The American introduction of a youth program in postwar Germany was exceptional in German history. Youth experts in the American Military Government introduced public youth work that was unprecedented in both form and degree. The program was only loosely executed by public administrators and excluded only those youth who had held responsible positions in Hitler Youth and the League of German Girls. The American intention to place German youth work in the hands of the youth themselves—a feature of American youth policy that was unique to the German experience—compares favorably with present-day standards. The Americans developed a youth policy and implemented it through a program which, in the long run, achieved notable success.

The Petersburg Benevolent Mechanics' Association (PBMA) was founded on 4 January 1825 by a group of mechanics “for a closer union, for mental improvement, for the promotion of mechanical arts and sciences and for benevolent and charitable purposes.” PBMA members worked in a vibrant, burgeoning economy; by 1830, Petersburg, Virginia, was a wealthy, diverse manufacturing town, with a population of 3,440 whites, 2,032 free blacks, and 2,850 slaves. It was the fourth largest city in Virginia and one of the larger towns south of the Mason-Dixon line.

In chapter 13 of Leviathan (“Of the Natural Condition of Mankind as Concerning Their Felicity and Misery”), Thomas Hobbes, that great chronicler of “masterless men” in a competitive market economy, graphically describes the fear and anxiety that pervade life in a state of nature. Hobbes begins by noting that “the natural condition of man” is marked by natural equality, competition, diffidence, and vanity and that life in a competitive society of self-directing individuals is one of constant competition for power, wealth, and glory. Life, Hobbes insists, is a zero-sum contest—a competitive race with all the prizes going to the winners. “The comparison of [the] life of man to a race,” he writes in The Elements of Law, “holdeth so well for our purpose. This race we must suppose to have no other goal, nor other garland, but being foremost.” If it were not for “that great LEVIATHAN … that mortal God … to which we owe … peace and defense,” competition, ambition, and greed would plummet society back into a state of nature and a life that is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.”

With the election of a Republican-controlled Congress in 1994, new questions are being raised about the federal role in education. Some members of Congress, for example, are questioning the need for a U.S. Department of Education and have even introduced legislation to abolish that cabinet-level agency. While there are few indications at this time that the U.S. Department of Education will be terminated in the near future, disagreements over the proper role of the federal government in education matters have intensified. Interestingly, during the current debates over education, the topics of the federal role in research and statistics have surfaced only occasionally. Attention more often is focused on either federal aid to education or federal regulation of schools; the issue of federal funding and dissemination of research and statistics usually is ignored or discussed only in passing.

At the turn of the century, European settlers, officials, and missionaries in Southern Rhodesia were apathetic about promoting African girls' schooling. By the late 1920s, however, all sectors of the European community—settlers, officials, and missionaries—were debating whether, and for what reasons, girls should attend mission schools. Europeans discussed girls' and women's schooling as a strategy for coping with problems in the social and economic development of the region. Some Native Commissioners hoped that disciplined moral education would encourage women to remain in rural areas and take responsibility for their families, supporting the system of migrant labor. Many missionaries hoped that domestic education could train women to build peasant households in rural areas and Christian havens for educated African men. Some settlers called for servant-training programs as ways of enlisting African women's support of European society. These educational strategies for coping with tensions caused by social change proved highly contradictory, however. Ultimately, the rhetoric of social engineering was more prominent than the results in the education of girls and women in Southern Rhodesia.

Within England's system of higher education, the role of Oxford and Cambridge as defining institutions is scarcely questioned. Whether viewed from a contemporary or a historical perspective, the dreaming spires of the nation's two oldest universities dominate the landscape. More than any comparable pair of institutions in the United States, they set the standards by which all other English universities are measured. According to many accounts of the development of higher education in England, one result of Oxbridge superiority has been a propensity toward “academic drift,” a process whereby newer and/or second-rank institutions copy the curriculum and academic style of elite institutions. England's civic universities appear to have been particularly guilty of this tendency. Established during the Victorian and Edwardian eras by the nation's larger provincial towns in order to meet local needs for higher education, they initially represented a distinct alternative to the ancient universities, not only in terms of their location and the socioeconomic composition of their student bodies but also in terms of mission. Nonetheless, according to many commentators, the civics eventually abandoned their aim of creating a new model for higher education in England which stressed scientific research, practical professional training, regional service, and more open access. Citing the rising proportion of arts graduates, especially during the two decades following World War I, along with increasing pressure to provide halls of residence, modern observers such as A. H. Halsey and Roy Lowe have concluded that the newer universities renounced their original ethos, attempting instead to replicate as much as possible of the Oxbridge ideal amid the smog and squalor of their urban, industrial settings.

In 1864, the British government established the Taunton Commission to conduct an inquiry into the education of middle-class boys. Concerned about the status of the arts and sciences in the schools, the Commission directed its appointed inspectors to pay particular attention to scientific subjects. Almost as an afterthought, the Commission decided to investigate the conditions in girls' schools as well. From 1864 to 1868, inspectors traveled throughout Great Britain, observing classes, interviewing headmasters and headmistresses, and examining students in private, proprietary, and endowed schools. To their surprise, members of the Taunton Commission discovered that while the sciences maintained at best a marginal toehold in boys' schools, they were quite popular in girls' schools. While a boy's education centered around Latin and Greek, a girl's education included ample doses of botany, chemistry, natural philosophy, natural history, and physiology.

More than twenty-five years have passed since the publication of Canadian Education: A History, the most comprehensive scholarly overview of educational development in Canada. Much has happened historiographically since the early 1970s, but a new grand synthesis of Canada's educational history has not been part of this intellectual harvest. For more positive reasons than the lack of an alternative, the book has enduring value and is the place one still turns, at least initially, for lucid accounts of key events in the history of Canadian education.

Any analysis of social, cultural, and political issues in any part of the world can be instantly derailed by inserting into the discussion the comment “except in the South.” A discourse, for example, on the striving, otherworldly qualities of French Gothic architecture is brought up short with the qualification “except in the south of France.” Likewise, an analysis of political behavior in Chicago, with its ethnic diversities and rivalries, has to treat the southside of Chicago as exceptional.

Children do not simply grow up; they have to be educated in order to become decent adults. This belief inspired sermons, manuals on marriage and the family, belles-lettres, and, last but not least, genre painting in seventeenth-century Holland. This article examines this belief in the necessity of education by focusing on this last genre. Attention is directed at the power of images containing idealized educational messages for parents, and not at the reality of families and child-rearing. Significantly these paintings show that the Dutch portrayal of children was less a celebration of childhood as a unique stage of life than an attempt to show adults how children could be molded and shaped through a variety of educative processes.

The history of school reform has continuously fascinated historians of education, but their study of the subject has acquired a new urgency in the last quarter of a century as national political discussions have given an increasingly important place to educational policy. The recent publication of Tinkering toward Utopia: A Century of Public School Reform (Harvard University Press, 1995), by David Tyack and Larry Cuban, offers the latest comprehensive study of the subject. We have invited four distinguished scholars to comment on the book. They are Robert L. Hampel of the University of Delaware, William R. Johnson of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, David N. Plank of Michigan State University, and Diane Ravitch of the Brookings Institute. Professors Tyack and Cuban have, in turn, agreed to respond to the comments.