“That's when we were marching for jobs … They didn't even have the first black teacher then.”

—Calvin Moody, Black politician, on Milwaukee civil rights activism in the 1940s

The 1930s and 1940s pose a challenge to historians of the civil rights era, since these decades are still the “forgotten years.” Most accounts of the movement focus on the tumultuous events of the mid-1950s through the mid-1960s: the mass boycotts, sit-ins, and protest marches which mobilized thousands of African Americans. Thus civil rights historians commonly draw upon the 1930s and 1940s only to set the stage, merely a preface to more important events yet to come.

The early years of the University of Chicago's Department of Pedagogy are generally identified with the work of John Dewey and his laboratory school. Dewey, however, had very little to do with the actual teaching of pedagogy within that department in its first years. That task fell to Julia Bulkley, who was associate professor of pedagogy from the opening of the University of Chicago in 1892 until March 1900 and who taught the majority of the pedagogy courses offered during that period. Yet, despite being offered a position two years before John Dewey and despite her extensive experience in teaching, teacher education and supervision, she was not involved in any significant way in the University Elementary School which opened in January 1896, nor has she remained historically visible as Dewey's colleague in the Department of Pedagogy. She was thoroughly trained in and taught Herbartian pedagogy, which dominated the national pedagogical discussion during precisely the years of her tenure at the University of Chicago, yet she appears to have taken no part in that discussion, although John Dewey was a founding member of the National Herbart Society at its formation in 1895 and remained on its executive committee until at least 1899. Highly qualified in teacher education, she bolstered her credentials with a European school study tour and a Swiss doctorate in philosophy and pedagogy before actually beginning her Chicago teaching career, which should have ensured her leadership in the Department of Pedagogy.

In my book, The Rise and Fall of an Urban School System, I argue that at key periods in history, the politics of education in Detroit either foreshadowed or directly paralleled developments in American politics writ large. During the early 1930s, for example, educational politics in Detroit fractured along lines that looked very much like what would become the national political realignment over the New Deal. Similarly, during the late 1940s and early 1950s, Detroit witnessed the formation of a liberal-labor-black coalition whose membership paralleled the larger civil rights movement in the nation. This coalition came to power in Detroit almost a decade before Lyndon Johnson's massive electoral triumph in 1964, and its successes and failures, particularly in the area of school desegregation, foreshadowed the rise and fall of liberalism in the latter part of the 1960s. Indeed, in the early 1960s, some political commentators who tracked school elections in Detroit and Michigan, had already identified conservative voting trends among the white working-class, trends that eventually produced the “Nixon-” and later “Reagan-Democrats.” Finally, the collapse of the liberal-labor-black coalition in Detroit in 1970 signaled what would be the larger crack-up of American liberalism, a collapse whose repercussions still reverberate in American politics today.

On 17 April 1975, the communist Khmer Rouge marched into Phnom Penh and established Democratic Kampuchea. Declaring an end to “over two thousand years of Cambodian history,” Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot announced a new beginning, referred to metaphorically by scholars of the period as the “Year Zero.” The “new Cambodia” lasted exactly three years, eight months, and twenty days, during which time the people of Cambodia were subjected to a cataclysmic social experiment as part of what one historian has termed “the world's most radical … revolution.”

Eighteenth-century European writers showed a heightened awareness of childhood and children, expressed frequently in sentimental or romantic terms. Historian Hugh Cunningham lists key aspects of this sensitivity to children, which had its roots in the Renaissance and Reformation and emerged in the mid-nineteenth century's “ideology of childhood.” He includes: “a belief in the importance of early education; … a concern for the salvation of the child's soul; … a growing interest in the way children learn; and … a sense that children were messengers of God, and that childhood was therefore the best time of life.” An exemplar of this type of thinking was Nikolaus Ludwig, Count von Zinzendorf, the leader of the Moravian church in the eighteenth century. Emphasizing the child's connection to the divine and portraying childhood as a special stage of life, he wrote in 1739: “Children are little royal majesties. Baptism is their anointing, and from then on they should be treated as none other than a king by birth.” Zinzendorf wrote numerous religious works for children and about child-rearing, demonstrating a deep concern for early education.

During the Reagan presidency a storm arose over the refusal of a small Presbyterian college to be regulated by the United States Department of Education. Arguably, not since the Dartmouth College case of 1818, when the Supreme Court under Chief Justice John Marshall prevented a public takeover of Dartmouth's charter, had national policymaking centered so intensively and symbolically on a private collegiate institution. By preserving private autonomy, Dartmouth College v. Woodward fostered a pluralistic and competitive system of higher education that in the post-World War I I era made American universities the envy of the world. The batde over Grove City College, still in recent memory, is significant less for its immediate outcome than for the light it sheds on the deepening entanglement of American higher education in the web of the expanding regulatory state.

