Earliest efforts to provide some form of federal aid to education can be traced to the days of the Northwest Ordinance of 1785. The century following provided many precedents in legislation and judicial interpretation and witnessed the long heritage of interest by various groups in such proposals. Gordon Lee has carefully examined this background and has analyzed the first major efforts to obtain federal aid for the schools during the years 1870–1890. During the twentieth century there has been a continuous and increasing interest in proposals for federal aid to elementary and secondary schools. More than a dozen bills have received serious consideration by Congress between 1900 and 1945 and since then federal aid bills have been introduced regularly in every session. Congress, however, has failed to pass any of them.

It is not, of course, for his work as a teacher in the Academy that Plato is remembered most in the history of education but rather for his Utopian plan for education, a plan which had a profound influence on the education of antiquity. This may explain why so little is known of the internal functioning of this famous school.

The Social Frontier, a hybrid of political radicalism and progressive educational theory, appears as an anomaly when viewed from the perspective of American educational history. This union of education and politics also has made certain features of the journal's history difficult, if not impossible, to interpret. Although it was sponsored by many of the more influential leaders of the progressive education movement, its platform failed to attract a large following among classroom teachers. The John Dewey Society for the Study of Education and Culture and the Progressive Education Association were both affiliated with the journal, but the latter constantly found it a source of embarrassment. Even the wide variety of intellectuals—e.g., Eric Goldman, Harold Laski, John Herman Randall, Jr., and Leon Trotsky—who contributed an occasional article, thus giving the journal wider intellectual interest, were not aware of its educational philosophy. The journal appealed for educators to unite with the labor movement, but the labor unions—including the teachers' union—made no effort to encourage the supporters of the journal or to endorse their philosophy of social reconstruction. The journal's strong declaration of purpose and impressive list of directors and contributors created the impression of organizational stability and purpose, even though the former was partly illusory and the latter eroded away.

William Seward was elected governor of New York State in 1838. Economic depression and distress resulting from the Panic of 1837, a strong political machine engineered by Thurlow Weed, and the editorial talents of Horace Greeley produced a Whig landslide and the election of Seward by ten thousand votes. Very early in January 1839, Seward delivered his first annual message to the state legislature. After carefully submitting his recommendation for internal improvements within the state—a subject which held high priority in all of Seward's messages—the Whig governor turned his attention to the progress of education in New York State. Although the state's system of public instruction was by no means unsuccessful, the governor thought “that its usefulness is much less than the state rightfully demands, both as a return for her munificence and a guaranty of her institutions.” Superior educational facilities were imperative if Americans were to achieve an enlightened understanding of responsible citizenship and cherish the legacy of their republican heritage. Seward was convinced that only a first-rate education could effect “the improvability of our race”—an elevation which was infinite in dimension. Careful not to deprecate the past merit of New York's educational system, Seward tempered his critical remarks by noting that “all that is proposed is less wonderful than what has already been accomplished.” Lest his legislative audience misconstrue his educational observations as mere platitudes doomed to oblivion amid more important priorities, the chief executive forewarned that “education is the chief of our responsibilities.” In fact, Seward prophesied that during his administration “improvement in our system of education will be wider and more enduring than the effects of any change of public policy.”

In his The Education of American Teachers, Dr. James B. Conant rejects the idea that education is an academic discipline. The argument he develops is a logically simple one that follows a rather familiar pattern. Education, like medicine, is both a practical art where scientifically derived generalizations may helpfully guide action, and a deductive-theoretical endeavor where the “wide premises of culture,” largely unexamined, condition decision-making. And in education, since these two “modes of thought”—the practical and the theoretical—are inseparable, it is impossible to designate so “vast a field of human activity directed toward practical ends” as a separate science or a discipline. For knowledge and insight into the nature of education and medicine, the teacher and the physician cannot turn to the “educationist” or the “medicinist,” but must look to those established independent sciences and disciplines that touch upon these areas of human service. The doctor has such sciences as biology and chemistry to which to turn for truth about the healing arts; the teacher has the educational sciences which are the academic disciplines—political science, anthropology, psychology, history, philosophy, and sociology—from which to get understanding about the teaching arts. In this way does Conant the logician destroy the theoretical underpinnings of the idea of a separate discipline of education and, in the process, reassert the legitimacy of the claims of the scholarly sciences and disciplines over this now fractured and disposesssed academic orphan.