At the Reformation the possibilities of the printed book as a means of educating members of the laity, young and adult alike, in their religious and political obligations, were quickly recognized by those in authority. But the state church soon found itself faced with the problem that perennially faces every educator who teaches his pupil a prescribed skill only to find it used for a purpose that is not approved. In this case authority faced a threefold problem. Armed with the skill of reading for itself, a literate laity would first of all be able to interpret what it read—and especially a vernacular Bible—in a possibly heterodox fashion. Secondly, it would now be able to read nonapproved productions of the printing press—and there were plenty of these. Thirdly and more importantly, it would be able to read such books and pass on such interpretations to the illiterate laity, the mass of the people, who hitherto had heard only the received word handed down by the clergy. The printing press had become, to some at least, a doubtful ally, even a political enemy. Margaret Spufford has already clearly demonstrated that there was a ready market for the wide range of “small books”—whether “godly” or “merry”—which printers were producing for a wide social spectrum of readers. Our concern here is with the negative nature of the response of those in authority to one part of that literature, “false fonde bookes, ballades and rimes,” a response which was to be found in all denominations of the Christian church, and put forward on both moral and political grounds, for layman and cleric alike saw such books as attacking the roots of social stability within a divinely ordained, hierarchical social structure.

During the last two decades the material and ideological processes by which schooling has assisted in the formation and reproduction of classes have formed an important theme in a burgeoning historical and sociological literature on the relationship between schooling and capitalism. In South Africa these structures and processes of schooling and socialization have differed from those elsewhere in that they have contributed to the reproduction of classes that are broadly racially defined. It is usual to trace the origins of apartheid education to the introduction of Bantu education. This article will show that the introduction of a racially divided system of education, playing its part in shaping a dispossessed and exploited black working class and a privileged and racist white ruling bloc, long predates the introduction of the Bantu Education Act of 1953. It is rooted in the pattern and dynamics of the particular form of South African capital accumulation, specifically the rapid growth and expansion of the gold-mining industry after 1886.

History is constructed reality; yet, as historians we often select material and shape our interpretations without self-analysis. We assume that because we were educated to be objective, we undertake our research, analysis, and interpretation in an objective manner. We rarely question why we have chosen a particular issue to investigate or how far our understanding of the body politic existing in our own day colors our interpretation of institutions and events in the past. Once we have established ourselves in our field, how often do we change our perspectives, or even our focus? How often do we incorporate new ideas, or new perspectives, into our interpretations of the past? Only occasionally, I believe. Sometimes, though, when we read ideas that differ radically from our own, we may begin to interpret our own research data using a different lens or a different focus. Sometimes, we may begin to search for new material in order to investigate an issue, using perhaps a telephoto lens to probe into it more deeply than we had originally intended. And sometimes, we may even change our topic of investigation, swinging our camera to capture a fresh aspect of reality.

The appointment of an Ad Hoc Reform Council, or Rinkyoshin, on 21 August 1984 was a logical culmination to a lengthy period of concern in Japan over a set of widely perceived educational problems and the future prospects for Japanese education. The charge given to the council by Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone was clear: “to consider basic strategies for necessary reforms… so as to secure such education as will be compatible with the social changes and cultural developments of our country.” The prime minister went on to remind council members that “if our nation is to build up a society that is full of vitality and creativity as well as relevant to the 21st century, it is a matter of great urgency to design necessary reforms.”

In recent years, historians of higher education have mercifully taken us beyond the pinched and narrow conventional view of the nineteenth-century college curriculum to a more meaningful contextual interpretation of that much maligned institution. In the process they have reinterpreted the “Old College's” principal manifesto: the Yale Report of 1828. Earlier studies had depicted the Yale Report as either a document cementing a collegiate education to the past or as one aimed at maintaining “a numerically tiny social elite against the hostile pressure of a rising Jacksonian equalitarianism.” Recent studies have revised this interpretation, on the one hand by arguing that the report simply reaffirmed the liberal arts as taught through the classical curriculum, and on the other by contending that it was “actually a thoughtful, responsible attempt to consider the place of the undergraduate college in the totality of the American educational scheme.” Instead of representing the last “bulwark of educational reactionism, elitism, and authoritarianism,” the revisionists argue, the report did not significantly differ “in its essentials from the vision held by most of America's foremost champions of university reform.”

The South has long represented a distinct and enduring subculture in American society. Its uniqueness stems in part from the overwhelming strength of evangelical Protestantism in the region, a monolithic religious presence unmatched elsewhere in the United States, save in Utah. At the turn of the twentieth century, the pervasive influence of the Methodist and Baptist denominations was even more pronounced than it is today. The intense religiosity of southern society and culture contributed significantly to the failure of southern higher education to conform to the pattern of change characteristic of other regions after the Civil War. Elsewhere, secular ideals of utility and research displaced the older educational values of piety and mental discipline and outdistanced the rival conception of liberal culture, and universities eclipsed colleges in importance. In contrast, colleges continued to dominate education in the South, and the higher learning there adhered to a different philosophy, liberal Christian education, a distinctive amalgam which remained committed to the central importance of religious and moral principles.

