¹ For a comparative survey, see Heidenheimer, Arnold J., ‘The Politics of Public Education, Health and Welfare in the U.S.A. and Western Europe: How Growth and Reform Potentials Have Differed’, British Journal of Political Science, 3 (07, 1973), 315–40CrossRefGoogle Scholar. As late as 1935 the public school system could be described as ‘the only fully developed public service’. (Comstock, Alzada, ‘Expenditures, Public’, Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, 6, 7Google Scholar).

² American Political Science Review, 52 (12, 1959), 1032–51Google Scholar.

³ A critical but sympathetic review of what Bailyn calls ‘the patristic literature of a powerful academic ecclesia’ is provided by Cremin, Lawrence A. in The Wonderful World of Ellwood Patterson Cubberley (1965)Google Scholar.

⁴ The Social Composition of Boards of Education (1927), and School and Society in Chicago (1928). For a recent study of Counts see Gutek, Gerald L., The Educational Theory of George S. Counts (1970)Google Scholar. The educational Jeremiad is, of course, a polemical form which has flourished in the United States.

⁵ Note the comment by Silberman, Charles E. in Crisis in the Classroom (1971), p. 141Google Scholar: ‘To read some of the more important and influential contemporary critics of education – men like Edgar Friedenberg, Paul Goodman, John Holt, Jonathan Kozol – one might think that the schools are staffed by sadists and clods who are drawn into teaching by the lure of upward mobility and the opportunity to take out their anger – Friedenberg prefers the sociological term ressentiment, or “a kind of free floating ill-temper” – on the students’. The classic work on teachers, described by David Riesman as ‘the most harassed of white collar cadres’, is Waller, Willard's The Sociology of Teaching (1932)Google Scholar. For a useful transatlantic comparison see Brown, George and Tropp, Asher, ‘Teachers in England and America’, in Halsey, A. H. et al. (ed.), Education, Economy, and Society (1963), pp. 545–57Google Scholar. In New York teachers by developing their own form of business unionism have become a potent political force.

⁶ Prior to the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, the main examples of such programmatic assistance were measures of national preparedness: the Smith-Hughes Act of 1917, providing aid for vocational training, was much influenced by German example and competition; the National Defense Education Act of 1958, providing money in the wake of the Sputnik flight for training in scientific subjects, was designed to redress the technological balance of the Cold War. On the 1965 Act see Meranto, Philip, The Politics of Federal Aid to Education in 7965 (1967)Google Scholar. During the 1960s federal grants to primary and secondary education increased from about a half-billion dollars in 1960 to about $3.5 billion in 1970. See Tyler, Ralph W., ‘The Federal Role in Education’, The Public Interest, 34 (Winter, 1974), 164–87Google Scholar.

⁷ Blackwell, G. W., ‘A Sociologist on School-Community Relationships’, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 302 (11, 1955), 128–35CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁸ One local ethnic variation, the intrenched Irishness of the Boston school system, is portrayed by Shrag, Peter in Village School Downtown (1967), p. 51Google Scholar: ‘At the Boston School Department, encrusted in a ten-storey spittoon-age building at 15 Beacon Street and in some 200 elementary and secondary schools, the old order is still intact … the McDonoughs still speak mainly to the O'Learys, the Caseys, and the Hogans’.

⁹ See Engerman, Stanley L., ‘Human Capital, Education and Economic Growth’, in Fogel, Robert L. and Engerman, Stanley L. (ed.), The Re-interpretation of American Economic History (1971), pp. 241–56Google Scholar.

¹⁰ This is the definition of Mich, Ivan in De-schooling Society (1971), p. 25Google Scholar.

¹¹ For a local study of the relation of compulsory schooling to the prevention of child labour, see Stambler, Moses, ‘The Effect of Compulsory Education and Child Labor Laws on High School Attendance in New York City, 1898–1917’, History of Education Quarterly, 8 (Summer, 1968), 189–214CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹² In Education and the Cult of Efficiency (1962) Raymond A. Callahan surveys the application to the schools of developing techniques of business administration, with a corresponding equation of school and factory, principal and manager.

¹³ See Tyack, David, ‘Bureaucracy and the Common School; the Example of Portland, Oregon, 1851–1913’, American Quarterly, 19 (Fall, 1967), 475–98CrossRefGoogle Scholar, Katz, Michael, ‘The Emergence of Bureaucracy in Urban Education; the Boston Case, 1850–1884’, History of Education Quarterly, 8 (Summer, 1968), 155–85, (Fall, 1968), 319–57CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and David Rogers, 110 Livingston Street (1968). By 1880 it was being said in Boston that ‘the taxes of the people go to fatten “organization” and the children suffer’, and in Portland that ‘the elaborate public school system’ was ‘largely managed and directed by those whom it supports’. It should Review Article: Public Schooling in the United States not be forgotten, however, that until the First World War 60 per cent of teachers worked in rural areas, and that more than half of these worked alone. Not until the 1920s was there a nation-wide educational ‘industry’ of a self-perpetuating kind.

