The year 1984 brought much reflection in the popular media on just how far we have become clasped in the totalitarian grip of “big brother.” That question quite aside, Orwell's dreaded date should also be a time to examine to what degree the two large dictatorships of his time—the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany—were really in the “total” control of an Orwellian “Party.” Though Orwell as a journalist had little to say about the schools and much to say about the press and television serving the totalitarian party, few of his readers, then or now, would fail to reflect on what role schooling from kindergarten to university would play in such a society as Orwell feared.

The gap that for many seems to separate modern knowledge from human values has become by now a rather well-worn topic. Let us leave aside, for the moment, the question to what extent this is an actual or only a seeming gap. The more immediate question is whether there remains anything of worth to be said about the subject, which has not already been said and scrutinized in myriad form by countless observers. And what might the historian of education in particular stand to gain by staring once more into this yawning abyss? My contention in this talk will be that as educators, and as historians of education, we have yet to engage fully some of the major issues in the relation between knowledge and values, and that to do so holds promise for us, whether our interest is that of the historian only, or of the historian also concerned with present educational understanding and endeavor.

Weimar Germany. The words conjure images of ineffectual leaders and stopgap governments, of a haphazard democratic way station en route to Hitler and National Socialism. Historians have probed and assessed the weaknesses—sociological, political, economic, psychological—that bedeviled this ill-fated system. The chief defect oftentimes is judged to be a weak and divided middle class, which proved incapable of acting as a moderating and stabilizing force of the political center. A variety of studies have pinpointed the political and economic fragmentation of the German bourgeoisie. Another, not insignificant, factor helped split the bourgeois middle in Weimar Germany. Educational differences founded upon the clash between advocates of religious and secular schooling acted as a serious hindrance to bourgeois political cooperation.

Over the past few decades, scholars have often considered many of the professions to be the natural offspring of the global processes of modernization. Countless studies relate professional development to the broader currents of technological change or structural differentiation. Moreover, since the professions were seen as having a common parentage, much research has been devoted to identifying the characteristics and developmental patterns that all of them shared.

Until recently, historians have tended to treat teachers as nonpersons. Female teachers especially have been portrayed as objects rather than subjects, as either the unknowing tools of the social elite or as the exploited minority whose labor is bought cheaply. Rarely have they been treated as subjects in control of their own activities. Seldom has the world of schooling been presented through their eyes. This essay attempts to reverse the traditional angle of vision and explore an educational event from the perspective of the teachers involved. Specifically it explores the failure of unions to organize teachers during the Great Depression.

Colleges were founded in many of the cities of Victorian England. Some failed; others became the civic universities of twentieth-century Britain. Owens College, Manchester; Yorkshire College, Leeds; and University College, Liverpool, which formed the Victoria University; are examples both diverse and interconnected, as well as representative and influential, and therefore form the basis of this study. The new colleges quickly evolved efficient academic self-government. The successively evolved constitutions of Owens College and the Victoria University were widely influential, but the developing practice of academic governance was perhaps more significant. British academics were learning to use their constitutions and diverge from the apparent letter of statutes in ways which have been widely admired in the twentieth century.

The traditional image of nineteenth-century European students presents the liberal French revolutionary mounting the barricades or the romantic German drinking or dueling to protect his honor. Many of these images were deceptive, and historians in the last ten years have worked to find the true significance of the student subcultures in Europe, and the manner in which these students were socialized for their future roles in society. Robert J. Smith has argued that students at the Ecole Normale Supérieure drew progressive political lessons from their education, which contributed greatly to defining the characteristics not only of French education, but of the Third Republic itself. McLachlan and Rothblatt have demonstrated that when nineteenth-century students at Princeton or Oxford and Cambridge were dissatisfied with the official curriculum of those institutions they were quite capable of taking the initiative and establishing much of their own social and intellectual life. Konrad Jarausch has emphasized the role of voluntary student organizations in the neutralization of liberal impulses in German higher education, and has stressed the importance of student subculture for the shift from left-wing to right-wing nationalism in Germany. In general, Jarausch has pointed out the importance of traditional student organizations, which “socialize the future elite toward adult roles and form a safety valve for sporadic outbursts of violence, sexual license, etc.”

