Using a collection of settler family letters to the Elementary Correspondence School (ECS) in British Columbia, the first provincial government–supported “schooling by mail” arrangement of its kind in Canada, I highlight the efforts of rural families to secure an education for their children in the period between the First and Second World Wars. The settler families who took advantage of correspondence schooling did so without the benefit of a professional teacher or a dedicated schoolhouse. This arrangement proved onerous for many settler families. In their letters to the ECS, adults and young people articulated the belief that the provincial government needed to do more to provide educational services for them. Families were acutely aware of their contributions to the prosperity of the province and, in return, they demanded schools for their children. Given the unique perspectives reflected through this collection of letters, my examination is situated in the interstices between rural schooling and correspondence schooling.

Progressive Era advocates of spelling reform argued that adopting “simplified” word forms would increase the efficiency of American schools. National education leaders and administrators sustained the movement as they discussed simplified spelling extensively in meetings of the National Education Association and state teachers’ associations as well as in education journals. While emphasizing saving money and time, their arguments for spelling reform also infused social justice into social efficiency, and efficiency into child-centered pedagogy. Although leaders saw schoolteachers as the torchbearers for simplified spelling, teachers’ subtle resistance undermined the movement. Teachers and the few administrators who opposed spelling reform occasionally voiced objections to efficiency itself, but their concerns about public scrutiny most influenced their opposition and thus the movement's ultimate demise. This examination of the public education sector's relationship to the simplified spelling movement illustrates the complexity of education leaders’ relationship with efficiency as well as their vulnerability to teacher resistance and public censure.

This article focuses on teachers in the discourses of early twentieth-century proponents of intelligence testing in America. Teachers were often a targeted enemy in the academic literature on intelligence testing—their methods belittled, their unreliability emphasized. Yet, in part because teachers were essential for intelligence tests to be given in schools, they were also often talked about in more ambiguous ways. In particular, this paper argues that psychologists’ ways of talking to, at, and about teachers presented a relationship characterized by an originary indebtedness of teachers toward psychology. Intelligence tests, it was implied, were a gift for teachers, and psychologists’ help a favor that teachers should repay by using the tests and showing rigor, obedience, and gratefulness in doing so. Arguably, the debt was framed in such ways as to render impossible its repayment and to make illegible the potential contributions and initiatives of teachers in the intelligence-testing movement.

Sidney Hook set the terms of debate on Communism, higher education, and academic freedom in the postwar United States. His view that Communists lacked the independence necessary for teaching and research—a view forged in the heated debates of New York City's radical left in the 1930s—provided the rationale for firing Communist professors across the country in the late 1940s and 1950s. Relying on close readings of underutilized archival sources, this article explores the development of Hook's thinking, charts his impact on key players in the period's higher education establishment (such as philosopher John Dewey and the American Association of University Professors), and outlines the way his writings helped lead to faculty dismissals at the University of Washington and New York University. The article also highlights the work of students and professors who challenged Hook's anti-Communist position, revealing a rich and often neglected mid-century discourse on academic freedom.