“The deaths of great men in national and political history are commemorated by song, story and memorial days,” Aaron Gove told his fellow school superintendents in 1900. “Only in secluded family circles, and midst the personal friends, are the works and lives of heroic schoolmasters recorded and remembered.” To this day, historians have largely neglected those who probably did more than any other individuals to shape the day-to-day operation of American public education—the superintendents of school districts. Not entirely neglected, of course: we have Raymond Callahan's important, path-breaking work; several scholars have enlightened us about changing metaphors of leadership and the ideologies of administrators; early historians have traced the administrative duties of school chiefs; and we have a number of narratives about individual superintendents. But we are still just beginning to understand the character of educational leadership in the past. We need to focus especially on superintendents in the local districts, where the chief decision-making power resided for most of American history rather than at the state or federal level (a statistic illustrates this point: in 1890 the median size of state departments of education was two persons, including the superintendent.)

A guarded optimism seems to govern most appraisals of Tudor and Stuart education. Some writers have been so impressed by the achievements of the period, especially of the years 1560 to 1640, that they see not only an educational ferment involving an increase in the number of schools but also an expansion of opportunities which brought schooling within reach of the hitherto deprived lower members of society. The expansion of printing as well as the expansion of education leads R. D. Altick to suggest, “that in the Tudor and Stuart eras the ability to read was more democratically distributed among the English people than it would again be until at least the end of the eighteenth century.” W. A. L. Vincent asserts in The Grammar Schools; their continuing tradition 1660–1714 that, “the first sixty years of the seventeenth century was a period when the grammar schools of England and Wales flourished, and when education of the sort preparatory to the university was available to all who wished to avail themselves of it.” Even more enthusiastic in this vein is W. K. Jordan, who claims, in The Charities of Rural England, that by 1660 “a widespread and well-endowed system of education has been created within the reach of any poor and able boy who thirsted for knowledge and who aspired to escape the grip of poverty.”

Very few of the American students who studied in Germany up to 1870 claimed perfection for German institutions and values. Virtually every one of them realized that American institutions had to grow out of American values. Thus, any historical account that explains the development of American universities purely in terms of German “influence” must be highly suspect. The American universities were not constructed from simple blueprints shipped over on the Hamburg Line. And American scholars were anything but imitations of their German teachers.