Forty years ago Bernard Bailyn remarked that American historians of education had carried out their work “in a special atmosphere of professional purpose” and had made the history of the public school the focus of their investigations. Lawrence Cremin seconded that observation and added that, for all intents and purposes, the history of American education had been “the history of the public school realizing itself over time.” In the tradition of Ellwood Patterson Cubberley that self-realization of the American public school was portrayed as a progression from local roots to state-wide systems. It became synonymous with the evolution of school government from local control on the district and ward levels to direction and oversight by state administrators. For many school professionals and historians that progression meant progress. They saw it as overcoming local control which they regarded as a relic of the past denoting an endorsement of inequality, discrimination, and special privilege. It persuaded them to see the solution to the schools' problems in strengthened state and, eventually, federal control.

At the end of her spring term in 1862, Martha Hale Clary bade farewell to her classmates at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary one year before she was to graduate. She was a 24 year-old teacher, the daughter of a farming family from Conway, Massachusetts, who had graduated from Westfield State Normal School five years earlier. By the autumn of 1862, she was living in an abandoned plantation house in Beaufort, South Carolina, organizing a school for the Gullah people not many miles from Confederate lines, one of the earliest participants in the Sea Islands’ “Rehearsal for Reconstruction.” For the next eleven years she taught scores of the islands’ freed slaves in Beaufort and Hilton Head, one of the hundreds of teachers sponsored by the venerable American Missionary Association (AMA). By the early 1870s, young former slaves had themselves gained sufficient education to become their people's elementary teachers, so in 1873 Martha Clary accepted a position with the Presbyterian Committee on Missions to the Freedmen to teach in its academy for black students in North Carolina, Scotia Seminary. She would remain there for another fourteen years, finally retiring to her native state in 1887 after twenty-five years of service to southern African Americans.

In 1948, fundamentalist theologian Edward John Carnell launched a spirited attack upon the “disease concept” of alcoholism. The Bible stated in no uncertain terms that drunkenness was a sin, Carnell wrote. By deeming alcoholism a sickness, clergymen and educators threatened to erode the “sense of guilt” that had once surrounded it. “The drinker takes the first glass as a free agent,” Carnell intoned. “He knows in advance the risks of his act, yet he proceeds…. As a moral, rational being, then, the drunkard is guilty and stands under God's severe wrath.” Yet in public schools and even in churches, Carnell complained, too many Americans learned to regard alcoholism as a medical affliction rather than as an ethical lapse. “The crux of the problem is whether man is made in the image of God, and thus is a responsible moral being, or whether he is just a product of naturalistic forces and is responsible to none,” Carnell concluded. “In judging drunkards, then, one's total world view comes into play.”

The signing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was heralded as a tremendous victory for the civil rights movement, the fulfillment of a decade-long struggle to enforce the Brown v. Board of Education decision. Along with measures against job and housing discrimination, the Civil Rights Act included provisions specifically designed to overcome the white South's massive resistance campaign and enforce school desegregation. Despite the continued intransigence of segregationists, these measures proved successful and white public schools across the South opened their doors to black children. With segregationists in retreat and the Voting Rights Act on the horizon, this was a time of celebration for civil rights activists. But this was not the end of the story.

Philanthropy is typically defined as a charitable act, a gift, or an organization that dispenses such gifts. Rarely do we think negatively about gifts. However, as the literature in this area tells us, there is much mistrust of philanthropy and those behind it. Some critics have pointed toward the ulterior motives underlying the gifts of philanthropists. Is it really a gift or does it serve the philanthropist more than the recipient? Others have drawn attention to the unethical business practices of the corporations behind the philanthropies. How can “tainted” money promote good? Still others have questioned the amount of control that many philanthropists gain once their benefactors become dependent on them. Are philanthropists giving money just to extend the reach of their power? Despite these criticisms, philanthropy, in the words of Robert Bremner, “has been one of the principal methods of social advance.”

