The German Social Democratic Party, the most influential socialist party in Europe and the largest single political movement in Germany on the eve of World War I, was a major force promoting educational reform in the Wilhelmian period. The party's reform activities centered on the Volksschule, the common elementary school maintained by the German states to inculcate piety, patriotism, and the work ethic in the children of factory workers, artisans, peasants, and small tradesmen. Traditionally the German working-class movement demanded state support for a secularized and expanded school program. Through the 1890's, the Social Democrats perpetuated this demand. As the twentieth century opened, the party's radical faction, committed to class struggle and revolution, articulated a new position. The radicals suggested specific curricular reforms to instill values compatible with the tenets of socialism. Moreover, they specified ways in which the party might achieve a greater voice in school affairs. Lastly, they promoted educational alternatives to the Volksschule: socialist training in the home, a youth movement, and adult education. The purpose of the radical program was to prepare the child to participate in the class struggle. By broadening the Social Democrats' traditional position on school reform, the radicals made education part of a comprehensive program for political action.

Any serious student of American educational history is fully cognizant of the fact that in the last fifteen years his field has undergone a major reawakening. It all began when Bernard Bailyn asked the first of all questions: What is education? He had his own answer, of course, and suggested that historians view education as the “entire process by which a culture transmits itself across the generations.” He then went on to say that once the historian begins from this point he “is prepared to see great variations in the role of formal institutions of instruction, to see schools and universities fade into relative insignificance next to other social agencies.” Finding Bailyn's definition of education too broad in its failure to distinguish between socialization and education, Lawrence A. Cremin has sought to restrict it while at the same time retaining Bailyn's insight of conceiving education in broader terms than the institution of the school. Cremin, in a recent work, has come to view education as the “deliberate, systematic, and sustained effort to transmit and evoke knowledge, attitudes, values, skills, and sensibilities.” But while Cremin is more concerned with the deliberateness of educational efforts than is Bailyn, he still regards it as the proper concern of the educational historian to ask “what agencies, formal and informal, have shaped American thought, character, and sensibility over the years and what have been the relationships between these agencies and the society that has sustained them.” Thus, in recent years our entire conception of what constitutes educational history has been substantially enlarged. This essay is in that tradition.

Small colleges in the “Age of the University” have been neglected. For years, historians have dismissed the college with a wave of President Eliot's inaugural speech and ushered the university builders onto center stage. Few studies have gone beyond Laurence Veysey's generalization that “the only course of action” those in charge of colleges “could urge was to hold on, perhaps making minor concessions, and hope that their institution would be able to survive.” Implicitly colleges have been assumed to be uniform and passive institutions that only broke from antebellum practices in reluctant response to the universities. Although the new models of higher education had an important effect, the prevailing stereotype misses the extent to which colleges shaped their policies in terms of local, denominational and institutional circumstances. The resulting diversity suggests that colleges, like other traditional institutions facing modernization, participated in the shaping of their destinies and were not merely passive victims.

Schooling in capitalist America will make waves in the history of education, but it is only incidentally concerned with history. Rather, it is an effort to locate schooling in the social and economic context of capitalist society. The authors seek to offer a comprehensive account of the role schools have served in the American economic structure; they advance a critique of efforts to change or reform schools; and they suggest an alternative vision of how school reform should work.

An important new educational institution was created in America in the early nineteenth century—the theological seminary. The development of seminaries, although almost completely ignored by twentieth-century educational historians, was an important achievement with far-reaching consequences for religion, education, and society. Education for the ministry became formally organized, systematized, and extended in the specialized theological seminaries which substantially improved professional preparation. Within a generation of the founding of Andover in 1807, the theological seminary became the accepted pattern of professional training for the educated and learned ministry in Protestant churches. Alumni of seminaries and divinity schools not only preached the gospel, but also extended education throughout the land by establishing and supporting literally thousands of educational agencies and institutions: colleges and seminaries, academies and common schools, churches and Sunday schools, libraries and the religious press, and benevolent and reform societies.

The Short Career of Randolph Bourne (1886–1918) has been useful in various ways to students of American intellectual history. For cultural observers such as Van Wyck Brooks and Christopher Lasch, Bourne's life and work are symbolic of the youthful questioning that characterized the intellectual mood of the 1890's–1920's. Bourne's writing touched on nearly all of the issues of his time—cultural nationalism, progressive education, socialism, feminism—with an adolescent vigor which made him, both then and now, an appropriate spokesman for his generation. Bourne has also served those with more specific interests: for the historian of education, Bourne's articles in The Gary Schools provide vivid testimony to the exciting innovations inspired by John Dewey's pedagogy; while for the historian of philosophy, Bourne's disillusionment with Dewey's “pragmatic” stance during World War I offers an episode in the history of a philosophical debate which began with Plato and Aristotle (or earlier). Finally, for those who value the role of the critic in America, and who believe that the health of any society requires a periodic questioning of its accepted values, Randolph Bourne is an important figure.

The past decade has been a tumultuous one for Japanese higher education with faculty pitted against students, students against government, and government against both in an often chaotic and seemingly incessant search for an answer to the question “Who governs Japan's universities?” The answer given by many analysts is “no one”—that the conflict between these three bodies have rendered Japanese universities ungovernable. Failure to achieve consensus and implement needed reforms in higher education has been attributed largely to the decentralized internal organization of the leading universities and the tradition of deep-seated hostility between academic intellectuals and the Japanese government. Although the more violent and dramatic of the conflicts in the late 1960s and early 1970s have received considerable attention by observers outside Japan, the long tradition of conflict over university governance which provides such a significant part of the intellectual and political context for those caught up in the contemporary debates has received far less attention. The purpose of this essay is to provide an historical perspective on this conflict by sketching in the prewar background that constitutes the heritage of academic self-government at Japan's oldest and still foremost universities, the imperial universities of Tokyo and Kyoto.

