Disguised as demographic analyst and historiographical innovator, Philippe Ariès launched his own clandestine attack on modernism twenty-five years ago. As a demographic analyst, he carried on a series of perceptive interpretations of typical French populations and their evolution from the eighteenth century onward: Parisians, miners of the Northeast, villagers of Touraine, Bretons, southerners, dwellers in the Alps all paraded past his eyepiece. As an historiographical innovator, he provided a way of inserting demographic material directly into history. In 1946, that was a daring thing to do. Ariès also showed how family portraits, wardrobes, textbooks and other antiquarian paraphernalia, long condemned to supply the comic relief for serious history, could become evidence of the deepest, longest transformations of social life.

The nature and state of the family has long been a major concern in the United States. It has been apparent in the literature and criticism since the Puritan arrival in the seventeenth century and may be followed thereafter. However, the family has not been a major concern of American historians. As Edward Saveth reminds us, in the 1962 Presidential Address of the American Historical Association, Carl Bridenbaugh spoke of the need for research in the neglected field of American family history and suggested that the profession assign a priority to this general area. Saveth, in 1969, concluded that “apart from some impressive work in historical demography, the situation has not altered.”

Intellectuals in many societies have been deeply concerned about education ever since the days of Socrates and Plato. They have speculated about how their youth should be taught and have protested when they believed that the schools were lapsing from these aims. Spokesmen of this variety are produced by most sophisticated societies, and modern Turkey is no exception. In addition, there are the relatively few innovative philosophers who are capable of creating more systematic theoretical systems. Several theorists of this second type have made their impact on Turkish educational thought since the turn of the century.