Berlin, a focal point for Cold War tensions among the occupation powers, left to history an exceedingly rare and little-known instance of Allied cooperation in curriculum reform. In the midst of frequent ideological clashes, education officials on the Allied Kommandatura Education Committee (AKEC) concluded an agreement in the summer of 1948 on the formation of the postwar history curriculum for a new generation of German youth. The divided city thus remained the only area within the entire occupation zone where Soviet and American education officers established a dialogue over a specific dimension of school knowledge. The proceedings of the AKEC in Berlin and the subsequent accord on the teaching plans for German history offer a unique perspective on the clash between Soviet and American ideological interpretations of modern German history. The theme of this study is the nature of this dialogue, comprising both conflict and a surprising accommodation by both sides. The related issue of school structure, although important for the examination of postwar educational reform in Berlin, is beyond the scope of the investigation.

In his introduction to volume one, number one, of the History of Education Journal, published in autumn 1949, R. Freeman Butts asked, “What would historians be if they did not look at their own history?” Professor Butts did not answer his question, so we may assume it was rhetorical. Yet it would be inexcusable to discuss the future of the history of education as a professional field without some reference to its origins and development. As Lawrence Cremin has noted, the history of education was an important part of the professional training of teachers well before the Civil War and by the early twentieth century had become a virtually universal component of teacher education programs.

For a brief moment in 1964, a network of alternative schools flourished as a central component of the civil rights movement in Mississippi. The Freedom Schools of the Mississippi Summer Project were sponsored by COFO, the Council of Federated Organizations, an alliance of civil rights groups led by SNCC, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Through COFO, SNCC activists brought hundreds of northern volunteers, most of them white, to Mississippi for a few months to register voters and to teach in forty-one Freedom Schools. The schools offered young black Mississippians an education that public schools would not supply, one that both provided intellectual stimulation and linked learning to participation in the movement to transform the South's segregated society.

The History of Education Quarterly has done it again. Despite many scholars' previous attempts to summarize the state of the art in historical studies of literacy, this special issue will now be the best, up-to-date place for a novice to start. It should be required reading for everyone interested in this subfield. The editors have enlisted an impressive roster of prominent scholars in the field, and these authors have provided us with an excellent array of synthetic reviews, methodological and theoretical discussions, and exemplary research papers.

As bastions of tradition and instigators of change, universities periodically confront the tension embedded in those two antagonistic roles. The latent conflict between tradition and change often becomes manifest when new leadership is chosen. Presidential selection can be an occasion for defining the purposes of an institution; consequently, struggles over these appointments take on prophetic significance. The appointment of Robert Maynard Hutchins as the fifth president of the University of Chicago in 1929 was such an occasion. During his twenty-two-year tenure at Chicago Hutchins became a leading voice of educational reform and made his college the focus of national interest. The legacy of the Hutchins years is much disputed, but that is another story. This article will instead describe how a thirty-year-old easterner came to a prominent leadership post in the Midwest.

Near the end of 1940 Friedrich Hauptmann secretly fled to his native Germany, forsaking Rutgers University where he was chairman of the German department at the New Jersey College for Women (N.J.C.). Despite having acquired American citizenship the previous year (several months before the start of World War II), Hauptmann traveled on a German passport, with expenses paid by the Hitler government. This was undoubtedly a reward for “serving ‘the cultural-political interests of the Reich’ in New Jersey.”

One of the best-known comments on English rural education appears in James Fraser's evidence to the Newcastle Commission (1858$n61), in the course of which he states: “Even if it were possible, I doubt whether it would be desirable, with a view to the real interests of the peasant boy, to keep him at school till he was 14 or 15 years of age. But it is not possible. We must make up our minds to see the last of him, as far as the day school is concerned, at 10 or 11.”

Efforts to teach native Americans to read and write were subsumed, in the colonial context, within the larger framework of religious proselytism. This, in turn, was set within the all-encompassing arena of the politics of Indian-white relations. How scholars view attempts to impart literacy has therefore been colored by historians' judgments of the virtues and vices of mission activity in general.

