The wonderful thing about the history of education as a field of study is the permeability of its boundaries, its intellectual squishiness, the expansiveness of its definitions of education and history-doing, and its capacity to tie scholarly pursuit and social imperatives so closely together. As historians, we have, I believe, been uncommonly sensitive to issues of compelling political and ethical importance in education, a sensitivity which shows in the ways in which we have engaged our work. Consider the content of presidential addresses to the History of Education Society (HES) over the last decade, a wonderful thing to do by the way, since presidential addresses are an evocative and creative genre in our craft. Dazzlingly diverse in focus and content, those addresses have almost unvaryingly constructed ways to enlarge the reach of our field in ways that join it to the cause of social justice, civic reconstruction, school reform, a free press, and new modes of both conceiving and informing public policy. They constitute essays in social criticism as well as historical exploration.

In 1862, a free boy of color named Lucien Lamanière, age fourteen, wrote a letter addressed to Tampico, Mexico. After describing a trip he once took to Europe he explained to his friend: “I am going next year and I invite you to come we will go to Paris together before coming back to New Orleans, we will go and visit that fine country called Hayti and if you are not satisfied of those two countries, we will go and visit Mexico the finest country after Paris.” Not only was this an “imagined” letter (which I will explain) but it was also a rather fanciful one, since Lucien had planned an impossible voyage around the Atlantic. This impossibility becomes clear at the foot of his letter. As a postscript Lucien wrote, “since the blockade I have not heard from you.” Indeed, Federal troops were just off the coast of Louisiana, and a few months later the Union army had occupied the city of New Orleans.

Setting the parameters of education for the prototypical Janek (Johnny) required a series of important decisions. Definition of the teaching corps, curriculum, and authority structure were negotiated among priests, teachers, ethnic leaders, and parents. The Polish-American press took a lively and continual interest, with editors publicizing the discussion while vigorously offering their opinions. Outsiders, such as diocesan superintendents of education and the public education establishment, also influenced school development. Finally, the formation of Polish-American Roman Catholic elementary education occurred in the context of an evolving ethnic identity which conditioned continuity and innovation.

In early March 1953, the Americans for the Competitive Enterprise System (ACES), a private, business-backed economic education association, opened up shop in Reading, Pennsylvania. Founded three years earlier in Philadelphia, ACES sought to “demonstrate the superiority of the American competitive system over any forms of collectivism.” To achieve that goal, the organization distributed literature, created a speakers’ bureau, and offered educational activities for clergy, women's groups, and industrial workers. ACES’ most extensive program, however, targeted high school students. It consisted of a three-day schedule of activities that included classroom instruction in economics and tours of local industries. In 1953, after having successfully established a program in the Philadelphia public and parochial schools, ACES sought to expand its base of operations throughout Pennsylvania with chapters in Harrisburg, Lancaster, Erie, and Reading. Although unions throughout the state were suspicious of the organization from its inception, ACES met the strongest resistance in Reading. In that city, local socialists and trade unionists immediately mobilized along class lines and blocked ACES from gaining access to the Reading public school classrooms.

Her Majesty's Inspectorate of Schools in England and Wales was created in November 1839, a few months after the establishment of the Committee of Council on Education, itself a symbol of the concern then mounting about the people's education. Before that, their schooling had been conducted entirely under voluntary auspices, mainly in the schools connected with the National Society or the British and Foreign School Society established in 1811 and 1814 respectively, to provide a basic education in literacy and numeracy, either within an Anglican or a more broadly Christian framework. In 1833 the state had eventually intervened by granting £20,000 to assist those Societies in building their schools, though each pound of grant had to be matched with locally raised funds.

A large number of social, demographic, and other factors converged in the mid-to-late 1940s to place women's colleges in the United States in an awkward, if not precarious, position. The dominant cultural conditions and values of this early “post-feminist” era were at odds with many of the core values and traditions of such long-established and respected institutions as Mount Holyoke, Smith, and Wellesley Colleges. Since their respective foundings in 1837, 1875, and 1875, these colleges have been variously characterized as pioneers in women's education, unique communities of women nurturing women and women's scholarship, dangerous centers of feminist and other radical ideas, anachronistic holdovers from a bygone era, endangered institutions marking time until they become co-educational, and leaders in feminist scholarship. Choosing not to follow the example of Vassar, which opened its doors to men in 1968, these colleges and a few others like them survived the difficult years when the “Ivy League” colleges first admitted women. Today there is not much question about their reputation or permanence, yet in the post-World War II era their future was not as secure.

Since the early nineteenth century, the idea of American prisons, like the idea of common schools, has reflected a faith in public institutions for effecting social reform through individual transformation. With this goal in mind, penal theory has been a type of educational theory, making a systematic, sustained effort to “correct” the behavior and ideas of inmates. What has set penal theory apart from educational theory—and prisons apart from schools—are other social functions of imprisonment: retribution for crimes committed, custodial control that separates the inmate from society, and deterrence. The goal of punishment has dominated the evolution of American prisons; nevertheless, as “total” institutions prisons have had their own paeadia and this paeadia—along with its relationship to punishment—has changed significantly over time.

