Ironically perhaps, literary evidence has often proved a misleading or inadequate basis for the study of popular literacy in the past. The reasons for this observation include the approaches and assumptions of researchers, the types of literary sources examined, biases of both students and their data, researchers' misplaced emphases and expectations, inadequate notions of the meaning of “literacy” as well as that of the “popular” among reading publics, and the literary materials available for perusal.

A highly regarded work in recent educational history, Raymond E. Callahan's Education and the Cult of Efficiency (1962), persuasively described early twentieth-century educators' capitulation to principles of business management. However, my research into nineteenth-century teacher-training literature has indicated that, long before 1900, schoolmen had assumed a business rather than a scholarly identity. Subsequent investigation into the origin and development of the public school superintendency amplified my earlier findings.

During the twenty-five years, 1776–1800, sixteen colleges opened in the United States that still operate today. They almost tripled the total number of the nation's colleges. The increase demonstrated the augmenting American interest in higher education and also the restless, expansive urge of the American people, for with the exceptions of the College of Charleston and St. John's College in the Chesapeake port of Annapolis, these institutions arose on the edge of settlement: in upstate New York, the district of Maine, northeastern Georgia, western Massachusetts, and even in the Territory South of the Ohio, two years before it became the state of Tennessee. Indeed, their location on the frontier was one of the primary determinants of these colleges' character, for it led these colleges to develop functions, commitments, and curricular and atmospheric traits that differed somewhat from those of the established, seaboard colleges.

Since 1929 Mexican American organizations, headed by middle class leaders, have played a significant and increasing role in challenging discriminatory school policies and practices. Led and inspired by the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) and the G. I. Forum, the challenge to education has been essentially a liberal one. As most liberals, Mexican Americans have perceived discrimination, segregation, inferior schools, and culturally biased curriculum and instructional practices as problems incidental to education, not as specific manifestations of systematic structural inequality. As a result, they have not sought the improvement of the existing educational structure by eliminating those barriers which limit Mexican American access to and participation in that system. Hence, the challenge to education has been limited to abolishing segregated schools and student assignment and classification policies which serve to increase segregation. The following essay is a history of this campaign to eliminate the segregation of Mexican American children in the Texas public schools. Emphasis will be placed on the strategies and tactics utilized by LULAC and the G. I. Forum to desegregate the public schools. The period to be covered will be between 1929 and 1957. The year 1929 marks the period during which the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), the first statewide civic organization of Americans of Mexican descent, was organized in Texas. In the latter year the last of a series of desegregation cases filed by the Mexican American community was won. For the next ten years (between 1957 and 1967) because of political, financial, and organizational difficulties, no further legal challenges to educational segregation were made by the Mexican American community. The campaign to desegregate the public schools by Mexican American organizations from 1929 to 1957 has not received the scholarly attention it deserves. This essay will hopefully contribute to this gap in the history of American minority groups by describing and tracing the nature of this campaign against separate and unequal schools for Mexican Americans in Texas.

It can quite safely be asserted that no broad analytic work exists which deals with the schooling of the rich variety of social and ethnic groups in the varied history of South Africa. At best, the very limited number of publications are either mainly concerned with describing White education in its administrative and organisational dimensions or, at worst, frighteningly quaint in their prejudicial accounts. The best of the former would be E. G. Malherbe's earlier work, Education in South Africa 1652–1927 and the worst of the latter genre would be E. G. Pells', Three Hundred Years of Education in South Africa.