The appointment of an Ad Hoc Reform Council, or Rinkyoshin, on 21 August 1984 was a logical culmination to a lengthy period of concern in Japan over a set of widely perceived educational problems and the future prospects for Japanese education. The charge given to the council by Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone was clear: “to consider basic strategies for necessary reforms… so as to secure such education as will be compatible with the social changes and cultural developments of our country.” The prime minister went on to remind council members that “if our nation is to build up a society that is full of vitality and creativity as well as relevant to the 21st century, it is a matter of great urgency to design necessary reforms.”

In recent years, historians of higher education have mercifully taken us beyond the pinched and narrow conventional view of the nineteenth-century college curriculum to a more meaningful contextual interpretation of that much maligned institution. In the process they have reinterpreted the “Old College's” principal manifesto: the Yale Report of 1828. Earlier studies had depicted the Yale Report as either a document cementing a collegiate education to the past or as one aimed at maintaining “a numerically tiny social elite against the hostile pressure of a rising Jacksonian equalitarianism.” Recent studies have revised this interpretation, on the one hand by arguing that the report simply reaffirmed the liberal arts as taught through the classical curriculum, and on the other by contending that it was “actually a thoughtful, responsible attempt to consider the place of the undergraduate college in the totality of the American educational scheme.” Instead of representing the last “bulwark of educational reactionism, elitism, and authoritarianism,” the revisionists argue, the report did not significantly differ “in its essentials from the vision held by most of America's foremost champions of university reform.”

The character of the urban school has been shaped by the processes of democracy, law, bureaucracy, professionalism, and the market. These identify important but very different rule regimes, each with its own “action logic.” The concurrent exercise of these diverse regimes—not moderated by a common culture—implies conflict in the urban school's organizational evolution. Other difficulties are implied by the heterogeneity of the common school and job market transformations as well as by political pluralism.

The recent opening of the Horace Mann Bond Papers to scholars, along with publication of an article on Bond's early career which used those papers, should spark renewed interest in the work of this noted teacher, scholar, and educational administrator. Visitors to the Bond Papers, housed at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, will find a wealth of unpublished and published material relating to many notable events in the educational history of the twentieth century. Bond's interests were broad, encompassing both humanistic and social scientific approaches to the educational and social problems of blacks. He wrote noted critiques of the mental testing movement at several stages of his long career, did historical research for the plaintiffs in the Brown v. Topeka school desegregation suit, and traveled extensively to Africa and studied its civilizations in the later stages of his career.

Jeffrey Brooks deals with one of the most significant, yet still relatively unexamined aspects of change in late imperial Russia—the advent of mass literacy and a popular readership. Penetration of a market economy, the peasantry's increasing administrative integration after the serf emancipation, migration to cities, temporarily or permanently, all compelled the rural population to place a greater premium on literacy as a tool for survival. Additionally, and this is Brooks's focus, literacy provided peasants and former peasants a key to an imaginative world of cheap commercial fiction in which they sought not only recreation, but orientation amid a rapidly changing, complex environment and affirmation of new values, aspirations, and dreams that many of them were beginning to internalize by the turn of the century. When Russia Learned to Read is nothing less than an attempt to plumb collective popular mentalités during this period, largely by reading what lower-class Russians read. The author's conclusions are provocative, if not definitive, and should force us to rethink some of our assumptions about popular attitudes on the eve of the revolutions of 1917.

Donald Spivey's The Politics of Miseducation is a historical case study of the transfer of American “industrial education” to a small Liberian school. It is also an institutional history and a contribution to the literature of comparative and international education.

In the introduction to A Little Commonwealth, his 1970 work on family life in Plymouth Colony, John Demos observed that this kind of study had not gained “a wide following among working historians” (p. vii). Most historians, he said, still preferred to concentrate on large social units such as region, class, or party and leave the family, “the smallest and most intimate of all group environments,” to anthropologists, sociologists, and psychologists (p. viii). Today, almost twenty years later, no such statement can be justified. Since 1970, the new social history, including family history, has grown dramatically to become a significant force in contemporary historiography. Thus, in his latest book, a collection of essays on the family and the life course in American history, Demos offers no special pleading for his subject and simply assumes his readers will understand and accept its importance. Demos now writes with the quiet confidence of one who is working well within the mainstream of historical scholarship.

This nicely crafted and clearly written volume examines the course of America's colleges from the eve of the Stamp Act crisis to the mid-1780s. Distributing his attention even-handedly among the nine colonial colleges, John Roche details the ways in which college leaders and students participated in the revolutionary movement, and, in turn, the ways in which the Revolution affected the colleges. The focus is on the flow of events, not on their longer-term implications and consequences.

In 1869 Catharine Beecher and her sister Harriet Beecher Stowe published a compendium of advice to women entitled The American Woman's Home. This popular and influential book urged its readers to construct homes that could also serve as schools and as churches. Beecher and Stowe sketched for their readers a Gothic revival cottage with a steeple for a chimney and a moveable screen to convert the parlor into a nave. This cottage that looked like a church poses the fundamental question underlying Colleen McDannell's book: why and how did Victorian Americans conceive such close connections between the home and religious observance?