I want to tell a story about American higher education. Like many historical accounts, this story has a contrapuntal quality. As we know, historians frequently find themselves trying to weave discordant themes into complex patterns in the hope of making harmony. The reason for this is that simple themes are hard to find in the account of any complex social institution, especially one like education, which is composed of a motley accumulation of historical residues and social functions. We often come across one point about education that makes sense and then find a counterpoint that also makes sense. If we cannot eliminate one in favor of the other, then we try to put them together in a way that does not violate the rules of harmony and historical logic. In the effort to do so we, therefore, find ourselves in the business of writing fugues.

A considerable body of scholarship has examined the history of compulsory attendance in the United States in an effort to explain why compulsory attendance laws were enacted, what effects they had on school attendance rates, and what made enforcement of these laws effective eventually. Recent research has revealed that some long-standing assumptions and conclusions about compulsory attendance warrant reconsideration. For example, the assumptions that educators promoted compulsory attendance and that compulsory attendance laws were enacted when state legislators responded to educators' demands disregard the historical reality that educators and state teachers' associations generally did not support compulsory attendance and that the biggest proponent of compulsory attendance legislation was a faction of the Republican Party. Similarly, the conventional periodization of compulsory attendance laws into two phases—“symbolic” and “bureaucratic”—obscures several facts. The conventional periodization holds that before the 1890s compulsory attendance laws were merely symbolic because the laws enacted were “unenforced and probably unenforceable.” During the bureaucratic phase, between the 1890s and 1920s, new compulsory attendance laws —“strong laws” with teeth—were passed, which finally made compulsory attendance effective. This periodization obscures the facts that (1) compulsory attendance did not develop in any linear or progressive fashion as much as in a “two steps forward, one step back” manner; (2) the state had limited power to enforce even “enforceable” compulsory attendance laws in the early twentieth century when most funding was local not state funding; and (3) compulsory attendance laws were not tremendously effective, accounting for no more than 5 percent of the increase in school attendance in the first half of the twentieth century.

Refuse to allow your children to be taught by radical teachers. In some places that may mean teaching them at home. Well, then, teach them at home! No matter if it is the fashionable thing in your town to send girls to one of the colleges dominated by socialists—refuse to send your daughter—better for her to be without an A.B. than to be a disloyal citizen.

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times… . Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities (1859)

Don T . Martin introduced me to the History of Education Quarterly (HEQ) in my first history of education graduate course at the University of Pittsburgh (Pitt) in 1972. HEQ seemed to be revered there. I soon found out why. This scholarly journal had originated at Pitt under the editorship of Ryland W. Crary. Ry (as we called him) became another of my mentors at Pitt. In his trademark urbane and sophisticated style, he taught me much about scholarly writing and social grace. A signed and treasured copy of the first issue of the Quarterly still resides on a bookshelf in my study.

We believed we had overwhelming evidence that to know a child better is to love it more.

At the Catholic Educational Association's (CEA) annual meeting in 1911, Reverend John E Green, president of St. Rita College Prep, an academy for boys on the southwest side of Chicago administered by the Augustinian Fathers, argued against Catholic schools' seeking accreditation from non-Catholic institutions. He called the practice “a heterodoxical spectacle” and “a stultification of our claim of the necessity of Catholic education.” Reverend Green opposed accreditation by both state agencies and professional associations, but just five years later requested assistance from the speaker of the Illinois House of Representatives, David E. Shanahan, to pursue state recognition for St. Rita. Speaker Shanahan called on the Illinois Superintendent of Public Instruction and asked him to respond to Reverend Green's request to dispatch the Illinois High School Supervisor to St Rita. What motivated a staunch opponent of recognition and accreditation like Green to go to such lengths to procure it? While accreditation by non-Catholic institutions did not negate the need for Catholic education, as Reverend Green feared, how did it contribute to the assimilation of Catholic schools and hence Chicago Catholics in the early twentieth century?

In the late 1820s, African Americans’ access to primary and religious instruction expanded significantly throughout the urban Northeast, yet barriers to their higher education remained firm. Segregated in public “African” schools, blacks were also barred from most private academies. Collegiate education similarly remained out of reach. In response, an alliance of black and white abolitionists launched a campaign to build a separate “African” college in 1831. Two ministers, one black, Peter Williams from New York, the other white, Simeon Jocelyn from New Haven, led the endeavor. After much consideration, they selected New Haven, Connecticut to house the new institution, believing that in “no place in the Union” is the “situation [of blacks] more comfortable, or the prejudices of a community weaker against them.” On September 5, 1831, Williams and Jocelyn announced their intentions. Their timing could not have been worse.

In a 1987 volume titled Class and Culture in the South Pacific, Samoan historian Malama Meleisea describes orthodox Marxism, modernization theory, and unilineal evolutionary thought as united in their “Eurocentric frame of reference,” their “notion of unilineal progress,… assumption that pre-capitalist social institutions are obsolete and that class formation is historically inevitable.” While Meleisea's pointed polemic against metanarratives that privilege a universality of Western laws of historical development and progress is partly informed by the undelivered promises of modernization theory, his critique is more than the mere stirrings of an incipient postmodernist discourse. It also derives from a practical engagement with socio-political developments in the South Pacific region that puts in relief the ways in which grand paradigms can mold and distort contemporary Pacific Island institutions into Western images. Here, he speaks to the tendency to explain the endurance of chieftaincies in modern Pacific states as homologous with, a local variant, or the actual equivalent of, a new type of “class relations.” In a more recent edited volume that focuses on chiefs in the contemporary Pacific, White and Lindstrom similarly note a popular regard for chiefs as “antique survivals from pre-state political formations” that ultimately fails to address contemporary chiefly authority on its own terms. As White and Lindstrom note further, based on the projections of development proposed in Weber-inspired modernization theory, chiefs should have become obsolete in the modern nation-state: “The forces of modernity were meant to usher him (or sometimes her) from the global stage, replacing tribal or feudal styles of leadership wkh thg universalistic, rational forms of the natioh-state and its attendant bureaucracies.”

