“There is need for a shift of emphasis in the CCC. The whole concept should be that the CCC is an essential part of the American educational structure.” This statement by Clarence S. Marsh in May 1940 expressed one side of a significant controversy in American education during the 1930's and the early 1940's. The quarrel concerned the educational program of the Civilian Conservation Corps, a New Deal agency established to provide jobs for youths and to aid in efforts to preserve the natural resources of the nation. Opponents of Marsh feared by the late 1930's that the school program of the CCC was an attempt to achieve federal control over the schools in an indirect and deceptive manner.

The cutting edge of a popular drive for educational reform during the early years of the French Revolution was a demand for an abolition of the old royal academies. The attack upon such established institutions of learning grew out of their own backwardness, a new insistence on equality, and the revolutionary determination to put an end to the privileged corporations that were believed to have limited opportunity and discriminated against able men in the arts and sciences. As early as 1789, Louis David was leading a rebel group seeking to reform the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture from within. This institution held a monopoly in the arts and was cordially hated by struggling artists. Ultimately, in order to abolish it, David led his fight into the Jacobin clubs, the Paris Commune, and into the National Assembly itself.

The strange course taken by the fame of Johann Friedrich Herbart is a fascinating tale. At his death in 1841 he had few disciples and very little influence. Then, twenty years later, Ziller, largely through his book, Foundation for the Doctrine of Educative Instruction, revived interest in Herbart and made Herbartianism an international educational movement. As such it came to the United States about 1890 as Charles DeGarmo and the McMurry brothers made it into the best organized and most vocal educational force of the period. The National Herbart Society for the Scientific Study of Teaching was organized in 1895. Then five short years later the Herbart Society died, and after 1905 literature on Herbart or Herbartianism scarcely appeared in the United States. At present, to most educators Herbart is little more than a name, vaguely associated with catch-phrases like “the five steps” or the “apperceptive mass” or the “threshhold of consciousness.”

Historians of ancient education have been speculating about the enrollment in Isocrates' school. While enrollment can hardly be taken as a critical historical datum—and evidence supporting even the best opinions on the subject is not too good—these speculations may bring to light some little-known dimensions to Isocrates' basic teaching method. If Isocrates were teaching as many as 100 students a year, his pedagogy should not have been the same as if he taught only 100 students during his entire career. Freeman believes that Isocrates had a huge school attracting an annual clientele of 100 students; Isocrates himself speaks of having had more pupils than all the other schools combined. Marrou, on the other hand, describes the Isocratic school as an elite institution supplying an academic adventure of rare quality to carefully selected and highly motivated persons. Is there any way of illuminating these divergent views since apparently they cannot be reconciled?

The reverend Benjamin Trumbull has generally been overshadowed by his more renowned relatives. His father's first cousin was Jonathan Trumbull, the Revolutionary War governor of Connecticut whose son, John, became one of America's most distinguished artists. Yet, notwithstanding such illustrious kinsmen, Benjamin Trumbull's long and diversified career also formed a prominent part of New England's past. He was born in Hebron, Connecticut, on December 19, 1735, and in his adult years served as both a chaplain and a soldier during the American Revolution, wrote a noteworthy history of colonial Connecticut, and, for sixty years prior to his death in 1820, he often influenced the religious atmosphere in his native state from his Congregational pulpit in North Haven. In all these differing roles, Benjamin Trumbull, like many of his well-known contemporaries, felt the durable effects of a colonial higher education.

In the last two decades of the nineteenth century Columbia College in the city of New York emerged as a modern university. Years of reform agitation culminated in major innovations: a graduate school of political science, Barnard College for women, Teachers College, expanded library facilities, and revised governing statutes. These changes reflected not merely national trends, though the obvious successes of Johns Hopkins and Harvard played important roles, but also the confluence of a number of features particular to Columbia. New faculty members—most importantly John Burgess—arrived with training from the research-oriented German universities. The governing board of trustees began, for the first time, to reflect New York's commercial and internationally oriented classes. Similarly, a generation of post-Civil War liberal arts graduates, having found their classical education inadequate to industrial America, now provided organized pressure for curriculum reform and more advanced studies. But underlying these, were two and a half decades of agitation by Columbia's President F. A. P. Barnard for a university not a college—twenty-five years of hope and frustration.

Since Schleiermacher there has been little agreement as to the authenticity of the Alcibiades Major. Taylor, for example, doubts that Plato wrote the dialogue because of its language, its colorless portrayal of Alcibiades, and the textbook character of its substantive elements, and an impressive list of scholars seem to agree, although perhaps for different reasons. While fewer individuals—especially Friedlander and Vink—accept the dialogue as genuine, they at least have the ancient weight of Olympiodorus, Proclus, and Plutarch behind them. Perhaps the most interesting view to be presented in recent years is that of Clark who, in a heroic effort at compromise, ascribes the first two thirds of the dialogue to a student of Plato and the final part to Plato himself. Presumably the bulk of the dialogue is ascribed to a non-Platonic source since the majority of commentators question its authenticity, but I find Clark's position unconvincing, especially when she suggests that it was Plato's “usual affection for his pupils and associates” that prompted him to finish the work when the student died.