The society for the Promotion of Collegiate and Theological Education at the West was established in 1843 as one response of evangelical Protestants to the challenge of westward migration and the need to create a new society in the vast hinterland of America. Although the work of the Society has been known to students of nineteenth century American culture, the recent availability of the organization's letter files encourages a thorough re-examination of the SPCTEW's activities. The results fall roughly into a two-part sequence: first an analysis of the special set of religious attitudes and assumptions which motivated the Society and shaped its activities, and second, a description of the development and eventual decline of the organization itself, including discussion of some of the key events and forces which determined that development. Hopefully these twin concerns properly delineated will provide a better understanding of the significance of the SPCTEW in nineteenth century American religious and educational history.

Any time anyone mentions Dewey's disciples, the most obvious person associated with that description is Dr. William Heard Kilpatrick. Known by many as the great interpreter and popularizer of Dewey's theories, Kilpatrick has been both criticized and applauded as the leading defender of progressive educational practices. Often the impression has been given that, as the Apostle Paul carried the teachings of Christ to the pagans, Kilpatrick's major role in life was to carry the teachings of Dewey to the educators. Seldom is Kilpatrick's name mentioned without the notation that during his lifetime he touched the hearts and minds of over 35,000 students who attended his classes, learning the gospel of Dewey.

How does one study Catholic history? It is easy to acknowledge that, on the whole, it has not been studied well. As Andrew Greeley tirelessly reminds us, Catholics have been of only peripheral interest to historians and social scientists. The historiography of American Catholicism has traditionally been directed at confirming Catholic beliefs and commitments to the Church's institutional structure. The argument generally offered is that the flock, threatened by a Protestant environment and by attacks on Catholics, sought consolation in the Church and forged structures essentially compatible with loyal Americanism. Initial historical writings stressed the heroism and piety of early Catholic missionaries, immigrant patriotism, and Catholic difficulties in times of anti-Catholic agitation. Religious questions and Church institutions, the hierarchy (especially the “liberals” within it), the Irish (except where the non-Irish are presented as a “problem”), and neglect of the years since World War I except as a measure of the triumph of Roman Catholicism as an American middle class religion have been its hallmarks. Only the internal Church controversies between liberal and conservative clergy and the ethnic tensions of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries have suggested the complexity and subtlety of American Catholicism.

Kliuchevskii's essay, “Dva vospitaniia” is the pioneering work in the history of childhood and of the family in Russia, and it has been sorely neglected. V.O. Kliuchevskii wrote this piece as a public lecture which was given on February 1, 1893, for the Moscow Committee on Literacy. In it he contrasts the educational values of traditional Muscovite society of the sixteenth century with those of Ivan Ivanovich Betskoi, Catherine the Great's principal educational advisor during the first years of her reign. More precisely, he compares two documents. The first was the Domostroi, the “House-orderer,” of the priest Sil'vestr. He, Metropolitan Makarii, and Aleksei Adashev were the principal advisors of Tsar Ivan IV in the early years of his active reign after 1547. They were the creators of the new ideology of the Muscovite state based on the dream of unified Orthodox Tsardom. They compiled a single all-Russian paterikon, a new unified law code, a unified ecclesiastical rule, and an official geneological history of Russia's rulers. The regimentation of personal behavior represented by the Domostroi was an essential part of the campaign for standardization and codification, which saw the origins of printing in Russia as well. In the sixteenth century these precepts had the same official sanction and status as did Catherine's legislation two hundred years later, especially the Statute of her boarding schools.

In early 1892, Arthur MacDonald, a young docent in applied ethics from Clark University in Wocester, Massachusetts, traveled to Washington to assume the duties of specialist in education “as preventive of pauperism and crime” for the United States Bureau of Education. Hired by the Hegelian philosopher and Commissioner of Education, William T. Harris, he quickly won the approval and praise of his superiors. By the middle of the decade, however, Harris became aware of several disturbing tendencies in his new clerk-specialist. Instead of gathering material for use by educational experts, MacDonald was accumulating “laboratory instruments” for the study of anthropometrics (the measurement of physical characteristics and speculation about their effects upon psychology). Worse, some of the material MacDonald presented to the department, and some which he published in outside books and articles, showed that he was advocating controversial theories of criminology inspired by Cesare Lombroso in Italy and Alphonse Bertillon in France. MacDonald thought he had found a direct link between physical appearance and criminality, insanity, and poverty, in other words, a system of physical stigmata. On the basis of this, he proposed to reorient education from its traditional emphasis upon development toward considerations of hygiene.

The Congregational Library, located in downtown Boston, possesses an important collection of papers related to the history of American education in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries which deserves the attention of historians. The Library has long served as a principal repository for the historical records of American Congregationalists, well known for their broad support of education. In 1965, as a result of the earlier merger of Congregational-Christian and Evangelical Reformed churches into the United Church of Christ, the files of the Congregational Board of Homeland Missions were deposited at the denominational library in Boston. These materials included the manuscript records of all the national educational societies of the denomination.