“You are students at the university, and have no more business with politics than you have with rat-catching,” asserted John Ruskin, expressing, albeit somewhat forceably, a view which would have gained the hearty assent of most university officials of any period. Yet it has often proved impossible to separate education from political values and to prevent undergraduates from expressing political preferences. Nonetheless, the forms of student political activity have varied markedly: from quiet debates in a convivial, club-like ambiance to direct action and violence; from extreme Right to extreme Left. In contrast to students of other countries, Oxford undergraduates during the 19th century were predominantly Tory. This political character and its favorable contrast to the universities of the Continent was complacently noticed by the young Oxford graduate, George Curzon, in 1884. “The swaggering infidelity of the Parisian students, the atmosphere of beer and bravado that prevails among the Germans, the organized sedition of the Russians, one and all inspire us with an additional respect for a system which is so far as possible removed from any of these extremes,” he asserted. Although this glib differentiation was obviously a self-congratulatory caricature, like most caricatures, it rested on a solid basis in observed fact. What were the causes of these differences between Oxford and the continental universities and what role did Oxford itself play in the formation of undergraduates' political values during the 19th century?

The question of Church-State relations in Italy in the 19th and early 20th centuries was as critical a problem to Italian statesmen as that of the “Mezzogiorno” The hostility of the Roman Catholic Church towards the new Italian nation spanned five popes and almost seventy years, lasting until the signing of the Lateran Accords in 1929 during the pontificate of Pius XI. During this entire period the Vatican refused to recognize the legitimacy of the Italian government; the “non-expedit” forbidding Catholic participation in politics was not lifted entirely until 1919; and the Holy Father remained in voluntary exile in his apartments until after 1929. In return, the Italian governments of the Liberal Era used the power of the state to harass the Church, encouraging anti-clericalism and Masonry among the people and limiting the influence of Catholicism whenever possible. Although gradually the Church and the Italian State became accustomed to the status quo and the strongest waves of anticlericalism seemed to have passed by 1963, there nonetheless remained a strong current of suspicion which lasted well into the 20th century. Indeed, by 1900 it was not possible to speak of the realization of Cavour's celebrated formula, “A free Church in a free State”, for Italians had been embittered by the inflamed passions emanating from both sides of the Vatican walls.

A year ago, at this occasion, Clarence Karier closed his address with the observation that “our need today for a broader, more sophisticated educational history, comprehensively conceptualized on sound, structured ideas derived from free minds, playfully interacting with each other and the primary sources perhaps has never been greater, nor given today's social climate, more difficult to produce.” Nothing has happened during the past twelve months that would lead me to change this assessment. As before we stand in need of free minds; minds which are committed to comprehensiveness and rigor in their scholarly labors; minds which excel and delight in the play of intelligence with ideas and sources. As before, too, we are distraught by the indifference, even hostility, which our society, caught now in its own economic and moral crisis, manifests towards our concern for a more comprehensive, a more sophisticated understanding of our educational past; an understanding which, we hope, could be more adequate, more helpful for and in assessing our educational present.

Much of the literature appearing within the past decade on the reform and centralization of urban school governance throughout America from 1890 to 1920 has dwelled upon the influence of bureaucracy and social class to the neglect of very significant ethnic and religious factors. Only token recognition, if any, is granted to ethnicity and religion by Michael Katz and others who depict the centralization movement nearly exclusively as a class effort displaying an anti-working class bias and born out of an elitist thrust for power. From this perspective, the contests for school reform as outlined for New York, Boston and elsewhere appear one-dimensional in nature and over simplified.