Hundreds of American Indian children attended schools run by the Board of Foreign Missions (BFM) of the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America (PCUSA) during the nineteenth century. Yet these young Indians left little written evidence from which to reconstruct their responses to an alien educational experience. Presbyterian missionaries, on the other hand, sent detailed reports on the schools and pupils to headquarters in New York. If subjected to careful analysis, the admittedly partisan BFM writings are a rich source for discovering how Indian pupils responded to their teachers and to the whole BFM program.

Historical research has contributed to our understanding of the evolution of juvenile justice and public school bureaucracies. Yet, these institutions remain an enigma as long as the rules guiding their actors cannot be identified with law, professional standards, or policy. Sociologists have used participant observation to disclose such “informal” or “backstage” understandings and rules, which are shared by organizational actors but not with the public. However, participant observation is limited, notably in its absence of historical and systemic perspectives. Because backstage rules have a history and are symbiotically related to bureaucratic evolution, a historical perspective may also contribute to unraveling this enigmatic aspect of public bureaucracies.

As appropriate as research is as the focus of energies and resources in the research university, the exclusive concern with research in the training of recipients of the Ph.D. degree—to the neglect of any concern with teaching or with any professional responsibility other than to scholarship—has encouraged college faculties to abandon the sense of corporate responsibility that characterized professors of the pre-professional era.

(From Integrity in the College Curriculum: A Report to the Academic Community, 1985, by a committee of the Association of American Colleges.)

The character of the urban school has been shaped by the processes of democracy, law, bureaucracy, professionalism, and the market. These identify important but very different rule regimes, each with its own “action logic.” The concurrent exercise of these diverse regimes—not moderated by a common culture—implies conflict in the urban school's organizational evolution. Other difficulties are implied by the heterogeneity of the common school and job market transformations as well as by political pluralism.

Thirty years ago, Merle Curti ventured that “philanthropy has been one of the major aspects of and keys to American social and cultural development.” It was an apt, challenging, and important observation that was not immediately heeded and has yet to be sufficiently pursued. With Curti's comment in mind, I should like to sketch the development of a politics that took shape in the United States in the early twentieth century, and then to explore a number of relationships between that politics and some of the early activities of one of the large, grant-making foundations established before the First World War—the Carnegie Corporation of New York. Although the argument I shall present derives from a close study of only one foundation, the history of the Carnegie Corporation crosses and even merges with the history of many other institutions, including other foundations, and is inseparable from ideas, national trends, and both national and international events that have touched American society generally. What is more, the size, the longevity, the broad scope, the effectiveness, and the concern for responsible philanthropy that have always characterized the Carnegie Corporation have made it a leader and even a model for many of its peers. To some degree at least, then, in considering relationships between Carnegie Corporation philanthropy and what I shall call the politics of knowledge, one is also considering the validity of Curti's “hypothetical” claim. One is asking, not only whether, but, more importantly, how philanthropic foundations have achieved the significance Curti attributed to them.

The recent opening of the Horace Mann Bond Papers to scholars, along with publication of an article on Bond's early career which used those papers, should spark renewed interest in the work of this noted teacher, scholar, and educational administrator. Visitors to the Bond Papers, housed at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, will find a wealth of unpublished and published material relating to many notable events in the educational history of the twentieth century. Bond's interests were broad, encompassing both humanistic and social scientific approaches to the educational and social problems of blacks. He wrote noted critiques of the mental testing movement at several stages of his long career, did historical research for the plaintiffs in the Brown v. Topeka school desegregation suit, and traveled extensively to Africa and studied its civilizations in the later stages of his career.

The national discussion about the future of American education and the teaching profession continues with the 1986 publication of two major reports: A Nation Prepared: Teachers for the Twenty-first Century and Tomorrow's Teachers: A Report of the Holmes Group. These reports, by the Carnegie Forum on Education and the Economy and by the Holmes Group, respectively, agree that the key to educational improvement is to create a career ladder for teachers which recognizes and rewards excellence, but they disagree over which group—practitioners or professors—we should look to for the advancement of professional knowledge and technique. The Carnegie Forum looks to the experience of outstanding teachers in the schools while the Holmes Group seeks to reassert the role of faculty in research universities in setting professional standards.

The essays below continue a debate that began with the publication of Michael B. Katz, The Irony of Early School Reform: Educational Innovation in Mid-Nineteenth Century Massachusetts (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1968). One celebrated part of this important work was a study of the controversy over the public high school in Beverly, Massachusetts, including a close analysis of the vote in 1860 to abolish the school. The occasion for these essays is the publication of Maris A. Vinovskis, The Origins of Public High Schools: A Reexamination of the Beverly High School Controversy (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1985). The first essay is a review of the Vinovskis study by Katz, now professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania; the second is a review by Edward Stevens, Jr., professor of education at Ohio University; the third is a response to these reviews by Vinovskis, professor of history and research scientist at the Center for Political Studies at the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan.