In recent years it has become commonplace to speak of the declining support for public schools as an unprecedented break in nearly 150 years of educational expansion. Acutally, public backing for the schools has waned and the educational enterprise itself has been called into question at various times in American history. The political controversies surrounding several of the nineteenth century challenges to the public schools have, in fact, been well researched. However, the politics of educational retrenchment in this century, particularly the struggles during the Great Depression, have received little attention. Such studies as Sol Cohen's Progressive and Urban School Reform and Julia Wrigley's Class Politics and Public Schools have described the retrenchment battles in New York City and Chicago respectively but merely as secondary events highlighting more significant trends. Cohen's study of the Public Education Association, for example, sees the budget battles of the early thirties as the last flurry of excitement before the decline of the organization. Wrigley uses her comprehensive discussion of Chicago's school crisis to illuminate the power of the newly emerging political machine. Unlike those studies, this paper will focus on the retrenchment controversies specifically as they influenced school policy and as they related to changes in educational politics in Detroit.

For the self-preservation of the nation, Eliphalet Pearson warned in 1815, “an immediate and universal effort must be made to provide religious instruction.” Pearson, a former professor at Harvard College and president of the board of trustees of Phillips Academy and Andover Seminary, was preaching at the organizational meeting of the American Society for the Education of Pious Youth for the Gospel Ministry. To Pearson, America seemed to be plagued by a “common degeneracy in religion and morals” with hundreds of thousands bereft of religious instruction. Religion and education were to be the means of salvation for both the individual and the nation. Pearson exhorted, “Schools are to be multiplied, Bibles distributed; and, above all, thousands of pious young men must be educated for the ministry; and this speedily.” Thus, the American Education Society (AES) was formed in Boston as part of a Protestant crusade to save the nation.

In their search for the ideological origins of the women's rights movement, historians have already defined rather clearly two distinct ideas. The first Linda Kerber has labeled “the ideology of the Republican mother,” a cluster of attitudes popular in the years after the American Revolution that emphasized the importance of mothers being educated in order to educate their children. These ideas were argued persuasively by both male and female writers in New England and the Mid-Atlantic, most eloquently by Judith Sargeant Murray, the New England essayist who stressed the need for female education in the 1790s. By the 1820s, a second ideology was taking form, one that I would like to label “the ideology of the teaching daughters,” in which writers argued the benefits of employing women as teachers.

The British Government's once comfortable assumption that, whatever might happen in India, colonial administration would continue for an unlimited time in Africa, was undermined by a number of complex and interrelated factors after the Second World War. These included the emergence of the United States and Soviet Union as two superpowers both hostile to colonialism; the anti-colonial principles written into the United Nations Charter; the victory of the British Labor Party in the 1945 general election and the agitation of the African nationalist movements. Until 1948 these factors hastened the progress towards decolonization without causing undue friction. In 1947 the British Government took a giant step towards divesting itself of its empire by conceding independence to India, and a year later Arthur Creech-Jones, the Secretary of State for the Colonies, declared that British colonial policy was simply “to guide the colonial territories to responsible government within the Commonwealth in conditions that ensure to the people concerned both a fair standard of living and freedom from oppression from any quarter”. But in 1948 a number of events shattered this complacent air of dignified, peaceful and paternalistic progression towards eventual independence in British Africa. The communist coup d'état in Czechoslovakia followed by the Berlin blockade heralded the ending of peaceful coexistence and the beginnings of the cold war. It was not long before British imperial forces were locked in an anti-communist war in Malaya. Meanwhile in West Africa the Colonial Administration was stunned by the outbreak of violent nationalist agitation, demonstrations, strikes and rioting following Kwame Nkrumah's appointment as general secretary of the United Gold Coast Convention in January 1948 and the sporadic echoing of his ‘Positive Action’ campaign amongst the Zikist nationalists in Nigeria. Fear of cold war communist intervention in Africa and a determination to resist the ‘extremist’ nationalists created a very different atmosphere in the West African territories after 1948. During the next three years Nukrumah's militant Convention People's Party in the Gold Coast [Ghana] and the radical Zikists in Nigeria waged a violent revolutionary struggle for independence against a more sullenly antagonistic colonial power.

Most historians have a favorite time and place that we believe is truly central to understanding the past, a time and place that illuminates an era or sets the conditions of the future. For many years, that time and place for me has been late nineteenth and early twentieth century Chicago.

