To scholars in pursuit of Africa's past, the written record is a scarce and treasured resource. Among the primitive black cultures on this continent most history is oral history in the truest sense. Knowledge about the past passes by word of mouth from generation to generation, and not only must the scholar capture it but he must also try somehow to filter the significant from the inconsequential as well as the truth from the exaggerated. And yet historians in modern technological societies often face the same problem. In America today events of great importance are more and more receiving less and less documentation. Men can use the telephone or even the airplane to speedily carry their messages or themselves to desired correspondents, and frequently that revealing letter so important to the historian never gets written.

The United States Bureau of Education was never popular with Southerners, who saw it as a potential instrument of federal intervention into state affairs. But in spite of Southern opposition in Congress, the bureau grew in size and influence after its creation in 1867.

Both the 1918 Education Act (the Fisher Act) and the 1944 Education Act (the Butler Act) are of interest to the English social or education historian as major signposts along the road to the English welfare state. The acts are even more striking when juxtaposed, because their developments follow similar patterns. This paper will suggest that the evolution of both acts involved the following pattern: First, the ideational components of each act were produced by the Board of Education and by the consultative committee of the Board of Education in the years before the world wars. In both cases the ideas out of which the acts were constructed were merely the conventional wisdom of the prewar educational establishment. Second, the crystallization of these ideas was the result of wartime events. Third, because in each case the energizing force for the articulation of the conventional wisdom into legislative enactment was the war, it was inevitable that the disappearance of the source of energy (the war) would produce an eventual diminution of educational momentum. In both cases a postwar educational “slump” was the result.

In the decades after the Civil War, no individual did more to popularize the kindergarten in America than Elizabeth Palmer Peabody. First acquainted with the new institution for childhood through Mrs. Carl Schurz in 1859, later followed by a European tour to see Friedrich Froebel's work, Peabody spent the next thirty-five years of her life proselytizing for the emancipation of the child. The kindergarten, she believed, was not simply a method of education but a movement of mystical significance. Her advocacy was an “apostolate,” kindergartening a religion, a “Gospel for children.” Like Froebel, Peabody spoke of absolutes and universality. She dealt with Truth, the Child, the Home, Family, and Motherhood, and offered to stem the hedonistic tendencies of childhood. All children, Peabody and her associates believed, were self-centered. In their earliest years they discover their bodies, senses, and power to act. Their mothers' tenderness heightens their impulses toward selfishness. They demand immediate satisfaction. Without an agency external to the family in which socialization among peers and to society's mores occurs, childhood would thus ultimately become self-destructive. It was here that the kindergarten became necessary, allowing the child “to take his place in the company of his equals, to learn his place in their companionship, and still later to learn wider social relations and their involved duties.” “A kindergarten, then,” Peabody wrote, “is children in society—a commonwealth or republic of children—whose laws are all part and parcel of the Higher Law alone.”

During the 1840s and 1850s the transformation of schoolkeepers into a professional corps of educators hinged more on the efficiency of contemporary revivalist strategies than on any conception of scholarship or systematic pedagogy. At best, theories and ideologies of instruction generally offered only supplementary argumentation to justify immediate practices and experiments. Little educational activity seems to have been inspired directly by any ideological treatises on learning, although professional schoolmen of the ante-bellum period freely invoked Pestalozzi, de Fellenberg, Rousseau, Lancaster, and the European educational systems as models of various educational practices. In New England the effective plan behind the call for professional educators came not from adaptations of foreign instruction, but rather from already proven measures which had been applied and perfected by religious evangelicals of the 1830s. The major institution for educational improvement in the ante-bellum period was the teachers' institute which operated as a kind of revival agency. The origin, spread, and eclipse of this institution for professional teachers, both in its conceptual and institutional features, illuminate the shifting contours of educational policy and practice in New England before the Civil War.