An innovative minority of elementary schoolteachers in the big cities of Imperial Germany embraced the principles of progressive education early in the twentieth century, many years before those reforms were widely introduced in urban public schools under the Weimar Republic in the 1920s. From the 1890s on, proposals for the reform of the socially stratified educational system and the traditional pedagogy were widely discussed in the meetings and newspapers of the German Teachers’ Association. Progressive educational reform became an organized movement from 1908 on, with the founding of the League for School Reform and the creation of an office within the German Teachers’ Association for the promotion of modern pedagogy. The avant-garde of this movement—teachers in the big cities who were predominantly left-wing liberals and Protestants—were a small part of the elementary school teaching profession, but they exercised an influence in their professional society out of proportion to their numbers. In 1912, representatives at the national congress of the German Teachers’ Association adopted a resolution supporting the neue Pädagogik, as progressive education was called at that time. Why did some public elementary schoolteachers take up the political fight for democratic school reforms and become exponents of the “new pedagogy”? Where did the educational theories for the Arbeitsschule, as Germany's child-centered and active-learning school was called, come from? An investigation of these questions can deepen our knowledge of the origins of the progressive education movement in Germany and enhance our appreciation of John Dewey's contemporaries in the movement on the European continent. This research also adds a new dimension to recent historical interpretations of Imperial Germany in the years before the First World War as “a society of reform movements,” a society in which bourgeois professionals and civil servants who were politically critical of the traditional norms and institutions of the established order took the initiative to create organizations devoted to reform.

Due to the complex, contingent relationship among schooled knowledges, cultural hegemony, and oppositionally constructed ethnic identities in Ireland, attempts to bridge the divide between Catholics and Protestants through integrated schooling have largely failed. Scholarly analysis of this failure has been overwhelming dominated by historian Donald Akenson, whose books provide a comprehensive macro-level outline of the structure and context of Irish education from the late eighteenth through the twentieth centuries. Akenson's pioneering research has provided a foundation for scholars with micro-level approaches to “fill in the gaps with material gathered from individual national school classrooms.”

In the 1840s the perception of mental retardation began to change in the Western World. Until then the feebleminded were a natural part of the community. Since the 1840s they began to be seen step-by-step as a social problem. “Experts” started to develop ideas and interventions towards the feebleminded, in particular towards the “idiot” child. Mental retardation became a special field of educational interest and in several countries special care for “idiots” and “imbecile” children emerged. Distinct national traditions emerged in France, England, America, and Germany between the 1850s and the beginning of the twentieth century; in the Netherlands, however, there was little specialist care and few special initiatives were taken before the end of the century. The dominant expert opinion was that these people needed the standard care offered by the asylum. Two mid-nineteenth-century initiatives, however, are worth analyzing, since they signal the cautious start of special institutional education in the Netherlands: the Idiotenschool (School for Idiots) in The Hague and the class for idiots at the new asylum, Meerenberg. However, the only influential Dutch alternative to care in the asylum was offered by the end of the century by institutions with explicit religious motives, evolving from Catholic charity and Protestant philanthropy for all kinds of socially weak and dependent people. In most other Western countries by then the initial educational and therapeutic optimism was in decline; older educational ideas and optimism about the possibility of treating learning disabilities revived in these religious circles by the end of the century.

“We came late enough to escape the self-consciousness and the belligerence of the pioneers, to take education and training for granted. We came early enough to take equally for granted professional positions in which we could make full use of our training. This was our double glory.” Speaking before an audience at the University of Michigan, her alma mater, in 1937 Marjorie Hope Nicolson, then Dean of Smith College, reflected on the heady years during which she, Class of 1914, and her female contemporaries came of age. These lines, later published in a well-known essay entitled “The Rights and Privileges Pertaining Thereto…,” are often quoted in histories of women's higher education to capture the circumstances—among them, peaking female enrollments, rising doctorates, and wartime employment—that buoyed the aspirations and career ambitions of college women in the early decades of the twentieth century. By vividly evoking the spirit of possibility that so deeply influenced women in the Progressive Era, Nicolson's description, in turn, offered an equally telling perspective on the disillusionment that many female graduates experienced later, in the wake of vastly changed employment realities and a widespread backlash against women's advances. “We did not realize that such fever is inevitably followed by reaction…. Within a decade shades of the prison house began to close.”

The stormy history of church-state relations has often appeared in the history of education in various countries, and in this regard Australia is no exception. Additional complexity occurs when different denominations are involved. In the case of Australia's Lutherans internal splits were reflected in the creation of separate Lutheran synods and educational systems. This essay concentrates chiefly upon the educational efforts of those Lutherans, overwhelmingly German, who first emigrated to Australia's southern states during the period 1838–1850, taking their place amongst the original pioneers of that vast new land.