It is a gracious and trusting tradition that allows the president of this Society considerable latitude in selecting a subject for this annual address. I hope I have not violated that trust by proposing to discuss a topic that, by its title, may convey marks of a parochial and narrowly conceived (if not contrived) theme. For a southerner to talk on the southern past is perhaps bad enough; but for one who teaches at the University of Virginia to dare focus on that same institution runs the risk of exceeding all bounds of courtesy and custom, to say nothing of decent historical conventions and canons of scholarship. Still, begging your indulgence, I shall seek to explore with you some possible linkages between cultural ideals and youthful conduct that gave a special cast to student life and identity in antebellum Virginia.

The time has come to take stock of the 1960s on college campuses, to examine the decade, and to assess its impact. As the offspring of undergraduates of the 1960s themselves now enter college, they remind us that what was once the immediate present has receded into history. My own concerns as a historian lead me to focus on the impact of the events and processes of the 1960s on student cultures. The 1960s profoundly reshaped undergraduate worlds. Because the unnaturally calm campus of the 1970s and early 1980s was the paradoxical outcome of that turbulent decade, we are still living within its ironic consequences.

Olympia Brown came to Ohio's Antioch College in 1856 in search of a liberal education. At Mount Holyoke Female Seminary she had found too many rules and restrictions: “young ladies are not allowed to stand in the doorway”; “young ladies are not allowed to linger in the halls”; and “we never examine young ladies in Algebra.” Reared in Michigan under the influence of a mother determined to see her daughters fully educated, Brown was attracted to Antioch “by evidence of a broader spirit.” She graduated four years later and went on to become the country's first ordained female Universalist minister, a women's rights activist, and a vice president of the National Women's Suffrage Association. In the 1850s, however, she was particularly interested in what Antioch's first president, Horace Mann, described as its “Great Experiment”: coeducation.

Editor's note: The essays below are the product of an exchange between two scholars who have studied the impact of the Dartmouth College case on American higher education. The first essay is by John S. Whitehead, professor of history at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks; the second by Jurgen Herbst, professor of history and educational policy studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

In the opening decades of the twentieth century, the idea of using schools to prepare young people for work blossomed into a major campaign to integrate the school more closely with the economy. Reformers across a wide spectrum of opinion became convinced that in place of the seemingly haphazard manner in which young people left school and drifted into the labor market the school should mediate between youth and the workplace, or as one proponent put it, “act as a transmitter between human supply and industrial demand.” It was the central task of the school, they argued, to train youth for jobs and to direct them into occupations that suited their talents and interests and matched the economic needs of their communities.

Colleges and universities are often living monuments to their founders, as either the school or its buildings bear their benefactor's name. Institutional histories, statues, paintings, plaques, biographies, and campus publications tell the college's story—from humble beginnings to present-day glories, praising the generosity, wisdom, and vision of the founder. Such is not the case, however, with Barnard College, the women's undergraduate division of Columbia University, and one of the prestigious Seven Sisters. The college took its name from Frederick A. P. Barnard, tenth president of Columbia (1864–1888). President Barnard had, before his death, wished the new institution well, but took no part in establishing it. In fact, he preferred and worked for coeducation at Columbia, and his family initially objected to the college's use of his name. If not Frederick Barnard, then who founded the college? The answer to that question depends very much upon whom you ask.

Endowments for charitable purposes, including schools, have existed for centuries, usually in former times associated with religion, as in the Christian and Islamic worlds, in Jewish communities, and doubtless elsewhere. Most often under older conditions they consisted in the right to receive income from land, or from land and buildings, under whatever provisions for tenure and ownership might prevail from one place to another. They have generally been “perpetual,” that is, intended to pass unchanged from one generation to the next. Much has been written on the origins of such endowments or foundations. Less attention has been given to how they may end.

James Bryce observed in 1888 that “he who would understand the changes [in] the American democracy will find far more instruction in a study of the State governments than of the Federal Constitution.” So neglected was the subject, he found, that it could not even be called a field: “it is rather a primeval forest, where the vegetation is rank, and through which scarcely a trail has yet been cut.” Although Bryce himself cut one such path in The American Commonwealth, much of the terrain of state government in the nineteenth century remains unexplored to this day.

