Throughout education's long history legends and myths that have been generated in misinformation and cultivated by indifference or incorrigible obstinacy have attached themselves to a core of historical knowledge to distort the dimensions of its accuracy. Some were transitory, were quickly dispelled, and had relatively little influence on the work or the thought of historians or schoolmasters; but others have defied the erosions of time and truth and have grown in stature to become part of the conventional educational tradition. Their validity goes unchallenged; it is simply and perhaps blindly accepted. Here we propose to plumb the authenticity of four myths of content that, despite their fictitious character, have achieved an almost unassailable status in the history of education and two myths of conception, by which we mean unreal expectations for or invalid interpretations of the role or the meaning of the history of education. The distinction between these two general types of myths will shortly become clearer, but here we can say that some myths deceive us on points of content, while others blur our conception of the nature and purpose of educational history.

There was once a lad from the neighborhood of Auchinblae, in Kincardineshire, named James Milne. With Mill, Mills, Miln, and Milner, the surname Milne belongs to the ancient family of Miller, a trade name which is derived probably from the Gaelic Muileann, a meal (mill), thus signifying one who dwells at or near a mill, a miller. “The miller ground the corn and the bakester (Baxter) baked the bread.” James was brought up like “our rural ancestors, with little blest” to be “patient of labour”; he was accustomed to hard work; yet he was placid of temper; his natural reserve caused those whom he met to respect him for his canniness; although unendowed with great wisdom he had his measure of country shrewdness. A good, honest, humble workman, he was, moreover, punctilious in his Episcopalian devotions.

Spanish intellectual history seems to be a field of investigation too little known or even considered by American students of comparative education. The image of Spain as the personification, par excellence, of a militant Catholicism saturated with the spirit of the Middle Ages is so prevalent that educational historians and philosophers of education tend to “write it off” when dealing with educational developments of western Europe.

The England of 1880–1902 saw the final flowering of Imperialism and the beginnings of its collapse in the South African War of 1899. It was a period of tremendous optimism, when society as a whole appeared prosperous and ebullient, but in which social injustice and rank poverty were widespread. The Education Act of 1870, the democratization of government made possible by the enlargement of the franchise, the coming of the popular press, and the reorganization of local government were the pointers to a new conception of the Great Society (as one of Graham Wallas's books was entitled). The searching analysis of social organization made in the 1840's by Marx and Engels, combined with the liberal ideals inherited from the French Revolution and the American War of Independence, took a more kindly and acceptable form in the intense yet essentially gentle collectivist doctrines of post-Utilitarianism, Fabian Socialism, and organized Labor—movements in which John Stuart Mill, Sidney Webb, H. G. Wells, Graham Wallas, and Keir Hardie were prominent. A. V. Dicey, in his great book on the origins of the British welfare state, underlines the fact that essential reforms were made possible by the climate of opinion, especially after 1870: education was able to ride high on the tide of these reforms.