Less than a minute into his 1931 Fisk University commencement speech, Woodson had already insulted his audience. “The large majority of Negroes who have put on the finishing touches of our best colleges,” Woodson said, “are all but worthless in the uplift of their people.” With this sweeping indictment of the teachers, lawyers, doctors, and other black professionals assembled before him, Woodson proceeded to catalog the inconsistencies, shortcomings, and abject failures of “Negro education.” The result was a caustic and uncompromising litany that seemed to go on forever. Negro education, Woodson charged, clung to a defunct “machine method” based on the misguided assumption that “education is merely a process of imparting information.” It failed to inspire black students and did not “bring their minds into harmony with life as they must face it.” Theories of Negro inferiority were “drilled” into black pupils in virtually every classroom they entered. And the more education blacks received, the more “estranged from the masses” they became.

The work here explores the voices of Ontario's humanist educators, who advocated for the preservation of a curriculum theory rooted in faculty psychology, mental discipline, and the classics in the face of progressivist revisions to the province's public school organization. A great deal of scholastic sweat has been poured over the subject of progressive education, its meanings, and its purposes. Much less has been said about the critics of progressivist reform, who are referred to here as humanists; this term follows from the work of Herbert Kliebard, who characterized humanists as one of four competing interests in an epic struggle over the curriculum in the United States. Theodore Christou dubbed humanists “foils” to the progressivist reformers who succeeded in overturning Ontario's Programmes of Study for the public schools. Kliebard defined this group as:

From the late nineteenth century through the first decades of the twentieth century, New York City housed two contrasting models of professional education for teachers. In 1870, the Normal College of the City of New York opened in rented quarters. Founded to prepare women to teach in the city's public schools, in just ten weeks the tuition-free, all-female college “filled to overflowing” with about 1,100 enrolled students. Based upon a four-year high school course approved by the city's Board of Education, the “chief purpose” of the college was to “encourage young women… to engage in the work of teaching in elementary and secondary schools.” Vocationally oriented and focused on practical skills, the Normal College stood in contrast to the School of Pedagogy at New York University and Teachers College, Columbia University founded in 1890 and 1898, respectively. The Normal College's neighbors situated their work within the academic traditions of the university. According to a School of Pedagogy Bulletin from 1912, faculty sought to,

In its truest sense, higher education is aimed at fostering academic achievement and educating students for good and productive citizenship. With this purpose in mind, over the past few decades there has been a proliferation of research on civic engagement. Although substantial in size and reach, the civic engagement literature is limited in terms of depth and scope. Many scholars working in this area have sought to define civic engagement as well as service learning; service learning is believed to lead to greater civic engagement and to increase educational attainment by some scholars and practitioners. Of note, this scholarship aims to defend civic engagement by providing a philosophical justification for it, reclaiming the historic civic purpose of higher education, or providing an assessment of student outcomes, including participation in protest, voting knowledge and behavior, and the impact of service learning. The civic engagement literature also demonstrates the level of engagement among undergraduate students and provides in-depth case studies of college and university initiatives to engage local communities throughout the nation. Scholars of civic engagement have focused on many different types of majority institutions, including small private colleges, state universities, land grant institutions, and private research universities. Most of these studies draw on how the unique histories of these various sectors of higher education position them for civic engagement work as well as the institutional efforts to engage local communities.