The comparative study of educational movements … is not impractical, seeing that the intellectual and economic interests of the great nations are closely interwoven and that therefore a serious change to the educational equipment of any one of them is certain, sooner or later, to concern the rest.

The youthful practitioners of the youthful field of comparative education frequently display toward the past an attitude of let the dead bury the dead. It was salutary to see them reminded recendy of the work of Michael Sadler, Isaac Kandel, and Nicholas Hans. The work of these pioneers is more than a historical curiosity; much of it, especially the theoretical part, has a modern ring, a contemporary relevance. My own interest is in Michael Sadler as an invaluable guide to changes occurring in American public education at the turn of the century.

In 1917 a delegation of negroes went before the Board of Education in Atlanta, Georgia, to demand equal facilities for colored school children. This marked the beginning of the work in Atlanta of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. The youthful branch secretary who sparked this drive, Walter Francis White, called this “our first fight and our first victory and … we have only begun to fight.” Despite his enthusiasm, Atlanta moved at a glacial pace toward parity in the dual school systems.

If I may give a personal turn to Karl Jasper's cosmic phrase, the year 1959 marked an “axial year” in my thinking about the history of education. It was in that year that I came back to Teachers College from a period of educational service in India. I had taken leave from the teaching of the history of education to take part in one of the new technical assistance programs being launched by AID in key spots around the world. To put it briefly: I will never be the same. The axis of my academic interests and professional concerns had been basically altered. No one who has not lived, worked, and grappled with the staggering problems of a people seeking to become modern yet faced with the mountainous forces of tradition can fully know what I mean. This is not only a phenomenon historic in its present importance; it is a part of a long historical process.

On October 19, 1781, at Yorktown, Virginia, in a military setting framed by symmetrical rows of soldiers bearing the colors of three nations, Charles Cornwallis, Major General of the British forces in South Carolina, surrendered his army to George Washington. As news spread up and down the coast and westward to inland villages and farms, citizens congregated for impromptu celebrations. No longer colonials, the victors now could transmute the hardships and tragedies of the war into memories of heroic deeds and patriotic sacrifices, and, for the moment, forget the uncertainties of peace and independence.

How one assesses the characteristics, the major direction, and the role of republican education in the early national period is bound to be influenced by how one defines the kind of society in which it existed. The controversy still continuing among historians about the degree of democracy in the colonial and revolutionary eras has an important bearing on any estimate of what constituted republican education. This controversy revolves around such questions as: Did democracy exist in the colonial era or did it first emerge in the Jacksonian period? To what degree had hierarchy and status been broken down? Was there in fact a ruling elite or had it been dissolved by political democracy and a changing social structure? How much vertical mobility was there in allowing individuals to rise economically or to achieve political leadership?

At the Seventeenth Party Congress in January 1934, Stalin appraised the world situation optimistically. For five years, he argued, the capitalist world had been at mortal grips with an incurable economic crisis, disrupting industrial and agricultural production and destroying all national and international trade and financing. The capitalists sought salvation in preparation for a new imperialistic war. Hostility among capitalist countries was sharpening. The Sino-Japanese conflict and the occupation of Manchuria caused tensions in the Far East. In Europe the Nazi victory and rising revanchisme enhanced dangers. The Japanese and German departure from the League of Nations accelerated rearmament.

Controversy over the issue of school segregation in the North is nearly as old as the history of American public education. Negroes have protested repeatedly against separate schools and classes, and on occasion in the past they even engaged in what would today be called direct action. In 1899 and again in 1905–1906 East Orange, New Jersey, was the scene of Negro protest against public school segregation. In the 1905 instance the colored citizens staged a boycott and established a counterpart of today's “freedom schools,” rather than permit their children to attend separate classes.

The Fate of Education in a land brought under enemy occupation is a matter of perennial interest. Here, we shall concern ourselves with the educational policies of the resistance leaders on the Island of Leyte, the Philippines, during World War II. A brief prefatory statement regarding the military situation at that time is in order.

