The purpose of this paper is to trace some of the educational developments in British India which later shaped the thinking of educators in Pakistan and to discuss the educational aspirations of Pakistan within the broader context of Pakistan society. The first section contains a description of some educational reform plans prepared in pre-independence India. The second section deals with the circumstances of the partition of the Indo-Pakistan sub-continent from the standpoint of Pakistan and with the political and economic conditions which appeared to influence educational reforms in Pakistan. In the final section, some salient recommendations for educational advancement in Pakistan are examined and it is noted that the government of Pakistan has conceived of its schools as instruments for the reconstruction of Pakistani society.

It is strange in these days of increasing demands on the school that voices from an age of unlimited faith in the power of schooling—such voices as that of George Counts in the 1930's, Lester Frank Ward in the 1890's, or William Maclure in the 1830's—sound strangely archaic. In some respects our age expects more of the schools than did theirs; in others—particularly in the domain of social reform—vastly less. When set against their hopes and dreams, ours are trivial. Perhaps so are our efforts.

The prevailing general aim of American education in 1895 was the accumulation of knowledge. When the Herbartian appeared on the scene, he demanded something more. He called this something more “morality.” To the Herbartian, morality was not a strictly religious concept, and he argued that the achievement of right conduct or the development of an ethical view was within the province of educational aims. He viewed morality in two interrelated perspectives. From one angle he stated the goal of education in terms of individual character because he believed firmly in the importance and the uniqueness of the individual child. From another perspective, the one which received the most emphasis in Herbartian circles, he couched the ultimate purpose of education in terms of social morality. Regarding this latter the Herbartian believed that the historical tendency in America to exalt the individual had created certain repugnant “non-social” types of character. This belief, together with his view that the social and economic forces of the then rapidly expanding industrial and urban society had created a new cultural environment, an environment in which the school had yet to recognize its crucial role, caused the Herbartian to urge strongly in his Yearbooks that education promote a “new type of citizenship,” in short, social morality.

A valuable perspective on William Maclure's unique approach to education for a good society is provided by Professor Burgess' study. Although the spread of the essentially “enlightenment faith in education” of the nineteenth century to which the paper refers is well known and emphasized by historians of education, the specific contribution of Maclure is perhaps less well recognized. Thus we are provided with an insight into his work and thought that goes beyond the usual account of his experiment with Robert Owen at New Harmony, to a trenchant analysis of the design of his plan for social reform through education.

An unpublished ninth-century document which has apparently survived in a single copy has pertinence for historians of education as a prototype of licensing examinations. The document reports the results of an oral examination administered in the empire of Charles the Great in A.D. 809. Although a number of textbooks, some in catechistic form, have survived from the period of the Carolingian revival of learning, I know nothing else of this kind. For all save the few historians of early medieval mathematics, it needs a brief historical and technical introduction.

From the Renaissance to the present day there has been a gradual lengthening of the span of the process of education. Medieval lay education was completed at a young age, but formal learning had since been stretched into the late teens and early twenties. In our own time, there is a significant movement to prolong education throughout adulthood by means of the development of continuing education programs. Though the degree of organization, the scope, and the effectiveness of these programs make them unique, they are hardly a new phenomenon. Nineteenth century England furnishes many well-known examples of experiments in adult education, and as early as the eighteenth century one can see the first real pressures toward it. A survey of the career of Jean-Marie Roland de la Platière will illustrate the development of programs for continuing education in France during the Enlightenment.

Nations, in the course of their history, are confronted at certain intervals with totally new ideas and alternatives. The two or three decades preceding 1900, especially the decade of the nineties, was such a time for the United States and provided a provocative and challenging inception for the twentieth century.

This paper was written from the standpoint of three broad general assumptions: (1) that a study of the history of education has much to contribute to the upgrading of the quality of the profession of teaching; (2) that the future of education in the United States calls for a deeper sense of historical reality; and (3) that the root of much of our confusion in educational policy today is to be found in the area involving the quality of the relation between religion and politics. Dr. Robert Ulich has stated our problem quite well:

James G. Carter (1795–1849) is remembered as a champion of free schools. His writings and his work in the Massachusetts legislature furthered their cause. Histories of education tell of his efforts on behalf of the establishment of public institutions for teacher education. A neglected aspect of Carter's thought is his conception of the inductive method of Francis Bacon and his application of it to the subject of education.

