In reflecting on Rousseau and authority, one should face first the perennial problem of Rousseau's own authority. Many reject the thoughts because they reprove the thinker. Rousseau celebrated his human weaknesses in a manner that ill becomes a philosopher of stature. And not only did Rousseau celebrate his weaknesses, those weaknesses resonate ominously with certain first impressions imparted by his work. Should one take seriously a critique of civilization by a man so imperfectly civilized? Should one follow pedagogical theories proffered by an incompetent tutor and derelict father? Should one bother with the ideal of virtue proclaimed by a neurotic who once stood in an alley baring his penis to shock the passing young ladies of Turin?

“Before the French Revolution,” said Ferdinand Buisson in 1911, “the principle of free instruction, that is, of education regarded as a public service, was unknown.” He added that of course the church had given free schooling to a few poor boys before 1789, and that the principle of free education was now well established in France “at least for the primary schools.” It is well known that free education in secondary schools, at the public expense, was not realized in France until 1933.

THE LIVELY CURRENT DEBATE about developing programs of study which will raise women's consciousness and bring them into American intellectual life on a level of equality with men tends to be ahistorical and to subscribe to many of the unexamined assumptions of American educational history. Among the most revered of these is the interpretation unhesitatingly advanced by historians (1) of education that coeducation automatically was a “liberating experience” for American women and that access to professional education naturally placed women on a level with male professional peers. Advocates of increased participation for women in the creation and transmission of American culture had better examine these assumptions with the skepticism which feminists normally extend to male interpretations of women's experience if they are not to devise a faulty strategy for reform through inability to perceive some of the concealed hazards of the landscape. Although cultural historians have universally concluded that the development of educational institutions in colonial America and in the young republic of the early national period played a decisive role in the creation of an American democratic culture, little effort has been expended in analysing the impact of these institutions on women's social role or on their consciousness of themselves as independent intellects. To understand the dimensions of this impact we must begin, as in all questions of American cultural history, with the colonial period and the Puritan heritage. Governor Winthrop of Massachusetts Bay gave as succinct an expression of Puritan attitudes to women with aspirations to learning as it would be possible to find in his diary entry after meeting the emotionally disturbed wife of a friend.

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.

Public schooling has held a central place in the mythologies celebrating the assimilation of immigrants into American life. It is no surprise then to find that the historiography of schooling and immigration has been characterized by a good deal of polemic and a paucity of data. Depending upon their political persuasions, scholars have either described the schools as an immense success in providing opportunities, or as reactionary institutions designed to perpetuate the existing class order.

A SEXUAL IDEOLOGY with profoundly antifeminist implications developed in the northern United States during the forty years after 1830. This middle class ideal of sentimental womanhood, defining women as spiritual, emotional, and dependent, has received less attention than the ideology of the small minority of feminists and reformers who rejected a passive stereotype of women in their search for autonomy. Yet the antifeminist system of belief dominated the perception of women in the nineteenth century. It provided women with supreme domestic powers through religious influence and the education of children, though it exacted a price of powerlessness beyond these spheres. How was it that this sentimental ideal had such pervasive influence? The most common answer is that it was the result of economic change.

Among the first to give serious attention to the use of discipline as an educational tool was Philippe Aries in Centuries of Childhood. Aries believes the systematic application of discipline in schools and colleges was a crucial factor in the transition from medieval to modern education. While others who have investigated student life during the fourteenth to eighteenth centuries have not accorded discipline such an important role, scholars such as Rashdall, Rait, Thorndike and Mullinger have acknowledged its anecdotal utility for conveying the style and flavor of education at a given institution. A midpoint in assessing the importance and meaning of student discipline is to view it as that part of the educative process whose form and function reflect the values and attitudes concerning student conduct that are held by the educational authorities of the time. The present paper is written in this latter vein in an attempt to understand the use of a particular form of discipline, namely corporal punishment, in light of the circumstances at a specific institution, Harvard College, during its founding century.

