Those who think that the job of an intelligent agent of Mr. Paryski is limited to selling his books [and] his newspaper, collecting the money, attending to business and never showing up again are wrong indeed…. The true, intelligent agent of “Ameryka-Echo” has the responsibility to visit as many Polish families (or Lithuanian, Slovak, and Russyn) as possible, to encourage them to learn, to facilitate their learning through providing them with suitable inexpensive books and newspapers, getting to know their problems and needs, and giving them appropriate advice so that people can be brought out from their misery and degradation…. Whoever wants to effectively work for the people, needs to go among the people, get to know the people and then to begin the Positivist work (praca pozytywna).

“The greatest educational problem now facing the American people is the Rural School Problem,” argued Minnesota county superintendent Julius Arp in 1918. “There is no defect more glaring today than the inequality that exists between the educational facilities of the urban and rural communities. Rural education in the United States has been so far outstripped by the education of our urban centers, that from an educational standpoint, the country child is left far behind in the struggles of life.” This conceptualization of the Rural School Problem, framed within a larger national discussion about the growing disparity between urban and rural life wrought by industrialization, galvanized a broad based coalition of educators, ministers, farmers, agro-businessmen, sociologists, and social reformers into a robust campaign for rural school reform in the early twentieth century. Often lost in recent education histories which have paid much greater attention to urban school reform, this rural school movement had far-reaching consequences, not only for local school governance in the countryside, but for emerging state administration of education. The Rural School Problem, this article argues, helped to stimulate and legitimate significant new state interventions into local schools and define the forms of state aid, regulation, and bureaucracy in a formative period of state development.

In the Fall of 1840, twenty-four-year-old Clarissa Pengra journeyed from a small town in western New York to the growing city of Syracuse to take up a new teaching position. She began by heading north by carriage on a plank road to Rochester, where she would catch a canal boat east. Arriving in Rochester in the evening, after what she described as “an unpleasant ride,” she decided to spend the night at a boarding establishment rather than at the home of a family friend, “in order to be convenient for the boat in the morning.” While in the city, she finished her “shopping,” a term she had never used in the context of her rural hometown. Already, Clarissa had traveled a social and psychological distance. In the hours, weeks, and months that followed, her sense of dislocation would continue. At 6 a.m. on the morning after she arrived in Rochester, she boarded the canal boat for a trip that would take 24 hours, ending in Syracuse the following day “before daylight.” On the boat, Clarissa encountered whist-players, whiskey drinkers, and a follower of the Calvinist evangelist, Charles Finney, each in his own way somewhat at odds with her own principles and ideas. With respect to the trip as a whole, she expressed a sense of adventure, tempered by a hint of anxiety. “I have left home and friend,” she wrote in her journal, “and for the present must learn to depend upon myself.”

In February 1899, the Committee of Physical Culture of the Chicago Public School Board approved an intensive “anthropometric” study of all children enrolled in the city's public schools. The study was a detailed attempt to measure the height, weight, strength, lung capacity, hearing, and general fitness of Chicago's student population. Through 1899 and 1900, thousands of Chicago's primary, grammar, and high school students had their bodies closely scrutinized, measured, weighed, tested, and, in a few cases, diagrammed. What the School Board members wanted to know was the “fitness” of the student body. Were Chicago public school students—many recently arrived immigrants from eastern and southern Europe—vital and vigorous children who could become energetic modern workers and citizens (Figure 1)?

Of the classic documents addressing issues in higher education, few have provoked as much commentary as the Yale Report of 1828—and perhaps fewer still have been subject to such undeserved infamy. Ostensibly, the Report originated as an institutional memorandum. It was produced in response to the suggestion made at the annual meeting of the Yale Corporation in 1827 that the College might consider dropping the study of “the dead languages” from its curriculum. But its authors—President Jeremiah Day, Professors Benjamin Silliman, Sr., and James L. Kingsley—were clearly participating as well in an ongoing public debate. The 1820s were a decade of lively campus discussions on the subject of curricular reform. The stakes were high. The study of Latin and Greek traditionally constituted the core and bulk of college education. Wasn't it time for change?

On September 18, 1890, an enthusiastic and portly man on a train from Chicago to New Haven scribbled in a notebook. The man was William Rainey Harper, and the contents of his notebook would become the plans for The University of Chicago. Upon arriving in New Haven, he wrote a letter to John D. Rockefeller, who would finance Harper's vision for a university. Harper wrote,

In a high-profile newspaper editorial written in the fall of 1868, the future French premier Jules Ferry denounced the “lamentable” state of training in France's law faculties in no uncertain terms: “One must say that the lowly consideration that is given today in our courts to what was once legal science; the mania for judging and pleading only on the facts; the growing elasticity of texts and the lazy indiscipline of interpretation; the substitution of equity, that is to say arbitrariness, for the rule of law, have all created harmful trends that threaten all the good habits, the noble scruples, and all of the perhaps strict but salutary traditions of past times.” Given the limits placed on the press, suffrage, and the practice of law itself under the regime of Napoleon III, it is striking that Ferry would focus on France's law faculties as a primary area of concern. But like other critics who spoke out on the issue, Ferry saw the weakness of legal education as a symbol of the corruption of elites in Second Empire France, and education reform would be a hallmark of his tenure as Premier in republican governments of the 1880s. In addition to the momentous laws that bore his name making secondary education “obligatory, secular and free,” the reform of training for the professions was a priority for Ferry and others who followed his strain of moderate, or “opportunist,” republicanism.

