“The true end of the education of women,” said a writer in the Contemporary Review in 1866, “is making good wives and mothers,” and similar assertions can be found scattered through the writings and speeches of almost all the nineteenth-century commentators on the education of women. On the face of it, one would assume that those expressing this view were unequivocally committed to the definitions of femininity of their period, either the domestic ideology of the first half of the century or the social Darwinism of the period after 1870, and therefore belonged to a conservative wing of the movement for the education of women. Yet this statement of their aims can be found in the writings of the whole spectrum of those interested in educational change: protofeminists like Mary Wollstonecraft and Emily Davies, comparative conservatives like Hannah More and Dorothea Beale, those defined by Sara Delamont as separatists who wanted to develop a specifically female curriculum and academic structure, and those she calls uncompromising who wanted to make the girls' curriculum identical with the boys’.

As primary civilizing forces, science and formal education have achieved a position of dominance and prestige in modern society. In the United States, efforts to institutionalize these two cultural commitments became especially strong during the decades preceding the Civil War. Historians of science, such as Robert Bruce, have argued that the antebellum period saw the “launching” of American science. During the years before the Civil War, many institutional forms were established, patterns of patronage were begun, and the scientific community was organized around professional ideals. Writing about the same period, historians of education have stressed the origins of government-supported common school systems, the rise of educational professionals and professional societies, and the growth of specialized training in higher education. Despite these parallel concerns, there has been little exploration of the place of science in educational reforms of this period or of the importance of education in efforts to upgrade the antebellum scientific community.

In the late years of the nineteenth century Barnard and Teachers College were formally incorporated as part of Columbia University. The addition of Barnard and Teachers College to the Columbia system figured within a broad plan to revitalize and transform Columbia from a small, provincial college into a prominent “metropolitan university.” The trend in higher education in the post-Civil War years was toward the development of the modern university; and Columbia rapidly moved in that direction under the leadership of Seth Low, who was president of the university from 1890 to 1901, and later under Nicholas Murray Butler, whose administration spanned the years 1901–45. By the early years of the twentieth century, Columbia had become a complex institution, supporting graduate research, professional education, specialized studies in the arts and sciences, and claiming under its auspices a number of affiliated colleges, and educational and cultural agencies.

I first began to think about boundaries, although not about bridges, and the history of education when my first Ph.D. advisee walked into my office sixteen years ago to tell me about her dissertation topic. “I'm going to look at the history of the world to see who got educated, who didn't get educated, and why,” she announced. I was horrified. Needless to say, I soon persuaded her to abandon her boundless, boundaryless, topic for a neat “do-able” one with clearly defined boundaries of time, place, and subject. Two years later, my student had her degree. Sixteen years later, I am having second thoughts. What might she have produced if I had not fenced her in?

Contemporary Americans are experiencing an orgy of anxiety over material matters. There are books announcing the imminent demise of American economic supremacy in the world. There are prophets of doom announcing that material resources are dwindling and/or being appropriated by foreign nationals seeking to dominate our land. There is a national lament over the quality of work being done in the nation's manufactories, and there is a sense of moral outrage over the work habits of American laborers. There is high distress over the intellectual qualities of the nation's youth, and there is an outpouring of reports calling America's teachers to task. The calls for educational reform are not calls for justice or equality, but for technological productivity, military superiority, economic dominance, and cultural supremacy. Ironically, the reports call on schools to enhance the economic position of the United States, while urging a retreat from vocational emphases in the schools. Many calls for reform advocate new alliances among industry, government, and public schools, but champion a return to a traditional core curriculum or the imposition of national examinations as a solution.

As the twentieth century opened, many corporate leaders viewed with dismay the failure of manual training and trade schools to supply an army of skilled workers. Business people especially disliked industrial education programs offered through public school systems, and targeted trade unions and educators alike for criticism. Thomas E. Donnelley of R. R. Donnelley and Sons in Chicago, for example, charged that labor unions gained “representation upon the board of managers (of public schools) for the avowed purpose of seeing that their own monopolistic advantages are not jeopardized.” The chief educational spokesman for the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) characterized public education as “an incapable, semi-ignorant, headless jumble.” The problem, he claimed, stemmed from the training of “the schoolmaster… [who was] uninformed in the needs and direction of the School of Life.”

