For the self-preservation of the nation, Eliphalet Pearson warned in 1815, “an immediate and universal effort must be made to provide religious instruction.” Pearson, a former professor at Harvard College and president of the board of trustees of Phillips Academy and Andover Seminary, was preaching at the organizational meeting of the American Society for the Education of Pious Youth for the Gospel Ministry. To Pearson, America seemed to be plagued by a “common degeneracy in religion and morals” with hundreds of thousands bereft of religious instruction. Religion and education were to be the means of salvation for both the individual and the nation. Pearson exhorted, “Schools are to be multiplied, Bibles distributed; and, above all, thousands of pious young men must be educated for the ministry; and this speedily.” Thus, the American Education Society (AES) was formed in Boston as part of a Protestant crusade to save the nation.

The earliest academic quality ranking ever discussed by those few scholars who have written comprehensive reviews of such rankings was a 1925 rating of graduate departments in 20 disciplines at American Ph.D.-granting universities. It was published by Raymond M. Hughes in 1925. In actuality, academic quality rankings existed before then; as early as 1911, for example, the United States Bureau of Education produced one that stratified hundreds of American colleges and universities into five levels, according to their presumed quality. However, because a storm of protest led to this work's being suppressed before it was officially published, very little is known about it.

Scholars and students thrive on “explanations,” those taut progressions from cause to effect which convince us how something became history. But as luck would have it, historical explanations tend to come in different dimensions. Some are excruciatingly comprehensive. Others stress either cause or effect—but rarely both. The latter sort typifies the explanation most commonly offered for the emergence of education benefits (Title II) as a major focus in the Veterans Assistance Act of 1944.

Under the influence of liberal mentors such as his former tutor the Swiss republican F.C. La Harpe, Tsar Alexander I of Russia set out to follow his grandmother Catherine II as an “enlightener” through developing her program of national education. He created a ministry of public education and promulgated laws to provide schools for all classes of the population from the level of the primary parish school to supply the most elementary educational needs of all children, to the more senior elementary district school in each county, to the gymnasium (the advanced provincial secondary school) and finally to the university. The successes and failures of his reform provide excellent measures of the aspirations, as well as the practices, of imperial Russia. Whatever differences may exist among historians on aspects of educational policy, there has been nearly unanimous agreement that while gains were made on the secondary and university levels, the results were dismal on the elementary levels. The village or parish schools especially were failures because the government did not fund them and local initiative was lacking. Adam B. Ulam has asserted that “public education was as yet on so small a scale that it could contribute little, whether good or bad, to national life.”

An important part of historians' view of the process of social change is the role assigned to the spread of literacy and education. The contrast between tranditional societies, one of whose characteristics is limited literacy and educational opportunities, and modern society with high levels of literacy and widespread education, has shaped both social history and development policy. For some, the acquisition of literacy exposes people to new ideas, makes them more rational, and, ultimately, changes their behavior. People “become modern” at least partially through education and learning to read and write. In this vein Francois Furet and Jacques Ozouf have emphasized the introspection and access to written culture that came with literacy in France, and Michel Vovelle has spoken of a possible “cultural revolution” accompanying spreading literacy in eighteenth-century Provence. Thus, the democratization of literacy meant far more than just more people knowing how to read and write; it made people more logical and philosophical.

Most works on Russian educational policy contain an underlying assumption: namely, that the size and shape of educational systems are largely determined by what sociologists of education call “corporate actors” organized groups united by shared commitment to specific goals such as egalitarian reform, economic growth, national integration or social controlor by the interplay of such groups; According to this interpretation, the major impetus for educational change comes from those directly responsible for education policy-making; in Russia, this included the central government and the educated Russian elite, acting through the zernstvos, municipal dumas, and after 1906, the national Duma. Influenced by trends in social history, however, some historians are beginning to argue that “primary actors,” or the population as a whole, playa major role in determining the scale and even structure of educational systems. In other words, these historians place exphasis upon social demand, rather than supply, as the major factor in educational growth.