History is constructed reality; yet, as historians we often select material and shape our interpretations without self-analysis. We assume that because we were educated to be objective, we undertake our research, analysis, and interpretation in an objective manner. We rarely question why we have chosen a particular issue to investigate or how far our understanding of the body politic existing in our own day colors our interpretation of institutions and events in the past. Once we have established ourselves in our field, how often do we change our perspectives, or even our focus? How often do we incorporate new ideas, or new perspectives, into our interpretations of the past? Only occasionally, I believe. Sometimes, though, when we read ideas that differ radically from our own, we may begin to interpret our own research data using a different lens or a different focus. Sometimes, we may begin to search for new material in order to investigate an issue, using perhaps a telephoto lens to probe into it more deeply than we had originally intended. And sometimes, we may even change our topic of investigation, swinging our camera to capture a fresh aspect of reality.

The South has long represented a distinct and enduring subculture in American society. Its uniqueness stems in part from the overwhelming strength of evangelical Protestantism in the region, a monolithic religious presence unmatched elsewhere in the United States, save in Utah. At the turn of the twentieth century, the pervasive influence of the Methodist and Baptist denominations was even more pronounced than it is today. The intense religiosity of southern society and culture contributed significantly to the failure of southern higher education to conform to the pattern of change characteristic of other regions after the Civil War. Elsewhere, secular ideals of utility and research displaced the older educational values of piety and mental discipline and outdistanced the rival conception of liberal culture, and universities eclipsed colleges in importance. In contrast, colleges continued to dominate education in the South, and the higher learning there adhered to a different philosophy, liberal Christian education, a distinctive amalgam which remained committed to the central importance of religious and moral principles.

Thirty years ago, Merle Curti ventured that “philanthropy has been one of the major aspects of and keys to American social and cultural development.” It was an apt, challenging, and important observation that was not immediately heeded and has yet to be sufficiently pursued. With Curti's comment in mind, I should like to sketch the development of a politics that took shape in the United States in the early twentieth century, and then to explore a number of relationships between that politics and some of the early activities of one of the large, grant-making foundations established before the First World War—the Carnegie Corporation of New York. Although the argument I shall present derives from a close study of only one foundation, the history of the Carnegie Corporation crosses and even merges with the history of many other institutions, including other foundations, and is inseparable from ideas, national trends, and both national and international events that have touched American society generally. What is more, the size, the longevity, the broad scope, the effectiveness, and the concern for responsible philanthropy that have always characterized the Carnegie Corporation have made it a leader and even a model for many of its peers. To some degree at least, then, in considering relationships between Carnegie Corporation philanthropy and what I shall call the politics of knowledge, one is also considering the validity of Curti's “hypothetical” claim. One is asking, not only whether, but, more importantly, how philanthropic foundations have achieved the significance Curti attributed to them.

The national discussion about the future of American education and the teaching profession continues with the 1986 publication of two major reports: A Nation Prepared: Teachers for the Twenty-first Century and Tomorrow's Teachers: A Report of the Holmes Group. These reports, by the Carnegie Forum on Education and the Economy and by the Holmes Group, respectively, agree that the key to educational improvement is to create a career ladder for teachers which recognizes and rewards excellence, but they disagree over which group—practitioners or professors—we should look to for the advancement of professional knowledge and technique. The Carnegie Forum looks to the experience of outstanding teachers in the schools while the Holmes Group seeks to reassert the role of faculty in research universities in setting professional standards.

The essays below continue a debate that began with the publication of Michael B. Katz, The Irony of Early School Reform: Educational Innovation in Mid-Nineteenth Century Massachusetts (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1968). One celebrated part of this important work was a study of the controversy over the public high school in Beverly, Massachusetts, including a close analysis of the vote in 1860 to abolish the school. The occasion for these essays is the publication of Maris A. Vinovskis, The Origins of Public High Schools: A Reexamination of the Beverly High School Controversy (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1985). The first essay is a review of the Vinovskis study by Katz, now professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania; the second is a review by Edward Stevens, Jr., professor of education at Ohio University; the third is a response to these reviews by Vinovskis, professor of history and research scientist at the Center for Political Studies at the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan.

Across the educational world today stretches an iron curtain which the professional educationists are busily fashioning. Behind it, in slave-labor camps, are the classroom teachers, whose only hope of rescue is from without. On the hither side lies the free world of science and learning, menaced but not yet conquered. A division into two educational worlds is the great danger that faces us today. American intellectual life is threatened because the first twelve years of formal schooling in the United States are falling more and more completely under the policy-making control of a new breed of educator who has no real place in—who does not respect and who is not respected by—the world of scientists, scholars, and professional men.