Charles W. Eliot brought to the chairmanship of the Committee of Ten a background of more than twenty years' concern about and interest in secondary schools. In April 1892, the president of the Massachusetts Association of Classical and High School Teachers said that Eliot had been “with us” since 1870 as “a most original, stimulating, inspiring, and, I may almost say, provoking force.” He added that it was “no small distinction to this body that President Eliot, by all odds the leader in American education today, got some portion of his training in the arena of debate which we provided him.”

It is strange that Charles W. Eliot, William Torrey Harris, and Nicholas Murray Butler are so little remembered. For a generation their counsels dominated American education, yet few histories of education give them more than passing notice. Eliot does receive some attention as father of the elective principle, and Harris enjoys at least a dubious reputation as high priest of conservative idealism. Butler, if mentioned at all, appears as Harris's acolyte and is variously described as a classical humanist, an intellectualist, and an idealist with faintly liberal tendencies. It has been his misfortune to be cast in the role of educational philosopher, the role to which he aspired, but to which he could bring the least talent. Butler was an independent thinker, but not a creative one, a man of action, not of contemplation. Comparing him with Harris is like comparing Alexander with Aristotle. “Nicholas Miraculous” was, in truth, that rare combination of insights, practicality, and force that makes a philosopher king. Never content to contemplate ends, his vast energies were concentrated on means. He fathered organizations, not ideas.

Increased subsidization of education by foundations, corporations, and individuals, as well as the federal government, has caused many citizens again to question the influence of such programs. The thoughtful individual inquires about both the positive and negative potential of aid to education: the capacity to improve public education, as well as to weaken local and state interest in, and control of, the schools. Hence, it appears timely to review an early program of aid to public schools, that of the Peabody Education Fund, and to analyze its effects upon educational programs and local initiative.

Today American elementary and secondary education is under active attack for alleged failures or shortcomings of various kinds. In the minds of those responsible for running the schools, much, if not most, of the criticism is distinctly ill-founded and irresponsible. School personnel have long been decrying outmoded practices and promoting new ones, many of the latter bearing the brunt of current condemnations. But present lay criticism seems to have caught a large segment of school personnel quite unprepared to meet it; hence responses are often unconvincing, recriminatory, or yielding. If the educational profession is to maintain past and present gains and to achieve new ones, it must know what has been done in the past, what has proven unsatisfactory and what satisfactory, what innovations have been tried and what has come of them, and why we have come to do what we are now doing. This perspective requires a study of the growth of American educational thought and practice, for if we do not know history, how can we avoid repeating the errors of our predecessors?

Faced with the ubiquitous problem of financial solvency, Pennsylvania's denominational colleges, in the nineteenth century, adopted an unusual—and unsound—method of securing prepaid tuition. Temporary and permanent scholarships were sold at varying prices, frequently far below the normal charge for tuition, presumably on the assumption that the large sum of money so collected and invested would realize an income adequate to meet the operating expenses of the institution.