An integral factor in the history of American higher education is the evolution of the textbook as an instructional device. This often ignored item can, as a matter of fact, offer insight into seemingly disparate threads of the historical process, such as the role and function of academic personnel, pedagogical techniques, and the curriculum. None of these implications will be examined here; rather, it is the purpose of this article to sketch the evolution of the text as a text.

Frederick Jackson Turner tends to stress, on the part of the frontiersman, “a return to primitive conditions,” a “plowing with a sharp stick.” While the regression to a form of semi-barbarism was certainly typical of frontiersmen in some areas, particularly in the eighteenth century, there is evidence to suggest that settlers in the Middle West during the early nineteenth century can by no means be described in toto as primitive. Indeed, it may be noted that from the viewpoint of the provision of educational facilities the frontiersman of the early nineteenth century was often a good deal more active than were his Eastern and Southern brothers. Early attempts to provide public education in the Midwestern states are remarkable for their foresight and enthusiasm. This argument may be examined by means of a description of the development of secondary education in the state of Illinois.

In his The Education of American Teachers, Dr. James B. Conant rejects the idea that education is an academic discipline. The argument he develops is a logically simple one that follows a rather familiar pattern. Education, like medicine, is both a practical art where scientifically derived generalizations may helpfully guide action, and a deductive-theoretical endeavor where the “wide premises of culture,” largely unexamined, condition decision-making. And in education, since these two “modes of thought”—the practical and the theoretical—are inseparable, it is impossible to designate so “vast a field of human activity directed toward practical ends” as a separate science or a discipline. For knowledge and insight into the nature of education and medicine, the teacher and the physician cannot turn to the “educationist” or the “medicinist,” but must look to those established independent sciences and disciplines that touch upon these areas of human service. The doctor has such sciences as biology and chemistry to which to turn for truth about the healing arts; the teacher has the educational sciences which are the academic disciplines—political science, anthropology, psychology, history, philosophy, and sociology—from which to get understanding about the teaching arts. In this way does Conant the logician destroy the theoretical underpinnings of the idea of a separate discipline of education and, in the process, reassert the legitimacy of the claims of the scholarly sciences and disciplines over this now fractured and disposesssed academic orphan.

In January, 1787, readers of the American Museum found in the magazine an article entitled “Address to the People of the United States,” written by Dr. Benjamin Rush, the prominent Philadelphia physician, philanthropist, and patriot. The first statement which met their eyes was: “There is nothing more common than to confound the terms of American Revolution with those of the late American war. The American war is over, but this is far from being the case with the American Revolution.”