a complementary but equal female role and often contrasted to emancipation, the assimilation of male behavior and values. Although the ideology of spiritual motherhood was invoked in support of a great variety of causes, it was most systematically developed by the kindergarten movement which was concerned from the outset not only with preschool children but with the education and status of the women to whom their care was entrusted. “Women and children are the most oppressed and neglected of all,” remarked Friedrich Froebel, founder of the kindergarten movement, in 1848. “They have not yet been fully recognized in their dignity as parts of human society. If progress and a greater degree of freedom depend largely upon the degree of universal culture, then it is women, to whom God and Nature have pointed out the first educational office in the family, on whom this progress depends.”

The ambitious plans for universal, compulsory public education in all regions of Germany in the first half of the nineteenth century reflected the great expectations of German nationalists and liberals for the eventual establishment of political unity and cultural regeneration. In turn, these plans excited many educational reformers and teachers who hoped to be the heroes of this cultural and national rebirth.

A short time ago, when I began to write this piece on the historiography of education in the German Democratic Republic, i.e., East Germany, I intended to describe the research and writing of the history of education in that country, but also to criticize the intellectual isolation and ideological narrowness of East German scholars. The GDR remains one of the most impregnable bastions of firm ideological control and rigid censorship in a part of the world where free thought and expression are as rare as water in the Sahara. Marxism still stands for more than a slogan in East Germany. Indeed, the texts, articles and journals reflect this deep ideological commitment. For example, John Dewey receives considerably less attention than such Marxist heroes as W. G. Belinski, N. G. Tschernyschewski, and N. A. Dubroljobow, in the standard East German text. This, of course, reflects the Eastern (or Russian) orientation of East German scholarship as well as its ideological stance. In addition, articles invariably deal with a social class analysis of education. One finds virtually no mention of recent Western scholarship in either bibliographies, footnotes, or book reviews. In general, an apparently stultifying situation.

“German schools,” says Gerald Strauss near the beginning of Luther's House of Learning, “… are central to this book.” Certainly the vernacular schools are central to the argument of the book, for their inability to provide an effective religious education lies at the heart of Strauss' case that the German Reformation was a failure—at least in terms of the reformers' own aspirations. This argument, richly documented and persuasively presented as it is, is one that historians of the Reformation will find difficult to refute. Yet it is fair to say that the German schools themselves, as functioning institutions, are not extensively described in this book. For Luther's House of Learning is, to a large extent, history-from-above; the author's viewpoint tends to be that of the Lutheran intelligentsia—the magisterial reformers, the educated clerics they trained, and the sophisticated magistrates and bureaucrats who had absorbed their point of view. At the beginning of the book we are shown the pedagogical assumptions and religious and social aims of this intellectual elite. Then we see how its members created new institutions or tried to reshape existing ones in attempting to bring about a truly Christian society. Finally we are shown how their aspirations were thwarted by the inadequate tools through which they had to work—the mass of well-meaning but hopelessly underpaid and overworked village ministers and urban and rural German schoolmasters. It was the elite group of reformers who had defined the aims of the Reformation; it was the same group whose members, traveling grimly from village to village as they conducted their melancholy visitations, came to conclude that their undertaking had failed. From beginning to end the issue is seen primarily in their terms, and though Strauss forces us to recognize their failure he also registers his “deep and genuine sympathy for the reformers and their cause.”