In the late nineteenth century, when universities were being created in the United States, the question arose of whether colleges could survive in the new era. When, for example, a faculty member from the University of Chicago traveled to a nearby college town in 1894, the local audience had to be assured that “the lean and hungry universities” did not intend to devour the fat and innocent colleges. In fact, the occasion of this visit provides an illustration of one way in which colleges survived in the age of the universities.

Whatever else written history may offer, it is bound to exhibit the preoccupations of its authors as faithfully as it records the experience of its subjects. As I understand the purpose of this symposium, it is an effort to sample such preoccupations–to produce a decent reflection of the concerns of the moment–unmediated by much effort to see how well they seem to fit evidence of the past. Although living, breathing historians are probably unused to being cast in the role of artifacts, it may prove an interesting and useful innovation.

In 1938 Michael Demiashkevich, professor of education at the George Peabody College for Teachers, and F. Alden Shaw, principal of the Detroit Country Day School, founded the Essentialist Movement at the annual meeting of the American Association of School Administrators. At that Atlantic City meeting, William Chandler Bagley delivered an address—“An Essentialist's Platform for the Advancement of American Education.” Like any tag, the essentialist tag that has been pinned on Bagley obscures as much as it designates. It has drawn attention away from the greater part of his career as an educationist, obscuring many of the problems he encountered and attempted to resolve.

Historians have traditionally built the early modern English state on two educational planks. One was that of a so-called new learning, renaissance humanism, coming into England shortly before hops and reformation. The entry of this new learning has been pushed back into the fifteenth century, and some have even been so discourteous as to cast aspersions upon its value. Yet it continues to attract scholarly attention.

Two facts, I am sure, are evident to all of us. We desperately need an appraisal of the history of education in northern black ghettos, but because of the incredible lack of research on this subject in the past we can only dimly perceive the outlines such a study might take. Consequently, I should like to suggest a few leading questions which might guide this investigation and to indicate some of the sources to which historians might turn for evidence and insights. Let me stress the speculative and tentative character of this essay.

Many schools in England have long histories, but few can rival that of Reading School, stretching from before the foundation of Reading Abbey to the present day, broken only by four years in the middle of the last century when it had to be reconstituted on a fresh site. At the time of the dissolution of the monasteries, its learned schoolmaster Leonard Cox, who was a friend of Erasmus, was given letters patent to keep on the school, and it was on this rather ad-hoc basis that the school was run for many years. In 1640, Archbishop Laud, a former pupil, endowed the school with an extra £20 per annum to assure the master of a decent salary, and arranged for triennial visitations from Oxford to check on progress. Despite these careful arrangements and endowments, the school fell on hard times, and when Dr. Valpy came to be head in 1781 he found little comfort, few sound traditions, and fewer possibilities for development.

Although the sixteenth century is more popularly known in the accounts of Russian history as a time of internal crises largely perpetrated by a bloody autocracy and boyar intrigues, those violent events were no more significant than developments in the social and cultural reconstruction of life among the peoples of Orthodox Rus' during the same period. Prominent among these developments was the gradual formation of small centers of learning, largely outside the confines of the Moscow Tsardom but yet within the larger community of Eastern Orthodox Slavdom. Both within and between the nationality areas, communication and the pursuit of learning not only continued to function while they existed under different state administrations, but even began to intensify and to expand, especially during the latter half of the sixteenth century and into the seventeenth. This intensification of cultural life had its sources and foundations in the geographic, political, economic, social and intellectual realities in the lands of Orthodox Rus’. It both reflected and helped shape the growing crisis faced by leaders of the Orthodox clergies of Rus'.

On the eve of his retirement as the first president of Johns Hopkins University there came to Daniel Coit Gilman the opportunity to direct the fortunes of an institution that promised to become the most important research enterprise in the United States. Moreover, with the financial backing of the institution's founder, Andrew Carnegie, who had set aside as an endowment United States Steel bonds worth ten million dollars, Gilman faced the refreshing prospect of guiding an institution that was free of the usual budgetary deficit.