THE FEMALE COLLEGE was a new phenomenon which developed after the Civil War. Those who planned these infant colleges were aware of their institutional antecedents—academies and seminaries which generally steeped females in the domestic arts along with cultural and moral refinements. In antebellum America, female education and domesticity were inexorably related as educators sought to insure the endurance of the domestic occupation for women by elevating it from drudgery to a noble profession. The pious homemaker would uplift American civilization by providing order, stability, and self-restraint in an otherwise chaotic society. After the Civil War, however, molders of female colleges struggled with these traditions as they tried to determine whether such colleges would continue to protect domestic values from decay or whether higher education for women would represent a break from the perpetuation in educational institutions of feminine passivity and dependence.

One could easily construct an argument that modern professional sports, played within the capitalistic atmosphere of competitive salaries and managerial techniques, provides the mass spectator with a sense of relief and adventure from the dull monotony and drudgery of our modern technological and urban environment. An extension of this argument would be that spectator sports by occupying the leisure time of the mass man dilutes his political consciousness and diffuses his feelings of rebellion. Within this framework sports could be considered one of the controlling instruments of our technological culture.

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.

The Somali are getting much cheekier. These people must learn submission by bullets — its the only school; after that you may begin more modern and humane methods of education.

In some parts of Kenya “modern and humane methods of education” appeared fairly shortly after the introduction of colonial administration, often as the result of missionary initiative, but for the Somali pastoralists this was not the case. Having “learnt submission by bullets” and having been finally disarmed by 1919, they then had to wait until the Second World War for any Government initiative in the sphere of education. Nor was the situation of the Somali township traders, who never offered any further armed resistance to the administration after 1894, any better. The purpose of this paper is, therefore, to focus attention on some of the problems encountered in developing educational facilities for the Somali in Kenya and to analyse the factors that retarded this development.

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)

The comments by Katz on our paper reflect a misinterpretation of our aims and considerable confusion regarding the methodological issues involved. Let us take up some of the points that he raises.

PERHAPS as a final tribute to a nineteenth century individualism soon to be extinguished by the New Deal, Americans of the late twenties and early thirties frequently amused themselves in endless polls and competitions to find America's greatest men and women. The definitive order of greatness was never discovered, but in every poll Jane Addams did well. Included in Mark Howe's list of six outstanding Americans, she received Good Housekeeping's seal of approval as the greatest living American woman. But in 1933 the National Council of Women failed her. They declared her the second greatest American woman. First was Mary Baker Eddy. (1) Jane Addams, who treasured such symbols of fame, may well have felt considerable pique at being so linked with the founding mother of Christian Science. The two women certainly appear very different types. Where Mrs. Eddy achieved power through establishing a church, Jane Addams, except for one brief episode, was never involved in organised religion; where Mrs. Eddy exploited the world of the spirit, Jane Addams consciously entered the grubby world of the slum; where Mrs. Eddy sought to cure bodies through faith, Jane Addams' solution was better housing, higher wages, and better garbage disposal. Later historians have reinforced the contrast. Some have viewed Jane Addams as an energetic feminist, which Mrs. Eddy decidedly was not; Christopher Lasch, in the most widely accepted interpretation, has seen Jane Addams as the first of a new class, the intellectuals, whose animus was a revolt against middle class gentility and particularly against the constrictive atmosphere of the 19th century family. (2) Mrs. Eddy for all her interest in the mind, was no modern intellectual, nor did she reject the family.

WHEN Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr established their home in the Hull mansion on Halsted Street in Chicago in 1889, they knew only that they wanted to connect up to the life of their time by living within the neighborhood of the immigrant poor. Their residence grew gradually into Hull-House, a pioneer social settlement, which served as a model to others seeking solutions to the social question at the turn of the century. What is often lost sight of is that Hull-House developed in Chicago as a response, in part, to its specific local currents. Restored to its setting, the Hull-House experience takes on a new and clearer meaning.

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.