Aid to the “suffering south,” especially educational aid, was the concern of many groups after the Civil War. Alongside the agents of the Freedmen's Bureau and the Yankee schoolmarms was the Peabody Education Fund, first of the major educational foundations in this country. After the soldiers, agents, and missionaries had gone, the Peabody Fund remained an influence upon southern education for nearly fifty years.

If ever there was an opportunity, in the history of American education, to create “a school in which all good things come together,” it seemed to exist in Chicago in 1898. At least it seemed so to Colonel Francis W. Parker who, in that year, described his hopes for just such a school. Colonel Parker had, during the preceding twenty years, earned national recognition for his reforms in elementary education and teacher training in the Quincy, Massachusetts, public schools and the Cook County and Chicago normal schools. Sympathetic professional colleagues applauded his pedagogical innovations and looked to him for continued leadership in the “new education” movement. Others, however, judged his revolutionary ideas quite differently. Certain influential Chicago laymen, advocates of “economy and efficiency” in the public schools, regularly denounced both Parker and his practices and sought repeatedly for his dismissal. His national reputation, it appeared, was more secure than the future of “the work,” as he called it, to which he had dedicated himself. It was this mixture of commendation and condemnation, the chronic threat to his work coupled with his near-religious commitment to carry it forward, that prompted him to write of his hopes and fears to Mrs. Emmons Blaine.

Many questions have long shrouded the nature and extent of colonial New England's effort in education. Samuel Eliot Morison, a recognized authority on New England history, has remarked that “for want of records there is still much obscurity in the educational history of colonial New England.” In spite of the scarcity of town records, a controversy has reigned for some time over how well the early school laws were enforced, how good the schools that were established may have been, and the extent of religion's role in education. Some historians, Professor Morison included, have seen in the efforts of Puritan New England a legitimate and positive influence respecting education. Others, including some professors of education, have tended to criticize colonial New England's educational program for being too religious in nature and too narrow in scope.

The british army, one of the most conservative institutions in Victorian England, smugly resisted military reforms after the defeat of Napoleon I by the Duke of Wellington in 1815. Not until the crisis of the Crimean War (1854-1856) did England even consider improving her corroded Army which was now struggling desperately to maintain an invasion foothold at Sebastapol in Russia's Crimean Peninsular. Only then, and under a torrent of public criticism, did the Army initiate improvements that were characteristic of the age of reform. Typical of these reforms were experiments in education that would elevate the status of the lowly enlisted man and raise his degree of literacy.

In background, temperament, and intellectual proclivities Herbert Spencer epitomizes some of the most salient features of Victorianism and the Victorian age. Brought up in a middle-class Nonconformist family, he retained, and often felt impious delight in stressing, many of the characteristics of nineteenth-century English Philistinism, namely, a “hedgehog-like independence,” a reaction to traditional views about religion, education, and morality, an aversion to authority and orthodoxy, and a puritan-like austerity with its contempt for “the pleasures and graces of life.” Like so many of the eminent Victorians at home and abroad, Spencer was a man of remorseless energy, who reveled at his Olympian propensity to grapple with huge questions about the cosmos, man, and society. His prodigious intellectual output (William James called Spencer the “philosopher of vastness”) was a blending of what he perceived to be “scientific” reasoning about organic, inorganic, and superorganic development or evolution, with strong ideological overtones.