The use of schooling to support various societal agendas has attracted much attention among the last generation of global education scholars. Whether as a neo-Marxian “ideological state apparatus,” through which societal elites seek to preserve socioeconomic inequity, or as a means for regimes to acquire sociopolitical legitimacy, the dynamics of education's unique socializing role have proven quite intriguing. In particular, new states espousing nationalist modernization consciously deploy national educational systems as central to broad projects of political socialization. Here, as officials, teachers, or pedagogical scholars, those affiliated with national education become conceptualizers, interpreters, and implementers of particular national visions. Academic theorists of nationalism have thus rightfully labeled these individuals “nationalist educator intellectuals,” capturing the pedagogical corps’ self-perception and the special, often understudied contribution educators make to the formation of nationalist ideologies. Indeed, interpreting the purview of education quite broadly, educators have seen it as their duty to think and write programmatically on the whole gamut of issues affecting their environments.

This article focuses on the two leading projects in the educational “struggle for the hearts and minds” of the people in the British North American colony of Lower Canada (currently the southern portion of the Canadian Province of Quebec) in the wake of the insurrectionary struggles and armed border incursions of 1837–38. (See Figure 1.) English Radicals and Whigs, with some Canadian allies, promoted a broad-ranging reconstruction of colonial government and legal and cultural institutions. The educational component of their project centered on the “nationalization” of the French- and English-speaking populations through the attendance of young people in common schools, where they would be instructed in a nonsectarian civil religion later known as “our Common Christianity.” The cooperative management of such schools by adult male property holders would train men in the operations of local representative self-government. Most of those involved in promoting this project for a new form of community understood it to be aimed at the assimilation of French Canadians to a broadly “British” nationality.

Contentious public debates about women's rational and moral capacity circulated during the European Enlightenment at the same time that science was emerging as a dominant mode of inquiry. As historian Karen Offen argues in European Feminisms, these debates preoccupied both men and women intellectuals of the middling and upper classes and represented a pivotal moment in the three-century campaign to rearticulate a politics of knowledge proclaiming women as deserving as men of formal schooling at all levels. Disputes about women's capabilities emerged in the context of efforts to redefine the rights and privileges of men, of male intellectuals to reassert male dominance over and control of females’ access to intellectual participation as well as the craft guilds associated with women's work, and of men and women to consider the meaning and structure of social institutions and social systems. The German poet Philippine Engelhard captured women's frustrations with the limits imposed upon them in comparison to men in the context of the formation of the liberal state, the development of the middle class, and the growth of humanistic and scientific inquiry:

This article critically examines how the 1919 Federal Survey of Education in Hawai'i, under the guise of a scientific study to guide educational reform, was used as the means to implement colonial policies over the territory's largest ethnic group, the Nikkei, people of Japanese ancestry. Furthermore, the survey was also used by various other political and religious parties and individuals to further their own objectives. Although there were many facets to the federal survey, this study focuses only on the debate surrounding Japanese language schools, the most sensational issue of the survey. The battle over the control of Japanese language schools among the white ruling class, educational authorities, and the Nikkei community in Hawai'i created the foundation for an anti-Japanese language school movement that spread to the West Coast of the United States. The survey was also a catalyst for Nikkei in redefining their Japanese language schools and a battleground concerning their future and identity. Despite numerous studies on Japanese Americans in Hawai'i, and studies of the Japanese language schools, neither the process, results, nor effects of the survey have been critically examined to date. This paper analyzes the process of how the federal survey evolved and how it arrived at its conclusions through an examination of the Education Bureau's files in order to illuminate the origins of the Japanese language school control movement and its chapter of ethnic American educational history.

In the late 1960s, the all-male Phi Delta Kappa and the parallel all-female organization, Pi Lambda Theta, faced local and national pressures to abandon their single-sex status and become coeducational. Demands for the sex integration of both fraternities from university students, from educational and women's associations, and from universities responding to governmental censures to eliminate sex discrimination forced Pi Lambda Theta (PLT) and Phi Delta Kappa (PDK) to examine the purpose and organization of single-sex associations in American professional and collegiate life. For Phi Delta Kappa and, in particular, Pi Lambda Theta, the advent of coeducational membership led to direct competition between the formerly cooperative men's and women's groups. Thus, the elimination of sex segregation in the education fraternities ended approximately fifty years of cooperation and an alliance that promoted the professional distinctions between all educators and those in the separate but parallel Phi Delta Kappa and Pi Lambda Theta.

