Although substantial opposition to the board of education illustrates the kind of political, economic, regional, and cultural conflicts that accompanied the creation of a state school system in nineteenth-century Massachusetts, the victory of the board's supporters was symbolic of the major trends in education already emerging by 1840. The episode was also prophetic of the direction public education took in the succeeding decades. In this book we have attempted to present and analyze the most important of those trends. We have emphasized quantitative information that reflects mass behavior, rather than the ideas and viewpoints of educational reformers and other socially prominent people, although we have tried to relate the two types of evidence when it seemed appropriate. The resulting evidence does not support a picture of an evolving, benevolent, democratic school system opposed only by religious dissidents, bumpkins, and aristocrats, a picture that predominated in early times. On the other hand, we disagree at several points with some recent historians who have focused – too narrowly, we believe – on human exploitation in our economic system as the chief generator of public school development. Educational participation as well as reform attitudes were indeed often related to the economic status of an individual, a town, or a region, but education itself is so complex that it cannot be treated as a single variable and then pegged to a single historical development, out of which all other concerns flowed.