The First World War placed a high premium on the patriotism and efficiency of all sectors of British society. Sooner or later all the nation's resources, including transportation, mines, and factories, were placed under strict government control, and the lives of all its people subjected to a degree of central regulation undreamed of prior to 1914. Thousands of ordinary elementary schools provided most of the nation's industrial and agricultural workers and fighting men. Inexorably, and perhaps inevitably, during the four years of continual crisis these schools sought to inculcate attitudes that would strengthen national resolve and to intensify activities contributing materially to the war effort. Indeed, the schools became totally subject to the demands of war, and rightly so in most people's eyes.

Historians of education have long been interested in determining who attended school in the nineteenth-century United States. In a period of rapidly increasing expenditures on education, not all residents shared equally in the benefits. Knowing who attended school is a crucial first step toward an assessment of the opportunities education afforded to nineteenth-century Americans, as well as measurement of the returns the new investment produced for the American economy as a whole.

More than two decades of interest in the history of American women as college students have recently culminated in a trio of notable books. Barbara Miller Solomon's In the Company of Educated Women: A History of Women and Higher Education in America, Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz's Campus Life: Undergraduate Cultures from the End of the Eighteenth Century to the Present, and Lynn D. Gordon's Gender and Higher Education in the Progressive Era all use a rich variety of sources to bring to life the experiences of generations of women undergraduate students, mainly at prestigious colleges and large state universities. While the authors have different emphases, they share a commitment to making sense of college experiences through alumnae memoirs, letters, yearbooks, and works of fiction, as well as more conventional sources. Their inquiries intersect in their analyses of life for women on coeducational campuses during the Progressive Era and earlier years. Together, Solomon, Horowitz, and Gordon present a cohesive picture of “coeds” whose lives were entirely controlled by the Victorian notion of separate gender spheres. The “outsiders” of the first generation espoused traditional values, studied hard, and remained on the sidelines during extracurricular activities. Beginning in the 1890s, women of the second generation proclaimed that, like men, they could devote themselves to “college” life; adhering to a separate spheres ideology, they created student government, clubs, and activity groups for women only. Solomon, Horowitz, and Gordon portray a form of education in which male and female students stayed entirely apart—education that did not warrant the prefix “co.”

“Athletics is the universal language,” an editorialist asserted in the Howard University campus newspaper in the spring of 1924. “By and through it we hope to foster a better and more fraternal spirit between the races in America and so to destroy prejudices; to learn and to be taught; to facilitate a universal brotherhood.” Such sentiments had been enunciated since the turn of the century. But it was during the interwar years that the athletic ideal resonated most intensely for various commentators on the prospects for racial reform. Capturing the belief shared by numerous African American leaders that the football gridiron and baseball diamond, the track oval, and even the boxing ring offered significant platforms for proving equality, the Howard student writer carefully articulated the widespread desire that black athletes might engage white society in a broad-based dialogue about democratic principles and practices. Ideally, the success of African Americans in sport would provide powerful lessons in “interracial education.”

The history textbook reform in Allied Occupied Japan, 1945–52, was one of the major education policies designed to demilitarize and democratize pre-collegiate Japanese education. Since 1952, however, both history textbooks and the textbook system that certifies them have been extremely controversial. In the post-Occupation period Japan's Asian neighbors have criticized Japanese history textbooks for covering up Japanese wartime aggression in Asia. And in Japan textbook writers and teachers have repeatedly challenged the textbook certification system as unconstitutional. Ironically, the leading protestor was the very historian who had contributed to writing the first reformed history textbook under the guidance of the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers (SCAP). Although the purpose of this article is to highlight and analyze the issues involved in the textbook reform, it also proposes to show how education policies became embedded in larger political and ideological concerns, how Japanese society resolved its textbook conflict, and how academic issues and educators were used and abused in the process of public school textbook writing.