An examination of the Protestant women's home mission enterprise at the turn of this century offers an opportunity to chart the process by which women reformers came to redefine the responsibilities of civil government, a crucial first step in the fashioning of a welfare state. More importantly, it provides insight into the alteration of the existing social relations between different ethnic groups. The welfare state was not just the creation of one class, or one group, of social reformers. Like those who provided social services, those who received the services played a central role in their development. In her critique of the argument that welfare agencies were little more than instruments of social control, Linda Gordon has written that the “social control experience was not a simple two-sided tradeoff in which the client sacrificed autonomy and control in return for some material help. Rather, the clients helped shape the nature of the social control itself.” Gordon concludes that we err in thinking of the “welfare state” only as a “campaign spearheaded by elites,” and in so doing may overlook the “pressure” that clients or recipients exerted for these welfare reforms. The welfare state was not just a paternalistic agency of social control but was also a means by which oppressed groups could gain greater autonomy and empowerment.

Turn-of-the-century women, armed with college or professional education, encountered many barriers as they attempted to enter the professions. Although circumstances in such male-dominated areas as science and medicine differed from the feminized fields of nursing and librarianship, some similarities existed. Margaret Rossiter, in Women Scientists in America, revealed that colleges and universities were more willing to educate than employ female scientists and, as a result, women developed several strategies to infiltrate the field. The most successful approach was segregation, both topical (women gained control over such feminine areas as home economics and hygiene/physical education) and hierarchical (women gained employment as lab assistants under male supervision). Medicine, according to Gloria Moldow, provided an even greater challenge to women who wished to become doctors. Although marginal medical schools welcomed them as students, female graduates encountered great difficulties as they sought legitimation from hospitals and professional associations directed by men. Moreover, after 1900, these associations successfully drove the less-orthodox areas of medicine from the profession.

The history of literacy in Russia may be divided into four periods: 1) the Kievan, from the tenth to the thirteenth centuries (before the Mongol invasion); 2) the medieval (Muscovite), from the middle of the thirteenth to the end of the seventeenth centuries; 3) the imperial, from the eighteenth century to 1917; and 4) the Soviet, after 1917. For each of these periods distinctive sources have been preserved that call for special handling and methodologies.

Over the past decade, an increasing number of researchers in North America, Britain, and South America have become interested in the history of art education. Their work has had little impact on general educational history but high visibility in the art education network. In addition to numerous journal articles, there have been several books and seven international conferences on the topic since the early 1980s. Prior to then, however, very little was written about the subject, or at least very little that was new. Art education historiography has never had its Bernard Bailyn or its Lawrence Cremin, or even its Ellwood Cubberley. But in the United States it did have someone who served one of Cubberley's functions: to provide subsequent historians with a set, narrow interpretive framework. That person was Isaac Edwards Clarke.

In 1965 Laurence Veysey published what has remained the definitive study of the transformation of the American university in the late nineteenth century. Over twenty-five years later, there is as yet no similarly comprehensive history of what could be called the second transformation of the university—the emergence of the post—World War II “multiversity.” There is, however, a large literature on the postwar university, both appreciative and critical, from which has emerged the generally accepted account of this transformation. This account idealizes the prewar university as a tightly knit community of scholars and scientists, dedicated to the expansion and transmission of knowledge, and portrays the university's postwar transformation, through federal support for research, into a disparate collection of scientists and scholars sharing only the goals of serving a variety of publics and advancing their own careers. If the prevailing image of the prewar university has been the “ivory tower,” the postwar image has been the federally funded laboratory, staffed with researchers who are exempt from, or little interested in, teaching, and who work in large groups with expensive scientific equipment.

This forum on the nature of American Education in the twentieth century revolves around the major themes in Paula S. Fass's Outside In: Minorities and the Transformation of American Education (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989). Because of the diverse subjects explored and analyzed in Outside In, the editors of the HEQ invited three leading scholars to respond to the volume, and Professor Pass also kindly agreed to reply to their commentaries. We are extremely grateful to Professors V. P. Franklin of Drexel University; Lynn D. Gordon of the University of Rochester; Maxine Schwartz Seller of the University at Buffalo, State University of New York; and, of course, Paula S. Fass of the University of California at Berkeley, for their willingness to share their perspectives on a broad range of issues with our readers.

Author's note: This essay, intended to commemorate the thirtieth anniversary of the publication of Transformation of the School (New York, 1961), was nearly complete when news came of Lawrence Cremin's sudden, tragic death in early September 1990. I had written it in the present tense, as though Cremin were alive, and for that matter, as though Transformation represented his current views. I can see no good reason for changing it. For many—perhaps most—historians of education, Lawrence Cremin will continue to represent a vital intellectual force for years to come. I prefer to let this review stand in its original form as a tribute to the enduring quality of his contributions to our field.