The Origins of modern Russian education are transparently clear. Old Muscovy had only religious schools of little consequence. Peter the Great traveled to Western Europe and upon his return to Russia, imported teachers and books, opened the first modern schools, and abandoned the older traditions. The hallmark of the new Petrine educational policy was a fanatical emphasis on technical training. Reinhard Wittram, author of the finest biography of Peter the Great, contrasted the religiocentrism of Muscovite education with the practicality of the great reformer in the simple phrase, ‘Mathematick statt Katechismus,’ which suggests the radical secularization of the new schooling. James Billington merely echoed the conclusions of generations of earlier historians when he wrote that

[Peter the Great's] efforts to advance Russian learning were almost completely concentrated on scientific, technical or linguistic matters of direct military or diplomatic value. “To Peter's mind, ‘education’ and ‘vocational training’ seem to have been synonynlous concepts.” … Peter the Great was important not for introducing foreign technical ideas into Russia, but for making them the basis of a new state-sponsored type of education.

Disguised as demographic analyst and historiographical innovator, Philippe Ariès launched his own clandestine attack on modernism twenty-five years ago. As a demographic analyst, he carried on a series of perceptive interpretations of typical French populations and their evolution from the eighteenth century onward: Parisians, miners of the Northeast, villagers of Touraine, Bretons, southerners, dwellers in the Alps all paraded past his eyepiece. As an historiographical innovator, he provided a way of inserting demographic material directly into history. In 1946, that was a daring thing to do. Ariès also showed how family portraits, wardrobes, textbooks and other antiquarian paraphernalia, long condemned to supply the comic relief for serious history, could become evidence of the deepest, longest transformations of social life.

Charles Chauncy knew he was striking a responsive chord when in a commencement address at Harvard in 1655 he drew on the Third Epistle of John to declare, “I have no greater joy than to hear that my children walk in truth.” The seventeenth-century Puritans who shook off the dust of the English Babylon and ventured into the “howling wilderness” of the New World clearly expected that this act of faith would insure the salvation of their children. The Scriptures told them this was so: as God promised Abraham, so he assured the inhabitants of the New Israel that he would “make thee exceeding fruitful,” and “establish my covenant between me and thee and thy seed after thee in their generations for an everlasting covenant. …” Hardly a complacent group, the Puritans understood very well that the “old deluder Satan” was abroad in New England and would do his utmost to thwart the salvation of as many souls as possible, even those of the children of the covenant. Thus, they promptly established regular public worship, encouraged family and community attention to the nurture of literacy, exercised controls over apprenticeship, and built schools and colleges—all actions designed, in part, to create the conditions most favorable for the reception of God's grace. In the end, the Puritans knew their difficult struggle would culminate in victory. They could afford to be optimistic; they had God's promise that grace was hereditary: God would honor his Covenant and their children would be saved.

More than 150 years ago, a people undertook to rebuild its wartorn country by instituting sweeping social and educational reform. This endeavor—in Prussia after the defeat by Napoleon—marks one of the few instances in which a philosophical anthropology formed the explicit basis of a successful program for social change. Its leading proponents were among the foremost statesmen, politicians and thinkers of that brilliant age: Friedrich Wilhelm III, the Prussian King; Karl Freiherr von Stein, who headed the government in 1807–1808; Fichte, whose “Addresses to the German Nation” helped to crystallize the new national consciousness; and Wilhelm von Humboldt, the philosophical scholar who was able to translate the ideal of complete and harmonious human development into a comprehensive system of educational facilities.

It is both encouraging and gratifying to the members of this Board to witness the unexampled success of our school system, and the great popularity of the schools. This is still the more gratifying, when we feel a consciousness that this popularity is deserved; and that the more our schools are tried and the closer their operations are examined, the greater will be their popularity, and the confidence reposed in them.

Soviet education of the 1920s has attracted much attention from both historians and educators. (1) Until 1931 Soviet educational authorities sponsored a flurry of measures many of which were initially advanced in the writings of such western educators as John Dewey, Helen Parkhurst, and Maria Montessori. Study of this “romantic and experimental period” (2) in the history of Soviet education is therefore understandable.

