Twenty-five years ago Lawrence Cremin and Bernard Bailyn exerted a commanding influence on the field of American educational history. Between them they forged a new definition of the subject matter, studying families, churches, workplaces, and newspapers, not just schools. Some historians of education, including the present writer, did not learn this lesson very well. I defended my focus on schooling in The Evolution of an Urban School System by arguing that the big story in the nineteenth century was the transition from the informal mode of education that Bailyn had emphasized to a predominant reliance on formal schooling as an instrument of public educational policy by 1850. In Pillars of the Republic, ten years later, I again defended the focus on schooling: “If one wants to understand state policy toward education, schools are the appropriate focus. Society educates in many ways; the state educates through schools.”

W. E. B. DuBois once argued that the proper education for oppressed groups such as African Americans had a special, critical purpose. He knew, as have all serious educators since Socrates accepted his cup, that education was always and everywhere political. For the oppressed, the political role of schooling had to be aimed precisely at finding the means to end the oppression. In 1930, speaking before the graduating students at Howard University, he put the issue this way: “Let there be no misunderstanding about this, no easy going optimism. We are not going to share modern civilization just by deserving recognition. We are going to force ourselves in by organized far-seeing effort—by outthinking and outflanking the owners of the world today who are too drunk with their own arrogance and power successfully to oppose us, if we think and learn and do.” It is clear from his own life's work that to “think and learn and do”—the “outthinking and outflanking”—required schooling.

My title is taken from a poem, “Tanto viro locuturi,” by the renowned satirist, Walter of Châtillon, who flourished in the latter part of the twelfth century (his dates are circa 1135–1203), that is, just at the time when the first universities were being formed at Paris, at Bologna, and at Oxford. “Quid dant artes nisi luctum et laborem?” reads the complete line: What do the arts give other than trouble and toil? Walter's poem is the bitter lament of a poor scholar unable to find a job and questioning the value of his years of hard study, expense, and self-denial. It is a lament, of course, that echoes through the ages, that we hear no less frequently in our own universities than the contemporaries of Walter of Châtillon seem to have heard it when the institution was first coming into being. Nowhere, perhaps, is it truer than in the tradition-bound institution of the university that “plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.” There is one obvious difference between the lament of Walter's poor scholar and our own. His is addressed to the pope. We know the power and the purse strings controlling our careers lie elsewhere than Rome.

Revolutions are a commonplace in studies of the history of American higher education. Every decade or so seems to bring upheaval of revolutionary proportions and a literature to analyze it. Significantly, Laurence Veysey began his study of the rise of the American university with some words from Noah Porter's 1871 inaugural address as president of Yale, “college and university education are not merely agitated by reforms; they are rather convulsed by a revolution.” Then Veysey proceeded with his own excellent account of Porter's revolution—the forces, events, and personalities in the struggle to create the new research university at the turn of the nineteenth century. Christopher Jencks and David Riesman described quite a different sort of revolution in The Academic Revolution, their study of the rise of college and university faculties to preeminent professional influence in the early 1960s. It was a short-lived triumph at best, for immediately followed the revolutionary upheavals of the late 1960s. At close range, but with considerable insight, Lewis B. Mayhew analyzed the causes and consequences of the troubled sixties, and more recently other studies of that revolution are beginning to appear.

About a century ago, the private boarding school movement began in earnest in the United States. What are today considered among the best, if not the best, boarding schools were founded between 1883 and 1906: Lawrenceville (1883); Groton (1884); Woodbury Forest (1889); Taft (1890); Hotchkiss (1892); Choate (1896); St. George's (1896); Middlesex (1901); Deerfield (1903); and Kent (1906). Other schools launched earlier, were enlarged or their character altered during this quarter century: Phillips Andover (1778); Phillips Exeter (1783); Episcopal (1839); Hill (1851); St. Paul's (1856); and St. Mark's (1865). This is the “select sixteen” identified by E. Digby Baltzell in The Protestant Establishment. Baltzell should know—being a Philadelphia mainliner, a graduate of St. Paul's, and for years professor of sociology at the University of Pennsylvania.

Friedrich Froebel, founder of the kindergarten, like other prophets was honored chiefly outside his own country. When the kindergarten, which had become a popular cause among the liberal reformers of 1848, was banned in Prussia in 1.851, kindergarten activist Bertha von Marenholtz-Bülow wrote, “We must seek to gain over foreign countries, so that we may open the way from them for the cause in Germany…. How sad that this is so, and that there is so little independence in our own country.” The foreign country to which this German idea was most successfully transplanted was the United States. After some initial hesitation, the public school authorities in most American states proved quite hospitable to the kindergarten, and by 1914 most American urban school systems had incorporated kindergarten classes on a public, though noncompulsory, basis. In the land of its origin, by contrast, the kindergarten had found far less acceptance. “A great disadvantage,” lamented Eleonore Heerwart, president of the German kindergarten teachers' organization in 1897, “is the isolation of the kindergarten; it gets little help from parents and no help at all from the schools, while in other countries its incorporation into the school has occurred quite naturally.” How can we explain the fact that the kindergarten, in theory and in practice, found greater support in America than in Germany?

Public high schools were relatively rare in antebellum America. The first public high school in the United States opened in Boston in 1821, but it was not until the late 1840s and 1850s, when there was a rapid expansion of public high schools throughout the commonwealth, that they became more common in Massachusetts. Most communities in other states, especially those outside of New England, did not provide public high schools for their teenagers.