The educational traditions of Scotland have always been distinct from those of England, and reputedly more democratic. Mass literacy was achieved at an early stage, the general character of the system was meritocratic, and the four universities were noted in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries for their vigor and their popular base. Yet the country has attracted little attention from the growing band of scholars studying the comparative social history of education. One exception is Hartmut Kaelble, who has used Scottish evidence in his studies of education and social mobility; but Scotland does not figure either in the recent collection of essays on higher education edited by Konrad Jarausch or in the most substantial work in this field, Fritz Ringer's Education and Society in Modern Europe. Ringer's book includes brief treatments of England and the United States, but it is essentially about higher and secondary education in France and Germany, and is notable for the mass of statistical data that it assembles and analyzes.

Received tradition in America has identified the Puritans with the “detestation of idleness” and tended to denigrate them as the originators of this value judgment. Although scholars have written extensively about the Puritan work ethic and the theological framework undergirding the stress on diligence in one's calling, little has been said about the conceptual and cultural background for Puritan opposition to idleness. According to historian Perry Miller, a likely source for such views is England rather than New England. Miller has asserted that, when considering Puritan culture as a whole, “ninety per cent of the intellectual life, scientific knowledge, morality, manners and customs, notions and prejudices, was that of all Englishmen.” The sixteenth-century courtesy literature, that body of treatises intended for the instruction of the aristocracy, confirms that abhorrence of idleness was indeed a hallmark of the ideal advocated for the English Renaissance gentleman. The courtesy treatises demonstrate that the Massachusetts Bay settlers had inherited from their English ancestors a century-old written tradition, wherein idleness had been defined and its sinful consequences unequivocally denounced by those who assumed the task of educating the well-born and the governing classes. Concurrent with the denunciations, courtesy treatises exhorted the gentlemen to good stewardship of time, i.e., to a life primarily of worship and work. Hours spent in recreation were approved, he was told, only for “honest” pastimes taken in moderation. An analysis of these sixteenth-century conceptions begins with a review of the educational ideals portrayed in the courtesy literature.

In Belgian educational circles toward the end of the nineteenth century, there was a tendency to adapt primary education to the new social conditions. The objective was expressed in the slogan: “The school for and by life.” “By life” meant that the education must not be alien to the surrounding reality but must allow itself to be inspired by it. Between the world wars, under the influence of Ovide Decroly, this was finally concretized in the study of the environment by means of active observation. “The school for life” meant that the primary school must meet the new needs. Economically, a better educated work force was needed for industry; socially, the workers' movements were making their influence felt. During the nineteenth century, the ideological opposition between the Catholics and the liberals dominated education, the former wishing to maintain the religious character of the society, the latter striving for secularization. Both the liberal and the Catholic bourgeoisie were confronted with the social question and, after the 1880s, with the organized socialist movement. The leading classes perceived socialism as a danger for the social order, fearing that it would threaten religion, undermine the family, and generate a spirit of rebellion. Clamorous strikes made that danger all too obvious. Greater attention to social problems was thus demanded, and this led to the beginnings of social legislation, among other things.

In recent years, statistics for Elizabethan and Stuart literacy levels, compiled by David Cressy, have challenged the familiar image of the period as a golden age of educational opportunity. These figures can serve as the foundation for a new analysis of social mobility in the period, particularly among those below the level of the gentry. Yet the most striking figure among them is the one which is consistently the highest of all, regardless of the population sampled: the illiteracy rate for women. The number of women of all classes unable even to sign their names hovers around 90% and rises as high as 95 ± 3%; Cressy's figures obviously do not even consider complex reading comprehension or extensive writing ability, skills commonly associated with the spread of Renaissance culture through education.

