“All that has happened to you,” an English friend wrote Benjamin Franklin, “is also connected with the detail of the manners and situation of a rising people; and in this respect I do not think that the writings of Caesar and Tacitus can be more interesting to a true judge of human nature and society.” Indeed, the story of Franklin's life has mythic sweep and significance. The son of a soap boiler who stood before kings, a runaway apprentice printer who became minister plenipotentiary, Franklin had a career of constant change and discontinuity. His mobility—intellectual, geographical, social—would have staggered a less resilient man.

Samuel Keimer suffered the misfortune of having had his sole surviving historical portrait drawn by a caricaturist. The medium of caricature utilizes a technique of selective accentuation; one or another of the subject's features or attributes are presented so much larger than life that they totally dominate the whole and effectively submerge, or at best adumbrate, all the others. The portrait of Keimer, the preservation of which is due solely to the fame of its creator rather than its subject, was penned by a hand that had completely mastered this technique as an instrument for its own purposes. The artist in question was Benjamin Franklin, and the portrait of Samuel Keimer achieved a modicum of immortality due to its inclusion in Franklin's Autobiography.

Although the relation between the public schools and the public is one of the persistent themes in American educational debate, the character of this relation is far from self-evident. In part, the problem lies in the two broad styles of discussion concerning the publicness of public education: The public is sometimes viewed as a whole, as the raison d'être, source of virtue, mainstay of support (or rightful mainstay which sometimes withholds its support) for the public schools; and sometimes the public is viewed in a fragmented fashion, as a series of groups, either totally comprising the public or over and against the public as a whole. This second conception is particularly prominent in the puzzled and defensive rhetoric of educators who see the public school as a citadel under constant attack from a series of pressure groups.

The early history of Indian education in the United States reveals an arresting segment of the continuing, current controversy between church and state over the use of tax funds for the support of religious schools. In the history reviewed below, church and state not only stood toe to toe but also “eyeball to eyeball.” The degree to which either stepped back or blinked is subject to an interpretation of the consequences which are not all in yet. This brief history of federal support of religious Indian schools is not only important in itself, but perhaps something is to be learned from the scars of battle by those involved in the struggle today.

Human motivation is at best difficult to fathom, especially since “complex” and “ambivalent” man is frequently conditioned by multiple factors and motivated by many and often disparate considerations. The task is further complicated when one attempts to assess the motivational factors that induce a person to act one way instead of another in a particular situation.