Many schools in England have long histories, but few can rival that of Reading School, stretching from before the foundation of Reading Abbey to the present day, broken only by four years in the middle of the last century when it had to be reconstituted on a fresh site. At the time of the dissolution of the monasteries, its learned schoolmaster Leonard Cox, who was a friend of Erasmus, was given letters patent to keep on the school, and it was on this rather ad-hoc basis that the school was run for many years. In 1640, Archbishop Laud, a former pupil, endowed the school with an extra £20 per annum to assure the master of a decent salary, and arranged for triennial visitations from Oxford to check on progress. Despite these careful arrangements and endowments, the school fell on hard times, and when Dr. Valpy came to be head in 1781 he found little comfort, few sound traditions, and fewer possibilities for development.

This writer discovered recently that a 1624 edition of Isaac Habrecht's Janua Linguarum Quadrilinguis was bought by the University of Pennsylvania from the collection of Professor Paul Monroe of Columbia University in 1928. Unfortunately, the volume was catalogued under the wrong author, John Amos Comenius, for forty years.

Although the Talmudic Academies of Sura and Pumbeditha in Babylonia ceased to function almost one thousand years ago, their contributions to Jewish learning and to Jewish unity have so impressed contemporary Jews that they still recite the ancient prayer, Yekum Purkan, as part of the traditional Sabbath morning service in behalf of “our scholars and teachers in the land of Israel and in the land of Babylon, the heads of the academies and of the chiefs of the captivity….” As early as A.D. 220, Abba-Arika founded the renowned academy which was to flourish for eight centuries. Later, Sura's great rival, Pumbeditha, gave Jewish scholars another Talmudic center for research and teaching, and from both of these celebrated academies, inspirational messages flowed unceasingly to the Jewish communities throughout the Diaspora. The early sages of Sura, the Amoraim, devoted themselves to Talmudic interpretation, and their successors, the Savoraim, judged the Talmud and enlarged it considerably. At the beginning of the seventh century, the Massoretic scholars added even greater glory to the academies by making further contributions in both schools to their great project of supplying vowel points and accents to the Biblical text.

While practitioners of the “new” history of education see much more clearly than most historians the dynamic relationship the school has with the society of which it is part, we continue to share with the other observers of education a tendency to look at the child in the classroom as someone being taught; that is, we see him primarily as the object of the process of education, rather than in his real role of learner. We have ignored what has become a truism in other branches of educational thought: that schooling is more a matter of learning than it is of teaching. The child's attitude, personality, and his life in his family and its wider environment are more important factors in governing what he learns and how he uses what he learns than are curricula, textbooks, teachers, school administrators, and school boards. We know, for example, that much of the paraphernalia of the “new” education in Canada and the United States at the turn of the century—manual training, industrial education, domestic science, health and hygiene, scientific temperance education, and so on—were introduced into the schools to give to the children of the urban working class an education supposedly more appropriate to their needs and calling in life than the traditional school curriculum. We do not know, however, whether these changes in what went on in the school made any difference, good or bad, to the children they were designed to serve. Can we say that, in 1910, whether a child of downtown Toronto or New York profited in any substantial way from his schooling depended mostly on the curriculum and teaching staff of his school, or on the kind of person his family and children. Our research opportunities arise, however, not only from new questions or concepts, but also from the use of new techniques. In those areas of French, English, and American studies where historians have used the microstudy framework, they have been able to achieve very substantial results from their research. Demographic historians, for example, have invented the technique of family reconstruction which they are using to ask questions about changes in the age at which marriage takes place, the size of families, the family and the prevailing social structure, and so on. With a little ingenuity it should be possible to prod out of this kind of data, or from our own similar material, much that will be useful in discovering, particularly at periods of sharp change or crisis, the relationship between the child and the family on one side–such things perhaps as number, spacing, and birth order of children; family size; family cohesiveness; socio-economic status and the like—and schools on the other.

The American Herbartian movement was, of course, more than merely the activities of the people connected with it. It was a body of ideas and practices. Obviously the Herbartians would not have borrowed and promulgated the doctrine with such success as they achieved had not these ideas appeared useful to the educators of the time. Necessarily the success of the movement was in large part a function of the virtue of the ideas as well as the skill and devotion with which they were expounded.