It is no exaggeration to state that political economy was the most popular subject with the British public in the first half of the nineteenth century. The Ricardo lectures of 1824, delivered by J. R. McCulloch, were attended by the elite of London society, and the popularization of Ricardian political economy by Harriett Martineau in the 1830s outsold many of the popular novels of the day. Nonetheless, despite this deep public curiosity, political economy did not form part of the required knowledge at either of the two English universities, Oxford and Cambridge. Although the 1820s saw the institution of professorships at both universities, the subject was not especially popular at either place. Indeed, when George Pryme, the professor of political economy at Cambridge, wrote to William Whewell, the powerful Master of Trinity College, of his intention to resign, he worried about the future of political economy at Cambridge. “The Absence of any endowment for a Professorship,” he wrote, “has made me hesitate as to offering this Resignation; but as I have confidence of the desire of the University not to let so important a study be neglected (and this would be the only University in the Kingdom where it would be so) I have no right to suppose that the Council and the Senate would not give effect to this feeling by making an adequate provision for the continuance of the Professorial duties.” It is strange to think today that the predecessor of Alfred Marshall and John Maynard Keynes would have stayed on at his post many years after he felt he had ceased to be useful for fear that the University would abolish his post if he resigned.

In recent years scholars representing various academic disciplines have carried on government sponsored research to determine the impact of integration on black and white students. These scholars have produced such nationally influential and widely adopted studies as the first “Coleman Report.” Nevertheless, the research has made little reference to the history of integration and has therefore called into question whether such practices are best for every school system. Moreover, the studies have had broad foci, rarely concentrating on specific school grades or areas of student growth and development. Using the secondary schools of Chicago, both high schools and junior high schools, this essay will examine the historical integration-segregation dilemma from the passage of the first Illinois school law in 1825 to the solidification of the segregation era in the 1930s. It will also provide information on the structural impediments to black students' academic advancement as well as identify the forces which sought to establish a vocational caste system to limit the employment opportunities for these students.

Undifferentiated fear of left-wing radicalism, defined by its enemies as ‘militant socialism’ or ‘Bolshevism,’ has had important consequences for schools in western societies during certain crucial periods. In the years immediately following the Russian revolution, public education in Britain, North America and Australasia was subjected to intense pressure aimed at making schools assume a greater role in resisting subversion. This pressure, in many instances, was to lead not only to increased instruction in patriotism but also to the systematic monitoring of teacher and pupil loyalty. In the United States many state legislatures instituted loyalty oaths for teachers, while the investigations of the Lusk Committee resulted in the dismissal of teachers suspected of harbouring left-wing sympathies. In New Zealand the introduction of compulsory school flag-saluting and teacher's loyalty oaths during 1921 were roughly contemporary and were similarly motivated. Apart from affording an interesting comparison with larger countries, New Zealand, with its largely centralised education system and small population, was a country where public fear of left-wing radicalism was unhesitantly expressed and where appropriate educational remedies were quickly tried. In particular, this article considers three vital factors which shaped patriotic education in New Zealand schools during the early 1920s: the widespred, generalised public alarm over left-wing militancy; the attempts, largely by professional educators, to shape syllabus requirements to counter the possible subversion of school children; and the Government's increasing willingness to resort to regulation and legislation to weed out disloyal teachers.

Research on the educability of Africans in the past focused narrowly on the learning process: could blacks learn as well as whites? Did they learn in the same manner? More recently attention has turned to broader themes. One recent interpretation of white views about black minds holds that philosophical and psychological preconceptions influenced both the amount and the type of schooling provided for blacks in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Other recent works suggest the past psychological focus has obscured the basic question of who should be educated and for what purposes? Thus, one may ask, were white views about black minds only philosophical and psychological guides to pedagogical practice or were they also bulwarks to perpetuate class and caste structures? Moreover, how did such white views serve the self-interests of those who expounded them? This essay examines these questions during the formative years of the educational system in Belgian Africa—the Leopoldian Period (1879–1908). The educational system then established underwent little change until after World War II.

In the modern history of West Malaysia, people from four of the world's major cultural traditions—Malay, Chinese, Indian, and British—have met, settled, clashed and sought to co-exist. Although the British who came as colonizers have now gone, the complex relationship between the formal educational system of the colonial era and the divisive pluralism of contemporary West Malaysian society continues to attract considerable academic and political attention. Recently published monographic studies on aspects of West Malaysian educational history have focused on the period following British “Intervention” in the Peninsular Malay States of Perak and Selangor in 1874, and one of these studies explicitly attributes the “seeds of separatism” in contemporary West Malaysian society to the educational policies implemented under British colonial auspices during the period between 1874 and 1940. Since this article is concerned with an earlier period than the recent monographic studies, it cannot be employed to test or disprove the arguments of these works. The article does, however, examine the origins of West Malaysia's cultural pluralism in the century prior to 1874 and portrays this pluralism as the consequence of a multiplicity of circumstances, not merely British educational policies.

