Elizabeth Hamilton, author of the popular Letters on Education (1801), was a strong advocate of advanced education for females. When someone suggested to her that a “triumph of reason over the passions” might be unattractive in a woman, she retorted, “I beg your pardon; I thought we were speaking of the best method of cultivating the powers of human beings. … In this I can make no distinction of sex” [italics in original]. Most writers on education in the early republic agreed with Hamilton. The majority of educators believed that males and females were both rational human beings who needed to acquire mental discipline and who were interested in learning about the world around them. Both the curricula and the pedagogical methods proposed by educational theorists in the new republic reflected these beliefs.

In The Big Test Nicholas Lemann argues provocatively that the seemingly benign use of academic merit as a principal criterion for admission to selective American colleges has had perverse effects. Selection devices like SAT scores may have given a previously under-advantaged group an admissions advantage, but that advantage cannot be fairly characterized as helping to equalize educational opportunity. Those who cannot play the academic merit game fall behind. Opportunity for all is thus not really broadened.

Academies and academy students increased substantially in number during the period from the American Revolution to the Civil War. Why? Who were these students and what did academy attendance mean to them? Theodore R. Sizer asked these questions in 1964, but his ability to answer them was limited by the absence of studies that focused on academy students. In this essay I reexamine Sizer's understanding of academies in light of evidence provided by subsequent studies of student populations. These studies include my own comparative analysis of data from nearly 500 Regents academies that operated in New York State between 1835 and 1890, as well as in-depth case studies of individual institutions by myself and others.

Life, as the poets have observed, imitates art. Nicholas Lemann has produced the most fascinating brief against meritocracy since Michael Young's 1957 novel that gave the world the term. And Lemann's critique is in a way prefigured in the populist “Chelsea Manifesto” that appears near the end of Young's The Rise of the Meritocracy:

Dignified brick and cobblestone former academies, restored as boutiques, museums, and houses, lend a romantic touch to many small towns and villages of the northern states. Seeming relics of a quaint educational past, these actually are monuments to a ubiquitous institution of nineteenth-century northern American communities, one that has slipped to the margins of public memory and inspired few histories. Historians most comfortably write about the antecedents and evolution of existing institutions. Those not leaving trails to the present pose evidentiary and conceptual problems. Just finding a word to label an institution that crosses modern categories of primary, secondary, and higher education is difficult.

The third section of Nicholas Lemann's book, The Big Test, culminates with the 1997 battle in California over Proposition 209, the antiaffirmative action amendment known as the Civil Rights Initiative. This amendment, which passed, ended racial preferences in state personnel, contracting, and college admissions decisions. This portion of Lemann's book discusses the issues of meritocracy, equal opportunity, and the politics involved in accomplishing these goals. These issues are viewed through the lens of the battle for Proposition 209 and the various individuals—“guardians”—who were beneficiaries of the open meritocracy that allowed them entrance in elite Ivy League institutions.

In 1995, Nicholas Lemann wrote an essay for the American Historical Review (AHR) in which he called himself a “non-academic historian” and described the rewards and challenges for that tribe. The Big Test should be scrutinized as the work of an historian, as this Forum does (and as I have done elsewhere, taking issue with his account of the formation of the Educational Testing Service in 1946 and 1947.) Here I will focus on the nonacademic part of Lemann's identity by comparing his work with several dozen books from his profession on American education.