This address derives from the intellectual contributions of young scholars and doctoral students, in faded memory of my life as a doctoral student and young scholar. I was tempted by other topics. One was the definition of the schoolteacher as the penultimate professional from a Deweyan perspective. I decided I would be, as we like to say in the Christ-haunted South, preaching to the choir. Another choice, one that deeply intrigues me, was the college movie, but indeed that topic was continuously marred by insubstantial acting and script.

Although not entirely neglected, the history of preschool reform and child study in Canada is understudied. Historians have documented the fate of “progressivism” in Canadian schooling through the 1930s along with postwar reforms that shaped the school system through the 1960s. But there are few case studies of child study centers and laboratory schools in Canada, despite their popularity in the latter half of the twentieth century. Histories of child study and child development tend to focus on the well-known Institute of Child Study directed by the renowned William E. Blatz in the Department of Psychology at the University of Toronto (U of T). Yet there were over twenty other child study centers established in Canadian universities during the 1960s and 1970s directed by little-known figures such as Alice Borden and Grace Bredin at the University of British Columbia (UBC).

President G. Stanley Hall hung only a portrait of Ralph Waldo Emerson in his office at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts. The philosopher embodied Hall's most cherished mid-nineteenth century ideas that comprised part of his intellectual worldview. In the 1840s, Emerson reflected on his transcendental concepts of the common mind and instinct, which held all innate human knowledge and behavioral patterns, in his Essays:

In 1941, members of the local unit of the Florida State Teachers Association (FSTA) met in Tampa to plan a lawsuit against Hillsborough County's school board for paying African-American teachers less than white teachers. Hilda Turner, who taught history and economics at Tampa's historically black high school, agreed to serve as plaintiff; she was the only one to volunteer. Thurgood Marshall chief counsel for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP)'s Legal Defense Fund (LDF), assisted Samuel McGill, a Jacksonville attorney, in representing Turner, who filed a complaint in federal court that November. In the fall of 1942, responding to Turner's suit, Hillsborough County school board dropped the race-tiered salary schedule and adopted a “rating” scale that based teachers' pay on a number of factors other than training and experience, including “physical, health, personality, and character,” “scholarship and attitude,” and “instructional skill and performance.” The rating committee charged with classifying teachers placed 84 percent of white teachers in the highest pay bracket, and 80 percent of African-American teachers in the lowest pay bracket. As in other Florida cases, Hillsborough County school board offered the new rating scale as evidence that the district no longer discriminated on the basis of race, an assertion Marshall attempted to challenge at trial. However, in 1943, two years after Turner's complaint was originally filed, the federal district judge ruled that the new salary scale was “fair on its face.”