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.

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.

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.

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.

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.”

Anyone reading the foregoing papers might easily conclude that they represent the result of careful planning and coordination by the organizers of the symposium. That is not the case. It was with surprise and delight that we discovered on the morning of the symposium the extent to which common problems and themes pervaded the five papers. This spontaneous appearance of shared concerns provokes two observations in particular: first, it once again indicates the extent to which each generation, in Beard's phrase, writes history anew according to the questions uppermost in its mind. Second, it suggests some of the ways in which the “new” history of education will differ, and improve upon, the “old” through an expansion of the concept of education beyond schooling to the very environment itself and through a clinical dissection of reform motives, processes, and results.

The American Herbartian movement was, of course, more than merely the activities of the people connected with it. It was a body of ideas and practices. Obviously the Herbartians would not have borrowed and promulgated the doctrine with such success as they achieved had not these ideas appeared useful to the educators of the time. Necessarily the success of the movement was in large part a function of the virtue of the ideas as well as the skill and devotion with which they were expounded.