A considerable body of scholarship has examined the history of compulsory attendance in the United States in an effort to explain why compulsory attendance laws were enacted, what effects they had on school attendance rates, and what made enforcement of these laws effective eventually. Recent research has revealed that some long-standing assumptions and conclusions about compulsory attendance warrant reconsideration. For example, the assumptions that educators promoted compulsory attendance and that compulsory attendance laws were enacted when state legislators responded to educators' demands disregard the historical reality that educators and state teachers' associations generally did not support compulsory attendance and that the biggest proponent of compulsory attendance legislation was a faction of the Republican Party. Similarly, the conventional periodization of compulsory attendance laws into two phases—“symbolic” and “bureaucratic”—obscures several facts. The conventional periodization holds that before the 1890s compulsory attendance laws were merely symbolic because the laws enacted were “unenforced and probably unenforceable.” During the bureaucratic phase, between the 1890s and 1920s, new compulsory attendance laws —“strong laws” with teeth—were passed, which finally made compulsory attendance effective. This periodization obscures the facts that (1) compulsory attendance did not develop in any linear or progressive fashion as much as in a “two steps forward, one step back” manner; (2) the state had limited power to enforce even “enforceable” compulsory attendance laws in the early twentieth century when most funding was local not state funding; and (3) compulsory attendance laws were not tremendously effective, accounting for no more than 5 percent of the increase in school attendance in the first half of the twentieth century.

At the Catholic Educational Association's (CEA) annual meeting in 1911, Reverend John E Green, president of St. Rita College Prep, an academy for boys on the southwest side of Chicago administered by the Augustinian Fathers, argued against Catholic schools' seeking accreditation from non-Catholic institutions. He called the practice “a heterodoxical spectacle” and “a stultification of our claim of the necessity of Catholic education.” Reverend Green opposed accreditation by both state agencies and professional associations, but just five years later requested assistance from the speaker of the Illinois House of Representatives, David E. Shanahan, to pursue state recognition for St. Rita. Speaker Shanahan called on the Illinois Superintendent of Public Instruction and asked him to respond to Reverend Green's request to dispatch the Illinois High School Supervisor to St Rita. What motivated a staunch opponent of recognition and accreditation like Green to go to such lengths to procure it? While accreditation by non-Catholic institutions did not negate the need for Catholic education, as Reverend Green feared, how did it contribute to the assimilation of Catholic schools and hence Chicago Catholics in the early twentieth century?

History, civics, and social studies courses in Canadian schools have always represented some official understanding of Canadian citizenship, even Canadian identity. They have prepared children for citizenship and the exercise of their adult duties in the community. As historian Ken Osborne argues, citizenship remains a “flexibly protean” term, changing over time according to setting, and always resisted or undermined by those who disagree with the official understanding imposed upon them. While it may be difficult to assess the impact of the school's messages on students, we can identify the official ideas about English-Canadian citizenship and identity transmitted by schools.