The educational attainment literature has brought back interest in early American primary schools, and much current research views those schools as superior to their European peers in the education offered to youth. Its emphasis, though, on using school enrollment as the prime indicator of attainment conflicts with the revisionist view of a previous generation of historians who argued that education in the heavily rural and agricultural society of the time should be considered as a process of social reproduction delivered by households, with schools being peripheral for most youth. This article, relying on evidence from statutes, indentures, and a 1798 New York State school survey, finds increased resort to primary schooling over the eighteenth century, attributable not to American exceptionalism but to a transatlantic movement away from scribal-dominated literacy and numeracy toward common use of a standardized written vernacular and “arithmetic by pen.” However, the dependence of households on child labor meant that the Three Rs did not get distributed in either an egalitarian or compact fashion. Small doses spread over a number of years—educational sprawl—best describes the system, and it lasted through much of the nineteenth century.

While a number of recent studies highlight John Stuart Mill’s role as a “teacher of the people,” his reflections upon the political significance of higher education have received relatively little attention. I argue that Mill’s 1867 St. Andrews Address was both a defense of liberal education against influential arguments for religion- and science-based models of higher education, and a call for elites educated in reformed universities to shape a public vision for the construction of a polity committed to liberal principles. I conclude that Mill’s St. Andrews Address can contribute to debates about the role of the university in contemporary liberal societies.

This article examines the relationship between gender and leadership in southern public Black colleges from the late nineteenth through the early twentieth century. Public colleges offer a unique view of this relationship because, in an era of disfranchisement, the political stakes of leadership were more obvious than in private schools. I argue that the gap between Black women's dynamic roles on public campuses and their marginalized representations in school reports reveals the processes that have obscured their public educational leadership in the American South. Analysis of images collected from college catalogs supplements my examination of documentary evidence from archives and published reports. State educational administration was one of the few remaining spaces where Black men could wield political influence. As they worked to produce institutional images that proclaimed their capacity for and right to public leadership, however, they minimized the contributions of Black women.

This article argues that the “airlift” language often used to describe the eight hundred Kenyan students who attended US and Canadian universities between 1959 and 1963 is misleading. It assumes that the students were being plucked out of substandard education, yet these youth had received some of the most rigorous education in the world—even though it was colonial education intended to inculcate in them British cultures and mores. The students took this education seriously because they knew it would help improve their economic status as well as that of their families. These elite students were not necessarily concerned with the politics of decolonization or the nation-state, as most studies of colonial elites at the end of empire have tended to claim. They were interested in uplifting their economic status. This uplifting was in and of itself a political act—even though it was not politically motivated.

This article analyzes class formation of the Milwaukee Teachers’ Education Association (MTEA). In 2011, Wisconsin curtailed public-sector union collective bargaining, causing Wisconsin unions’ membership and political power to plummet. This article puts the 2011 collapse into historical perspective, by considering the development of Milwaukee teachers’ labor organizing over the course of the twentieth century. In part I, I chronicle the formation of the MTEA, including its early contest with the Milwaukee Teachers Union (MTU) and the gendered fault lines of the teachers’ collective vision. In part II, I discuss the consequences of teachers’ rhetorical contradictions, especially their lack of collaboration with the civil rights movement in Milwaukee. This article challenges the notion that class movements are preordained with unified interests and aims, and instead shows that unions themselves build and assemble people’s political ideas, either to expand solidarity or to narrow it.