With the election of a Republican-controlled Congress in 1994, new questions are being raised about the federal role in education. Some members of Congress, for example, are questioning the need for a U.S. Department of Education and have even introduced legislation to abolish that cabinet-level agency. While there are few indications at this time that the U.S. Department of Education will be terminated in the near future, disagreements over the proper role of the federal government in education matters have intensified. Interestingly, during the current debates over education, the topics of the federal role in research and statistics have surfaced only occasionally. Attention more often is focused on either federal aid to education or federal regulation of schools; the issue of federal funding and dissemination of research and statistics usually is ignored or discussed only in passing.

In 1864, the British government established the Taunton Commission to conduct an inquiry into the education of middle-class boys. Concerned about the status of the arts and sciences in the schools, the Commission directed its appointed inspectors to pay particular attention to scientific subjects. Almost as an afterthought, the Commission decided to investigate the conditions in girls' schools as well. From 1864 to 1868, inspectors traveled throughout Great Britain, observing classes, interviewing headmasters and headmistresses, and examining students in private, proprietary, and endowed schools. To their surprise, members of the Taunton Commission discovered that while the sciences maintained at best a marginal toehold in boys' schools, they were quite popular in girls' schools. While a boy's education centered around Latin and Greek, a girl's education included ample doses of botany, chemistry, natural philosophy, natural history, and physiology.

Children do not simply grow up; they have to be educated in order to become decent adults. This belief inspired sermons, manuals on marriage and the family, belles-lettres, and, last but not least, genre painting in seventeenth-century Holland. This article examines this belief in the necessity of education by focusing on this last genre. Attention is directed at the power of images containing idealized educational messages for parents, and not at the reality of families and child-rearing. Significantly these paintings show that the Dutch portrayal of children was less a celebration of childhood as a unique stage of life than an attempt to show adults how children could be molded and shaped through a variety of educative processes.