“Should women learn the alphabet?” asked a nineteenth century feminist, intending irony, and suggesting what we all know, that education can lead to unforeseen and unintended consequences, social and personal. If schools accomplished only their announced purposes, if pupils learned only what they came to learn, the work of the historian of education would be easier than it is.

Access to higher education was and is an essential factor in the economic and social mobility of minority groups within the United States. Prominent among the groups to take advantage of educational opportunities were Catholics and Jews, the children and grandchildren of the Irish immigration of the mid-19th century and of the “New Immigration” from eastern and southern Europe at the century's end. Today, however, other groups — blacks, Hispanic-Americans, Indians, and Orientals — are knocking on the door of admissions offices at colleges, universities, and professional schools. It is still too soon to assess their rate of educational mobility and determine whether it will parallel or even exceed that of Jews and Catholics. The role of quotas, both discriminatory and benign, have played a crucial role in retarding and encouraging the educational mobility of both the earlier and contemporary aspirants to advanced degrees. In studying this area of educational and social history, the focus has been limited, at least for the time being, to elite private institutions, to the so-called Big Three of Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. Although admission and assimilation at these colleges would be more difficult than at most public institutions, once attained, success would be noteworthy and could help to open doors elsewhere.

Since the civil war there have been more women than men public school teachers. Before then, with the exception of the so-called infant or dame schools, “keeping school” was thought to be properly a masculine enterprise. The war changed that. Between 1860–1895, male teachers, most of whom were unable to buy their way out of the draft, were conscripted by the thousands. Few men returned to the schools when the booming economy of the late 1860's and early 1870's brought them employment opportunities at significantly higher wages than school officials were able or willing to match. In some states the percentage of male teachers declined by more than 20 percent during the war period alone. In 1870 the percentage of female teachers in U.S. public schools was 61.3 percent. This percentage dropped slightly during the next decade, but then climbed steadily until the mid 1930s when it reached approximately 80 percent. The ratios of men and women teachers were highly uneven between the states, however. Utah, for example, had 65 percent female teachers in 1935, while Vermont had 90 percent. Since 1964 the percentage of women teachers has hovered around 65 percent.

On October 30, 1970, almost eight years ago to the day, I gave a paper entitled, “The Quest for Orderly Change,” before the Midwest Regional History of Education Society in which I attempted to critically analyze some of the key assumptions of the new liberal philosophy which have occupied the center stage of American social and educational reform in much of the twentieth century. This afternoon I would like to reflect back on the conditions which gave rise to that interpretation; on some of the research that has been done in the intervening years on that topic; on some of the criticism engendered; and lastly to sketch some of the areas which need more careful and extended inquiry.

Young women who left their parents and homes between 1837 and 1850 to enroll at Mary Lyon's Mount Holyoke Female Seminary were beginning to plan consciously for a new kind of life. Their social origins indicate that their decisions to attend Mount Holyoke were schemes to widen their life chances. Their diaries and letters revealed what planners they were; their calculations seemed a necessity.

The pivotal role of the scribe in the development of Mesopotamian culture can scarcely be exaggerated. His was the cohesive force that helped preserve and enrich one of mankind's very earliest civilizations throughout its long historical career, that impressed upon it its unique form and character, and that maintained and revitalized its vast body of traditions, customs, and ideals over the span of almost three millennia, doing so in spite of repeated social, political, and intellectual changes. With the deployment of the first practical system of writing — an innovation which obviously lent societal mores a permanence and continuity heretofore lacking — the scribe emerged early as a central figure in the workings of Mesopotamia. Thus armed with a means of fixing thought on clay, it was inevitable perhaps that the tablet-writer should come to occupy a strategic position in his several roles as temple functionary, court secretary, royal counselor, civil bureaucrat, commercial correspondent, poet, and scholar. The role and importance of the tupšarru, it has been rightly observed, might be likened to those of the clergy in medieval Europe; his lore, tupšarrūtu, to that extensive body of knowledge, skills, and savoir-faire covered by the Islamic term adab. Any holistic appreciation for the Mesopotamian cradle of civilization, arguably, will accord pre-eminence to the scribe and his craft in ancient Near Eastern society.

A sense of urgency gripped educators and federal government officials in the summer of 1942. Word of the imminent lowering of the draft age meant that little time would remain between a boy's graduation from high school and his induction into the armed forces. In July, Robert A. Lovett, Assistant Secretary of War for Air, advised John W. Studebaker, U.S. Commissioner of Education, that “the need for pre-flight training and physical conditioning is every day become more apparent.” In September, an officer from the Navy Department warned that the country could not afford to lose any time in toughening and training all high school youth. Government estimates forecast that 80 percent of the nation's 1,300,000 high school boys between 16 and 18 would enter the armed forces shortly after graduation. The 20 percent physically unsuited for the military, and many girls, likely would enter industrial work and essential community occupations. Consequently, Paul McNutt, Director of the War Manpower Commission, added his voice to the chorus asking that adolescents in the schools compose a trained reserve.

