In 1938 Michael Demiashkevich, professor of education at the George Peabody College for Teachers, and F. Alden Shaw, principal of the Detroit Country Day School, founded the Essentialist Movement at the annual meeting of the American Association of School Administrators. At that Atlantic City meeting, William Chandler Bagley delivered an address—“An Essentialist's Platform for the Advancement of American Education.” Like any tag, the essentialist tag that has been pinned on Bagley obscures as much as it designates. It has drawn attention away from the greater part of his career as an educationist, obscuring many of the problems he encountered and attempted to resolve.

Although the sixteenth century is more popularly known in the accounts of Russian history as a time of internal crises largely perpetrated by a bloody autocracy and boyar intrigues, those violent events were no more significant than developments in the social and cultural reconstruction of life among the peoples of Orthodox Rus' during the same period. Prominent among these developments was the gradual formation of small centers of learning, largely outside the confines of the Moscow Tsardom but yet within the larger community of Eastern Orthodox Slavdom. Both within and between the nationality areas, communication and the pursuit of learning not only continued to function while they existed under different state administrations, but even began to intensify and to expand, especially during the latter half of the sixteenth century and into the seventeenth. This intensification of cultural life had its sources and foundations in the geographic, political, economic, social and intellectual realities in the lands of Orthodox Rus’. It both reflected and helped shape the growing crisis faced by leaders of the Orthodox clergies of Rus'.

Michael John Demiashkevich's professional career in the United States encompassed fewer than ten years. Within this brief period, however, he probably contributed more of lasting significance to American educational theory and practice than most philosophers of education contribute in a lifetime. It was during these years that he, along with a few other educators, laid the foundations of a new philosophy of education-a philosophy that was labeled “Essentialism,” a word Demiashkevich coined in 1935 to refer to his educational point of view.

John Orville Taylor was one of many prominent educators of the eighteen thirties and forties who labored continually to win public support for popular education. One can safely infer that his efforts to muster common school support were comparable with those of his more publicized contemporaries; yet today he receives little recognition from educational historians for the part he played in laying the groundwork for the American public school.

Near the drive that leads-to the top of Monticello a simple monument marks the grave of the third President of the United States. The inscription names the three services for which Thomas Jefferson wished to be remembered: author of the Virginia Statute of Religious Liberty and of the Declaration of American Independence, and father of the University of Virginia. The first two cleared the way to new heights of spiritual and political freedom. The other envisioned a trained and dedicated leadership for an intelligent citizenry.