I decided to study the history of American higher education shortly after May 1, 1968. Early that morning, over a thousand New York City police officers had cleared the Columbia University campus of demonstrators and the occupants of five university buildings. Upwards of 800 were arrested; perhaps the same number of students, faculty, and police needed medical attention. The next afternoon, the leaders of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) gathered on the balcony of the Columbia Law School building, looking at over a thousand demonstrators protesting the police action. The images of the police action initiated by the Columbia administration still haunt me. But so does the triumph of “manipulatory democracy” practiced by SDS members.

Immediately after the American Revolution, the founders set about the task of ensuring the continued existence of the fledgling republic. Facing a host of problems—economic, social, and governmental—some founders promoted a concept of schooling that would inculcate patriotism and forge a uniquely American identity. Noah Webster wanted to create an American language, and Benjamin Rush wanted schools to “convert men into republican machines.” Webster, Rush, Thomas Jefferson, and others all wanted to use some version of common schooling to instill in children a sense of nationalism. Textbooks used in these common schools would be a likely way to further promote a sense of American identity. What that identity should be, though, and what the “good citizen” of the new republic should look like, was sharply contested, and textbooks of this period reflect many of the fissures in the work of nation building.

The city was to be “called Babel,” according to the book of Genesis, “because the LORD did there confound the language of all the earth.” Although the Midwest of the nineteenth century had never been “of one language, and of one speech” as the ancient city with the tower to heaven, America's heartland was confounded by linguistic diversity, particularly as more and more immigrants poured into the region after the 1830s. Yet, these foreign-language speakers brought with them more than “ax and hoe and rifle,” as Mark Twain once wrote of the “poor immigrant” settlers. They also brought with them a desire to maintain their linguistic and cultural traditions—particularly in the emerging common schools—and the area that spanned along and east of the Mississippi and north of the Mason–Dixon line proved to be an excellent environment for that endeavor. Bilingual education took hold in the Midwestern schools not only because of the enormous amount of foreign-language speakers who settled there—making the region a modern Babel—but also because it was a developing area when the immigrants arrived, thus allowing them to become “co-founders and partners” in the region's affairs.

The University of Illinois, a land-grant college, opened in 1868 and developed slowly for a quarter of a century. In 1894 the trustees, determined to give the institution greater recognition, appointed Andrew S. Draper as president. Draper had made a reputation in New York State and in Cleveland as a school administrator, but he had never attended a college or university and did not understand the transformation of higher education then taking place in the United States. During his ten-year tenure the University gained the shape of a university by establishing various professional schools, but it lacked the spirit of a university.

In 1927, nursery school educator Lucy Sprague Mitchell heralded Jean Piaget's psychology as of “outstanding interest” and wrote in Progressive Education that it should be of “immense service” to psychologists, teachers, and parents. In 1929, psychologist Lois Meek praised Piaget's research in the National Society for the Study of Education's yearbook on preschool and parental education. In 1931, the National Association for Nursery Education bibliography on nursery school-based research, for which Meek was on the editorial board, included no mention of Piaget at all.

The essays in this special issue offer fascinating examples of many, often surprising interconnections within and between the international preschool movement and other education reforms. Just imagining Elizabeth Peabody in Florence and Rome puts her in a new light, and who knew that Julius Rosenwald contributed to a nursery training school in Britain along with his support for building schools for African-American children in the South?

Although music has long had a place in the school, its position has often been precarious, relegated to odd hours and odd locations, and starved of both funds and attention. While at times music and the arts have enjoyed considerable support, these subjects are often the last ones added and the first ones cut from the curriculum. Yet, the arts have passionate advocates as well, including parents and pedagogues who support a holistic model of education that emphasizes humanistic values and aesthetics as well as utilitarian training. Still, music educators have struggled to justify their subject, often relying on extrinsic arguments to support its inclusion in the curriculum. Music, one is told, helps students raise their reading and math scores, improves their self-discipline, and builds community. Such arguments are rarely persuasive to voters concerned with eliminating expensive “frills” or to officials trying to balance tight budgets and raise test scores. Local newspapers bear witness to this struggle, as music and art programs fight to stay alive in American schools. This story, so potent today, has a long history. It dates back to the nineteenth century and the very birth of school music programs. It crosses continents, having as much currency in Europe as it does in North America. Debates over music in the schools are nothing less than debates over the meaning and purpose of education. Music is not one of the “three ‘R's.” Yet, precisely because of music's peripheral

The kindergarten was, in all countries but Germany, a foreign import. The most familiar aspect of its diffusion to American scholars is the spread of Froebel's teachings into England and the United States by emigrants who had left the German Confederation after the failure of the revolutions of 1848–49. Familiar as well are the propaganda efforts by Baroness Bertha von Marenholtz-Bülow in Western Europe, especially in the 1850s when kindergartens were banned in Prussia. The recent anthology edited by Roberta Wollons, Kindergartens and Cultures, has shown that many countries received this institution secondhand, as Japan and Australia did via the United States.

Judge Justine Wise Polier

In 1935 Justine Wise Polier (1903–87), an intense young labor lawyer serving on New York City's Committee on Unemployment Relief, was pressuring Mayor Fiorello La Guardia to expand the city's welfare benefits. Thinking he would mollify her, La Guardia promoted Polier to the bench of the city's children's court, making her the first woman to rise above the position of magistrate in New York State.