One of the most interesting aspects of the German Reformation for us to ponder is that of the educational reconstruction attempted in all Lutheran states in the sixteenth century. Churchmen and politicians acted in close collaboration, first in response to the reformist zeal charging the Lutheran movement in its heroic years, later in meeting the procedural obligations laid down for officials in the established Reformation's institutional structure. They agreed on fundamental objectives and shared a coherent body of pedagogical suppositions. They had high hopes for the power of education to direct thought and mold behavior. In the new church-state symbiosis they recognized unprecedented opportunities for reform and were eager to act on them. For a time, religion and politics moved in unison toward the enactment of a program of schooling intended in its overall purpose to conform the young to approved patterns of evangelical and civic rectitude.

When Boniface VIII issued the constitution Cum ex eo in 1298, he was attempting to address a problem that had long preoccupied church leaders—the education of the parochial clergy. His plan to provide higher education for parish priests—outlined in Cum ex eo—was fairly straightforward: an unordained parochial rector, with episcopal license, could be absent from his parish and use the fruits of his benefice to finance his studies at a studium generale for up to seven years, provided that he proceeded to the order of subdeacon within a year from his institution to his benefice, that he was ordained to the priesthood within a year following the expiration of his license, and that he left his parishioners in the care of a suitable curate.

The rise of the modern American university between the Civil War and the Great Depression is a familiar story. In this relatively short span of time America acquired a host of universities that offered extensive graduate training, stressed research over teaching, and largely abandoned the prescribed common curriculum in favor of greater individual choice. Some of these new universities, like Chicago, Cornell, and Stanford, were created ex nihilo. Others, like Yale and Princeton, were gradually transformed from small, clerically directed, classically oriented denominational colleges into modern secular universities.

As president of Amherst College from 1912 to 1923, noted educational reformer Alexander Meiklejohn designed and implemented a new curriculum and revitalized the teaching force of the school. At Amherst he helped to determine what the modern liberal arts college would be. Although he brought new purpose to a campus that had fallen deep into the shadows of the burgeoning private and public universities of the late nineteenth century, Meiklejohn was dismissed by Amherst's trustees in an action so steeped in controversy and rumor that the college kept all records of the proceedings sealed for the next sixty years.

Students at Hyde Park High School set up the Theta chapter of Gamma Sigma fraternity in May 1896. Within two years they had a “small but comfortable” chapter house near the school on Kimbark Avenue; within three they were publishing a monthly journal, The Index. By 1908, when the fraternity's thirty-ninth annual convention was held in Chicago, the Theta chapter was involved in a four-year-old legal battle with the Chicago Board of Education, which was trying to get fraternities and sororities out of the high schools.

This is a study of how Intelligence Quotient testing, which was always controversial, became a tool for one of the nation's most advanced and progressive school systems, the Los Angeles public schools. Rather than considering what advocates said about intelligence testing, this essay focuses on the actual testing in schools. It argues that teachers never completely accepted I.Q. tests as the unambiguous instruments their designers had claimed. Instead, teachers immediately detected the cultural biases in the tests, and administrators recognized that they did not provide the revolutionary, educational, or diagnostic tool that had been expected. This essay does not suggest that I.Q. testing played no role in “tracking.” What it does demonstrate is that the test generated far more confusion and frustration for teachers and administrators than historians have thought. Educators initially expected that the test would provide a clear-cut pattern for separating students by intelligence. When they discovered that the test was unreliable, many looked for alternatives. Ability grouping in Los Angeles public schools in the 1920s and early 1930s depended less on I.Q. testing than historians have led us to suppose.

In The German Ideology, Marx articulates one of his most famous claims. Paraphrased, it reads in essence that “the ruling class will give its ideas the form of universality and represent them as the only rational universally valid ones.” While there have been interpreters of this point who have chosen to see this process as a conscious conspiracy, for Marx it was considerably more complicated. For him, out of the constitutive conflicts and contradictions of capitalism there were certain specific tendencies that were generated. Among these tendencies was the “natural” production of principles, ideas, and categories that support the unequal class relations of that social formation. These ideas were under constant threat, however. They needed constant attention because hegemonic control was not guaranteed. Because of the class conflicts also generated out of, and causing, changes in that mode of production, there always exists the possibility of different ideological tendencies which could subvert the dominant ones.

Federal policy toward the Navajo tribe during the 1930s offers a revealing case in the application of social science and educational theory to minority groups in the United States. Public officials, social scientists, and educational planners worked for several years to create a form of community education that they believed would respect the ways of the tribe while accelerating its members toward political empowerment and economic well-being. For a brief time, a consensus emerged about the value of cultural pluralism as a basis for achieving the goals of public policy. The result was a remarkable interplay of social-scientific reasoning and progressive educational thought, a rhetorical breakthrough perhaps most memorable in retrospect because what was intended as an enlightened intervention soon met, and quickly succumbed to, determined resistance. To see the policy experiment in historical perspective, it is necessary to look more broadly at the migration of social scientists into the corridors of power. An unprecedented transfer of experts and expertise from academia to government took place in the 1930s and 1940s, an infusion so dramatic in its effects that more social scientists worked for the federal government during those years than ever before in the history of the United States. World War II brought many of them to officialdom, but the way had been opened for these “service intellectuals,” as Richard S. Kirkendall called them, by a vast expansion of public bureaucracy during the 1930s.