A 1964 television series, “Profiles in Courage,” based on the late President John F. Kennedy's Pulitzer prize-winning book, featured the life of Mary Stone McDowell, a quiet, yet strong, teacher. Within peace circles, McDowell was a well-known figure. It was not unusual to see her marching in peace demonstrations or handing out antiwar literature at street meetings in the rain, snow, sleet and hot days in the summer. It was not out of the ordinary to read her editorials urging war tax resistance and certainly not surprising to those who knew her to draw strength from her courage and convictions. Yet what captured the interest of the show's producers was the stand she took during World War I. This quiet, unassuming Phi Beta Kappa graduate from Swarthmore College, and Quaker public school teacher in New York City, became the first educator in American history to test the constitutionality of the newly enacted loyalty oaths on religious, rather than political, grounds.

During World War II, female students at the University of California, Berkeley—then the most populous undergraduate campus in American higher education—made significant advances in collegiate life. In growing numbers, women enrolled in male-dominated academic programs, including mathematics, chemistry, and engineering, as they prepared for home-front employment in fields traditionally closed to them. Women also effectively opposed gendered restrictions on extracurricular participation, filling for the first time such influential campus leadership positions as the presidency of Berkeley's student government and editorship of the university's student newspaper. Female students at Berkeley also furthered activist causes during the war years, with the University Young Women's Christian Association (YWCA) serving as one of the most popular outlets for their political engagement. Historically rooted in a mission of Christian fellowship, by the 1940s the University YWCA held progressive positions on many of the nation's central social, political, and economic issues. Throughout the war years, women dedicated to promoting civil liberties, racial equality, and international understanding led the organization in its response to two of the most egregious civil rights violations in U.S. history: racial segregation and Japanese internment.

In the 1890s progressive educators like John Dewey proposed expansive ideas about integrating school and society. Working to make the boundaries between classroom learning and pupils' natural environment more permeable, for example, Dewey urged teachers to connect intellectual and practical elements within their curricula. Highly visible and widespread examples of this integrative goal were the school gardens that flourished from the 1890s well into the twentieth century. Evidence of their presence is recorded in newspapers, national magazines, and annual school reports whose illustrations typically portrayed well-dressed children cultivating large gardens next to impressive urban school buildings. Whether in large cities or country settings, school gardens were expressions of modern and progressive education of the sort encouraged by Dewey. Gardens were encouraged in theory and in practice not only at the laboratory school affiliated with the University of Chicago but also in normal schools across the country (Figure 1).

During the twenty to twenty-five years after World War II, children in the United States were increasingly taught to understand their nation, its history, and its economic greatness—as an “economy”—rather than in social, moral, philosophical, or political terms (i.e., as a society, a community, a republic, etc.). Equally powerful was its message that the U.S. economy was an unprecedented marvel of productivity and a facet of Americanness of which to be proud and to defend. During this time period, not only did an economics education movement emerge, but economics increasingly was taught as part of social studies, history, or other classes, and a huge amount of curricular material was developed and disseminated for classroom use.

In the aftermath of the Second World War, Germany found itself defeated, destroyed, occupied, and ultimately divided. The eastern portion of Germany fell under Soviet administration, while the western part came under joint occupation by the three victorious western Allies (the United States, the United Kingdom, and France). Recognizing at an early date that rebuilding Germany would promote political stability, economic growth, and peace in central Europe, the western Allies set out to reconstruct the defeated nation. The schools were an important part of this project. Many observers argued that without substantial reform to the educational system, German nationalism, militarism, and xenophobia might once again lead to conflict. In the western zones, particularly in the American zone, democratizing the schools took on great importance by 1947. This effort, however, was short-lived. The occupation of Germany ended in 1949, leaving many Americans with the sense that school reform was incomplete.

Were colleges obliged to address the dilemmas faced by the many firstand second-generation Americans who enrolled after World War I? No, replied many administrators who espoused exclusion or assimilation, or who expressed indifference. These attitudes meant that many students would never learn to navigate the turbulent waters of campus social life. Dropout rates were significant even before the Great Crash created insurmountable financial difficulties for numerous undergraduates. The testimony of peers who remained suggested that success often came despite institutional hostility.

Secondary education is one key area in which academic disciplines build their identity and legitimacy in the public realm. The public image of a science is, of course, constructed by a variety of means and on different platforms, including the generalist media and the lively industry of scientific popularization. However, the school occupies a unique role in representations of science because of its greater degree of formal continuity with the academic environment. The successful institutionalization and maintenance of any discipline depends on it taking root, in some form at least, in the system of public instruction. Because education both fosters and depends on disciplinary reproduction, the concrete shape that school subjects take is of great consequence to the long-term development of related sciences.

Women's colleges in the 1970s and 1980s faced highly uncertain futures. Soaring popularity of coeducation left them with serious enrollment downturns, and challenges from proposed equal rights legislation threatened to render illegal their single-sex admissions policies. These perilous external conditions drew together the presidents of U.S. women's colleges in new ways as they sought to preserve and strengthen their individual institutions and to secure a future for women's colleges as an institutional type.

The struggle to provide primary education for the Catholic poor in England and Wales dominated the agenda of English Catholic leaders in the last half of the nineteenth century. This effort occurred within the larger framework of a national educational revolution that slowly pushed the government into providing public education for the first time. Although state education grants at the elementary level began in 1833, lingering problems forced the government to establish a new era of educational provision with the controversial Education Act of 1870. This act created a dual education system consisting of the long-standing denominational schools operated by the different churches and new rate-supported board schools, operated by local school boards, providing no religious instruction or nondenominational religious instruction. In the closing years of the nineteenth century, the dual system grew intolerable for Catholics because local rates (property taxes) only supported the board schools and gave them almost unlimited funding while Catholic schools struggled to make ends meet on school pence and shrinking state grants, which Catholics had only had access to beginning in 1847.