Olympia Brown came to Ohio's Antioch College in 1856 in search of a liberal education. At Mount Holyoke Female Seminary she had found too many rules and restrictions: “young ladies are not allowed to stand in the doorway”; “young ladies are not allowed to linger in the halls”; and “we never examine young ladies in Algebra.” Reared in Michigan under the influence of a mother determined to see her daughters fully educated, Brown was attracted to Antioch “by evidence of a broader spirit.” She graduated four years later and went on to become the country's first ordained female Universalist minister, a women's rights activist, and a vice president of the National Women's Suffrage Association. In the 1850s, however, she was particularly interested in what Antioch's first president, Horace Mann, described as its “Great Experiment”: coeducation.

Colleges and universities are often living monuments to their founders, as either the school or its buildings bear their benefactor's name. Institutional histories, statues, paintings, plaques, biographies, and campus publications tell the college's story—from humble beginnings to present-day glories, praising the generosity, wisdom, and vision of the founder. Such is not the case, however, with Barnard College, the women's undergraduate division of Columbia University, and one of the prestigious Seven Sisters. The college took its name from Frederick A. P. Barnard, tenth president of Columbia (1864–1888). President Barnard had, before his death, wished the new institution well, but took no part in establishing it. In fact, he preferred and worked for coeducation at Columbia, and his family initially objected to the college's use of his name. If not Frederick Barnard, then who founded the college? The answer to that question depends very much upon whom you ask.

In the last two decades the field of social history, including the study of ethnic minorities and education, has undergone a renaissance. Historical studies, for example, have expanded traditional notions of the concept “education” to include all institutions that “educate,” have provided critical interpretations of the public school's evolution and function in an advanced capitalist society, and have shed new light on continuing issues in American education. Historical studies on ethnic minority groups, and especially Chicanos, have also been done, many of them by minority group members themselves. These new published works have increased our understanding of the process of immigration, illuminated the nature of conflict—racial, cultural, social, economic—in the Chicano community, and provided data on the origins and development of Chicano barrios throughout the Southwest. Despite the renaissance in the historical studies of both minorities and public education in the United States, little has been written on the educational past of Chicanos. As late as 1985, for example, not one single book providing an interpretation of their experiences in the schools had been published.

A few introductory comments may help the Western reader decode the following article, written by the director of the Laboratory for the History of Education under the Academy of Pedagogical Sciences in Moscow. Although the tone of the article makes clear that Dneprov is extremely dissatisfied with conditions in his area of history (and the stridency of his criticism of Soviet scholarship is in itself somewhat unusual), he must often resort to indirect and elliptical comment to make his basic points. Dneprov is representative of a younger generation of Soviet scholars, well versed in the changes in methodology and content that have affected the writing of history in the West, and impatient to introduce similar directions in the Soviet Union. Even more important, Dneprov notes that Soviet scholars have made significant advances in the study of the medieval period in general—in part because historians of talent often gravitate to more remote times where the strictures of ideology are less unbending and freedom of research more prominent. Yet Soviet educational historians have made few advances in this field, which has been studied in virtual isolation from general cultural developments, and which has adhered closely to dogmatic strictures first put forth in the 1930s.