The strange course taken by the fame of Johann Friedrich Herbart is a fascinating tale. At his death in 1841 he had few disciples and very little influence. Then, twenty years later, Ziller, largely through his book, Foundation for the Doctrine of Educative Instruction, revived interest in Herbart and made Herbartianism an international educational movement. As such it came to the United States about 1890 as Charles DeGarmo and the McMurry brothers made it into the best organized and most vocal educational force of the period. The National Herbart Society for the Scientific Study of Teaching was organized in 1895. Then five short years later the Herbart Society died, and after 1905 literature on Herbart or Herbartianism scarcely appeared in the United States. At present, to most educators Herbart is little more than a name, vaguely associated with catch-phrases like “the five steps” or the “apperceptive mass” or the “threshhold of consciousness.”

Among the ideas firmly associated with the Jacksonian era is that which asserts a general decline in the intellectual qualities of the national political leadership. Most recently, this concept of the low intellectual and educational level of the Jacksonians has been promoted by Richard Hofstadter in his Anti-Intellectualism in American Life. “The first truly powerful and widespread impulse to anti-intellectualism in American politics was, in fact, given by the Jacksonian movement. Its distrust of expertise, its dislike for centralization, its desire to uproot the entrenched classes, and its doctrine that important functions were simple enough to be performed by anyone amounted to a repudiation not only of the system of government by gentlemen which the nation had inherited from the eighteenth century, but also of the special value of the educated classes in civic life.”

General histories of the Progressive Era have by and large ignored educational reform even though it was an integral part of the Progressive Movement. Lawrence Cremin, who has done much to remedy this oversight, has described Progressivism in education as “a many-sided effort to use the schools to improve the lives of individuals.” To the Progressives, according to Cremin, this meant “broadening the program and the function of the school to include direct concern for health, vocation, and the quality of family and community life … applying in the classroom the pedagogical principles derived from new scientific research in psychology and the social sciences … [and] tailoring instruction more and more to the different kinds and classes of children who were being brought within the purview of the school.”

Like a kaleidoscope, Philippe Ariès has brilliantly assembled a multitude of colorful illustrations and episodes to demonstrate the discovery of the modern idea of childhood in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. He establishes a familiar rhythm as each chapter traces this discovery from another vantage point: the child as seen in works of art, the child playing games, praying at home, or attending school. Each time he uses the Middle Ages as a starting point where the child received no special attention apart from his elders. The total effect produced by Ariès' sensitive and probing treatment is one of great immediacy, of an actual, lively world in the past that has been very much neglected.