In the political ferment which followed economic collapse in 1929, many hallowed business symbols lost their luster. Politicians mocked openly at “rugged individualism” and “natural economic law.” In President Roosevelt's speeches the major domestic enemies appeared as the “unscrupulous money changers” and the “resplendent economic autocracy,” who sought “to carry the property and interest entrusted to them into the arena of partisan politics.” A proliferation of unorthodox political ideas and movements threatened the status quo. “Technocracy,” for example, was widely discussed as a method of bringing about a planned Utopia under the direction of the engineers. New concepts potentially dangerous to the status quo emerged from the “Keynesian Revolution.” The shock of economic collapse, followed by uncertainty and New Deal attacks, marked the beginning of the most formidable challenge to the business community in American history.

The death of Abraham Flexner on September 21, 1959 at the age of ninety-three ended a remarkable career. Here was an educational researcher and later a foundation executive who made significant contributions to American education. His report in 1910 of medical schools in the United States and Canada had a phenomenal result. It practically remade medical education and helped it achieve the respected status it now enjoys. How did he do it?

The idea of genius has intrigued and baffled generations of thinkers interested in the problems of human excellence, leadership, and creativity. Until the early twentieth century, it was generally assumed that the man of genius, whatever his mode of expression, was qualitatively different from the rest of humanity—that he possessed some mysterious, inborn element that made his achievements possible. Because of the supposed mystery surrounding the origin and nature of genius, there grew up over the years a veritable mythology linking the man of genius with phenomena ranging from Deity to insanity.

In the last decade of the seventeenth century a comment made by a colonial official foreshadowed the conflict in values and modes of behavior that developed in eighteenth century America. By 1691 Virginia appeared ready to foster an institution of higher education within the colony. London was requested by the colonial government to support the establishment of a college. An appeal was made to the Lords of the Treasury by the Reverend James Blair, a ranking official of the Church of England in Virginia. In his appeal he emphasized the value of a college in training ministers to save colonial souls. “Souls!” exclaimed Sir Edward Seymour, a treasury official, “Damn your souls! Make tobacco!” Despite this expression of a utilitarian and commercial view of the function of the colonies, a charter for the College of William and Mary was granted in 1693.

A great deal is being said and written about the importance and significance to contemporary society of liberally educated people. But few pause to define the term “liberal education” or “liberal arts.” Implicit in the words of their advocates is the assumption that people are generally agreed as to the content which the terms comprehend, and that this content is much the same now as it has been in the past. Historically this supposition is inaccurate; nor does it correctly picture the current temper of thought. The liberal arts curriculum and its product the liberally educated man, changed, albeit more slowly, as society changed. As we shall see, they represented something quite different in past ages, or even a century ago, from that with which they are invested by varying current opinions.

Throughout education's long history legends and myths that have been generated in misinformation and cultivated by indifference or incorrigible obstinacy have attached themselves to a core of historical knowledge to distort the dimensions of its accuracy. Some were transitory, were quickly dispelled, and had relatively little influence on the work or the thought of historians or schoolmasters; but others have defied the erosions of time and truth and have grown in stature to become part of the conventional educational tradition. Their validity goes unchallenged; it is simply and perhaps blindly accepted. Here we propose to plumb the authenticity of four myths of content that, despite their fictitious character, have achieved an almost unassailable status in the history of education and two myths of conception, by which we mean unreal expectations for or invalid interpretations of the role or the meaning of the history of education. The distinction between these two general types of myths will shortly become clearer, but here we can say that some myths deceive us on points of content, while others blur our conception of the nature and purpose of educational history.

In 1888 a Midwestern school official remarked, “I find people everywhere interested in a general way in schools but too much absorbed in other matters to give them much time or thought.” This candid appraisal, near the turn of the nineteenth century, was particularly applicable to the attitudes of Americans toward their rural schools. Staffed by poorly qualified and even more poorly paid teachers who came and went, given but minimal support by parents as token acceptance of the need for some sort of an education, the rural school was all too frequently a “hopelessly gloomy and forbidding” place where little of interest to farm children was taught.