Before sunrise one spring morning in 1815, twenty-four-year-old Susan Davis Nye left her family's farm in Amenia, New York. “After a most affecting parting from my beloved brothers, sisters and friends, I kissed my little sleeping babes and before the sun shone upon my dear native hills, bade them farewell, perhaps forever!” Thus begins the first entry in her journal dated April 22nd, the day she undertook the initial leg of a long voyage south to teach in North Carolina.

May the work of the L.T.A. go on ever upward and onward-gaining ground year by year; so that in future it will have its voice in the community, not low & sweet-but clear and resonant showing power and strength; may it gain that strength by increased membership, held together by strong bonds of love.
Let us then be up and doing,
With a heart for any fate;
Still achieving, still pursuing
Learn to labor and to wait.1

Miss Ophelia S. Newell believed that teachers occupied a public office of unappreciated responsibility. As the secretary of the Lady Teachers' Association (LTA) in Boston, she penned these hopeful remarks as a coda to her 1875 annual report, borrowing the last stanza of a popular Henry Wadsworth Longfellow poem. For Newell and her fellow teachers, “learn to labor and to wait” underscored their steadfast commitment to the schools. They founded the association attempting to bring women teachers “nearer together in sympathy and friendship and also for a mutual benefit in debate and parliamentary rules.” Frustrated with being “accused of a lack of enthusiasm in our profession,” they hoped such criticism could “be remedied by an organization of this kind.” Honing their debating skills represented one of the women's objectives, but they aspired to do more than polish their chances for professional advancement.

History, civics, and social studies courses in Canadian schools have always represented some official understanding of Canadian citizenship, even Canadian identity. They have prepared children for citizenship and the exercise of their adult duties in the community. As historian Ken Osborne argues, citizenship remains a “flexibly protean” term, changing over time according to setting, and always resisted or undermined by those who disagree with the official understanding imposed upon them. While it may be difficult to assess the impact of the school's messages on students, we can identify the official ideas about English-Canadian citizenship and identity transmitted by schools.

A host of scholars have illuminated the ways in which schools and other institutions have created and then sustained a vast gender gap in the scientific professions. Many of these studies have focused on overt discrimination: deliberate efforts by men to prevent the entry of women into scientific pursuits. Others have identified subtle and culturally mediated processes that have often led girls away from scientific courses and careers. This article examines rhetorically lofty, but qualified, efforts to encourage women's interest in science, and it demonstrates how even these attempts may have contributed to the gender gap in the scientific professions. Specifically, it focuses on the portrayal of women scientists in a high school science magazine, Science World, and analyzes its ambiguous messages to high school girls about the possibility of careers in science. This essay employs ideas about curricular self-selection and the formulation of career aspirations in interpreting the depiction of female scientists in issues from the time of the magazine's founding in 1957 to 1963, the year Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique and the symbolic dawn of the liberal feminist movement. During these years, the United States government funded numerous educational initiatives in response to the Soviet Union's launching of Sputnik to attract more students to the scientific professions. In addition, professional scientists revised high school curricula in physics and biology to foster public rationality, critical thinking, and greater appreciation of scientific inquiry. The late postwar era also marked the beginning of greater female participation in the sciences.

Case method teaching was first introduced into American higher education in 1870 by Christopher C. Langdell (1826-1906) of Harvard Law School (HLS), where it became closely associated with—and emblematic of—a set of academic meritocratic reforms. Though regnant today, “the ultimate triumph of [Langdell's] system was not apparent” for many years. The vast majority of students, alumni, and law professors initially derided it as an “abomination,” and for two decades case method and the associated reforms were largely confined to Harvard. During the subsequent twenty-five years between 1890 and 1915, a national controversy ensued as to whether case method teaching—and the concomitant meritocratic reforms—would predominate in legal education and, ultimately, professional education in the United States.

Many educational historians no doubt have experienced the inevitable cocktail party question: “so what is your area of specialization?” Whether uttered over the clink of ice or in some other social setting, the answer is rarely simple. Real historians, after all, are supposed to work in history departments, and to focus on periods and places rather than a specific type of institution. For many people, it seems hard to comprehend the idea of history taught in schools of education, or just how such a field might be considered interesting or important.

Demography, distance, and die expansion of settlements created problems for the State Department of Education in Western Australia and other Australian states in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Educational administration in Canada and parts of the United States faced similar issues with regard to the provision of schools. A common response was the establishment of one-teacher rural schools, frequently run by young, and sometimes unclassified, female teachers. In the United States locally elected school boards were the primary source of regulation, but in late nineteenth-century Western Australia such local boards had been stripped of their powers and were answerable to the newly established, highly centralized Education Department. Formal regulated teachers. The masculinized system of the Department and its inspectorate. All the same, however, the local community still exerted informal controls over the lives of teachers working and living in small settlements.