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.

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.

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.

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.”