“Is it possible to select medical students scientifically?” asked Mary D. Salter in a 1942 journal article that examined the Medical College Aptitude Test (MCAT). Salter, a Lecturer in Psychology at the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Toronto answered affirmatively, pointing out that “scientific selection of students would greatly reduce the wastage of time, money, and effort involved when students fail.”

In the mid nineteenth century Amherst, Massachusetts, amounted to a cluster of farm houses and a collection of public buildings. Its 3,000 inhabitants remained agricultural by trade and localist in orientation. Overlooking the town stood Amherst College, founded in 1821. Its three humble dormitories and decrepit chapel provided a fitting tribute to the evangelical asceticism of its founders. The clothing of its 200 students betrayed their disparate backgrounds. Freshmen stood out. A cringing, submissive manner distinguished them as they scurried to recitation. In contrast, sophomores exuded a haughty demeanor. Others boasted a genteel look, while Amherst's seven professors imparted an air of gravity to the campus. Bearded and dignified, they nodded warmly to pupils who stood aside in deference. Silence typically prevailed at sundown, but attacks by upperclassmen on the freshmen sometimes shattered the quiet. On select evenings, murmured prayers also broke the silence. Kneeling on the chapel floor, students might be found with their hands clasped and eyes shut in meditation. Some broke into tears under the intensity of the prayer meeting, weeping and holding one another with temporary abandon. Professors often knelt beside them. During such revivals, the walls that stood between teacher and pupil crumbled, if only for a moment, in a cathartic surrender.

A noted but rarely explored axiom of the history of American education is that public school practices often originate in private sector settings. As David B. Tyack suggested in his influential study The One Best System, “Many of the innovations designed to offer differentiated schooling in the nineteenth century stemmed not so much from career educators as from wealthy philanthropists, merchants, and industrialists.” Certainly the very organizational structure of many urban school systems grew out of a network of private charity schools formed in the early nineteenth century. After the Civil War, new educational features like kindergartens, manual training, and vocational counseling all began as charitable endeavors but soon worked their way into urban public schools. By the century's end, vacation schools offering summer recreation and industrial education to the children of the urban, immigrant poor became yet another philanthropic program to enter the public school domain. What happened to vacation schools in New York City as a consequence of public administration is the focus of this article.

In a letter to his Jesuit superior in the spring of 1558, John Paul Nicolas, S.J., described a recent argument with the bishop of Perugia:

The conventional historiography describing a strict public-private divide in United States schooling is misleading. The standard story claims that public schooling was a fuzzy concept 200 years ago; the division between public and private education for children thus developed largely over the nineteenth century. In the early nineteenth century, public funds went to many private schools and even large private systems, such as the New York Public School Society. In some instances, public funds went to parochial education, either explicitly or as part of an arrangement to allow for diverse religious instruction using public funds. However, the nineteenth century witnessed growing division between public and private, largely excluding religious education (or at least non-Protestant religious education). By the end of the nineteenth century, the standard educational historiography suggests, public schools meant public in several senses: funded from the public coffers, open to the public in general, and controlled by a public, democratically controlled process. Tacit in that definition was a relatively rigid dividing line between public and private school organizations. Historians know that this implicit definition of “public” omits key facts. First, the governance of public schools became less tied to electoral politics during the Progressive Era. Public schooling in nineteenth-century cities generally meant large school boards, intimately connected with urban political machines. By the 1920s, many city school systems had smaller boards in a more corporate-like structure. The consolidation of small rural school districts in the first half of the twentieth century completed this removal of school governance from more local politics. A second problem with the definition above is unequal access to quality education (however defined). Historically, the acceptance of all students was true only in a limited sense, either in access to schools at all (with the exclusion of many children with disabilities) or, more generally, to the resources and curriculum involved in the best public schooling of the early twentieth century (as with racial segregation).