¹⁴ See Handlin, Oscar, The Uprooted (1951)Google Scholar, and Covello, Leonard, The Social Background of the Italo-American School Child (1967)Google Scholar. For Italians, in particular, compulsory schooling represented both an enforced idleness and a threat to the cohesion and integrity of family life – ‘La legge è fatta contra la famiglia’.

¹⁵ Stein, Annie, ‘Strategies for Failure’, Harvard Educational Review, 41 (05, 1971), 158–204CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁶ See Cohen, David K., ‘Immigrants and the Schools’, Review of Educational Research, 40 (02, 1970), 13–27Google Scholar.

¹⁷ Much has been written on the mass media of a descriptive, subjective, and evaluative kind; an attempt to weigh more carefully the informational ‘outputs’ of various ‘educative’ agencies has been made by Machlup, Fritz in The Production and Distribution of Knowledge in the United States (1962)Google Scholar.

¹⁸ Trow, Martin, ‘The Second Transformation of American Secondary Education’, International Journal of Comparative Sociology, 2 (09, 1961), 144–66CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁹ See Part 1, ‘Reform by Imposition’, pp. 19–112, and Appendix C, ‘Social Composition of High School Enrollment’, pp. 270–1. For a later period see Counts, George S., The Selectivity of American Secondary Schools (1922)Google Scholar. Secondary schools provide their pupils with a kind of occupational tracking but on this issue doubts and dilemmas have been greater than in Britain, Germany, and France. In France La République des Professeurs failed to reform in any fundamental way a class-based dual system of state education. See Watson, D. R., ‘The Politics of Educational Reform in France during the Third Republic, 1900–1940’, Past and Present, 34 (07, 1966), 81–99CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²⁰ Despite its pessimism over input-output ratios (and hence compensatory education) the Coleman Report neither challenged nor compromised the legal and moral grounds for school de-segregation; it even supported the substantive grounds by showing the importance of an improved milieu (such as a poor Black might obtain by attending a white middle class school). See also Harvard Educational Review, 38 (Winter, 1968)Google Scholar, and Mosteller, Frederick and Moynihan, Daniel P. (ed.), On Equality of Educational Opportunity (1972)Google Scholar.

²¹ See Weiss, Randall D., ‘The Effects of Education on the Earnings of Blacks and Whites’. Review of Economics and Statistics, 52 (05, 1970), 150–9CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²² See Graubard, Allen, ‘The Free School Movement’, Harvard Educational Review, 42 (05, 1972), 351–73CrossRefGoogle Scholar, For the application of sensitivity training and ‘T-group’ dynamics to classroom teaching see Klein, Thomas et al. , Spinach is Good For You (1973)Google Scholar, with such chapter headings as ‘Discovering Each Other’, ‘Coming Together’. For a critique of the middle-class retreatist aspects of free schools see Kozol, Jonathan, ‘Politics, Rage and Motivation in the Free Schools’, Harvard Educational Review, 42 (08, 1972), 414–22CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²³ See Fishlow, Albert, ‘The Common School Revival: Fact or Fancy?’ in Rosovsky, Henry (ed.), Industrialization in Two Systems: Essays in Honor of Alexander Gerschenkron (1966), pp. 40–67Google Scholar.

²⁴ See Ravitch, Diane, The Great School Wars (1974)Google Scholar, and Kushnick, Louis, ‘Race, Class and Power; the New York Decentralization Controversy’, Journal of American Studies, 3 (12, 1969), 201–19CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²⁵ ‘School Reform and the Urban School’, History of Education Quarterly, 12 (Summer, 1972), 211–28CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²⁶ See Tyack, David, ‘The Tribe and the Common School; Community Control in Rural Education’, American Quarterly, 24 (03, 1972), 3–19CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²⁷ On the desirability of the school recreating the work environment of the early New England household see Dewey, John, The School and Society (1899), Chs. 1, 2Google Scholar.

²⁸ On schools as bureaucracies see Bidwell, Charles E., ‘The School as a Formal Organization’, in March, James G. (ed.), Handbook of Organizations (1965), pp. 972–1022Google Scholar. On schools as factories see Callahan, op. cit., pp. 126–47, ‘The “Factory System” in Education–The Platoon School’.

²⁹ I want to thank David Grimsted of the University of Maryland for his comments on an earlier draft.