As he prepared to leave office and active politics, George Washington offered the American people some advice based on a lifetime of thought and conviction.

“It is substantially true that virtue or morality is a necessary spring of popular government…. Promote, then, as an object of primary importance, institutions for the general diffusion of knowledge. In proportion as the structure of a government gives force to public opinion, it is essential that public opinion should be enlightened.” He went on to write in the same address that religion and morality were essential to national prosperity and to stability and happiness. Washington spoke as a gentleman, a republican it is true, but nevertheless a man schooled in a long tradition of courtesy.

The traditional historian's view of eighteenth-century English education is that it was an era moribund in both educational ideas and practice. “It is a dark picture” in William Boyd's phrase; “a dull and barren record”; or in J. E. G. de Montmorency's term, “a century of educational sleep.” Studies of the dissenting academies and charity schools by Irene Parker and Herbert McLachlan and others, however, have suggested that there was at least some restlessness in the sleep. More recently Nicholas Hans in New Trends in Education in the Eighteenth Century maintains that the era was in fact the beginning of “modern” education in England: “Many of the ideas of the nineteenth and even the twentieth centuries, which at the time were declared to be radical innovations, were enunciated and practiced in the eighteenth century.” The private academy especially, Hans points out, was a seminal institution. The academy masters, he states, “… were able and efficient teachers who must be considered as pioneers of modern education.”

The nature of the American college during the Colonial and early national periods has concerned many educational historians. Questions of curricula, organization and finance have been frequently posed and often answered. Yet these approaches have ignored perhaps the most central element in the collegiate scene: the professors.

American participation in international education started much earlier than the twentieth century. The activities of Franklin and Jefferson, although American, were international at the same time (see my two articles in the Proceedings of A.P.S. for 1952 and 1954). As an example of American interest in foreign education the project of transplanting the Genevan Academy to America could be mentioned. The details are taken from Jefferson Papers (Library of Congress, Washington) and Sir Francis D'Ivernois Papers (The Library of the University of Geneva).

Carnegie hall was the setting for an anniversary celebration on the evening of October 24, 1912. William Henry Maxwell, Superintendent of Schools of New York City, was being honored for twenty-five years of service to public education. Present on the platform were such luminaries as Nicholas Murray Butler and Seth Low, while in the audience were many distinguished men and women who had been invited to join in the tribute. When Maxwell was finally called upon to address the group, he spoke on his favorite topic—the achievements of the public schools of the city during the past decade. Although the Superintendent did not take personal credit for the advances he recited, the audience was more than ready to pay him tribute, agreeing with The School Journal that he had “made a new educational New York, full of instruction for every other city in the land….”