This essay queries how ideas about school choice traversed the Pacific in the late twentieth century. Specifically, it reconstructs and deconstructs the visits of two African American proponents of parental school choice, Annette “Polly” Williams and Howard Fuller, from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, to Aotearoa New Zealand in the 1990s. Drawing from oral histories, newspapers, and archives in the United States and Aotearoa New Zealand, this essay explores Fuller’s and Williams’s travels and the responses they generated to better understand how and why choice-based educational policies, including school vouchers, gained traction, or failed to do so, at the close of the twentieth century. A close-up analysis of one small strand of the transnational voucher movement reveals that educational ideas and policies did not drift naturally from one place to another. To the contrary, they were cultivated; and that cultivation, particularly when done across vastly different contexts, represented both a political act and an expression of power. This essay also prompts historians to understand the global ascendancy of school choice at the end of the twentieth century by looking to other transnational frameworks and ideologies in addition to neoliberalism: decolonization, Indigenous activism, Pan-Africanism, and the “Black Pacific,” among others. Finally, this essay hopes to encourage more historians of education, including Americanists, to peer beyond national boundaries when investigating the cultivation, development, and dissemination of educational ideas and practices. A close analysis of the transpacific travels of Fuller and Williams can serve as a tangible model for how historians might utilize microhistory to reap the benefits of transnational inquiry while avoiding its analytical hazards: broad generalizations, oversimplifications, and cultural misinterpretations.

Fear for the future of democracy in the 1930s and 1940s led university educators to redefine the purpose of general education as preparation for democratic citizenship. This mobilized social scientists to engage in curricular reform and experiment with progressive pedagogical practices in new general education courses. These courses have been overlooked in the scholarship on general education, which focuses on Great Books courses and educators’ efforts to create a common culture linked to Europe. Uncovering these courses demonstrates that general education was an important part of higher education’s commitment to democracy. Mid-twentieth-century social science general education was an innovative form of political education aimed at preparing independent-minded, engaged citizens with democratic values.

The Occupation of Japan (1945-1952) sought to democratize the nation’s education system; pupil guidance was expected to play a key part of this process. American reformers promoted new guidance practices (e.g., the comprehensive collection of students’ personal data, guidance interventions based on the case-study method, an expanded homeroom curriculum) that emphasized the psychological adjustment—translated as tekio (適応)—of students to school and society in a new Japan. By tracing the evolution of prewar and postwar Japanese guidance discourse, this study examines how American pupil guidance’s emphasis on student adjustment interacted with, and transformed, twentieth-century Japanese education. Drawing from prewar, Occupation-era and post-independence sources, the essay explores three points. First, by comparing prewar life guidance with Occupation-era and post-independence pupil guidance, it emphasizes the important changes effected by tekio-oriented guidance during the late 1940s. Second, by examining the way these practices related to Occupation’s educational democratization, it explores how their psychological approach to democracy defined—and arguably constrained—the dynamism of this broader project. Lastly, the work discusses who supported and opposed this new tekio discourse. American authorities succeeded in garnering the support of many elites in Japanese education (e.g., Ministry of Education officials, leading academics), but other educators remained skeptical.

Spain’s greatest modern philosopher, José Ortega y Gasset (1883-1955), wrote about many aspects of education including its aims; the education of children, nations, and elites; types of pedagogy; the reform of the university; and the challenges facing educators in an era of “triumphant plebeianism.” The article examines all aspects of Ortega’s educational thought, with a particular focus on his ideas about elites and their education, drawing on writings unavailable in English, including texts not published during his lifetime. At the heart of his writing is a vision of the qualities needed to enable individuals to make what he called a “project” out of their lives along with a powerful advocacy of the non-utilitarian and Socratic pedagogies that would help achieve that vision. The article looks at the balance of radical and conservative elements within Ortega’s educational thought and its relation to earlier “progressive” thinkers, and concludes with an evaluation of his legacy.

In the late 1970s Iranian student activists in the United States worked to educate the American public on the history of the US-Iranian relationship and the long-term consequences in Iran of the 1953 CIA-sponsored coup that placed Mohammad Reza Pahlavi on the Iranian throne. The students directly challenged local and state governments to respect freedoms of speech, press, and assembly, and pushed President Jimmy Carter to keep his promise of injecting human rights into American foreign policy. Iranians studying in the US were not monolithic in thought, but they shared the common goal of liberating Iran from Pahlavi’s despotic rule and creating an Iran free of American intervention and Cold War geopolitics.

At the start of the twentieth century, few Americans ever imagined getting a college degree. Less than 5 percent of children made it through high school, and approximately 1 percent of high school graduates enrolled in college. Two-year institutions were still a novelty, and four-year colleges catered to the 1 percent.1 Those numbers have changed dramatically. We now live in a world where 94 percent of Americans believe some college is “very important” to their lives and future prospects.2 Scholars tend to point to midcentury legislation—i.e., the GI Bill and Higher Education Act—as well as “College for All” movements as key drivers for the change. But the US isn’t alone. Globally, college-going has undergone a fundamental transformation during the past century. And the future promises the further expansion and reimagining of postsecondary education, though no doubt with surprising twists along the way.

For this policy dialogue, we asked Roger Geiger and Philip Altbach to discuss the past, present, and future of higher education in the US and abroad. Roger Geiger is a distinguished professor emeritus of higher education at Penn State University. He has written extensively on higher education history, with particular attention to research universities. His recent works include The History of American Higher Education: Learning and Culture from the Founding to World War II and American Higher Education since World War II: A History. Philip Altbach is a professor emeritus at Boston College, where he was a research professor and distinguished fellow at the Center for International Higher Education. He has received the NAFSA: Association of International Educators Houlihan Award for Distinguished Service and the Association for the Study of Higher Education’s Howard R. Bowen Distinguished Career Award. Both bring decades of research experience, professional expertise, and personal insight to this discussion.

HEQ policy dialogues are, by design, intended to promote an informal, free exchange of ideas between scholars. At the end of the exchange, we offer a list of references for readers who wish to follow up on sources relevant to the discussion.