Historians have traditionally built the early modern English state on two educational planks. One was that of a so-called new learning, renaissance humanism, coming into England shortly before hops and reformation. The entry of this new learning has been pushed back into the fifteenth century, and some have even been so discourteous as to cast aspersions upon its value. Yet it continues to attract scholarly attention.

Many schools in England have long histories, but few can rival that of Reading School, stretching from before the foundation of Reading Abbey to the present day, broken only by four years in the middle of the last century when it had to be reconstituted on a fresh site. At the time of the dissolution of the monasteries, its learned schoolmaster Leonard Cox, who was a friend of Erasmus, was given letters patent to keep on the school, and it was on this rather ad-hoc basis that the school was run for many years. In 1640, Archbishop Laud, a former pupil, endowed the school with an extra £20 per annum to assure the master of a decent salary, and arranged for triennial visitations from Oxford to check on progress. Despite these careful arrangements and endowments, the school fell on hard times, and when Dr. Valpy came to be head in 1781 he found little comfort, few sound traditions, and fewer possibilities for development.

In the 1830's and 40's America was experiencing basic and far-reaching social change derived to a large extent from the revolution wrought by industrialization. One significant area of change, the reformulation of woman's status and capabilities, has been recognized, but is too often ascribed to liberation through her possible or real role as a factory worker. A closer look, however, reveals that the woman who went into the factory as a worker was not liberated but simply shifted her work from home to factory. Her labor had always been absolutely necessary to keep her family economically solvent; where she had woven cloth and produced the necessary family goods at home, she now wove cloth in a factory and used her income to purchase the necessities. This woman lost neither function nor focus in her life. It was rather the middle-class woman who was most seriously affected by industrialization. Machine-produced goods replaced the goods she had once provided for her family and perhaps even deprived her of a pin money sideline “job.” Unlike her working-class sister, she could not take a job because incipient social standards demanded her idleness as a status symbol for her husband. As desire for status increased, a man who could afford it even relieved his wife of household duties by hiring domestic servants. All of this increased her financial dependence on her husband, took away her feeling of usefulness to the family, and gave her increased leisure time to reflect on her problems and needs.

Although the Talmudic Academies of Sura and Pumbeditha in Babylonia ceased to function almost one thousand years ago, their contributions to Jewish learning and to Jewish unity have so impressed contemporary Jews that they still recite the ancient prayer, Yekum Purkan, as part of the traditional Sabbath morning service in behalf of “our scholars and teachers in the land of Israel and in the land of Babylon, the heads of the academies and of the chiefs of the captivity….” As early as A.D. 220, Abba-Arika founded the renowned academy which was to flourish for eight centuries. Later, Sura's great rival, Pumbeditha, gave Jewish scholars another Talmudic center for research and teaching, and from both of these celebrated academies, inspirational messages flowed unceasingly to the Jewish communities throughout the Diaspora. The early sages of Sura, the Amoraim, devoted themselves to Talmudic interpretation, and their successors, the Savoraim, judged the Talmud and enlarged it considerably. At the beginning of the seventh century, the Massoretic scholars added even greater glory to the academies by making further contributions in both schools to their great project of supplying vowel points and accents to the Biblical text.

This writer discovered recently that a 1624 edition of Isaac Habrecht's Janua Linguarum Quadrilinguis was bought by the University of Pennsylvania from the collection of Professor Paul Monroe of Columbia University in 1928. Unfortunately, the volume was catalogued under the wrong author, John Amos Comenius, for forty years.