Since its founding in 1939, the Oram Group has been a maverick in the field of fundraising, lending its expertise to the areas of education, welfare, social action, civil rights, the arts, and the environment. Beginning with the organization's founder, Harold Oram, continuing to the current president and chief executive officer Henry Goldstein, Oram staff members have had an interest in supporting progressive (i.e., social justice-oriented) causes. Influenced by Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal policies and Lyndon B. Johnson's vision of a Great Society, the Oram Group staff has been steadfast in its dedication, with founder Harold Oram referring to the organization's work as “saving the world.” This approach was different from that of earlier fundraising organizations, such as Marts and Lundy or John Price Jones—firms that worked, by and large, with elite white institutions and with black colleges under the direction of white philanthropists. For example, according to Robert L . Payton, for Arnaud C. Marts [and his colleagues at Marts and Lundy],

In November of 1956, the Los Angeles City Board of Education held a regular evening meeting devoted entirely to the topic of school discipline. The session began with brief comments from the district superintendent, Ellis Jarvis, who urged those in attendance not to take the issue too seriously Discipline was “an inherent part of education,” he reminded them, and thus was always “a problem of all schools; all schools in this city, in every city, in every community.” Moreover, he joked, “Denunciation of the young is a necessary part of the hygiene of older people, and greatly assists in the circulation of their blood.” The rest of the meeting's speakers, however, almost all of whom were Los Angeles teachers, did not share Jarvis’ lighthearted perspective. Representing several local teacher organizations, clubs, and associations, as well as two Board-appointed committees charged with investigating discipline in the city's schools, they portrayed a district in crisis, overrun by misbehaving youth, and urged the Board to take action to address the problem.

The headlines “Who's Trying to Ruin Our Schools?” and “Danger's Ahead in the Public Schools” grabbed the attention of the American public during the early 1950s as mainstream publications reacted to efforts by right-wing organizations to influence the curricula of America's elementary and secondary schools. “A bewildering disease that threatens to reach epidemic proportions has infected the public schools of America,” warned John Bainbridge in a two-part series for McCall's in September and October 1952. “The disease does not attack the body but, rather, the mind and the spirit. It produces unreasoning fear and hysteria.” Bainbridge was writing of efforts of some men, women, and their organizations to censor textbooks; to standardize the curriculum; to eliminate teaching about communism, the United Nations and the workings of governments outside of the United States; and to discredit teaching methods used in both public K-12 schools and in the nation's colleges. These activists also sought to ban those who did not subscribe to a specific way of thinking from speaking before students and at educational conferences and gatherings. As a consequence, in the late 1940s and early 1950s a number of American communities were in an uproar over what the country's youth were being taught, and who was doing the teaching.

Research on the history of children and childhood in modern Japan (1868–1945) reveals that issues related to civil society, state, and the establishment of institutions for young children can be explored beyond the transatlantic world. This brief essay considers the role of state and nonstate agents in the genesis of institutions for young children in modern Japan after briefly surveying historiography, a few basic terms, and earlier patterns of state and private involvement in education. After that, it proceeds in chronological order, treating first the founding of kindergartens and then day nurseries, focusing on the initial four decades.

Just days after the start of the 1994-1995 school year, almost a quarter of the student body at McKinley Elementary School in Compton, California did not show up for class. Latino organizers had asked parents to keep their children out of school to protest what they perceived as school administrators' inadequate response to Latino educational needs. Parents of approximately one hundred of the school's 431 students heeded the call. Although one out of four was only slighdy above the daily absentee rate for a normal school day, the nature of these absences forced district administrators to take notice. The rhetoric that Latino activists used when describing the management of Compton's public schools served as the most disquieting aspect of the walkout. “The Compton Unified School District is like Mississippi,” asserted John Ortega, the lead counsel for the Union of Parents and Students of Compton United, the association that organized the attendance strikes. “In Mississippi, they didn't want to educate blacks in the ‘50s, and in the ‘90s, Compton doesn't want to educate Latinos.”

“What is our image going to be—conventional educators or innovators, milque-toasts or activists?” In posing this question, federal staff members responsible for developing the National Teacher Corps (NTC), a Great Society teacher reform initiative, articulated both their assumptions about and aspirations for teaching in the 1960s. According to the reformers’ thinking, existing teachers lacked the qualities of innovation, dedication, and social and political engagement required to teach students in America's low-income communities. In response, they called for a new breed of teacher, with attributes and characteristics distinct from those of conventional educators, as well as a new approach to teacher training. The Corps’ strategy for producing this new breed of educator involved recruiting bright, liberal arts graduates to be teaching interns in underserved classrooms and engaging them in an alternative preparation that emphasized familiarizing candidates with their prospective students’ communities and the culture of poverty. In attracting “better” people and devising more effective training for the challenges of teaching in low-income schools, the Corps exploited both the Zeitgeist of the times and a deeply entrenched historical critique of teachers and teacher education, seeking nothing less than the rehabilitation of the teaching profession itself.

Historians such as Seth Koven and Carolyn Steedman have shown how visual and literary depictions of children helped move late-nineteenth-century middle- and upper-class audiences to join in child-saving philanthropy aimed at the deserving poor. This was certainly true of the promotional literature of the free kindergartens, an analysis of which forms the focus of this essay. Starting from the concepts of fact, truth, and intertextuality utilized by Koven in his analyses of nineteenth-century representations of child-saving, this essay analyzes texts written by free kindergartners (that is, teachers in free kindergartens) Kate Douglas Wiggin in San Francisco and Lileen Hardy in Edinburgh during the 1880s and 1910s, respectively. It contends that we can better understand the purposes, messages, and relatedness of Anglo-American free kindergartners' accounts—and the movements of which they were a part—if we read them as contemporary readers might have; that is, as “artistic fictions” in the mold of the late-Victorian evangelical “true narratives” and as depictions of how child-saving was consciously performed for and presented to multiple audiences.