You that are men and thoughts of manhood know,
Be Just now to the Man who made you so.
Martyr'd by Scholars the stabbed Cassian dies,
And falls to cursed Lads a Sacrafice.
Not so my Cheever; Not by Scholars slain,
But Praised and Lov'd, and wished to Life again.
Cotton Mather, 1708

In New England, as in the country as a whole, teaching began as a male occupation. The earliest schoolmasters taught in small settlements of religious dissenters who had migrated to the wilderness of New England in the seventeenth century. The gendered meaning of teaching accompanied the social practice of hiring male teachers. Puritan minister Cotton Mather, in his passionate elegy for seventeenth-century New England schoolmaster Ezekiel Cheever, attests to the settlers' belief in the manliness of teachers. To Mather and other English settlers, the very term schoolmaster denoted masculine qualities. In Mather's own words: “He lives as a Master, the Term, which has been for above three thousand years, assign'd to the Life of a Man.” For Mather, teachers were not only male but embodied a particular vision of the masculine as well. Mather's vision of the ideal teacher, as having a specific kind of masculinity, was not unique to him. Drawing on English and Puritan traditions, the early New England colonists embraced an image of the ideal teacher that incorporated masculine virtues.

At the outbreak of World War II on the 3rd of September 1939, the British government feared that Britain's cities would soon be targeted by the German Luftwaffe, and within three days in early September it enacted a mass evacuation scheme that had been prepared the year before. That scheme entailed a huge movement of population, relocating 1.5 million of Britain's city children, their teachers, mothers with preschool children, and pregnant women from their homes to the safety of small towns and villages in designated “reception” areas. Evacuation would empty the threatened inner cities of the most vulnerable, keeping them safe from civilian bombing.

That plan would have a swift, total, and lasting impact on formal school education. Indeed, in April 1939 a circular from the Board of Education had stated unequivocally that in the evacuated areas “schools will be closed for the whole period during which the emergency may continue….” Reception areas would house and school city children for as long as any aerial threat remained. In practice, however, the course taken by the war in its earliest stages mitigated against the evacuation's effectiveness. Crucially, and despite regular false alarms, the first months of war proved quiet on the home front. Few enemy planes materialized, and the public perception of their threat began to weaken. As a consequence, the intervening months of the conflict came quickly to be known as the “phoney war.” While this proved a relief, not least because it allowed time for the building of what had up to then been poorly prepared civilian air-raid precautions, its impact upon the mass evacuation scheme of September 1939 was damaging. Despite the efforts of government to “talk-up” the success of evacuation and its benefits for children and the hard work of teachers and the evacuation authorities in trying to keep children in the reception areas, cracks began to appear in the planning as many children soon began to trickle back. The phoney war, homesickness, and growing reports of a mixed welcome and treatment received by evacuees persuaded many parents that they wanted their children back. By January 1940 nearly half of all evacuee schoolchildren had returned home. In some cities the picture was even worse. London, for example, had just 34 percent of its evacuee children remaining in reception areas, while in the cities of Sheffield and Coventry, both heavily bombed in the coming months, the figure stood at less than 10 percent. German raids and heavy bombing on British cities finally commenced during the summer of 1940.

Just about two years before Pearl Harbor, a young Japanese American woman took this pledge to herself when she completed a special study program in Tokyo, Japan. Although the shadow of war loomed increasingly over the Pacific, thousands of American-born Japanese (Nisei) youth like her flocked to their parents' native land during the 1930s to pursue cultural and language learning, as well as formal secondary and higher education. In any given year following 1932, an estimated 1,500 young Nisei students from North America resided in Tokyo and other urban areas of Japan. Often referred to as Kibei after returning to their native land, these young women and men attempted to embrace their ethnic heritage and identity during their sojourn in Japan with the support of Japanese educators.

Reformist educational discourses of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, usually referred to as the “new education” or progressive education, emanated from the industrialized countries of the United States and Western Europe. They emerged partly as a response to social and economic conditions but also as an attempt by educationists to ameliorate the regimentation and pedagogical limitations of nineteenth-century schooling. A considerable degree of cross-pollination of ideas across different countries occurred through visits, study, and the exchange of publications between educationists, allowing an international focus to emerge. The various discourses that constituted progressive education were at times confusing, even contradictory, and the use of these umbrella-type categories masked and distorted the diversity of pedagogical practices. These discourses also found their way into the Southern Hemisphere including British colonies such as Australia.

Documenting the impact of the mental hygiene movement has been problematical for historians. The hygienists operated in the realm of mass psychology and social relations, within the “mentalities” of children—particularly of the postwar generation—who have left little observable evidence of changing social attitudes and relationships resulting from changes to mass child-rearing and schooling practices. The influence of the movement upon parenting literature and curricular documents may be readily observed in postwar baby books, magazines, newspapers, radio scripts, and films, as well as in the changing language of educational theorists and practitioners. But as to seeing the actual effects of this material upon any society, documentary evidence has remained elusive.