In May 1985 the Canadian Historical Association gave over a major part of its meeting to the history of education. Joint sessions were sponsored by CHA, educational history groups, and those primarily interested in the history of the family or childhood. This program culminated fifteen years of intensive research into educational history on both sides of the Atlantic. Although there have been comparative histories of education and historiographical articles concerning the history of education in one or another country, there have been few attempts to compare historiographical trends of several countries. This article will compare trends in English, Canadian, and French historiography, which offer a stark contrast, and it will allude to trends concerning the United States, Europe generally, and Quebec within the framework of comparative historiography.

The rural teacher is a familiar and sad character in Russian literature. Yet little hard information has been forthcoming with which to verify impressions gleaned from fiction. Western as well as Soviet historians have pointed out that the teacher eked out a miserable existence, was usually a dropout from advanced schools, and was often of a radical cast of mind. Moreover, they have documented the failure of Russian primary schoolteachers to organize, to set and police their own standards of competence, or even to win the respect of the more elevated professions requiring a higher education for entry.

William Ballantyne Hodgson stands as a typical, but also a special Victorian. His unheralded but important essay, “Exaggerated Estimates of Reading and Writing as Means of Education,” also combines the typical with the special. It informs our understanding of nineteenth-century attitudes toward education, adding a complexity and a critical edge usually not accorded to reformers. It also reveals a special depth to that most Victorian of obsessions: the faith in the power and efficacy of schooling for the improvement of society and of the individual within it. The document, reprinted here, not only has a historical value which should be apparent to readers, but it may also be seen as speaking to concerned persons of the late twentieth century.

In the last two decades the field of social history, including the study of ethnic minorities and education, has undergone a renaissance. Historical studies, for example, have expanded traditional notions of the concept “education” to include all institutions that “educate,” have provided critical interpretations of the public school's evolution and function in an advanced capitalist society, and have shed new light on continuing issues in American education. Historical studies on ethnic minority groups, and especially Chicanos, have also been done, many of them by minority group members themselves. These new published works have increased our understanding of the process of immigration, illuminated the nature of conflict—racial, cultural, social, economic—in the Chicano community, and provided data on the origins and development of Chicano barrios throughout the Southwest. Despite the renaissance in the historical studies of both minorities and public education in the United States, little has been written on the educational past of Chicanos. As late as 1985, for example, not one single book providing an interpretation of their experiences in the schools had been published.

In the late 1960s great fanfares announced the emergence of a “new history of education.” According to John E. Talbott, “historians have begun to stake new claims in the history of education.” A formerly neglected and somewhat stagnant field started to bustle with excitement in anticipation of novel insights. In retrospect, it took quite a peculiar conjunction of circumstances to create this history of education in “a new key.” While the claims of social history were transforming the study of the past, a gradual “rehistorization” opened the social sciences to longer time perspectives and the political debate about the “troubled state of contemporary education” made educators more interested in the antecedents of the current crisis.

A few introductory comments may help the Western reader decode the following article, written by the director of the Laboratory for the History of Education under the Academy of Pedagogical Sciences in Moscow. Although the tone of the article makes clear that Dneprov is extremely dissatisfied with conditions in his area of history (and the stridency of his criticism of Soviet scholarship is in itself somewhat unusual), he must often resort to indirect and elliptical comment to make his basic points. Dneprov is representative of a younger generation of Soviet scholars, well versed in the changes in methodology and content that have affected the writing of history in the West, and impatient to introduce similar directions in the Soviet Union. Even more important, Dneprov notes that Soviet scholars have made significant advances in the study of the medieval period in general—in part because historians of talent often gravitate to more remote times where the strictures of ideology are less unbending and freedom of research more prominent. Yet Soviet educational historians have made few advances in this field, which has been studied in virtual isolation from general cultural developments, and which has adhered closely to dogmatic strictures first put forth in the 1930s.