FOR SOME FIFTEEN YEARS we have been busily engaged in revising the history of American education. It is now time to gain some perspective on the revisionist movements as we look ahead to see what shape the historiography of education should take in the next fifteen years.

BY THE END of the nineteenth century a period of formal schooling had replaced apprenticeship to a practitioner as the primary method of professional training and certification for American lawyers and doctors. In their public pronouncements leaders of these professional groups gave essentially similar reasons for this important shift. Lawyers and doctors commonly urged the formation of professional schools because such institutions, they argued, would through the systematic instruction offered there inevitably raise the moral and intellectual tone of the entire profession. To group students together on a regular basis under the tutelage of the most prominent members of a profession seemed inherently superior to the apprenticeship arrangement which necessarily reflected the impact of a wide range of professional talent and ethics. Finally, some men also supported professional schools because they would provide institutional shelter to those professionals who wished to set the practice of the profession on a more scholarly basis.

DURING THE LATE nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, industrial education became attractive to educators and industrialists. It seemed to be the answer to a vast amalgam of problems arising from the mechanization of the factory. If the work force were better trained, efficiency would improve, fewer accidents would result, and the workers would be more satisfied with their work. Unfortunately, some of the forms industrial education took were clearly exploitative of the workers and apprentices involved. One example was the experiment in co-operative education.

A RECENT SPECIAL ISSUE of the Quarterly (1) was devoted to “Education and Social Change in English-Speaking Canada”. In his interesting and impressive contribution to this issue, Michael B. Katz suggested that many hypotheses (2) concerning the determinants of school attendance may be tested by employing data relating to “the status and structure of the family and household” contained in the manuscript census. “By starting with the census one may study the gross patterns of attendance among the children of any group, religious, ethnic, occupational, or any other into which the census material can be arranged.” (3)

DENTON AND GEORGE have attempted to test my findings about school attendance with multiple regression analysis. The comparison of results obtained through different statistical means is an interesting and instructive undertaking. It is a pity, therefore, that their paper does not permit such a comparison.

The systematic use of autobiographies as sources of inquiry and as indexes of historical change is just now beginning. The relative indifference of historians to this kind of source is understandable. The inherently subjective character of each autobiography as well as the limited experience of any one author means, of course, that generalizations should be cautiously advanced.

The voice of Gordon Lee (1916–1973) is still. It was always a quiet voice in an age of stridency. For Gordy, despite his ever youthful exuberance, retained certain old fashioned commitments to reason and—if the phrase dare now be uttered—to good manners. Somehow he continued to hold an increasingly unpopular view of liberal education. He believed human beings could and should use symbols and ideas with care, justice, logical rigor, and elegance. The study of Education, he insisted, should be liberating, not simply a technical discipline. As a teacher in many universities—Columbia, Claremont, Washington, Texas, et. al—and as chairman of a department at Claremont and Dean of Colleges in Washington and Texas, he sought so to shape the discipline. His first book, The Struggle for Federal A id (1949), was so sharply organized that one scarcely realized a trained intelligence had imposed order on a chaotic universe; his last book, Education and a Democratic Age (1965), showed the same tidiness of mind with an added touch of wisdom. Despite prematurely failing health he kept on the move, serving not only across the states but also in the United Kingdom and in Afghanistan. He moved too fast and left too soon; those who knew him will regret the yet unfinished conversations.