The Japanese assault upon the Philippines was launched concomitantly with the attack on Pearl Harbor. Leyte fell to the invader in May of 1942. The Japanese immediately proceeded to set up a puppet provincial government and subjected the municipalities to its control. One of the conqueror's prime objectives was the restoration of stability, so that full integration into the New Imperial Order could be accomplished. To this end, the Japanese command early sponsored reopening of the schools–albeit, with curricular changes conformable to imperial aims.

History of any sort connotes, for me, searching, exploration, and increasingly complex designs. I think of what Henry James spoke of as a “fineness” of insight and perception, of what he described in Portrait of a Lady as expanded consciousness, the pursuit of a larger, “more plentiful” life. Isabel Archer in that novel is a kind of exemplary figure—one who “carried within herself a great fund of life”—whose “deepest enjoyment was to feel the continuity between her own soul and the agitations of the world. For this reason she was fond of seeing great crowds and large stretches of country, of reading about revolutions and wars, of looking at historical pictures—a class of efforts to which she had often committed the conscious solecism of forgiving them much bad painting for the sake of the subject….”

On the surface, the thesis that progressive education was “the educational phase of American Progressivism writ large” appears valid; but when one examines the various stages in the development of progressive education it becomes more and more like a misleading generality. The thesis suggests, among other things, that progressive education was a unified movement that continued to give expression to the ideology of progressivism until the mid-nineteen-fifties. Even if one were to ignore the other serious problems raised by this thesis, it would still be necessary to explain how it was possible for the educational phase of the progressive movement to survive by some thirty-five years the parent reform movement that came to an untimely end in 1920 with the landslide presidential victory of Warren G. Harding. But there is a more serious difficulty with Lawrence Cremin's thesis that may make it unnecessary to explain the strange tenacity of the progressive educator. In The Transformation of the School, Cremin observed that during the thirties a paralyzing split developed within the movement when influential educationists reacted against the child-centered pedagogy, which had reached its apogee during the twenties, by seeking “to tie progressive education more closely to political Progressivism.” Simply stated, the question that must be answered is whether the ideology of social reform-minded educators like George S. Counts, Harold Rugg, John L. Childs, and William H. Kilpatrick, who were the influential educationists to whom Cremin is referring, can be identified with the ethos of progressivism, with its emphasis on economic and political individualism. And if it cannot, then it would appear that the progressive education movement encompassed at least two distinct and often conflicting ideologies, of which only one can be identified with the progressive movement.

Historically, the status of the Negro has presented our nation with complex and challenging problems. Alexis de Tocqueville observed:

The Negroes may long remain slaves without complaining; but if they are once raised to the level of free men, they will soon revolt at being deprived of almost all their civil rights; and as they cannot become the equals of the whites, they will speedily show themselves as enemies.

“There is need for a shift of emphasis in the CCC. The whole concept should be that the CCC is an essential part of the American educational structure.” This statement by Clarence S. Marsh in May 1940 expressed one side of a significant controversy in American education during the 1930's and the early 1940's. The quarrel concerned the educational program of the Civilian Conservation Corps, a New Deal agency established to provide jobs for youths and to aid in efforts to preserve the natural resources of the nation. Opponents of Marsh feared by the late 1930's that the school program of the CCC was an attempt to achieve federal control over the schools in an indirect and deceptive manner.

Education in Illinois followed the pattern of other states in the Northwest Territory from 1818 when statehood was granted. There was the usual school fund from the Ordinances of 1785 and 1787. Nathaniel Pope, the Illinois territorial delegate, managed to reserve three fifths of the revenues from the sale of public lands for school use. Nevertheless public support for education was almost nil in Illinois during the first struggling years of statehood and a very inadequate effort was made by private venture and charity schools. Yet in 1825 Illinois passed a bill that briefly put the State far in advance of others in the formation of a system of public schools.

