“The greatest educational problem now facing the American people is the Rural School Problem,” argued Minnesota county superintendent Julius Arp in 1918. “There is no defect more glaring today than the inequality that exists between the educational facilities of the urban and rural communities. Rural education in the United States has been so far outstripped by the education of our urban centers, that from an educational standpoint, the country child is left far behind in the struggles of life.” This conceptualization of the Rural School Problem, framed within a larger national discussion about the growing disparity between urban and rural life wrought by industrialization, galvanized a broad based coalition of educators, ministers, farmers, agro-businessmen, sociologists, and social reformers into a robust campaign for rural school reform in the early twentieth century. Often lost in recent education histories which have paid much greater attention to urban school reform, this rural school movement had far-reaching consequences, not only for local school governance in the countryside, but for emerging state administration of education. The Rural School Problem, this article argues, helped to stimulate and legitimate significant new state interventions into local schools and define the forms of state aid, regulation, and bureaucracy in a formative period of state development.

In a high-profile newspaper editorial written in the fall of 1868, the future French premier Jules Ferry denounced the “lamentable” state of training in France's law faculties in no uncertain terms: “One must say that the lowly consideration that is given today in our courts to what was once legal science; the mania for judging and pleading only on the facts; the growing elasticity of texts and the lazy indiscipline of interpretation; the substitution of equity, that is to say arbitrariness, for the rule of law, have all created harmful trends that threaten all the good habits, the noble scruples, and all of the perhaps strict but salutary traditions of past times.” Given the limits placed on the press, suffrage, and the practice of law itself under the regime of Napoleon III, it is striking that Ferry would focus on France's law faculties as a primary area of concern. But like other critics who spoke out on the issue, Ferry saw the weakness of legal education as a symbol of the corruption of elites in Second Empire France, and education reform would be a hallmark of his tenure as Premier in republican governments of the 1880s. In addition to the momentous laws that bore his name making secondary education “obligatory, secular and free,” the reform of training for the professions was a priority for Ferry and others who followed his strain of moderate, or “opportunist,” republicanism.

In the aftermath of the Second World War, Germany found itself defeated, destroyed, occupied, and ultimately divided. The eastern portion of Germany fell under Soviet administration, while the western part came under joint occupation by the three victorious western Allies (the United States, the United Kingdom, and France). Recognizing at an early date that rebuilding Germany would promote political stability, economic growth, and peace in central Europe, the western Allies set out to reconstruct the defeated nation. The schools were an important part of this project. Many observers argued that without substantial reform to the educational system, German nationalism, militarism, and xenophobia might once again lead to conflict. In the western zones, particularly in the American zone, democratizing the schools took on great importance by 1947. This effort, however, was short-lived. The occupation of Germany ended in 1949, leaving many Americans with the sense that school reform was incomplete.

Secondary education is one key area in which academic disciplines build their identity and legitimacy in the public realm. The public image of a science is, of course, constructed by a variety of means and on different platforms, including the generalist media and the lively industry of scientific popularization. However, the school occupies a unique role in representations of science because of its greater degree of formal continuity with the academic environment. The successful institutionalization and maintenance of any discipline depends on it taking root, in some form at least, in the system of public instruction. Because education both fosters and depends on disciplinary reproduction, the concrete shape that school subjects take is of great consequence to the long-term development of related sciences.