In the political ferment which followed economic collapse in 1929, many hallowed business symbols lost their luster. Politicians mocked openly at “rugged individualism” and “natural economic law.” In President Roosevelt's speeches the major domestic enemies appeared as the “unscrupulous money changers” and the “resplendent economic autocracy,” who sought “to carry the property and interest entrusted to them into the arena of partisan politics.” A proliferation of unorthodox political ideas and movements threatened the status quo. “Technocracy,” for example, was widely discussed as a method of bringing about a planned Utopia under the direction of the engineers. New concepts potentially dangerous to the status quo emerged from the “Keynesian Revolution.” The shock of economic collapse, followed by uncertainty and New Deal attacks, marked the beginning of the most formidable challenge to the business community in American history.

In the last decade of the seventeenth century a comment made by a colonial official foreshadowed the conflict in values and modes of behavior that developed in eighteenth century America. By 1691 Virginia appeared ready to foster an institution of higher education within the colony. London was requested by the colonial government to support the establishment of a college. An appeal was made to the Lords of the Treasury by the Reverend James Blair, a ranking official of the Church of England in Virginia. In his appeal he emphasized the value of a college in training ministers to save colonial souls. “Souls!” exclaimed Sir Edward Seymour, a treasury official, “Damn your souls! Make tobacco!” Despite this expression of a utilitarian and commercial view of the function of the colonies, a charter for the College of William and Mary was granted in 1693.

In 1888 a Midwestern school official remarked, “I find people everywhere interested in a general way in schools but too much absorbed in other matters to give them much time or thought.” This candid appraisal, near the turn of the nineteenth century, was particularly applicable to the attitudes of Americans toward their rural schools. Staffed by poorly qualified and even more poorly paid teachers who came and went, given but minimal support by parents as token acceptance of the need for some sort of an education, the rural school was all too frequently a “hopelessly gloomy and forbidding” place where little of interest to farm children was taught.

There seems little doubt that comparative studies are the vogue in these days of “new frontiers” and “new directions.” There is even a new quarterly entitled Comparative Studies in Society and History. To be sure, comparative studies are as old as historiography, but there is a new insistence about them today that is unmistakable. Geographers have so expanded their specialty in depth as superficially to become historians. Anthropologists are no longer content merely to delineate present-day primitive cultures. They have broadened their discipline to include other cultures “not quite up to our date,” earlier cultures, and even our own. What is more, they have begun to explore behind the facade, to be aware of the influence of the past and thus, superficially at least, to become historians. A like tendency has long been afoot among sociologists, economists, political scientists, students of literature, students of the arts, and philosophers.

Frank Klassen's paper is not a dramatically novel interpretation but, nonetheless, a very substantial and well-documented treatment of eighteenth century American educational thought and practice. Basically, of course, Klassen is reasserting and supporting the claim that American education in the eighteenth century was dominated by Renaissance and Reformation views—which is to say, in Klassen's words, by the classics and by religion. Religious humanism in American education, Klassen reminds us, persisted throughout the eighteenth century despite the fact of some rather remarkable and far-reaching changes in the contemporaneous culture. Klassen's essential claim, then, is that until toward the end of the eighteenth century, the social and scientific innovations of the Enlightenment influenced American education only peripherally and then in a somewhat limited way at the level of higher education.

The past few years have been particularly troublesome for the American people, not the least of the worries being a concern with the Russian challenge to the American way of life. The incredible successes of the Russians in orbiting satellites and exploding nuclear weapons has been both a disturbing and a sobering thought to the United States, long secure in its isolation and power, and in the belief that it was the best society on earth. More than a decade ago an enduring Pax Americana based upon the unilateral possession of the atomic bomb disappeared; with the launching of various Sputniki since 1958 morale has dropped even lower.