There was once a lad from the neighborhood of Auchinblae, in Kincardineshire, named James Milne. With Mill, Mills, Miln, and Milner, the surname Milne belongs to the ancient family of Miller, a trade name which is derived probably from the Gaelic Muileann, a meal (mill), thus signifying one who dwells at or near a mill, a miller. “The miller ground the corn and the bakester (Baxter) baked the bread.” James was brought up like “our rural ancestors, with little blest” to be “patient of labour”; he was accustomed to hard work; yet he was placid of temper; his natural reserve caused those whom he met to respect him for his canniness; although unendowed with great wisdom he had his measure of country shrewdness. A good, honest, humble workman, he was, moreover, punctilious in his Episcopalian devotions.

Probably the first published directory of American colleges is found in the issue of the Connecticut Journal, a five-column weekly newspaper, for July 29, 1817. This periodical was published at New Haven for fifty-three years from 1767 to 1820. The list gives brief information concerning thirty-nine colleges in seventeen states and the District of Columbia. It occupies two-thirds of a 2 1/2-inch column on the first page of the Journal. It is reproduced on the next page with original spelling, capitalization, and punctuation.

In the winter of 1835, when he was a student at Harvard College, Henry Thoreau briefly “kept school” in Canton, Massachusetts. In 1837, after his graduation, he kept the town school in Concord for a fortnight but gave it up because he was unwilling to punish pupils by whipping. “I have ever been disposed to regard the cowhide as a non-conductor,” he wrote, at the end of the year, to Orestes Brownson, at whose home he had stayed while he was a “practice teacher” in Canton, “…. We should seek to be fellow-students with the pupil, and we should learn of, as well as with him, if we would be most helpful to him.”

The most interesting problem faced by the Spanish conquerors in the early years of Mexico was the cultural assimilation of the native population. Although from the very first the Spanish policy was to bring the Indian into the new social order, his status in this society was undoubtedly contingent on the amount of his assimilation. Thus the Indian stood as one of the most controversial puzzles. What were his mental capacities? Would he be able to absorb the new culture? These questions and many others about the natives arose as one of the greatest challenges in the colonization of Mexico.

Giambattista Vico was born in 1668, at a time when Italy was just beginning to recover from the enervating effects of more than a century of clerical and foreign domination. In 1559, a century before Vico's birth, the long contest between France and Spain for supremacy in the peninsula had been decided in favor of Spain by the treaty of Cateau-Cambresia. Following this, hope for the independence of Italy had definitely been abandoned. The minor princes submitted to being Spanish vassals, and the Spanish rulers joined hands with the Roman Curia in a strict surveillance of the thought and action of the Italian people. The Church, fearful of the spread of Protestantism, drew more straight and narrow the way of orthodoxy, increasing at the same time the degree of punishment for those who strayed. The decadence and torpor that engulfed Italy during this period has come to be called secentismo or baroque.

Spanish intellectual history seems to be a field of investigation too little known or even considered by American students of comparative education. The image of Spain as the personification, par excellence, of a militant Catholicism saturated with the spirit of the Middle Ages is so prevalent that educational historians and philosophers of education tend to “write it off” when dealing with educational developments of western Europe.

There seems little doubt that comparative studies are the vogue in these days of “new frontiers” and “new directions.” There is even a new quarterly entitled Comparative Studies in Society and History. To be sure, comparative studies are as old as historiography, but there is a new insistence about them today that is unmistakable. Geographers have so expanded their specialty in depth as superficially to become historians. Anthropologists are no longer content merely to delineate present-day primitive cultures. They have broadened their discipline to include other cultures “not quite up to our date,” earlier cultures, and even our own. What is more, they have begun to explore behind the facade, to be aware of the influence of the past and thus, superficially at least, to become historians. A like tendency has long been afoot among sociologists, economists, political scientists, students of literature, students of the arts, and philosophers.