Hebrews 11:1 (KJV)

First, I would like to thank all of the people who placed me in this position. What you did not know was I had no idea I would actually be in this situation. So, I come before you today with what is on my mind and in my heart. Many years ago, my husband Dr. Lewis A. Randolph told me I would be in this spot. Of course, I doubted him. But I thank him because he had more faith in me than I had in myself at that time concerning my trajectory in the field of the history of education. But here I stand as a child of God before you. I hope what he has given me to share with you spurns your thoughts, ideas, and your heart to continue to develop and uncover the history of African-American education.

Even though fraternity men glorified their duels with swords, a series of frivolous pistol duels with deadly ends led students to organize a movement against pistol duels that swept German universities in 1902 and 1903. Students argued that pistol duels violated the rules of reason, morality, and religion—and were thus also purportedly un-German. Male students organized assemblies, made passionate speeches, and passed resolutions in opposition to the pistol duel. They then sent these resolutions to the War Ministers in Prussia, Bavaria, and Saxony. Burschenschaft fraternity men built on their long tradition of liberal political activism and convened assemblies in Berlin, Bonn, Breslau, Freiburg, Giessen, Greifswald, Halle, Kiel, Königsberg, Leipzig, Marburg, Munich, Rostock, and Tübingen and passed resolutions inspired by the movement. Some of these assemblies drew large numbers of students, for example, 600 students in attendance in Leipzig, 1,500 in Munich, and 1,500 in Freiburg. In Berlin, leaders of 67 organizations representing 2,400 members signed petitions against the pistol duel. Other universities not included were majority Catholic institutions, such as Münster or Würzburg, where the opposition to all forms of the duel was even stronger as a result of the Catholic Church's prohibition against dueling. Reaching universities throughout Germany, this movement united students from across the political spectrum.

In the 1850s, at St. Mark's training college in Chelsea, London, ten students regularly violated the “lights out” rule in the evening at the end of long, exhausting days. Desirous of increasing their culture and general knowledge, they gave over half an hour every evening before sleep to what they styled, after the working-class clubs of the same name, “a mutual improvement society” in which they took turns giving lectures on a wide range of topics. They were not alone: throughout the second half of the nineteenth century, teachers-in-training across Britain supplemented their already daunting workload by writing poetry, reading novels, discussing Shakespeare, and holding debates about pressing social and political questions. From the perspective of many Victorian observers and historians today, this anecdote is an anomaly, an aberration that carries little weight in telling the story of the training colleges in which the majority of teachers in Victorian Britain eventually came to receive an education. For them, training colleges were the sites of rote memorization and pedagogical learning. Though some educationalists called for a more liberal curriculum for teachers, according to this view, teachers' education only began to emphasize expansive reading, original thinking, the cultivation of the individual, and general curiosity beginning in the 1890s with the rise of day training colleges affiliated with universities.

In 1901, Miss M. C. French contacted Hawai‘i's superintendent and inquired about teaching positions in the islands. “As the prospect for a principalship seems possible only upon removal by death and that at an extreme age in most of the middle west towns,” she wrote, “I look to the west as a field of great promise.” Not only, in French's estimation, did teaching positions in the West offer opportunities for career advancement, but she also observed, “the west remunerates well for modern school work.” French's letter of application indicated that she had normal school training and teaching experience totaling nine years in Chicago, Salt Lake, and Des Moines, the last under future Seattle Superintendent Frank Cooper. She highlighted skills in “geography, language, and grammar.” In closing her application, she remarked, “My strong point has seemed to be discipline, which however is a natural, not acquired, talent.”

“This is what college is supposed to be like!” That is what I thought before I was too far along in my EPS 201 course, “Social Foundations of American Education,” at the University of Illinois. I was a transfer student, and it was my first semester at the university. The professor was Paul Violas and my teaching assistant (TA) was Steve Tozer; the course was a survey of the history of education in the United States. I recall one day we had a guest lecture by Professor James Anderson, who drew material from a new book he was working on. What we learned in EPS 201 was substantial. It was, far and away, the most meaningful course in my undergraduate education. It was, also, the most significant preparation I had as a secondary school mathematics teacher.