Many governments in the twentieth century have attempted to transform their societies. Emerging states have faced the formidable task of nation-building, that is, of creating national unity and loyalty among citizens unaccustomed to living and working together within the same political system. New democracies have tried to educate new generations of “democratic” citizens, while authoritarian regimes have sought to indoctrinate their citizens in their ideologies, or simply in the habits of obedience. Leaders across the political spectrum have viewed the state as a tool for building a new and better society, with the schools as its foundation. In interwar Europe, the Soviet Union, National Socialist Germany, and Fascist Italy undertook the education of a new generation of citizens with unprecedented thoroughness. Their governments strengthened their control over school curricula, textbooks, and teachers through strict censorship and compulsory youth organizations.

In the early nineteenth century educators interested in the mechanized basis for American manufacturing began to experiment with and institutionalize, in mechanics' institutes and the periodic press, an alternative form of literacy based on a knowledge of mechanics and the material culture of manufacturing. This technical literacy was built along three basic dimensions: the relationships between mechanical knowledge and manufacturing; the linkages among the schemata for technical, liberal, and scientific learning; and the dissemination of technical knowledge in various media.

Industrialization in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries enlarged the possible roles of universities in three major respects. The range of topics that could be offered expanded as technical and commercial subjects joined the arts curriculum and the traditional learned professions of law, medicine, and theology. In addition, shifts in societal composition as a result of industrialization changed the mix of the pool from which students could be drawn. As the rural sector shrank and overall population increased, a much larger group of students from urban backgrounds became available, some of whom derived from the new middle classes and others from the industrial working class. Finally, as industrialization increased the need for literacy and numeracy throughout society, the demand for university-educated teachers grew.

From 1776 until the 1840s, America experienced a boom in the founding of societies dedicated to the spread of “useful knowledge.” Nearly one hundred such societies were founded, mainly in cities in the northeastern United States. Concomitantly, there was an increase in the number of publications devoted to the dissemination of useful knowledge. Accompanying this rapid growth of learned societies and journals were changing conceptions of what constituted useful knowledge and, perhaps more importantly, how and to whom that useful knowledge should be conveyed.

The bulk of the work on the history of literacy in Britain in recent decades has been in the period after 1500, concentrated largely on England (sometimes embracing Wales) and to a lesser extent Scotland. This essay attempts to outline the main trends in such studies and to assess their achievements.

The black civil rights movement of the early 1960s was a mass movement that used activist tactics, was committed to a philosophy of nonviolence, and sought racial integration and equality as its goal. By the middle of the decade, this movement had achieved a considerable measure of success. Race segregation in America, while not yet abolished, had been stripped of the institutional legitimacy it had previously enjoyed. In the process, America's culture and politics were transformed.

Compared to other European countries, one of the characteristic features of the expansion of literacy in Spain since 1500 has been the lack of firm and sustained religious, political, and ideological goals for its promotion and support. Also, the advancement of literacy in Spain has been much more dependent than elsewhere on schooling and on urbanization through migration from rural areas. Therefore, an analysis of literacy in Spain will be of special interest because of the contrast it provides to the countries of central and northern Europe and because of the opportunities it offers for an examination of the relative roles of central and local governments and of the Catholic church. Moreover, as Spain is a country with both a rich oral tradition and a significant written literature, we can investigate the complex and peculiar relationships between orality and literacy, between oral and written languages and cultures. And, in a region noted for its linguistic complexity, this analysis can be combined with a study of the clashes and interactions between two or more oral and/or written languages (Latin, Hebrew, Arabic, Castilian, Catalan, Basque, Galician), the development of literacy in one or more of them, and their uses in the family, religious, administrative, and school domains. As this latter issue of linguistic conflict is much too complicated for a short article, it will not be discussed here.