It is sometimes helpful, in this age of mass education with its attendant anxiety over and concern for any and all pedagogical techniques that will aid the learning process, to remember that no age has been without such concern nor without teachers who have attempted to solve such problems. There were a number of teachers in the early middle ages who realized that students and teachers alike could profit from advice in such matters and who accordingly devoted themselves to assisting either students to learn or teachers to present subject matter in such a way that students could profit accordingly. Two such individuals were Augustine of Hippo and Hugo of St. Victor who, though separated from his predecessor and objet d'admiration by at least 700 years, nevertheless followed him to such a degree that he was known as the “alter Augustinus.”

Professor Drake's paper begins by suggesting that more careful study of the historical relation between religion and education would help both to upgrade the teaching profession and to clarify the confusion in present-day educational policy. Many of us would, I think, agree. The footnote references in the body of the paper, however, indicate that it rests upon only three volumes dealing with the facts of educational history: John Brubacher, History of the Problems of Education; Adolph E. Meyer, The Development of Education in the Twentieth Century; and William Gellemman, The American Legion As Educator. For religious history, Professor Drake rests his case on three or four such works as Florence Simmonds, Orpheus, A History of Religions and Salo W. Baron's Modern Nationalism and Religion. The analysis of the “roots of the God-state idea,” and indeed the definition of that idea in both Biblical and historical terms seems to be drawn from Herbert Muller's Uses of the Past, George P. Grant's Philosophy in the Mass Age, and the volumes by Brubacher and Simmonds. The source documents he cites beyond Hegel's Logic are essays by the Reverend Billy Graham and the not very reverend Harold Lasswell, two items from the Congressional Record for 1960 and 1962, and a volume by J. P. Bang, published in 1917 under the title Hurrah and Hallelujah. The last he recommends as “excellent primary source material for the Protestant point of view.”

Historically, the two-year junior college in the United States was a by-product of the campaign waged by a number of German-trained university administrators to remove the first two years of undergraduate instruction from the university curriculum. Because of the lack of a graduate program at American colleges, students in search of the Ph.D. gravitated during the nineteenth century toward German universities, where they were more welcome than in England. In Germany, these young American scholars learned that students did not enter the university until they had completed the equivalent of fourteen years in preparatory schools. As a consequence, the German university was devoted primarily to professional training and research.

The education of southern Negroes during the Civil War period should be a significant part of the history of education in the United States. Unfortunately little has been written on that topic despite the existence of voluminous manuscripts and documents. Beyond a narrow circle of Negro scholars, even the name of Mary S. Peake is unfamiliar. Mary S. Peake is significant because she was the first day school teacher during this period. Her school, however, was not the only one of its kind from the beginning. On September 24, 1861, Lewis C. Lockwood, the sponsor of Peake's school, sponsored a similar school at Fortress Monroe under the instruction of another free Negro woman, Mrs. Bailey, assisted by Miss Jennings with James, a bright boy as monitor. About Mrs. Bailey and her school, little was known except that Union Premier was used and a Rev. Palmer Litts sent by the American Missionary Association eventually replaced her. Lockwood also established a “private” school for adults and children at Hygeia Hospital instructed by a crippled Negro. Between his own arrival on September 4, 1861 at Fortress Monroe and the end of the year, Lockwood had established at least three day schools between Fortress Monroe and Hampton. In this beginning effort, by circumstances or by choice, Lockwood relied on local resources to launch an inconspicuous but significant educational movement.

A rumor early in 1799 brought together briefly the lives of Lord Castlereagh (1769–1822) and Dr. George Miller (1764–1848). Lord Castlereagh was then a newly prominent British statesman, later to become eminent as his majesty's Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs during the Napoleonic wars; Dr. Miller was a distinguished Irish clergyman, historian, and professor. This relationship, arising from the rumor that the British government would establish a new college at Armagh in northeastern Ireland, produced a remarkable but largely forgotten exposition of the problems of higher education in the late eighteenth century.