If any Belgian educator belongs to the canon of the New Education, it is certainly Ovide Decroly (1871–1932). Particularly in southern Europe and in many Latin American countries, the ideas and the work of this French-speaking Brussels doctor have been inspirational for a movement that projected itself worldwide—albeit in different modes—as the “child-oriented,” “progressive” alternative to the rigid, traditional school. As recent research has shown, this movement manifested itself primarily by means of the development of its own language and discourse in which the “new school” was projected into a “new” society. However, ultimately, it turned out that the “new” did not involve a radical break with the modernizing trends from which it emerged and that it wanted to combat. Without going further into the discussion of its success or failure, about continuity and discontinuity of discourse and movement, we want to show that the construction of the self-discourse of the New Education was largely determined by the extolling of its own merits. We will do this via the example of Ovide Decroly. This extolling was generally done by epigones who, from the immediate circle of often charismatic school reformers, gazed in wonder on the work of the Master (or Mistress) and ascribed to his or her “method” an authenticity that it did not actually have.

During Reconstruction between one-fourth and one-third of the southern African-American work force emigrated to northern and southern urban areas. This phenomenon confirmed the fears of Delta cotton planters about the transition from slave to wage labor. Following a labor convention in Memphis, Tennessee, during the summer of 1869, one proposed alternative to the emerging employment crisis was to introduce Chinese immigrant labor, following the example of countries in the Caribbean and Latin America during the mid nineteenth century. Cotton plantation owners initially hoped that Chinese “coolie” workers would help replace the loss of African-American slave labor and that competition between the two groups would compel former slaves to resume their submissive status on plantations. This experiment proved an unmitigated failure. African Americans sought independence from white supervision and authority. And, Chinese immigrant workers proved to be more expensive and less dependable than African-American slave labor. More importantly, due to low wages and severe exploitation by planters, Chinese immigrants quickly lost interest in agricultural work.

Discussions of academic freedom inevitably elicit revolutionary and conservative forces concurrendy. This conflict is apparent, for example, in the 1916 report of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP). On one hand, the university is an “inviolable refuge” from various tyrannies, including the “tyranny of public opinion.” Here, professors are part of a revolutionary “intellectual experiment…where new ideas may germinate and where their fruit, though … [possibly] distasteful to the community as a whole, may be allowed to ripen.…” Accordingly, no professor “can be a successful teacher unless he [sic] enjoys the respect of his students, and their confidence in his intellectual integrity. It is clear, however, that this confidence will be impaired if there is suspicion on the part of the student that the teacher is not expressing himself fully or frankly, or that college and university teachers are in general a repressed and intimidated class who dare not speak with that candor and courage which youth always demands in those whom it is to esteem.” On the other hand, the liberty of the scholar “is conditioned by there being conclusions gained by a scholar's method and held in a scholar's spirit; that is to say, they must be the fruits of competent and patient and sincere inquiry, and they should be set forth with dignity, courtesy, and temperateness of language.” How to rectify the apparent contradiction between expressing oneself “fully” and “frankly” while at the same time being “temperate” in language is, perhaps, a key feature in the long history of, and the various debates about, academic freedom.

The history of teaching and learning via television has compressed into a half-century many of the same stages and themes of the larger story of common schooling in the United States. Responding to a variety of public, private, and foundation interests in the post-World War II period, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) set aside 242 television frequencies for noncommercial educational purposes in 1952. Three decades earlier, the Federal Radio Commission (FRC) had asserted a need for broadcasting to serve a common good for the broad public and civic interest. During the 1920s, nonnetworked educational radio stations were formed on various college and university campuses.

Pupil for pupil, more has been written about Japanese American students than about those of any other ethnic group in America. They enter into our historical consciousness with the abortive attempt of the San Francisco School Board to segregate Japanese American students in 1906–07 which led to the Gentlemen's Agreement of 1907–08 between the United States and Japan. As Henry Yu has recently reminded us, scholars were fascinated by the achievements of “oriental” students in American schools in the 1920s. Sociologists and educational psychologists, especially at Stanford University and the University of Chicago and often in conjunction with the Institute of Pacific Relations and/or Robert E. Park's Survey of Race Relations, produced a substantial corpus of work that focused on second-generation Asian Americans and stressed such things as test scores and life course studies. Conceived as studies in Americanization they almost totally ignored the community-run language schools: the lack of sophisticated studies examining these schools remains one of major gaps in the historiography of ethnic education in America.