The England of 1880–1902 saw the final flowering of Imperialism and the beginnings of its collapse in the South African War of 1899. It was a period of tremendous optimism, when society as a whole appeared prosperous and ebullient, but in which social injustice and rank poverty were widespread. The Education Act of 1870, the democratization of government made possible by the enlargement of the franchise, the coming of the popular press, and the reorganization of local government were the pointers to a new conception of the Great Society (as one of Graham Wallas's books was entitled). The searching analysis of social organization made in the 1840's by Marx and Engels, combined with the liberal ideals inherited from the French Revolution and the American War of Independence, took a more kindly and acceptable form in the intense yet essentially gentle collectivist doctrines of post-Utilitarianism, Fabian Socialism, and organized Labor—movements in which John Stuart Mill, Sidney Webb, H. G. Wells, Graham Wallas, and Keir Hardie were prominent. A. V. Dicey, in his great book on the origins of the British welfare state, underlines the fact that essential reforms were made possible by the climate of opinion, especially after 1870: education was able to ride high on the tide of these reforms.

One of the most outstanding classical scholars in the twelfth century was John of Salisbury, who, steeped in the literature of the Latin writers, seems to echo Cicero when he remarks that to be properly literate one must be familiar with mathematics and history as well as with the poets and the orators. The twelfth century as a whole reflected a deep interest in history and historical writing, to such an extent that Haskins calls it one of the greatest periods of medieval historiography. But history as it was understood by men like John of Salisbury, Hugo of St. Victor, and other learned clerics of the age was the history of St. Augustine, not the “narration of past events” of the Greek and Roman historians. The classical historians had regarded history as a branch of the art of rhetoric, written to please public taste, or to relate anecdotes, or to set examples, or to display the literary powers of the authors. Their theory of world cycles, in which the order of the universe was pessimistically regarded as a degeneration from the Golden Age of the past to the Iron Age of the present, and in which the present reproduced the past and the future the present, was supplanted by a new philosophy of history as formulated by St. Augustine. St. Augustine asserted that the whole record of the world turned upon the divine concern for man, which had eventuated in the life of Christ. Prior to this miracle of Incarnation, all mankind had been doomed; after it, all of the elect were to be saved.

Frank Klassen's paper is not a dramatically novel interpretation but, nonetheless, a very substantial and well-documented treatment of eighteenth century American educational thought and practice. Basically, of course, Klassen is reasserting and supporting the claim that American education in the eighteenth century was dominated by Renaissance and Reformation views—which is to say, in Klassen's words, by the classics and by religion. Religious humanism in American education, Klassen reminds us, persisted throughout the eighteenth century despite the fact of some rather remarkable and far-reaching changes in the contemporaneous culture. Klassen's essential claim, then, is that until toward the end of the eighteenth century, the social and scientific innovations of the Enlightenment influenced American education only peripherally and then in a somewhat limited way at the level of higher education.

In a recent publication of Columbia Teachers College's Institute of Higher Education, Earl J. McGrath charges that graduate education “has had a direct and profound, and on balance a harmful, effect on liberal education and the institutions society believes it has established to provide such education.” That the emerging graduate schools did exert a direct and profound effect on the American undergraduate college of the late nineteenth century, nobody will deny. That the effect has been “on balance” harmful, I believe, is open to questions.

Historically speaking, the idea of university autonomy has existed since the Fourth Century A.D. when St. Augustine taught in Carthage. Throughout this long span of time, encompassing some 1500 years, the most consistent characteristic of autonomy has been its mutability. The basic reason for this propensity to change has been the constant onslaught of redefinitions which have been superimposed upon it by a continuous flow of political and social innovation. In his confessions, Augustine noted that students were allowed to rush insolently about at random into a classroom of a teacher with whom they were not enrolled. He commented further on the foul, unrestrained license among students and then stated, “They break in boldly and, looking almost like madmen, they disrupt whatever order a teacher has established for his students' benefit. Augustine condemned them the more because they thought they acted with impunity, and he stated that their recklessness and injurious acts would have been punished by law, except that they had custom as their patron. Augustine felt that the students hurt themselves far greater than they did others by this form of irresponsibility; however, his greatest complaint was that as a teacher he was forced to suffer manners he did not wish for himself when he was a student. Primarily as a result of this abuse, Augustine decided to take a teaching position in Rome where he “had heard that young men studied in a more peaceful way and were kept quiet by the restraints of a better order and discipline.” This comment was footnoted to the effect that in Rome there were laws governing students; however, he failed to elaborate as to their exact nature.

Twenty years of diligent labor on the part of New Englanders in Ohio, the Western Literary Institute, and other groups resulted in the creation by the legislature, in March 1837, of the office of State Superintendent of Common Schools. The resolution of the General Assembly providing for the position stressed the two chief duties of this new official: (1) collecting information on the schools of the state; and (2) seeing that the school laws were being properly observed.

The past few years have been particularly troublesome for the American people, not the least of the worries being a concern with the Russian challenge to the American way of life. The incredible successes of the Russians in orbiting satellites and exploding nuclear weapons has been both a disturbing and a sobering thought to the United States, long secure in its isolation and power, and in the belief that it was the best society on earth. More than a decade ago an enduring Pax Americana based upon the unilateral possession of the atomic bomb disappeared; with the launching of various Sputniki since 1958 morale has dropped even lower.

The age which was not only that of Dr. Johnson but also that of Pope, Addison, Gay, Goldsmith, Fielding, Lord Chesterfield, Gibbon, Horace Walpole, Gainsborough, and Garrick is surely to be reckoned among the brilliant periods of English history. And, as William Sydney notes, these great figures lived, moved, and had their being against a strange, quaint, frivolous, and corrupt English background in which beaux strutted about Pall Mall displaying all their finery such as embroidered velvet coats, cocked hats, lace cravats, and ten guinea clouded canes; when belles, “accompanied by black boys and curly lap-dogs,” promenaded in St. James's Park, attracting attention by beauty patches stuck on their faces, by pyramidical headdresses, by hooped petticoats, and by oversized decorated fans; when people of quality, so-called, repaired to their pleasure haunts in sedan chairs and gilded chariots; when travelers quailed at “the thought and prospect of traveling after nightfall because of the armed and mounted desperadoes on the highways.”