Toward the end of the nineteenth century American sexual attitudes were beginning to undergo a fundamental alteration, for the dominant sexual ideology of sex as restraint was being challenged increasingly by the hitherto radical doctrine of sex as pleasure. The implications of this change in ideology extended far beyond the simple gratification of a temporal impulse to the very formation of character and the organization of society, for, as Freud wrote, the manner in which an individual responds to sexuality is often “a prototype for the whole of his other modes of reaction to life.” In turn, the nature of society is significantly influenced according to whether society chooses to resolve the conflict between Eros and Ananke by the repression, renunciation, or acceptance of sexuality.

In late colonial America schooling was plentiful but unorganized; schools were increasing in importance but still supplementary to the family, the church, and apprenticeship. Throughout the colonies schools provided training in rudiments for the many, classical training for the few, and some supplementary schooling in technical subjects for a growing number of town dwellers. Common schooling was not “neglected,” as historians of the public school system once asserted; rather, the legacy of the colonial period was a mode of schooling quite different in structure and operation from that to which we have been accustomed since the mid-nineteenth century. In coastal towns like New York, parents bought schooling as a commodity in an open market. Schoolmasters competing for students offered subjects ranging from the alphabet to astronomy, for children of all ages, at all times of the day. Schooling arrangements were haphazard and temporary; people in all ranks of society gained their education in a patchwork, rather than a pattern, of teachers and experiences.

In the last few years Canadians have begun to rediscover their educational past. For the most part the movement to revitalize the history of Canadian education has been the work of younger scholars, and the results of their thought, energy, and research are just now reaching the point of visibility. The purpose of this collection is to make some of that work public.

“Great will be our good fortune,” Robert Yerkes, head of the U. S. Army psychology team, wrote, “if the lesson in human engineering which the war has taught is carried over directly and effectively into our civil institutions and activities.” For psychology and the schools the great experiment of World War I was the construction and standardization of the Alpha and Beta group intelligence test as a technique for differentiating men within disciplined and highly stratified social organizations. The dream shared by psychologists, social reformers, and educators of the time was the creation of an efficiently organized society by the proper allocation of manpower resources. The individual I.Q. test was impractical to use with large numbers of the American population to determine proper occupational niches. Mass testing with a group I.Q. test, it was believed, made human engineering feasible. Efficiency in the human group, claimed army test developer, H. H. Goddard, in a 1920 lecture, “is not so much a question of the absolute numbers of persons of high and low intelligence as it is whether each grade of intelligence is assigned a part, in the whole organization, that is within its capacity.” Goddard went on to suggest that man could learn from the busy bee “the perfect organization of the hive.” “Perhaps,” Goddard stated, “it would be wiser for us to emulate the bee's social organization more and his supposed industry less.”

The ragged school movement in England spanned the period from 1840 to 1870, but the number of years during which the schools were being founded and expanded is deceptively brief in terms of their contribution to the care of the neglected juvenile. Of the three types of institutions conceived for the children of the destitute and delinquent classes — reformatory, industrial, and ragged schools — only the last proved to be a temporary phenomenon and failed to secure permanent government recognition. Their aim was nothing less than the civilization and conversion of an entire segment of the urban poor, a task too large for the resources of private charity. The schools were intended for a class of juveniles as yet unreached by any other institution, an urban group brought into existence by the rapid and unplanned growth of England's larger cities. They were the children of costermongers, pig-feeders, rag dealers, part-time dock workers, in fact of all those whose work was menial, irregular, and ill-paid. Also included in this category were the offspring of those who laid claim to no job whatsoever, the lowest mendicants and tramps, and persons who get their living by theft, who altogether neglect their children; the children of hawkers, pigeon-dealers, dog-fanciers, and other men of that class. A great proportion of the children are those of worthless and drunken parents, and many others are the children of parents, who, from their poverty, are too poor to pay even a penny a week for schooling.

It is in the social centers of Rochester that I should look for an answer to the question, whether in a great democratic community you were realizing the purposes of society.

The Victorian social conscience was troubled on many accounts, and perhaps no more so than by the plight of delinquent youngsters. Few causes cut so deeply into the delicate weave of moralism and economy out of which much nineteenth-century social policy was fashioned.