The earliest academic quality ranking ever discussed by those few scholars who have written comprehensive reviews of such rankings was a 1925 rating of graduate departments in 20 disciplines at American Ph.D.-granting universities. It was published by Raymond M. Hughes in 1925. In actuality, academic quality rankings existed before then; as early as 1911, for example, the United States Bureau of Education produced one that stratified hundreds of American colleges and universities into five levels, according to their presumed quality. However, because a storm of protest led to this work's being suppressed before it was officially published, very little is known about it.

Between 1880 and 1930 millions of women poured into the American labor force. The rate of female labor force participation in this period increased from about fifteen to nearly twenty five percent, such that by 1930 almost one out of every four American workers was a woman. Taking jobs as typists, clerks, teachers and telephone operators, as well as traditionally female jobs in manufacturing and domestic service, women rapidly expanded the range of occupations then open to them. Not surprisingly, these changes raised troublesome questions about women's roles in society, and invited more than a little controversy. “For the past fifty years,” wrote one observer in 1929, “there have been many 'scare’ headlines and perturbed fathers, mothers, preachers, teachers and reformers, ready to tell of dire consequences to follow the entrance of women into new occupations”. The movement of women out of the home and into the workforce was accompanied by a variety of changes in American social life. Not least among these was the development of a new range of educational experiences to prepare women for their rapidly changing world.

In 1923 John D. Rockefeller's General Education Board embarked on a project to reform the public schools in two rural Indiana counties and thereby to demonstrate to Hoosiers and other midwesterners the necessity and wisdom of fundamental change in rural education. The GEB demonstration project in Johnson and LaGrange counties developed from more than two decades of wide concern and voluminous writing about America's rural problems, particularly as they applied to schools. The Indiana project thus drew not only on Rockefeller money but on the best efforts of professional experts to define and solve the rural school problem.

Of all the important mission organizations that came to establish work in Malawi (known as Nyasaland until 1964) from the end of the last century, the Dutch Reformed Church Mission (D.R.C.M.) is perhaps one of the least researched. Unlike most other missions the D.R.C.M. has had no objective historian to analyse in English its activities in Malawi. Oliver's Missionary Factor in East Africa …, designed as a general study of the missions in the Eastern African region, only mentions the D.R.C.M. in passing. In a similar manner researchers like Andrew Ross on Blantyre Missions and John McCracken on Livingstonia Mission allude to the D.R.C.M. mainly to elucidate a point relevant to the analysis of their focal missions. Rotberg's Christian Missions and the Creation of Northern Rhodesia, 1880–1924 mentions the Cape D.R.C.M. only tangentially in connection with Dutch missionary work in the Chipata district of Zambia. Roderick Macdonald's thesis on pre–1945 education in Malawi covers a field too broad for special attention to be given to the Dutch. The single major but subjective published work in English featuring D.R.C.M. educational activity remains Educational Adaptations with Reference to African Village Schools with Special Reference to Central Nvasaland by J.G. Steytler, a former Dutch missionary to Malawi. This is supplemented by subjective articles by another former Dutch missionary, J.L. Pretorius, which include “Introduction to the history of the Dutch Reformed Church Mission 1889–1914,” “The story of the Dutch Reformed Church Mission in Nyasaland,” and “The story of school education in Malawi for the period 1875–1941.” More research is necessary into the history of this mission which deserves its important place in the historiography of Malawi.

As the regular monthly meeting of Memphis, Tennessee's Board of Education drew to a close on the evening of February 10, 1873, Judge J. O. Pierce, a new member, rose to his feet. Speaking in behalf of the city's corps of female teachers, the representative from the tenth ward introduced the following resolution:

Scholars and students thrive on “explanations,” those taut progressions from cause to effect which convince us how something became history. But as luck would have it, historical explanations tend to come in different dimensions. Some are excruciatingly comprehensive. Others stress either cause or effect—but rarely both. The latter sort typifies the explanation most commonly offered for the emergence of education benefits (Title II) as a major focus in the Veterans Assistance Act of 1944.

