William Cobbett has been called “the spokesman of the common people” of England in the early nineteenth century. It was Cobbett who was the most important advocate of the cause of the worker on the land and in the factory during a time when conditions in England were changing more rapidly than ever before. The principal reason for this change was the new means of production, which was transforming the country into the first industrial state. Yet, while profound alterations were taking place in the economy of the nation, political and social organization were slow to respond. England, which was outstripping the rest of the world in the production of goods, was governed in almost the same fashion as it had been 100 years before when it had had a self-sufficient agricultural economy. This situation, plus the manifold effects of the wars against France, meant suffering for the most defenseless part of the population. It was this suffering which roused Cobbett to fury and led him to dedicate his powerful pen to the restoration of the materially abundant and socially tranquil conditions which he believed to have existed in his youth. It is within this policy of advocating a return to an England which was simpler and purer that we must consider his views on education.

At the 25th Anniversary of Western Colleges held at Pomona College in Claremont, California, on March 25, 1949, Dr. Robert Glass Cleland asked Ernest Moore who he thought were the leading educators in California's past. Moore replied that he would not hesitate to head the list with “John Swett, the maker of the California School System….”

After 1900 demands for a more functional education in the secondary schools were argued with growing fervor as efforts to extend and perfect the ideal of universal educational opportunity were intensified. In pamphlets, at association meetings, and through a variety of other media, one proponent after another reiterated the traditional arguments: universal education would minimize social cleavage and keep equality of opportunity open; it would bring enlightenment to the republic; it would reduce crime; and it would serve to induct an increasingly heterogeneous and growing immigrant population into American society. These arguments reflected an increasing effort to expand the common school ideal to meet the changing needs of American life.

Historians of education are today often reluctant to condemn the post-Civil War college for its resistance to the mercantile spirit or the university idea. The “inflexibility” of James McCosh, Noah Porter, or Woodrow Wilson receives recognition as a struggle “… to preserve the western cultural heritage and to inculcate a respectable form of mental discipline.” Departure from the common learning of mathematical and linguistic disciplines becomes a story of increasing disagreement and uncertainty concerning the basic principles of higher education. In the more conventional narrations sympathetic to the revolution in higher education after 1870 the revolution develops as a sharp break from the old collegiate regime rather than in continuity, context, and dialogue with that old regime. Actually, the very wealth of arguments offered by each side—whether by Noah Porter or by William Graham Sumner—suggests depth of intellectual resources within the traditional college rather than rigid inflexibility or a state of bankruptcy ripe for unthinking flight to untried novelties. In this paper an attempt is made to depict the argumentation accompanying the reception of history and science in the curriculum—the two subjects which in the judgment of William T. Harris were the most comprehensive novel forms of learning which were threatening the traditional curriculum of classics, logic, mathematics, metaphysics, theology. Familiar ideas from the classical and theological traditions played important roles in domesticating historical and scientific knowledge in the curriculum. As in the case of William Rainey Harper, the same men who pioneered in building universities could be Cassandras on the price to be paid for specialization. Both resistance and welcome offered by classics men need to be differentiated from resistance and welcome having theological roots.

An integral factor in the history of American higher education is the evolution of the textbook as an instructional device. This often ignored item can, as a matter of fact, offer insight into seemingly disparate threads of the historical process, such as the role and function of academic personnel, pedagogical techniques, and the curriculum. None of these implications will be examined here; rather, it is the purpose of this article to sketch the evolution of the text as a text.