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.

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.

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.)