American imperialism opened new battlefields for the conflict between Protestants and Catholics over religion in public schools. The nineteenth-century textbook wars followed the flag to the Philippines. American Catholics had fought to protect their children from anti-Catholic school books and Protestant Biblical readings since the beginning of the common school movement. These issues provided much of the rationale behind the 1884 decision to establish a separate Catholic school system. Nevertheless, many Catholic children continued to attend public schools. With the end of the Spanish-American War, Catholic frustration with secular Protestantism took on fresh urgency. Now they feared that Catholic children in the Philippines, and in other new territories, would have their minds and souls contaminated by false interpretations of their church, interpretations that seeped in through American textbooks. The textbook battles that erupted in the Philippines rekindled old animosities and became part of a longer struggle waged by Catholic leadership in the United States to exercise more authority over colonial education. Its repercussions found their way to the White House and Theodore Roosevelt.

It is only recently that the power of the drama as a living force in daily life has been appreciated. Not only is it an educational force along intellectual and spiritual lines, but it offers first hand to the individual, a vision of the possibilities of self development and self equipment for the positive business of everyday existence…. It is of great educational value to witness the acting of a good play, but to walk upon the stage, to speak to hushed audiences is to awake to a consciousness of power generally unsuspected within the self.

In recent years social scientists have devoted increasing attention to the question of how members of ethnic and racial minorities are affected by living in segregated neighborhoods. A central concern has been that the poverty of these neighborhoods may be self-perpetuating. One obvious possibility is that this could be caused by reducing human capital formation: children in ghettos might be less likely than their counterparts elsewhere to attend school, perhaps because their demand for education is lower, or because their access to schools is restricted, or as a result of a combination of the two.

It has been written of Anne Isabella, Lady Noel-Byron (1792–1860) that she “managed to quarrel with practically everyone for whom she undertook any philanthropy and certainly does not emerge from any examination of her good works without the conclusion being drawn that her unrecognized motive was to dominate.”1 That may be so. What is certain is that Lady Byron was a member of that small group that includes Jeremy Bentham and Richard Lovell Edgeworth, whose work for education was considerable and from whom public recognition has largely been withheld. In this regard Lady Byron was both disciple and innovator. She readily cooperated with and took advice from contemporary social critics who had an interest in education (Maria Edgeworth, Richard Lovell Edgeworth, Samuel Frend, Emmanuel de Fellenberg are names that come naturally to mind) but the ways in which she applied her knowledge were innovative and, indeed, frequently idiosyncratic.

During World War II several popular Norman Rockwell paintings featured the soldier Willie Gillis. Rockwell depicted Willie as your average, all-American boy, a typical GI. Yet the Willie pictured on the cover of the Saturday Evening Post on October 5, 1946, seemed transformed (see Plate 1). Willie sits in the window sill of his college dorm room, smoking a pipe while diligently studying. The window in the center of the picture frames the venerable college clocktower and trees on the Quad. The everyman, dogface Willie had matured. He had been transformed into a college student with an air of confident assurance, comfortable within his new genteel surroundings. One could only imagine a bright future for Willie.

One of the quiet cultural transformations of the twentieth century in the United States has been the widespread consensus over the meaningfulness of age gradations among children and youths. Joseph Kett's important book on the history of the idea of adolescence examined the first significant triumph of experts in promoting the concept of human development in American institutional life. Who could have predicted at the dawn of the twentieth century the swift success of the “adolescent idea” and the subdivision of stages in growing up that has occurred since? Certainly the rise of the expert and the medicalization of “deviance” have contributed significantly to the broad acceptance of age gradations and the developmental perspective. But schooling, the most pervasive of all modern institutions has had the greatest influence on the willingness of Americans to think through novel categories of cognitive, emotional, and physiological growth and well-being in young people. While the passage and enforcement of compulsory schooling and a concomitant need to make distinctions among children's school performance (which led to age-grading) established the framework for thinking about pupils developmentally, it was the voluntary extension of schooling that proved the true measure of parents' willing adoption of the developmental view. The critical period of growth in schooling beyond the minimum required by law occurred between 1910 and 1940, when high school attendance grew dramatically. One factor in its expansion was the invention of the high school “drop out,” which both constituted and reflected the spread of the idea that high school was within the reach of every girl and boy and that every child, moreover, should want to attend high school.