Across the educational world today stretches an iron curtain which the professional educationists are busily fashioning. Behind it, in slave-labor camps, are the classroom teachers, whose only hope of rescue is from without. On the hither side lies the free world of science and learning, menaced but not yet conquered. A division into two educational worlds is the great danger that faces us today. American intellectual life is threatened because the first twelve years of formal schooling in the United States are falling more and more completely under the policy-making control of a new breed of educator who has no real place in—who does not respect and who is not respected by—the world of scientists, scholars, and professional men.

Jeffrey Brooks deals with one of the most significant, yet still relatively unexamined aspects of change in late imperial Russia—the advent of mass literacy and a popular readership. Penetration of a market economy, the peasantry's increasing administrative integration after the serf emancipation, migration to cities, temporarily or permanently, all compelled the rural population to place a greater premium on literacy as a tool for survival. Additionally, and this is Brooks's focus, literacy provided peasants and former peasants a key to an imaginative world of cheap commercial fiction in which they sought not only recreation, but orientation amid a rapidly changing, complex environment and affirmation of new values, aspirations, and dreams that many of them were beginning to internalize by the turn of the century. When Russia Learned to Read is nothing less than an attempt to plumb collective popular mentalités during this period, largely by reading what lower-class Russians read. The author's conclusions are provocative, if not definitive, and should force us to rethink some of our assumptions about popular attitudes on the eve of the revolutions of 1917.

Donald Spivey's The Politics of Miseducation is a historical case study of the transfer of American “industrial education” to a small Liberian school. It is also an institutional history and a contribution to the literature of comparative and international education.