A growing body of literature is calling for the historical study of educational experiences outside of the realm of the established school system. Lawrence Cremin has recommended that educational historians move beyond the traditional analysis of schools and colleges. In Traditions of American Education, he broadly defines education “as the deliberate, systematic, and sustained effort to transmit, evoke, or acquire knowledge, values, skills, or sensibilities, as well as any outcomes of that effort.“ Herbert Gutman similarly urges that educational historians transcend the exclusive study of institutional history by exploring such untouched areas as the “selfactivity” of workers and its relationship to class development and class formation. Rolland Paulston delineates a theoretical framework to ascertain the social and economic conditions, ideological bases, programmatic characteristics, and contributions of “nonformal education” in social movements. He posits that nonformal education functions as structured, systematic, nonschool education that relies upon training activities of relatively short duration and involves a fairly distinct target population. “It is, in sum, education that does not advance to a higher level of the hierarchical formal school system.”

The independence of Spanish America presented new problems to the republics created out of the wreckage of Spain's American Empire. Economic restructuring, political organization, relations with neighbors and Europe, and the rise of new political groups all occupied the attention of young governments. One of the many social questions that had to be faced was that of education. Was it to be elitist and traditional as in the colonial era? Would the Church still be the primary agency for education? And how should formal learning be utilized for the good of the new societies?

Described by one unsympathetic observer in Buffalo as “Schools of Nonsense” and by one ardent participant in Milwaukee as “rebel factories,” the movement to establish Socialist Sunday schools (S.S.S.) in the United States during the early twentieth century is perhaps one of the best kept secrets of American socialist and educational historiography. This essay attempts to rectify that situation by analyzing an educational movement that falls outside of the traditional and progressive educational camps of the early 1900s. During these years numerous working-class radicals provided their children with a formal, weekend education that lacked the strong capitalistic biases dominant in the public schools.

In 1916, the Bureau of Education published The Social Studies in Secondary Education, the final report of the Committee on Social Studies of the Commission on the Reorganization of Secondary Education. The Commission on the Reorganization of Secondary Education was composed of sixteen committees, each addressing one aspect of the curriculum or administration of public education. Historians agree that The Social Studies in Secondary Education along with The Teaching of Community Civics, an earlier report of the Committee on the Social Studies, were among the most influential documents produced by the Commission. Many of the recommendations advanced in both reports, particularly those calling for the development of courses in Community Civics and Problems of American Democracy, were not only widely discussed by contemporaries, but also set the scope and sequence of social studies education which remained virtually unchanged until the early 1970s.

The unmarried female schoolteacher may qualify as the most written about, yet least understood, figure in the history of modern education. She emerged in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century as a literary stereotype defined by the likes of Miss Priscilla Batte, that “shapeless yet majestic” matron of Dinwiddie Academy in Ellen Glasgow's Virginia, the Cabot sisters in Joseph Lincoln's Mary-Gusta, or the ever vigilant Miss Dorothy Gibbs, head of the Female Institute in Thomas Aldrich's Story of a Bad Boy. Stiff, humorless, and punctillious to the end, these grim products of the literary imagination were construed to typify an entire profession that seemed peculiarly vulnerable to caricature. Until World War I, at least, teaching and “spinsterhood” were synonymous in the public mind. And the self-denigration that accompanied acceptance of the “old maid” stereotype presumably blunted the creative urge to write. As several American historians have noted, there is a remarkable paucity of memoirs and autobiographies, through which the subject could speak for herself; thus, we know little about the proverbial lady who stood in front of the chalkboard.

During the past decade college student enrollment has encompassed increasing numbers of students older than the traditional age range of seventeen to twenty-three. A historical review of college student age suggests that this is not a new precedent and that students in the colonial colleges spanned a wide age range, from early adolescence to adults over thirty. This age span persisted in various forms at many institutions but finally compressed to the traditional age pattern for the most part, with the formation and growth of American high schools beginning in 1880. The following discussion of student age follows a rough chronological and geographic pattern beginning with New England colonial colleges and ending in the latter 19th century at midwestern state universities.