Educational policy has too frequently been understood as that body of weighty pronouncements on educational matters issued by higher authorities. Encapsuled in official reports and policy statements, educational policy appears rigid, changing only as one official document replaces another. Consequently, the study of educational policy has also acquired a static, one-dimensional quality in some hands. Emphasizing the contents of reports and their relationships to previous and subsequent policy statements, these analyses fail to penetrate the surface to reach a more profound understanding of educational policy.

Into the 1970s Canadian professors, on the whole, were not much involved in politics or in public controversy. In The Vertical Mosaic (1965), the eminent sociologist John Porter wrote of Canada: “It would probably be hard to find another modern political system with such a paucity of participation from its scholars.” Two political scientists noted in 1967: “Ideological contributions of intellectuals to any party have been slim, certainly since the League for Social Reconstruction helped the young CCF draft the Regina Manifesto of 1933.” Another political scientist complained in 1970 that Canadian professors “… have become [sic] intellectually conservative and loath to engage in controversy that has not been sanctioned by their professional norms.”

During the 1920s the flight to the suburbs received wide attention in the popular press. Magazines carried articles with such titles as “The World's Greatest Migration,” “Why I Live in a Suburb,” and “The City's Diminishing Returns.” Actually suburbanization was not a new phenomenon. For example, since the 1840s the population of New York City's periphery had been growing at a faster rate than the city's core. But while the process of migration to the suburbs was not new, the civic pride and sense of independence of many suburbanites was. Armed with the progressive idea of positive government and determined to halt any further attempts by the city to expand, suburbanites, particularly of the upper-middle class, built communities that would serve as islands of exclusivity within the greater metropolis.

Most studies of political leaders have shown that certain socializing agents, in the view of those leaders, have been primarily responsible for developing their political ideas and personal values. Generally, the most important socializing agents of political leaders have included family, friends, events, books, teachers and the general university environment. Mexican political leaders are no exception to this general pattern. The purpose of this essay is to examine one of these socializing agents, the university's social environment, and its effect on those generations of leaders who guided Mexico's development from 1946 to 1970. Because the overwhelming majority of Mexico's political leaders during that period studied at the university from 1920 to 1940, this analysis will focus on that time period.

One reason that educational institutions are of interest to the historian is that they provide direct access to values and beliefs, both explicit and implicit, that are deemed worthy of transmission from one generation to the next. A case in point is the Victorian Sunday school. As a product of the evangelical revival, its primary purpose was the inculcation of religious and moral principles. Yet the moral education that it offered was by no means limited to Christian doctrine. The teachings of the Sunday school comprised a number of disparate and intertwined elements, each the product of a different history. At the core of the instructional program was the moral theology of evangelicalism, affirming the Christian faith against the competing claims of “the world.” Alongside orthodox doctrines that remained formally intact, however, were other beliefs and attitudes characteristic of the surrounding culture. Juxtaposed with the doctrine of original sin, so fundamental to evangelical theology, was a distinctly Pelagian view of man. In a number of other ways also the teachings of the Sunday school reflected an evangelical subculture that had in fact become comfortably adapted to the world around it. Conceptions of God and Providence had a Victorian coloration. The social values of the middle and lower middle classes took their place beside such traditional virtues as piety, charity, and honesty. Also conspicuously present were the consensus ideals of Palmerston's England.

Prof. Mattingly:

Welcome to this Symposium, “Institutionalization and Education in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries.” This afternoon we hope to initiate several lines of inquiry which will be productive in the historical study of institutionalization and education. Both of these notions have become increasingly important in all disciplines of American scholarship, and in a sense in proportion to this heightened significance their meaning becomes progressively confused. It would not be totally out of place to make that ratio one of the maxims for studying both institutions and education today.