At the south edge of New Harmony, Indiana, in Maple Hill cemetery, over the grave of Joseph Neef, a monument erected by his daughter, Mrs. Richard Owen, bears the inscription, “Joseph Neef was a co-adjutor of Pestalozzi, in Switzerland and was the first to promulgate the Pestalozzian system of education in America.” Mirroring the epitaph on his stone memorial, American educational historians have interpreted Neef as the lengthened shadow of Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi in America. Neef, although in many ways a reflection of his Swiss mentor, was also an educational theorist in his own right. Pestalozzi, as a European, had waited for the coming of a benevolent monarch to inaugurate a natural system of education. Neef quickly accepted the frontier egalitarianism of his adopted nation, blending both Pestalozzian and republican principles to develop an original theory of ethical education.

The past decade has witnessed a surge of writing in history of education, broad in scope, humanistic in character, solid and mature in its use of the tools and apparatus of historical scholarship: Lawrence Cremin's The Transformation of the School, Jack Campbell's biography of Francis W. Parker, Timothy Smith's work in immigration history, Claude Bower's history of progressive education in the depression, Patricia Graham's history of the Progressive Education Association, Krug's history of the American high school, Geraldine Joncich's biography of Thorndike come to mind. And recently several of our more venturesome colleagues have demonstrated how methods and insights borrowed from the social sciences, especially sociology and statistics, can provide significant new approaches to the history of education. I have in mind David Tyack's study of the relationship of bureaucratic processes in the Portland school system at the turn of the century and progressive education, Michael Katz's examination of bureaucratic structure and educational innovation in mid-nineteenth-century Massachusetts, and Charles Bidwell's extremely sophisticated use of sociological and statistical tools to analyze the relationships between school control, moral training, and social structures in the Northeast during the Jacksonian period.

In the 1830's and 40's America was experiencing basic and far-reaching social change derived to a large extent from the revolution wrought by industrialization. One significant area of change, the reformulation of woman's status and capabilities, has been recognized, but is too often ascribed to liberation through her possible or real role as a factory worker. A closer look, however, reveals that the woman who went into the factory as a worker was not liberated but simply shifted her work from home to factory. Her labor had always been absolutely necessary to keep her family economically solvent; where she had woven cloth and produced the necessary family goods at home, she now wove cloth in a factory and used her income to purchase the necessities. This woman lost neither function nor focus in her life. It was rather the middle-class woman who was most seriously affected by industrialization. Machine-produced goods replaced the goods she had once provided for her family and perhaps even deprived her of a pin money sideline “job.” Unlike her working-class sister, she could not take a job because incipient social standards demanded her idleness as a status symbol for her husband. As desire for status increased, a man who could afford it even relieved his wife of household duties by hiring domestic servants. All of this increased her financial dependence on her husband, took away her feeling of usefulness to the family, and gave her increased leisure time to reflect on her problems and needs.

Michael John Demiashkevich's professional career in the United States encompassed fewer than ten years. Within this brief period, however, he probably contributed more of lasting significance to American educational theory and practice than most philosophers of education contribute in a lifetime. It was during these years that he, along with a few other educators, laid the foundations of a new philosophy of education-a philosophy that was labeled “Essentialism,” a word Demiashkevich coined in 1935 to refer to his educational point of view.

American Herbartianism was to an astonishing degree the creation of three men, all of whom were connected with the Illinois State Normal University: Charles DeGarmo, Charles McMurry, and Frank McMurry. Though they were aided and abetted in very important ways both by other American members of the movement and by various distinguished educators who were never card-carrying Herbartians, any account of American Herbartianism must focus primarily on these three, for they were both its theoretical proponents and its practical agitators.