Historians have recently begun to examine the contribution of education to American economic development during the antebellum period. To a large degree the study of education and its effects on economic productivity during this period is a reflection of similar efforts by economists analyzing education in the 1960s. Unfortunately, the few historical studies of the role of education in American economic and demographic development have suffered from a lack of educational data and the resulting generalizations have been based on very fragmentary evidence. Particularly lacking is any series of educational data over time that might be compared with a series of economic or demographic variables.

The condition of the family was a subject that much preoccupied school promoters in Upper Canada. Like educators in other times and places they blamed the weaknesses of the family for many social ills; at the same time they put forth an idealized portrait of domestic relations as a major hope for social progress. Besides the usual vague complaints and exaggerated hopes, they also had some very specific anxieties about the family, among them two that were clearly associated with the spread of formal schooling and that occurred in many parts of the United States as well as in Canada. The first was the recurring suspicion that some kinds of schools, especially those controlled increasingly by the state, were gradually undermining family authority. The second, which is the subject of this essay, was intimately related to the first and concerned the education of children and adolescents away from home. How could schools and colleges replace the authority, affection, and advice normally provided by families, for these absentees from the domestic fireside?

In 1884 “A small band of zealous young scholars fresh from German seminars” organized the American Historical Association “to propagate and give new direction to ‘American history and history in America.’” In one sense, these self-conscious professionals institutionalized a fundamental element of nineteenth-century thought; they shared with many Americans a deep commitment to historicism and its two central tenets: the belief that all human life is in a process of continual growth and transformation and the related conviction that facts and events can be explained only by reference to earlier facts and events. In a century in which change and process were bywords, “the historical method” was a highly respected thought tool. “To know a thing properly,” as William Torrey Harris expressed it, “we must study it in its history.” The study of history satisfied an almost compelling psychic need of nineteenth-century Americans to reexperience time, to analyze it, to capture it conceptually, and thereby in a personal way to control it. They found great psychological comfort in tracing a modern institution or trend to its very roots. It should be no surprise, then, that a profound sense of the continuity of human experience, “an historical mindedness,” was a cherished goal in an age so characterized by discontinuity. No surprise, either, that history was the first of the social sciences to be organized on a national scale.

Students of early American culture often seek its sources in the experiences of England's religious and political dissenters. One example is the thesis that England's dissenting academies stimulated Colonial colleges to become, as John Brubacher and Willis Rudy express it, “broader and more modern in outlook.” Thomas Jefferson Wertenbaker calls the academies' influence “a matter of profound moment in the history of American education,” while Richard Hofstadter, Lawrence Cremin, Brooke Hindle, and Francis Broderick emphasize the academies' “direct and strong” impact on college curricula. Usually this influence is defined in terms of promoting the study of modern science and mathematics, although the academies also added new subjects like English composition, English literature, modern languages, and modern history, modified traditional subjects like Latin and ethics, and adopted new teaching methods like free discussion and the use of the vernacular.

BETWEEN THE 1880s and the 1920s a growing band of English Canadians created and began to test a new consensus on the situation of the child in their society. In the four major dimensions of their enterprise they worked to change the nature and improve the quality of family life, to establish new systems of child and family welfare, to transform Canadian education, and to organize child and family health care. Of these reform efforts the public health movement had the most immediate, the least ambiguous, and the most accurately measurable positive effects on the lives of Canadian children.

As conflict in American culture increases and the idea of revolution is no longer dismissed as some absurd anarchist dream but increasingly entertained by men of more moderate persuasion, more and more voices can be heard echoing a common warning. The warning is this: The new left must either temper its attacks on the military, corporate, and educational establishment in this country, or we will all suffer the wrath of a fascist nightmare. Put in these terms, the new left is made responsible for the coming American fascism. The usual analysis proceeds with the notion that the attack on the liberal center from both the right and left weakens and eventually destroys democratic institutions. The process begins with the left questioning the mythologies that sustain bourgeois society thus threatening the security of those in power and ends with a repressive fascist order. In this sense, the more the left agitates, the more the fascist right can be expected to grow. There are few political and social analysts in this country who seriously doubt the possibility that given an open confrontation the fascist would win. Virtually every observer seems to predict that a socialism of the right not the left would emerge. It is interesting that in times of severe crisis, most liberals can be relied upon to move to the right rather than to the left of the political spectrum.

In 1870 John Carling, Ontario's Commissioner of Public Works and Agriculture, repeated one of the most persistent ideas of the nineteenth century: what this country needed, he said, was some kind of agricultural education in “the science of farming.”