During the peace deliberations at Versailles in 1919, the victorious Allies claimed for themselves the right of drawing up a balance sheet on the record of the German Reich as a colonial power. The tribunal, of course, was hardly objective or impartial. Four and a half years of bitter warfare and the concomitant propaganda had preordained the decision eventually reached. As has recently been noted, “The Germans lost their colonies on the fields of Liege and in the blackened ruins of Louvain. Huns could not be trusted with the sacred task of civilizing other peoples.” With few dissenting voices the Versailles peacemakers concurred in the opinion expressed several years before the war by a German Reichstag member that the entire history of the German colonial empire is a long, sorry spectacle of embezzlement, deception, debauched cruelties, sexual abuses, frightful mistreatment of the natives of the colonies—things which form no pages of glory.

The nature and state of the family has long been a major concern in the United States. It has been apparent in the literature and criticism since the Puritan arrival in the seventeenth century and may be followed thereafter. However, the family has not been a major concern of American historians. As Edward Saveth reminds us, in the 1962 Presidential Address of the American Historical Association, Carl Bridenbaugh spoke of the need for research in the neglected field of American family history and suggested that the profession assign a priority to this general area. Saveth, in 1969, concluded that “apart from some impressive work in historical demography, the situation has not altered.”

When Ellen Key proclaimed this the Century of the Child sixty years ago, she might better have called it the Century of Adolescence. The modern dimensions of childhood had been developing steadily during the course of the nineteenth century. Adolescence, on the other hand, previously characteristic only of those privileged youngsters who were exempt from early entry into the job market, was beginning in 1900 to involve a much larger part of the population. Laws were excluding the teen aged from the job market and simultaneously cloistering them in the expanding sector of secondary education. Coincidentally, a whole set of extracurricular organizations, including sports clubs, youth hostels, and other age-graded activities, came into existence. Two of these, the German Wandervogel and the English Boy Scouts, the former founded in 1901 and the latter seven years later, were to become symbols of the era of adolescence in European history, a period whose distinctive social, political and psychological dimensions are the subject here.

In 1962, 26% of the elementary school pupils in the Netherlands attended a public school, 74% were in private or confessional schools. This has not always been the case. At the turn of the century 69% of all elementary school students were in public schools and 31% in private or confessional schools. One of the great turning points in this confessionalizing trend was the constitutional revision of 1917 which placed confessional elementary schools on a parity with the public schools in terms of state subsidy. The parliament which carried out constitutional revision was elected in 1913 and embodied 46 deputies in the clerical bloc, 38 in the liberal concentration and 16 social democrats, in the 100 seat lower house. The measure owed its passage to the social democrats who combined with the clerical bloc and some left-liberals to legislate a new school law. In 1902 the Sociaal Democratische Arbeiderspartij (SDAP), the recognized Dutch representative of the social democratic Second International, passed a resolution calling for state subsidy to confessional schools. Within the context of Dutch politics the 1902 resolution is important for two reasons. One, it laid down the guideline which the SDAP would follow until the dissolution of the party by German occupation authorities in 1940. After the Second World War a labor party, the Partij van de Arbeid (PvdA) was formed out of the ashes of the SDAP. The PvdA, acting as the logical successor of the SDAP, pursued, and continues to pursue, the policy of supporting state aid to confessional schools. In short, the labor community has aided in the confessionalizing trend by refusing to demand either a termination of aid to confessional schools or free compulsory state schools and a sharp, or total, curtailment of the existing confessional schools.

Intellectuals in many societies have been deeply concerned about education ever since the days of Socrates and Plato. They have speculated about how their youth should be taught and have protested when they believed that the schools were lapsing from these aims. Spokesmen of this variety are produced by most sophisticated societies, and modern Turkey is no exception. In addition, there are the relatively few innovative philosophers who are capable of creating more systematic theoretical systems. Several theorists of this second type have made their impact on Turkish educational thought since the turn of the century.

Few Monographs in the history of American higher education have been as influential or as frequently cited as Donald G. Tewksbury's The Founding of American Colleges and Universities Before the Civil War, With Particular Reference to the Religious Influences Bearing Upon the College Movement. Frederick Rudolph, in a bibliographic essay on the history of higher education, calls it “the most durable” and “the most useful” volume among the several hundred titles in the Teachers College series, “Contributions to Education.”