On 24 April 1946, Rhode Island Governor John O. Pastore signed “An Act to Guarantee and to Improve the Education of Children and Youth in This State by Providing Continuing Teaching Service.” The law stated that “three successive annual contracts shall be considered evidence of satisfactory teaching and shall constitute a probationary period” after which teachers would be granted tenure. Teachers could be dismissed only “for good and just cause” after they received tenure. However, the law contained one big loophole: it did not “prevent the retirement of any teacher under a rule of the school committee affecting marriage,” in effect leaving local school committees with the authority to fire women teachers as soon as they got married.

Between 1860 and 1900 Americans witnessed a revolution that ushered in a new type of university and a new academic order. During those years, the increasingly nonsectarian, scientific, and utilitarian university supplanted the denominationally affiliated liberal arts college as America's preeminent institution of higher learning. Many of the architects of this new university, whose ranks included university presidents, faculty, and civic leaders, christened it a “modern” institution of higher education, wrapping their academic innovations in the rhetoric of progress. Conversely, they often depicted their opponents and those associated with older collegiate traditions as academic relics wedded to retrograde practices and enamored of past ages. The popularity of the idea of progress in the late nineteenth century and its formative role in the rise of the modern university are well known. Less clear is the fate of representatives and elements of the older academic order during this period. If indeed the universities of the late nineteenth century were “modern” and “progressive,” what was to be the fate of the past—and educators and scholars committed to the wisdom of the past—within those institutions and higher education more generally?

“The School of Tomorrow,” as envisioned by psychologists Otis Caldwell and Stuart Courtis in 1924, “will pay far more attention to individuals than the schools of the past. Each child will be studied and measured repeatedly from many angles, both as a basis of prescriptions for treatment and as a means of controlling development. The new education will be scientific in that it will rest on a fact basis. All development of knowledge and skill will be individualized, and classroom practice and recitation as they exist today in conventional schools will largely disappear.” “The School of Tomorrow,” would use mechanical equipment, radios, and movies to reveal a world beyond the limits of books and recitations. Textbooks would be constructed for individual success and to underwrite a program of self-rehabilitation. Psychologists, through “experiments in laboratories and in schools of education” would discover “what everyone should know and the best way to learn essential elements.” In the surveillant spaces of “The School of Tomorrow,” hygienically regulated students would learn essential items under “psychologically right conditions.” John and Evelyn Dewey's Schools of Tomorrow (1915) can be read similarly, where psychology and apparatus of individualization underwrite the new pedagogy. Hybrids of buildings, machines, media, and psychologies in a popularized, “modern” culture, promised distinction, excitement, health, hygiene, leisure, and prosperity.

As the primary means through which academic success was measured and professional credentials were established, competitive examinations for university degrees and civil service appointments became a frequently discussed topic among the Victorian and Edwardian elite in Great Britain. Students and dons (the term for college fellows with teaching and pastoral responsibilities) at the universities of Oxford and Cambridge, as well as a whole range of outside observers, regularly commented on the importance of these exercises during the seven decades that passed between the curricular and administrative reforms of the 1850s and the conclusion of World War I, years in which these ancient institutions achieved their modern form and functioned, in the words of Jan Morris, as “power house [s]” and “conscious instruments of Victorian national greatness.” In an 1863 Student's Guide to the University of Cambridge, for example, J.R. Seeley, a famous Cambridge don and historian, celebrated the invigorating, youthful, and competitive nature of the Tripos (or Honors) examinations in a lengthy discussion of academic life: “Into these [examinations] flock annually the ablest young men … who during their University course have received all the instruction that the best Tutors, and all the stimulus that a competition well known to be severe, can give…. The contest is one into which the cleverest lads in the country enter [and] it may safely be affirmed that even the lowest place in these Triposes is justly called an honour.” By the 1860s, when Seeley first penned these comments, competitive examinations had become, in the words of one contemporary observer, “matters of … much interest and importance not only to those whose future success in life depended upon them, but to the public in general.” Public interest was further fueled, throughout this period, by numerous articles in the periodical press that discussed and debated the general value of competitive examinations and by the regular publication of test results in widely circulated, national newspapers such as the Times.