A major activity engaged in by educators between 1910 and 1918 which provides evidence of their increasing tendency to think and act in a business-like way was their action in handling the problems of retardation, elimination, and promotion. In this instance genuine educational problems did exist and they needed attention. But in the age of efficiency with an economy-minded public breathing down their necks some administrators dealt with these problems in a mechanical, financial way in order to defend themselves and demonstrate their efficiency. That the problems were perceived and treated in this manner was due largely to the way they had been presented and publicized by Leonard Ayres.

Charles W. Eliot brought to the chairmanship of the Committee of Ten a background of more than twenty years' concern about and interest in secondary schools. In April 1892, the president of the Massachusetts Association of Classical and High School Teachers said that Eliot had been “with us” since 1870 as “a most original, stimulating, inspiring, and, I may almost say, provoking force.” He added that it was “no small distinction to this body that President Eliot, by all odds the leader in American education today, got some portion of his training in the arena of debate which we provided him.”

The urge to organize and coordinate intellectual and educational activities on a grand scale has seldom been more dynamic than under the changing governments in France from the National Revolution in 1789 to the mounting powers of a Napoleonic Empire a few years later. The dynamism came largely from a group of intellectuals who styled themselves Ideologues. They held uppermost the causes of education, scholarship, and philosophy; and they hailed the possible support of successive governments in the decades immediately before and after 1800. As one political administration grew disappointing, they wished for its downfall and lauded the next. With each new government they anticipated a further break with the past and a revived hope for wider acceptance of their views. In developing these they valued highly the influence of Voltaire, Montesquieu, Helvétius, and the Encyclopedists of the French Enlightenment.

In the state university, Henry Pritchett once claimed, we find, “a conception of education from the standpoint of a whole people.…” If, he continued, “our American democracy were today called to give proof of its constructive ability, the State University and the public school which it crowns would be the strongest evidence of its fitness which it could offer.”

During the past 150 years England has been ruled largely by leaders who were educated in the English Public Schools. A knowledge of the dominant values and atmosphere of these élite schools is therefore an important clue to understanding the nature of English leadership, and hence the “tone” of English life. Vital to an understanding of the Public Schools is a knowledge of the methods by which their values have been inculcated and discipline maintained. The most distinctive single feature of these methods is the prefect-fagging system. A study of this system should therefore shed light upon some significant aspects of English history and society.

It is strange that Charles W. Eliot, William Torrey Harris, and Nicholas Murray Butler are so little remembered. For a generation their counsels dominated American education, yet few histories of education give them more than passing notice. Eliot does receive some attention as father of the elective principle, and Harris enjoys at least a dubious reputation as high priest of conservative idealism. Butler, if mentioned at all, appears as Harris's acolyte and is variously described as a classical humanist, an intellectualist, and an idealist with faintly liberal tendencies. It has been his misfortune to be cast in the role of educational philosopher, the role to which he aspired, but to which he could bring the least talent. Butler was an independent thinker, but not a creative one, a man of action, not of contemplation. Comparing him with Harris is like comparing Alexander with Aristotle. “Nicholas Miraculous” was, in truth, that rare combination of insights, practicality, and force that makes a philosopher king. Never content to contemplate ends, his vast energies were concentrated on means. He fathered organizations, not ideas.

Jonathan Swift's plan of education in Book I of Gulliver's Travels is both a picture in little of Swift's temperament through the whole four books—analytic, commonsensical—and a brief chapter in the history of Renaissance education—an ideal coolly reexamined and reformed.

One might say that Horace Mann's influence began to be felt in South America when he wrote his famous Seventh Annual Report concerning his trip to Europe to inspect schools, though the actual reading of it by the man whom it most impressed did not occur until four years later, in 1847. This man, Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, later famous as the “schoolmaster president” of Argentina, spread far and wide the doctrines Mann preached in Massachusetts, and at least three Latin-American nations are the richer because these two leaders of disparate background and destiny met briefly and exchanged ideas.

The vast complexity of a modern American university and the manifold duties of the man who serves as its executive are well known. Administration has become a more demanding operation than it was when James Madison, an Episcopal bishop and late eighteenth-century president of the College of William and Mary, described the vicissitudes of the College's early days: “The first plan of our College was imperfect. It consisted of a President, whose only business was to superintend….” Obviously, superintending is not what it used to be.

Increased subsidization of education by foundations, corporations, and individuals, as well as the federal government, has caused many citizens again to question the influence of such programs. The thoughtful individual inquires about both the positive and negative potential of aid to education: the capacity to improve public education, as well as to weaken local and state interest in, and control of, the schools. Hence, it appears timely to review an early program of aid to public schools, that of the Peabody Education Fund, and to analyze its effects upon educational programs and local initiative.

Today American elementary and secondary education is under active attack for alleged failures or shortcomings of various kinds. In the minds of those responsible for running the schools, much, if not most, of the criticism is distinctly ill-founded and irresponsible. School personnel have long been decrying outmoded practices and promoting new ones, many of the latter bearing the brunt of current condemnations. But present lay criticism seems to have caught a large segment of school personnel quite unprepared to meet it; hence responses are often unconvincing, recriminatory, or yielding. If the educational profession is to maintain past and present gains and to achieve new ones, it must know what has been done in the past, what has proven unsatisfactory and what satisfactory, what innovations have been tried and what has come of them, and why we have come to do what we are now doing. This perspective requires a study of the growth of American educational thought and practice, for if we do not know history, how can we avoid repeating the errors of our predecessors?

Among the several new religious orders founded during the sixteenth century, the Society of Jesus, from the viewpoint of education, was the most important. Ignatius of Loyola (1491–1556) arrived at the College of Montaigu of the University of Paris in 1528. He was thirty-six years old. His heroic resolve to further his education was the result of his spiritual conversion at Manresa in Spain in 1522. He desired an education, not to teach nor found schools, but to prepare for the priesthood. He continued at St. Barbara's in Paris his philosophy and arts course, with theology later at the Dominican Convent of St. James.

Very few pieces of educational writing have been subject to so much confused criticism as the brief tract which, with its laconic title, Of Education, was launched anonymously upon the public on June 5, 1644.

In the eighteenth century, American education, like American culture, was not self-sufficient: its acropolis lay in Britain. Students interested in medicine took their training at London or Edinburgh; ministers were continually recruited in the mother country; a few years at one of the Inns of Court still provided the best training in law; significant numbers of Americans attended Oxford or Cambridge, seeking “a gentleman's education.”