In 1892 J. M. Rice reported in The Forum his observations of American urban public schools. The first article in the series was subtitled: “Evils in Baltimore.” The article began with a recounting of an arithmetic lesson in an “advanced first grade.” This lesson, Rice wrote, “will indicate… in what a soul-inspiring manner from one-fourth to one-third of the time is spent in the average primary school of the city during the first two years of school life.”

In 1891, an Ohio school journal sponsored a teachers' roundtable about the state's most recent curricular requirement: Scientific Temperance Instruction. The exchange began with an anonymous letter from a self-proclaimed teetotaler, who nevertheless feared that STI's screeds against alcohol and tobacco would sap parental authority. “It is hard to know just what to say when dear little Johnny looks up in your face and says: ‘“Why, my papa smokes,”’ another contributor acknowledged, suggesting four possible responses that could promote abstinence without obstinance:

Historians of the French Revolution continue to argue about the extent to which it represents a watershed in French history and to debate the novelty of social, political, economic, and cultural formations that emerged from the shambles of the Old Regime. Historians of women have sought to trace the emergence of women's political consciousness and activity, while noting that the first French Republic denied women citizenship. Ultimately, the Revolution relegated women to the private sphere. In these attempts to grapple with the Revolution's legacy for women and gender relations, the Napoleonic period has attracted little attention, in part because the period appears to have been one of general regression for women. Napoleon's Civil Code is seen to symbolize the squelching of all feminist hopes since it firmly established women's subordination within the family and determined married women's loss of civil identity. In the field of education, the balance sheet is similarly negative. Napoleon is recognized for his creation of the Imperial University and of the secondary system of lycées for boys while, in general, primary education and girls' education remain largely unexamined.

In October 1940, New York Herald Tribune columnist Dorothy Thompson outraged her publisher, Ogden Reid, by switching her support from Wendell Willkie to Franklin D. Roosevelt in the midst of the latter's bid for an unprecedented third term as president of the United States. Reid initially suppressed the column containing Thompson's endorsement of FDR, but he ultimately printed it, beside a rejoinder from the Tribune editorial staff. His wife and co-publisher Helen Rogers Reid urged Thompson to confine herself, in the future, to “nonpolitical” subjects—a strange request to make of one of America's most widely read political commentators. Thompson's contract was up for renewal in the spring of 1941, and the Reids made clear that, if negotiations took place at all, they would be most unpleasant. Telling Helen Reid, “I feel an unbridgeable hostility to me in the Tribune,” Thompson accepted an offer to move her column to the New York Post.

A 1930 report of a rural New York Child Study Club meeting conveys the dubiousness with which many mothers have regarded using books to raise babies. In the words of the group's secretary: “One mother, at a certain point in the discussion, quoted, half in fun, the much-abused ‘Spare the rod and spoil the child,’ adding, That's in the book.’ (We have had quite a bit of fun about things being or not being ‘in the book.”) ‘Oh, but that's in the old Book,’ some made answer, and to that another said, ‘I guess you have to mix the two!”” This ironic dialog highlights women's ambivalence and confusion about the use of the “book” in child-rearing and about the sources of expert advice which have contended for authority in the child-rearing enterprise. Before the twentieth century, mothers who raised “baby by the book” were often ridiculed, with the assumption being that the care of children constituted common knowledge; however, in this century, middle-class mothers have avidly consumed child-rearing manuals. American parents have been inundated with baby books, from the free Infant Care pamphlets dispensed by the U.S. Children's Bureau in the early decades of the century to Dr. Benjamin Spock's 35-cent paperback Baby and Child Care, which was distributed to millions of mothers by physicians and nurses in the 1940s and 1950s.

The ideal of universal education is central to American democracy; indeed, the founders of the United States considered it key to the success of the Republican experiment. Because Americans governed themselves, they needed to be educated and virtuous to stem the forces of corruption endemic to a democratic system. Universal education was to ensure the literacy of all young Americans and furnish them with a profound sense of morality and appreciation of their duties as Republican citizens. Moreover, by providing free access to schooling for everyone, universal education would level artificial barriers against social advancement, and thereby contribute significantly to the fulfillment of a major promise of the new democratic state—equality of opportunity.

