Fifteen years ago the songwriter John LaTouche turned the Odyssey on its head when he wrote the musical The Golden Apple. Instead of sending his returning veterans on an unfortunate tour of a primitive inland sea, he dropped them into a modern city, to experience the varieties of novelty and disillusionment. To the corrupting politician character who plotted these experiences, he gave the line, “The city itself will be our strategem.”

Anyone reading the foregoing papers might easily conclude that they represent the result of careful planning and coordination by the organizers of the symposium. That is not the case. It was with surprise and delight that we discovered on the morning of the symposium the extent to which common problems and themes pervaded the five papers. This spontaneous appearance of shared concerns provokes two observations in particular: first, it once again indicates the extent to which each generation, in Beard's phrase, writes history anew according to the questions uppermost in its mind. Second, it suggests some of the ways in which the “new” history of education will differ, and improve upon, the “old” through an expansion of the concept of education beyond schooling to the very environment itself and through a clinical dissection of reform motives, processes, and results.

Two facts, I am sure, are evident to all of us. We desperately need an appraisal of the history of education in northern black ghettos, but because of the incredible lack of research on this subject in the past we can only dimly perceive the outlines such a study might take. Consequently, I should like to suggest a few leading questions which might guide this investigation and to indicate some of the sources to which historians might turn for evidence and insights. Let me stress the speculative and tentative character of this essay.

Whatever else written history may offer, it is bound to exhibit the preoccupations of its authors as faithfully as it records the experience of its subjects. As I understand the purpose of this symposium, it is an effort to sample such preoccupations–to produce a decent reflection of the concerns of the moment–unmediated by much effort to see how well they seem to fit evidence of the past. Although living, breathing historians are probably unused to being cast in the role of artifacts, it may prove an interesting and useful innovation.

The past decade has witnessed a surge of writing in history of education, broad in scope, humanistic in character, solid and mature in its use of the tools and apparatus of historical scholarship: Lawrence Cremin's The Transformation of the School, Jack Campbell's biography of Francis W. Parker, Timothy Smith's work in immigration history, Claude Bower's history of progressive education in the depression, Patricia Graham's history of the Progressive Education Association, Krug's history of the American high school, Geraldine Joncich's biography of Thorndike come to mind. And recently several of our more venturesome colleagues have demonstrated how methods and insights borrowed from the social sciences, especially sociology and statistics, can provide significant new approaches to the history of education. I have in mind David Tyack's study of the relationship of bureaucratic processes in the Portland school system at the turn of the century and progressive education, Michael Katz's examination of bureaucratic structure and educational innovation in mid-nineteenth-century Massachusetts, and Charles Bidwell's extremely sophisticated use of sociological and statistical tools to analyze the relationships between school control, moral training, and social structures in the Northeast during the Jacksonian period.

American Herbartianism was to an astonishing degree the creation of three men, all of whom were connected with the Illinois State Normal University: Charles DeGarmo, Charles McMurry, and Frank McMurry. Though they were aided and abetted in very important ways both by other American members of the movement and by various distinguished educators who were never card-carrying Herbartians, any account of American Herbartianism must focus primarily on these three, for they were both its theoretical proponents and its practical agitators.

The position of Johann Friedrich Herbart (1776–1841) in the annals of education is due largely to Herbartianism, a movement which adopted his name but which really became active only a quarter of a century after his death and had relatively slight connections with Herbart's own theory and practice. Yet Herbart's pedagogical theory and his philosophic doctrines in general are not wholly irrelevant or unimportant to students of education if only because they constitute the baseline against which the developments (and aberrations) of the Herbartians must be plotted.

At the south edge of New Harmony, Indiana, in Maple Hill cemetery, over the grave of Joseph Neef, a monument erected by his daughter, Mrs. Richard Owen, bears the inscription, “Joseph Neef was a co-adjutor of Pestalozzi, in Switzerland and was the first to promulgate the Pestalozzian system of education in America.” Mirroring the epitaph on his stone memorial, American educational historians have interpreted Neef as the lengthened shadow of Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi in America. Neef, although in many ways a reflection of his Swiss mentor, was also an educational theorist in his own right. Pestalozzi, as a European, had waited for the coming of a benevolent monarch to inaugurate a natural system of education. Neef quickly accepted the frontier egalitarianism of his adopted nation, blending both Pestalozzian and republican principles to develop an original theory of ethical education.