Surveying the urban scene in 1799, a group of upper-class women reflected on the condition of poor widows in New York City: “widow is a word of sorrow,” they wrote, “but a widow left poor, destitute, friendless, surrounded with a number of small children shivering with cold, pale with want, … her situation is neither to be described nor conceived.” Determined to do something about this situation, these women, led by Isabella Graham and her daughter Joanna Bethune, established the Society for the Relief of Poor Widows with Small Children, an organization intended to assist “the silent retiring sufferer.” It was the first private charity organization directed and managed entirely by women. However, by the 1850s perceptions of the urban poor as pitiful and needy had given way to a much harsher vision. Looking at a new generation of poor women in the same city, the directors of an industrial school saw their clients as neither suffering nor retiring, but as vile, wicked, and degraded. “A bad man is a curse to the community,” they observed, “but how much more vile a wicked woman.” Upon this premise the agents of a new charity established in the mid-nineteenth century a network of urban industrial schools which trained poor young girls in the rigors of factory work.

Throughout much of the nineteenth century the ascendent star of science was closely tied to the rise of the middle class. Science reflected their optimism and aided them in understanding a world and society in constant motion. The middle class embraced science in a hearty manner and as a labor of love they sought to popularize it in America. By the turn of the century, the middle class enthusiasm for popularization had abated somewhat, but science was still being pursued and popularized with great ardor by others. Only now the group most enamored of science, and certain that its rise was tied to the prestige and power of science, was the socialist movement, the self-appointed sentinel of the working class. No less than the middle class, the socialist intellectuals sought to ground their discourse in scientific language and to make the fruits of science readily available to a wide audience. The great revolutions in science—the Copernican, Newtonian, and Darwinian—became the subject matter for socialist popularizers of science. Their tale was simple: Marxism was a science, a scientific revolution in social thought, that would usher in not only a new world-view, but a new society, a new age.

In recent years, a wealth of theoretical literature, building on the many insights of marxist and feminist theory, has attempted to clarify the precise role of schooling in the reproduction of patriarchy and of capitalist society. Much of this analysis has far reaching consequences for the writing of education history. New questions and hypotheses have been formulated so convincingly regarding contemporary education systems that historians can no longer ignore them when dealing with the more or less recent past. While theory has inspired a substantial rewriting of the history of schooling, the new history has sharpened the theoretical tools of the social scientists.

Under the influence of liberal mentors such as his former tutor the Swiss republican F.C. La Harpe, Tsar Alexander I of Russia set out to follow his grandmother Catherine II as an “enlightener” through developing her program of national education. He created a ministry of public education and promulgated laws to provide schools for all classes of the population from the level of the primary parish school to supply the most elementary educational needs of all children, to the more senior elementary district school in each county, to the gymnasium (the advanced provincial secondary school) and finally to the university. The successes and failures of his reform provide excellent measures of the aspirations, as well as the practices, of imperial Russia. Whatever differences may exist among historians on aspects of educational policy, there has been nearly unanimous agreement that while gains were made on the secondary and university levels, the results were dismal on the elementary levels. The village or parish schools especially were failures because the government did not fund them and local initiative was lacking. Adam B. Ulam has asserted that “public education was as yet on so small a scale that it could contribute little, whether good or bad, to national life.”

Central to the rise of the modern state in western societies was the change from private to public schooling; an attendant feature of this shift was the development of bureaucratic modes of school organization. Recent North American studies of these related phenomena, however, present two different interpretations of their evolution. Michael Katz's and David Tyack's studies of nineteenth century American schooling have portrayed the state as the protagonist in the promotion of bureaucratic structures in education, and their arguments have been echoed in Canadian analysis. The state, according to this interpretation, set the pace of educational reform, redefined the nature of parental, communal and religious involvement in the socialization of the young, and provided the framework for the organization of schools along hierarchical and bureaucratic lines.

An important part of historians' view of the process of social change is the role assigned to the spread of literacy and education. The contrast between tranditional societies, one of whose characteristics is limited literacy and educational opportunities, and modern society with high levels of literacy and widespread education, has shaped both social history and development policy. For some, the acquisition of literacy exposes people to new ideas, makes them more rational, and, ultimately, changes their behavior. People “become modern” at least partially through education and learning to read and write. In this vein Francois Furet and Jacques Ozouf have emphasized the introspection and access to written culture that came with literacy in France, and Michel Vovelle has spoken of a possible “cultural revolution” accompanying spreading literacy in eighteenth-century Provence. Thus, the democratization of literacy meant far more than just more people knowing how to read and write; it made people more logical and philosophical.