While practitioners of the “new” history of education see much more clearly than most historians the dynamic relationship the school has with the society of which it is part, we continue to share with the other observers of education a tendency to look at the child in the classroom as someone being taught; that is, we see him primarily as the object of the process of education, rather than in his real role of learner. We have ignored what has become a truism in other branches of educational thought: that schooling is more a matter of learning than it is of teaching. The child's attitude, personality, and his life in his family and its wider environment are more important factors in governing what he learns and how he uses what he learns than are curricula, textbooks, teachers, school administrators, and school boards. We know, for example, that much of the paraphernalia of the “new” education in Canada and the United States at the turn of the century—manual training, industrial education, domestic science, health and hygiene, scientific temperance education, and so on—were introduced into the schools to give to the children of the urban working class an education supposedly more appropriate to their needs and calling in life than the traditional school curriculum. We do not know, however, whether these changes in what went on in the school made any difference, good or bad, to the children they were designed to serve. Can we say that, in 1910, whether a child of downtown Toronto or New York profited in any substantial way from his schooling depended mostly on the curriculum and teaching staff of his school, or on the kind of person his family and children. Our research opportunities arise, however, not only from new questions or concepts, but also from the use of new techniques. In those areas of French, English, and American studies where historians have used the microstudy framework, they have been able to achieve very substantial results from their research. Demographic historians, for example, have invented the technique of family reconstruction which they are using to ask questions about changes in the age at which marriage takes place, the size of families, the family and the prevailing social structure, and so on. With a little ingenuity it should be possible to prod out of this kind of data, or from our own similar material, much that will be useful in discovering, particularly at periods of sharp change or crisis, the relationship between the child and the family on one side–such things perhaps as number, spacing, and birth order of children; family size; family cohesiveness; socio-economic status and the like—and schools on the other.

Although the Talmudic Academies of Sura and Pumbeditha in Babylonia ceased to function almost one thousand years ago, their contributions to Jewish learning and to Jewish unity have so impressed contemporary Jews that they still recite the ancient prayer, Yekum Purkan, as part of the traditional Sabbath morning service in behalf of “our scholars and teachers in the land of Israel and in the land of Babylon, the heads of the academies and of the chiefs of the captivity….” As early as A.D. 220, Abba-Arika founded the renowned academy which was to flourish for eight centuries. Later, Sura's great rival, Pumbeditha, gave Jewish scholars another Talmudic center for research and teaching, and from both of these celebrated academies, inspirational messages flowed unceasingly to the Jewish communities throughout the Diaspora. The early sages of Sura, the Amoraim, devoted themselves to Talmudic interpretation, and their successors, the Savoraim, judged the Talmud and enlarged it considerably. At the beginning of the seventh century, the Massoretic scholars added even greater glory to the academies by making further contributions in both schools to their great project of supplying vowel points and accents to the Biblical text.

John Orville Taylor was one of many prominent educators of the eighteen thirties and forties who labored continually to win public support for popular education. One can safely infer that his efforts to muster common school support were comparable with those of his more publicized contemporaries; yet today he receives little recognition from educational historians for the part he played in laying the groundwork for the American public school.

The position of Johann Friedrich Herbart (1776–1841) in the annals of education is due largely to Herbartianism, a movement which adopted his name but which really became active only a quarter of a century after his death and had relatively slight connections with Herbart's own theory and practice. Yet Herbart's pedagogical theory and his philosophic doctrines in general are not wholly irrelevant or unimportant to students of education if only because they constitute the baseline against which the developments (and aberrations) of the Herbartians must be plotted.

Near the drive that leads-to the top of Monticello a simple monument marks the grave of the third President of the United States. The inscription names the three services for which Thomas Jefferson wished to be remembered: author of the Virginia Statute of Religious Liberty and of the Declaration of American Independence, and father of the University of Virginia. The first two cleared the way to new heights of spiritual and political freedom. The other envisioned a trained and dedicated leadership for an intelligent citizenry.

This writer discovered recently that a 1624 edition of Isaac Habrecht's Janua Linguarum Quadrilinguis was bought by the University of Pennsylvania from the collection of Professor Paul Monroe of Columbia University in 1928. Unfortunately, the volume was catalogued under the wrong author, John Amos Comenius, for forty years.

Fifteen years ago the songwriter John LaTouche turned the Odyssey on its head when he wrote the musical The Golden Apple. Instead of sending his returning veterans on an unfortunate tour of a primitive inland sea, he dropped them into a modern city, to experience the varieties of novelty and disillusionment. To the corrupting politician character who plotted these experiences, he gave the line, “The city itself will be our strategem.”