In 1929 the University of Toronto inaugurated a two-year diploma course in physiotherapy. This decision, the university stated, had come “in response to requests of organizations and individuals interested” in the establishment of such a course. Indeed, the course resulted from the sustained efforts of a group of energetic women during the previous decade. These women were committed to building a new “women's profession” in the health sector. In Canada the occupation of physiotherapy emerged from the Great War, as part of the federal government's commitment to the rehabilitation of returning wounded and disabled soldiers. Founded in 1920, the Canadian Association of Massage and Remedial Gymnastics (CAMRG) was a direct outgrowth of the communication links, social bonds, and relationships that were formed by those pioneer practitioners who served during wartime, the large majority of whom were women. The CAMRG leaders then set out to establish high educational standards for practitioners. Hence, they promoted the creation of a university-level course, which was perceived as a direct path toward professional status.

In an earlier study, an examination of the educational content of the African American monthly press between 1900 and 1930, I was surprised to find meager commentary on issues related to black teachers or on the conditions and practice of teaching in African American schools. For example, the periodicals contained only two full-length articles, both published before 1908, on the National Association of Teachers in Colored Schools (NATCS), the most prestigious African American educational organization of the period and aspirant to the title of black NEA. Likewise, the journals virtually ignored the social roles of teachers, rarely highlighting them as role models or lauding their community contributions. Why these omissions occurred is a matter of conjecture, though I speculated in the earlier work that the reasons were associated with the journals' middle-class orientation, which celebrated higher educational achievements by the race more than dwelling upon the deplorable conditions enveloping black common schooling during this troubled time. Given this framework, issues concerning African American teachers were neglected to the extent that a variety of concerns involving black common schooling were glossed over as well.

In 1900 John Dewey delivered the presidential address to the American Psychological Association (APA) urging his colleagues to adopt scientific methods as the foundation for their work. Psychology, he offered, would “afford [them] insight into the conditions which control the formation and execution of aims, and thus enable human effort to expend itself sanely, rationally, and with assurance.” His address proved an apt greeting to the new century, for it portended the acceptance of social scientific knowledge as the foundation for social reform. But Dewey also alluded to the limitations of the social science professions and the role of experts in the years ahead, warning that “psychology will never tell us just what to do ethically, nor just how to do it.” The question, then, of who would determine the ethical uses of social scientific knowledge and its formulation into public policy in a democratic and bureaucratic society plagued Dewey as the century unfolded. This essay explores Dewey's concerns about the potential threat to democratic community posed by dependence upon experts as policymakers.

Ever since Arthur Jensen touched off the so-called “IQ controversy” with his famous 1969 article in the Harvard Educational Review, most spokesmen for the educational aspirations of minorities and the lower classes have been highly critical of mental testing. Jensen's determination that 80 percent of the variability in IQ scores was due to innate, genetic factors and his suggestion that little could be done to increase a person's IQ substantially raised fears that support for compensatory education programs, such as Head Start, would be undermined. Consequently, critics began to challenge the assumptions of the testing profession and to explore the harmful effects of testing in the schools, concluding that these instruments restricted the educational opportunities of minority and underprivileged students.

The matter of religion and the schools has again surfaced in the public forum, both in Canada and the United States. Public officials, private groups, and individual parents have shown renewed interest in the place of religion in education. The decline of established religion, the erosion of personal religious involvement, and the increased ignorance of the historical role of religion have been linked to its absence in the public schools. Furthermore, some see the waning of public morality and Christian values as reciprocally related to the complete secularization of public education. All of this has sparked intense debate. Concern regarding a religiously hollow curriculum, an absence of moral guidance, and a lack of spiritual vision in public education is growing. Also on the rise is the number of parents choosing private schools, even home schooling, for their children.

In the middle of the twentieth century, the white elites who controlled public education in the South stood at a racial crossroads. Facing increasingly insistent demands for equality and access from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), political and educational leaders had to choose between accommodation and resistance. Pressure from the NAACP and the courts did bring important accommodations, but in significant, and still unexamined, ways the white South chose to resist. The most durable resistance to the challenges posed by the NAACP's legal campaign came not in the courts or in politics but within educational institutions. While the South's legal and political defense of racial discrimination and segregation ultimately collapsed, resistance inside schools endured. Beginning in the 1940s, shrewd southern elites institutionalized new, more legally defensible forms of discrimination and inequality that continue to define educational arrangements in the region today.