In his The Education of American Teachers, Dr. James B. Conant rejects the idea that education is an academic discipline. The argument he develops is a logically simple one that follows a rather familiar pattern. Education, like medicine, is both a practical art where scientifically derived generalizations may helpfully guide action, and a deductive-theoretical endeavor where the “wide premises of culture,” largely unexamined, condition decision-making. And in education, since these two “modes of thought”—the practical and the theoretical—are inseparable, it is impossible to designate so “vast a field of human activity directed toward practical ends” as a separate science or a discipline. For knowledge and insight into the nature of education and medicine, the teacher and the physician cannot turn to the “educationist” or the “medicinist,” but must look to those established independent sciences and disciplines that touch upon these areas of human service. The doctor has such sciences as biology and chemistry to which to turn for truth about the healing arts; the teacher has the educational sciences which are the academic disciplines—political science, anthropology, psychology, history, philosophy, and sociology—from which to get understanding about the teaching arts. In this way does Conant the logician destroy the theoretical underpinnings of the idea of a separate discipline of education and, in the process, reassert the legitimacy of the claims of the scholarly sciences and disciplines over this now fractured and disposesssed academic orphan.

Textbooks have always held a peculiarly important position in public schools in the United States, hence their selection has been significant. In the early days of the Republic and long afterward the quality of the textbook was more likely to effect education of high quality than any other factor, including the often poorly educated teacher. The first part of this essay deals with the struggle in Florida for uniformity of textbooks, the second with the fight for diversified instructional materials. Sources for the data have been chiefly primary, including the minutes of the selected county school boards, the annual and biennial reports of the state superintendents of public instruction, the laws of the State, and the minutes of the State Courses of Study Committee, with supplementary use of secondary sources, such as publications of the Florida State Department of Education and the Florida Education Association.

No series of American textbooks enjoyed so long and popular circulation as the McGuffey Readers. Most of the many biographies and articles written about the McGuffeys and their Readers give most credit for this to the original authors. It is not the purpose of the writer to belittle the great contribution made by the McGuffeys, but an analysis of the facts needs to be made to obtain a true picture of the matter.

For some time I have believed we owed it to ourselves to have a more rational discussion of the role of Dewey's thought in American education. His thinking is too firmly embedded in our tradition for us to profit from attempts to hide his works with a shroud, or to exorcise his spirit with clichés. This is as foolish as reiterating his words endlessly as if on a Tibetan prayer wheel.

William Cobbett has been called “the spokesman of the common people” of England in the early nineteenth century. It was Cobbett who was the most important advocate of the cause of the worker on the land and in the factory during a time when conditions in England were changing more rapidly than ever before. The principal reason for this change was the new means of production, which was transforming the country into the first industrial state. Yet, while profound alterations were taking place in the economy of the nation, political and social organization were slow to respond. England, which was outstripping the rest of the world in the production of goods, was governed in almost the same fashion as it had been 100 years before when it had had a self-sufficient agricultural economy. This situation, plus the manifold effects of the wars against France, meant suffering for the most defenseless part of the population. It was this suffering which roused Cobbett to fury and led him to dedicate his powerful pen to the restoration of the materially abundant and socially tranquil conditions which he believed to have existed in his youth. It is within this policy of advocating a return to an England which was simpler and purer that we must consider his views on education.

An integral factor in the history of American higher education is the evolution of the textbook as an instructional device. This often ignored item can, as a matter of fact, offer insight into seemingly disparate threads of the historical process, such as the role and function of academic personnel, pedagogical techniques, and the curriculum. None of these implications will be examined here; rather, it is the purpose of this article to sketch the evolution of the text as a text.

At the 25th Anniversary of Western Colleges held at Pomona College in Claremont, California, on March 25, 1949, Dr. Robert Glass Cleland asked Ernest Moore who he thought were the leading educators in California's past. Moore replied that he would not hesitate to head the list with “John Swett, the maker of the California School System….”

Historians of education are today often reluctant to condemn the post-Civil War college for its resistance to the mercantile spirit or the university idea. The “inflexibility” of James McCosh, Noah Porter, or Woodrow Wilson receives recognition as a struggle “… to preserve the western cultural heritage and to inculcate a respectable form of mental discipline.” Departure from the common learning of mathematical and linguistic disciplines becomes a story of increasing disagreement and uncertainty concerning the basic principles of higher education. In the more conventional narrations sympathetic to the revolution in higher education after 1870 the revolution develops as a sharp break from the old collegiate regime rather than in continuity, context, and dialogue with that old regime. Actually, the very wealth of arguments offered by each side—whether by Noah Porter or by William Graham Sumner—suggests depth of intellectual resources within the traditional college rather than rigid inflexibility or a state of bankruptcy ripe for unthinking flight to untried novelties. In this paper an attempt is made to depict the argumentation accompanying the reception of history and science in the curriculum—the two subjects which in the judgment of William T. Harris were the most comprehensive novel forms of learning which were threatening the traditional curriculum of classics, logic, mathematics, metaphysics, theology. Familiar ideas from the classical and theological traditions played important roles in domesticating historical and scientific knowledge in the curriculum. As in the case of William Rainey Harper, the same men who pioneered in building universities could be Cassandras on the price to be paid for specialization. Both resistance and welcome offered by classics men need to be differentiated from resistance and welcome having theological roots.