When American educational reformers surveyed the elementary school in the eighteen-nineties, three problems in particular distressed them. First, too many children exhibited a lack of interest when confronted by the joyless and often meaningless routine of learning the three R's. Second, the curriculum seemed irrelevant to the crisis through which American culture was passing on its way to urbanization and industrialization. The third problem, which grew in part out of attempts to resolve the first two difficulties, was the danger of overloading the curriculum of the common school with a host of new subjects which an explosion of specialized knowledge had made available. Charles McMurry, a leading American Herbartian, rejoiced in 1892 that “the old classical monopoly is finally and completely broken,” but he went on to warn that the common school course had become a “batch of miscellanies.” We are, he said, “in danger of over-loading pupils, as well as of making a superficial hodgepodge of all branches,” Educators who regarded themselves as adherents of the New Education now cast about with some urgency for a new elementary program that would incorporate material more relevant to the modern age and more appealing to children, without at the same time stretching the program of the school to impossible limits.

This article attempts to examine the various factors that influenced the introduction of legal provision for compulsory education in Ceylon and the machinery employed for the enforcement of these legal provisions with a view to ascertain the extent to which the legal measures for compulsory education effectively encouraged the development of elementary education.

The cutting edge of a popular drive for educational reform during the early years of the French Revolution was a demand for an abolition of the old royal academies. The attack upon such established institutions of learning grew out of their own backwardness, a new insistence on equality, and the revolutionary determination to put an end to the privileged corporations that were believed to have limited opportunity and discriminated against able men in the arts and sciences. As early as 1789, Louis David was leading a rebel group seeking to reform the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture from within. This institution held a monopoly in the arts and was cordially hated by struggling artists. Ultimately, in order to abolish it, David led his fight into the Jacobin clubs, the Paris Commune, and into the National Assembly itself.

In recent years scholars representing the various academic disciplines have taken over the task of curriculum revision. These committees of scholars have produced such nationally influential and widely adopted curriculum revisions as the School Mathematics Study Group's modern math and the Audio-Lingual foreign language revisions. Is it advisable to wrest the task of curricular revision away from committees composed of teachers in the local schools? Should the teacher be involved in the curriculum-making process? The historian of education can help to answer these questions by examining how the classroom teacher first acquired the responsibility for planning the curriculum. In what follows the school system of Denver is taken as an historical case study of teacher participation in curriculum revision.

The establishment of the Lincoln School of Teachers College at Columbia University in September 1917 was a reaction against the rigid educational practices of the time. The school developed from the ideas of Charles W. Eliot and Abraham Flexner, who were deeply concerned with the conservative philosophy and lock-step methods of education practiced in the existing schools and who advocated reform of these practices. The publication of Eliot's Changes Needed in Secondary Education and Flexner's A Modern School had influenced the General Education Board under the leadership of Mr. and Mrs. John D. Rockefeller Jr. and Mrs. Willard Straight to recommend to Teachers College that an institution be established that would incorporate the proposed ideas. Both Eliot and Flexner were extremely interested in what was being taught in the schools, feeling that tradition rather than individual or social needs were governing what was included in the curriculum. The General Education Board, in a series of meetings with representatives of Teachers College, convinced them of the value of participating in such an undertaking, and agreement was announced in May 1916. The agreement specified that the proposed modern school be a “laboratory for the working out of an elementary and secondary school curriculum, which shall eliminate obsolete material and endeavor to work up in usable form, materials adapted to the needs of modern living.” The General Education Board agreed to underwrite the annual deficit incurred by the school, and instruction began in September 1917. The Lincoln School opened with a staff of twenty-five and an enrollment of one hundred sixteen in the first five grades and grew rapidly to a staff of over seventy and an enrollment of over five hundred. As had been expected, there was originally great difficulty in finding teaching materials as they had to be developed to fit the philosophy of the school, but contrary to Flexner's expressed fears, there was little difficulty in finding teachers for the enterprise.

The development of supported systems of education in Australia was the outcome of conflicting constitutional, economic, and social policies in the nineteenth century. It is becoming obvious that Australian education needs to be reexamined in relation to the changing society in which it developed rather than as a separate institution. The period from 1830 to 1880 saw the influence of utilitarianism—in an increasingly democratic form—condition the gestation of contemporary systems of public-supported and centrally administered primary and secondary education. The conflict of policies is measured in part by the intellectual history of Australian society and is reflected in the granting of responsible parliamentary government, elected on a wide franchise, to the colonies, which in turn instituted systems of primary education. The whole process of emerging state control is evident in the current confusion over the role of the state in providing education for a modern complex and pluralist society.