In recent years it has become commonplace to speak of the declining support for public schools as an unprecedented break in nearly 150 years of educational expansion. Acutally, public backing for the schools has waned and the educational enterprise itself has been called into question at various times in American history. The political controversies surrounding several of the nineteenth century challenges to the public schools have, in fact, been well researched. However, the politics of educational retrenchment in this century, particularly the struggles during the Great Depression, have received little attention. Such studies as Sol Cohen's Progressive and Urban School Reform and Julia Wrigley's Class Politics and Public Schools have described the retrenchment battles in New York City and Chicago respectively but merely as secondary events highlighting more significant trends. Cohen's study of the Public Education Association, for example, sees the budget battles of the early thirties as the last flurry of excitement before the decline of the organization. Wrigley uses her comprehensive discussion of Chicago's school crisis to illuminate the power of the newly emerging political machine. Unlike those studies, this paper will focus on the retrenchment controversies specifically as they influenced school policy and as they related to changes in educational politics in Detroit.

The British Government's once comfortable assumption that, whatever might happen in India, colonial administration would continue for an unlimited time in Africa, was undermined by a number of complex and interrelated factors after the Second World War. These included the emergence of the United States and Soviet Union as two superpowers both hostile to colonialism; the anti-colonial principles written into the United Nations Charter; the victory of the British Labor Party in the 1945 general election and the agitation of the African nationalist movements. Until 1948 these factors hastened the progress towards decolonization without causing undue friction. In 1947 the British Government took a giant step towards divesting itself of its empire by conceding independence to India, and a year later Arthur Creech-Jones, the Secretary of State for the Colonies, declared that British colonial policy was simply “to guide the colonial territories to responsible government within the Commonwealth in conditions that ensure to the people concerned both a fair standard of living and freedom from oppression from any quarter”. But in 1948 a number of events shattered this complacent air of dignified, peaceful and paternalistic progression towards eventual independence in British Africa. The communist coup d'état in Czechoslovakia followed by the Berlin blockade heralded the ending of peaceful coexistence and the beginnings of the cold war. It was not long before British imperial forces were locked in an anti-communist war in Malaya. Meanwhile in West Africa the Colonial Administration was stunned by the outbreak of violent nationalist agitation, demonstrations, strikes and rioting following Kwame Nkrumah's appointment as general secretary of the United Gold Coast Convention in January 1948 and the sporadic echoing of his ‘Positive Action’ campaign amongst the Zikist nationalists in Nigeria. Fear of cold war communist intervention in Africa and a determination to resist the ‘extremist’ nationalists created a very different atmosphere in the West African territories after 1948. During the next three years Nukrumah's militant Convention People's Party in the Gold Coast [Ghana] and the radical Zikists in Nigeria waged a violent revolutionary struggle for independence against a more sullenly antagonistic colonial power.

Of all the important mission organizations that came to establish work in Malawi (known as Nyasaland until 1964) from the end of the last century, the Dutch Reformed Church Mission (D.R.C.M.) is perhaps one of the least researched. Unlike most other missions the D.R.C.M. has had no objective historian to analyse in English its activities in Malawi. Oliver's Missionary Factor in East Africa …, designed as a general study of the missions in the Eastern African region, only mentions the D.R.C.M. in passing. In a similar manner researchers like Andrew Ross on Blantyre Missions and John McCracken on Livingstonia Mission allude to the D.R.C.M. mainly to elucidate a point relevant to the analysis of their focal missions. Rotberg's Christian Missions and the Creation of Northern Rhodesia, 1880–1924 mentions the Cape D.R.C.M. only tangentially in connection with Dutch missionary work in the Chipata district of Zambia. Roderick Macdonald's thesis on pre–1945 education in Malawi covers a field too broad for special attention to be given to the Dutch. The single major but subjective published work in English featuring D.R.C.M. educational activity remains Educational Adaptations with Reference to African Village Schools with Special Reference to Central Nvasaland by J.G. Steytler, a former Dutch missionary to Malawi. This is supplemented by subjective articles by another former Dutch missionary, J.L. Pretorius, which include “Introduction to the history of the Dutch Reformed Church Mission 1889–1914,” “The story of the Dutch Reformed Church Mission in Nyasaland,” and “The story of school education in Malawi for the period 1875–1941.” More research is necessary into the history of this mission which deserves its important place in the historiography of Malawi.

In recent years, a wealth of theoretical literature, building on the many insights of marxist and feminist theory, has attempted to clarify the precise role of schooling in the reproduction of patriarchy and of capitalist society. Much of this analysis has far reaching consequences for the writing of education history. New questions and hypotheses have been formulated so convincingly regarding contemporary education systems that historians can no longer ignore them when dealing with the more or less recent past. While theory has inspired a substantial rewriting of the history of schooling, the new history has sharpened the theoretical tools of the social scientists.