Contentious public debates about women's rational and moral capacity circulated during the European Enlightenment at the same time that science was emerging as a dominant mode of inquiry. As historian Karen Offen argues in European Feminisms, these debates preoccupied both men and women intellectuals of the middling and upper classes and represented a pivotal moment in the three-century campaign to rearticulate a politics of knowledge proclaiming women as deserving as men of formal schooling at all levels. Disputes about women's capabilities emerged in the context of efforts to redefine the rights and privileges of men, of male intellectuals to reassert male dominance over and control of females’ access to intellectual participation as well as the craft guilds associated with women's work, and of men and women to consider the meaning and structure of social institutions and social systems. The German poet Philippine Engelhard captured women's frustrations with the limits imposed upon them in comparison to men in the context of the formation of the liberal state, the development of the middle class, and the growth of humanistic and scientific inquiry:

In the late 1960s, the all-male Phi Delta Kappa and the parallel all-female organization, Pi Lambda Theta, faced local and national pressures to abandon their single-sex status and become coeducational. Demands for the sex integration of both fraternities from university students, from educational and women's associations, and from universities responding to governmental censures to eliminate sex discrimination forced Pi Lambda Theta (PLT) and Phi Delta Kappa (PDK) to examine the purpose and organization of single-sex associations in American professional and collegiate life. For Phi Delta Kappa and, in particular, Pi Lambda Theta, the advent of coeducational membership led to direct competition between the formerly cooperative men's and women's groups. Thus, the elimination of sex segregation in the education fraternities ended approximately fifty years of cooperation and an alliance that promoted the professional distinctions between all educators and those in the separate but parallel Phi Delta Kappa and Pi Lambda Theta.

If any Belgian educator belongs to the canon of the New Education, it is certainly Ovide Decroly (1871–1932). Particularly in southern Europe and in many Latin American countries, the ideas and the work of this French-speaking Brussels doctor have been inspirational for a movement that projected itself worldwide—albeit in different modes—as the “child-oriented,” “progressive” alternative to the rigid, traditional school. As recent research has shown, this movement manifested itself primarily by means of the development of its own language and discourse in which the “new school” was projected into a “new” society. However, ultimately, it turned out that the “new” did not involve a radical break with the modernizing trends from which it emerged and that it wanted to combat. Without going further into the discussion of its success or failure, about continuity and discontinuity of discourse and movement, we want to show that the construction of the self-discourse of the New Education was largely determined by the extolling of its own merits. We will do this via the example of Ovide Decroly. This extolling was generally done by epigones who, from the immediate circle of often charismatic school reformers, gazed in wonder on the work of the Master (or Mistress) and ascribed to his or her “method” an authenticity that it did not actually have.

The history of teaching and learning via television has compressed into a half-century many of the same stages and themes of the larger story of common schooling in the United States. Responding to a variety of public, private, and foundation interests in the post-World War II period, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) set aside 242 television frequencies for noncommercial educational purposes in 1952. Three decades earlier, the Federal Radio Commission (FRC) had asserted a need for broadcasting to serve a common good for the broad public and civic interest. During the 1920s, nonnetworked educational radio stations were formed on various college and university campuses.