Twenty-five years ago Lawrence Cremin and Bernard Bailyn exerted a commanding influence on the field of American educational history. Between them they forged a new definition of the subject matter, studying families, churches, workplaces, and newspapers, not just schools. Some historians of education, including the present writer, did not learn this lesson very well. I defended my focus on schooling in The Evolution of an Urban School System by arguing that the big story in the nineteenth century was the transition from the informal mode of education that Bailyn had emphasized to a predominant reliance on formal schooling as an instrument of public educational policy by 1850. In Pillars of the Republic, ten years later, I again defended the focus on schooling: “If one wants to understand state policy toward education, schools are the appropriate focus. Society educates in many ways; the state educates through schools.”

Public high schools were relatively rare in antebellum America. The first public high school in the United States opened in Boston in 1821, but it was not until the late 1840s and 1850s, when there was a rapid expansion of public high schools throughout the commonwealth, that they became more common in Massachusetts. Most communities in other states, especially those outside of New England, did not provide public high schools for their teenagers.

As president of Amherst College from 1912 to 1923, noted educational reformer Alexander Meiklejohn designed and implemented a new curriculum and revitalized the teaching force of the school. At Amherst he helped to determine what the modern liberal arts college would be. Although he brought new purpose to a campus that had fallen deep into the shadows of the burgeoning private and public universities of the late nineteenth century, Meiklejohn was dismissed by Amherst's trustees in an action so steeped in controversy and rumor that the college kept all records of the proceedings sealed for the next sixty years.

Federal policy toward the Navajo tribe during the 1930s offers a revealing case in the application of social science and educational theory to minority groups in the United States. Public officials, social scientists, and educational planners worked for several years to create a form of community education that they believed would respect the ways of the tribe while accelerating its members toward political empowerment and economic well-being. For a brief time, a consensus emerged about the value of cultural pluralism as a basis for achieving the goals of public policy. The result was a remarkable interplay of social-scientific reasoning and progressive educational thought, a rhetorical breakthrough perhaps most memorable in retrospect because what was intended as an enlightened intervention soon met, and quickly succumbed to, determined resistance. To see the policy experiment in historical perspective, it is necessary to look more broadly at the migration of social scientists into the corridors of power. An unprecedented transfer of experts and expertise from academia to government took place in the 1930s and 1940s, an infusion so dramatic in its effects that more social scientists worked for the federal government during those years than ever before in the history of the United States. World War II brought many of them to officialdom, but the way had been opened for these “service intellectuals,” as Richard S. Kirkendall called them, by a vast expansion of public bureaucracy during the 1930s.