Rural school reform in California in the period 1900–1940 was motivated by many of the same concerns that underlay the national movement to reform rural education. As was true throughout the country, reforms in this period in California led to the expansion of state regulations and control over the work of teachers. But while these reforms emphasized the need for greater scientific and bureaucratic control, they were also framed in terms of gender, since the majority of rural teachers were women working in relatively autonomous one- and two-room schools. Some educational reformers, influenced by ideas of scientific management and control, argued for the need for supervision of rural women teachers because of women's presumed weaknesses; they argued for expert, usually male, control and supervision. However, this view was not uncontested; other reformers, much more frequently women who had experience working in rural schools, celebrated the capabilities and potential of rural women teachers. This more positive view was particularly strong among California educators, who were influenced by both progressive politics and conceptions of Deweyan progressive education. Increased state control over rural teaching did in fact occur in California, but the creation of institutional structures did not inevitably mean the imposition of male control or of a single view of teachers or rural schools.

In 1851, a “Great Exhibition” was held in London. There, under the dome of the Crystal Palace, each nation was invited to display its highest contributions to nineteenth-century civilization. Many Americans were mortified to learn, however, that their own offerings to this pageant were received as a dismal failure. The American exhibit, which included a model of Niagara Falls, some false teeth, and a large collection of pasteboard eagles, had even “fallen so far short of expectation as to excite ridicule.” Citizens of the young republic were stung by this blow to the nation's self-esteem.

Inscriptions on excavated oracle bones and tortoise shells confirm that formal education existed in China as early as the Shang dynasty (roughly 1480–1066 B.C.). Historical data show that Emperor P'ing-ti of the Han dynasty established a countrywide government school system in 3 A.D., consisting of a central school in the capital and local schools in prefectures and counties. Over the next nineteen centuries, the school system developed gradually, sometimes damaged by war but soon restored, until the introduction of the modern Western system in the early twentieth century.

No previous knowledge of drawing required

Keen competition characterized the American market for higher education in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Commercial design schools, normal institutes, business colleges, and four-year liberal arts colleges competed for overlapping pools of potential students. By the turn of the century, schools of commercial art and design, a major innovation in women's education in the 1850s, struggled to retain a small niche in the private education market. Aided by flexible admissions criteria exemplified by the 1919 catalog statement above, the Philadelphia School of Design for Women, a pioneer in the American design school movement, survived as a single-sex commercial art school from its founding in 1848 into the twentieth century. By 1932, when a merger with another women's school brought a name change that symbolized the end of an era, the School of Design had enrolled more than four thousand students. Familiar to Philadelphians today as Moore College of Art and Design, the school remains committed to its original mission of educating women for careers in the arts.

When Fritz Ringer published The Decline of the German Mandarins in 1969, the history of education and of the professions occupied a very modest position in the historiography of modern Germany. In the Federal Republic, the reprinting in the mid-1960s of Friedrich Paulsen's History of Scholarly Instruction in the German Schools and Universities and German Universities and University Study, both dating from the turn of the century, highlighted the lack of more recent scholarship, although it also heralded a major revival of interest in the field. In the United States, the experience of the two world wars had almost completely eroded the older admiration for aspects of German education ranging from the kindergarten to the research seminar. The search for the roots of National Socialism had led many historians to criticize German schools and universities for their teaching of authoritarian, militaristic, nationalistic, and even völkisch values. Yet during the two decades after World War II, a brief condemnation of the universities by the German exile Frederic Lilge was the only book-length study on any area of German educational history in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to appear in the United States.

In American urban classrooms in the early twentieth century, women teachers faced two looming and contradictory specters: the idealized image of the gentle, nurturing teacher, and the reality of the cold and confusing working conditions of city schools. Women teachers had entered an occupation that was swathed in romantic images of the honorable lady teacher. In both popular culture and educational dialog, the woman teacher was portrayed as “naturally” maternal, caring, and patient, and as having a greater interest in personal satisfaction than in financial reward. Teaching was perceived less as a job than as a mission or a personal commitment. Like mothering, teaching was not just something one did, but was something that defined who one was; it was not simply an act, but a role. Teaching, like mothering, was a sacred calling for sacred women.

Brian Simon is certainly the best-known living historian of education in the United Kingdom, probably in Europe, and possibly in the whole world. His reputation depends upon two factors. The first is a publication record which, to date, comprises some thirty books and more than one hundred other contributions. The second factor is Simon's own life in education. Indeed, the two have been so intertwined that this review of his four-volume history of education necessarily begins with a brief account of the latter. For Brian Simon is no closet academic, no mere observer of the historical scene. Even today, though well into his seventies, he remains, as he has always been, a participant; an understanding of the nature of that participation is essential to any appreciation of his writings.