Adam Smith's famous lectures on rhetoric and belles lettres, first delivered in Edinburgh from 1748 to 1751, were the first formal lectures on the subject of “English” in Britain to give singular pedagogical prominence to the application of selections from English literature in the university classroom. Literary and educational historians over the years have acknowledged Smith's role particularly in the teaching of rhetoric; but they have hesitated to assign any significant historical value to the theory that his extensive use of selections from English literature in his lectures was less belletristically inspired, in spite of his refined literary interests, and more the result of his deeply felt, practical concern over the future of a laissez-faire economic system that by its very nature advocated a lessening of political, social, and religious control over the commonwealth. Smith's decision to use selections from English literature in his classroom, as this essay argues, was based largely on the belief that vernacular literature could provide a ready context for the teaching of ideological, social and moral lessons. As an economist, Smith was naturally interested in the insular “business” of higher education, but he was also interested in the broader role that he thought higher education should play in preparing students for the “real business” of the real world.

The south did not share in the enormous expansion of American higher education in the years following the Civil War. Nationally, higher education enrollments grew over five-fold in the decades following the War. In 1870 there were 62,000 students in colleges, universities, professional, normal and teacher colleges in the United States. By 1890 the total higher education enrollment was 157,000 and by 1910 had risen to 355,000. Multipurpose institutions with programs characteristic of the leading twentieth-century universities began to appear in the East, West and Midwest. No such development was evident in the nineteenth-century South where colleges struggled to remain alive. Left virtually destitute by the War and lacking students, buildings and assets, college leaders clung more to romantic dreams and were unable to share in the bold expansion experienced by other regions. The point is etched clearly when one realizes that about the time Charles W. Eliot began to chart the transition of Harvard College to Harvard University, Landon C. Garland, President of the University of Alabama, and later of Vanderbilt, wrote:

Moral education for many years has been one of the most talked-about school topics in the English-speaking world; there has been a profusion of studies on various approaches to teaching morality or promoting moral “development.” During the years that this interest flourished, few curriculum areas were less evident in popular talk about education than history. While historians have shown a continuing interest in the role and status of their field in general education, many historians recently have lamented the current decline of historical studies.

In 1908 and 1909 the science journalist Edwin E. Slosson visited and described fourteen of what he called “The Great American Universities.” The volume of that title which he published still deserves a place among the most interesting books of this century on higher education. The members of his select group—California, Illinois, Michigan, Minnesota, and Wisconsin among the state universities; Columbia, Harvard, Pennsylvania, Princeton, and Yale from the descendents of the colonial colleges; and Cornell, Johns Hopkins, Stanford, and Chicago from the “new” endowed universities—these schools for the most part led other institutions of higher education in numbers of students, the size of their budgets, and the scholarly achievements of their faculties.

Ferrer's modern school movement has recently been brought to the attention of English-speaking educational historians in the scholarly work of Paul Avrich on American Anarchism and (in a somewhat more popular vein) in the writings of Joel Spring. However, apart from a considerable range of contemporary and near-contemporary biographical accounts, the majority of which are either uncritically sympathetic or overtly hostile, there still exists no “definitive” and scholarly biography of the martyred Spanish libertarian or “philosophic Anarchist,” Francisco Ferrer y Guardia. Several good critical studies dealing both with Ferrer and Ferrer's Spain have now thrown new light on certain aspects of Ferrer's work and influence, notably the Escuela Moderna of Barcelona and its significant antecedents in turn-of-the-century Spain; the activities of Ferrer's International League for the Rational Education of Children during 1908–9; and the Ferrer-inspired schools and colonies in the United States, especially those at New York and Stelton. It is questionable whether any complete synthesis or comprehensive analysis of the Modern School movement and of Ferrer's career could ever be accomplished. There are considerable lacunae in the scattered sources directly pertinent to the activities of the Modern Schools, which were established in places as diverse as Milan, São Paulo, Liverpool and New York; moreover, the Anarchist, libertarian or Socialist groups and personalities in various ways identified with them in many cases remain obscure.

Since the 1970s the history of educational development has become the object of scholarly research once more. Within the context of recent educational history, the post-war period has aroused particular interest in educational historiographers. This period of educational development was the central topic of a recent conference of Historical Commission of the German Society for Educational Sciences. That symposium sought to find points of reference or precursors in the post-war era of the reforms in the 1970s. In contrast, the development during the 1950s and 1960s has not yet been investigated in detail, a gap which is explained by its close proximity to the present.