Writing in 1940, the University of Pennsylvania's historian Edward Potts Cheyney characterized the entire period of that institution's history between 1829 and 1880 as “the renaissance.” Yet as proud as he was of “the beginnings of expansion” which occurred during that era, climaxed by the move to a new site in what was then still undeveloped West Philadelphia in the early 1870's, those sixty-one years were to be thought of as a prelude to the “era of expansion” itself and the inauguration of “modern times” which began with Dr. William Peppers administration in 1881. Our discussion of Pennsylvania is based on a sample of 691 alumni. Drawn first from the class of 1873 —the first to graduate after that move to a new campus was completed —and then from twenty-five consecutive classes thereafter, they represent those who were in attendance during what were presumably decisive years in this institution's history. Recipients of professional degrees, particularly medical students, make up the bulk of this sample, for these significantly outnumbered those to be found in the College both before and after the Civil War. Indeed although the number of Bachelor degrees awarded at Pennsylvania increased after 1873, the totals for even the peak years of 1886, 1887, and 1889 represented far fewer by way of comparison than the numbers being conferred during the same period at a school like Harvard. According to the sample, non-professional degrees accounted for about one quarter of all the degrees conferred (in course) in the 1870's, and that proportion diminished slightly to about one-fifth as the century drew to a close.

In 1682 Louis XIV made the important collège (secondary school) of the Jesuits, formerly called Clermont, a royal foundation, and it assumed the name Louis-le-Grand in honor of its illustrious patron. Those fathers continued to hold the school until April 1762 when the Parlement of Paris, the realm's most important court of law, forced them to cease instruction. In the following August the Parlement went further, dissolving the Society of Jesus within its jurisdiction and forcing the fathers to abandon the collège. During those eighty years, and even beyond, the collège itself was, in comparison to other such institutions in France, as “great” as the appellation of its patron. It was large (having nearly 3000 students prior to 1762, although fewer than 600 after that date) and prestigious (having many famous students, including Voltaire and Turgot prior to 1762 and Maximillian Robespierre after the Jesuits departed). It was, in short, one of a handful of very important collèges of the realm, along with such others as Mazarin (Quatre-Nations) within Paris and La Flèche and Juilly outside it.

The Anfang movement, centered in Vienna and Berlin from 1912 to 1914, was the twentieth century's first left-wing political youth movement whose main concern was youthful independence from adult authority. The movement took its name from its journal Der Anfang (“The Beginning”). The 3000 members were Austrians and Germans born between 1890 and 1899. Most were urban state secondary school pupils and university students from middle-class families, many of which were artistic, academic and intellectual. A third of the members were Jewish; in Vienna 90% were Jewish. In June 1914 the journal reached a high point of 1000 subscribers.

Historians of nineteenth-century common school reform have noted that the feminization of teaching meant expanded professional opportunities for women, but within a limited social and economic context. Schoolmen like Horace Mann seized on the rhetoric of popularizers of sentimental womanhood and declared that teachers should consider themselves mothers away-from-home. Writers and reformers alike emphasized women's nurturing qualities — gentleness, patience, and kindness with young children — and glorified the function of female “moral influence” in the purification of home and nation. But despite this inflated rhetoric, women teachers received less pay than their male counterparts, and they were denied positions of administrative authority in local and state school systems. Based on both “morality” and financial “efficiency,” the argument for female teachers was a powerful one; by the late Nineteenth Century (earlier in New England), women dominated the common school teaching force.

The institutional setting in which formal education occurs is of interest both in terms of its potential effects upon the school population and its broader social implications. As the sociologist Robert Dreeben has argued, analyzing the structural properties of the modern American public school, What is Learned in School derives not only from the curriculum but also from the institutional setting in which the activity occurs. In structuring individuals' activities in regular ways, he has argued, the organizational properties of institutions are themselves educative, fostering an acceptance of norms congruent with the requirements of institutional life. These norms may then be applied to other life situations. Thus changes in the institutional setting in which an activity such as education occurs may both reflect and promote broader changes in behavioral norms and social values.

The importance of universal education to the emergence of today's world is obvious to anyone, but its history is often unknown. For example, the story of how large parts of modern society made the journey from widespread illiteracy to almost total literacy is a tale yet to be told. In this article a small beginning will be undertaken, based upon sources dealing with several small countries of Germany which espoused Luther's Reformation during the sixteenth century. This will uncover an unsuspected concern for the education of girls as well as of boys, and, incidentally, evidence which reveals that German history is distorted when it is studied exclusively under the aspect of the evolution of the Prussian state.