Frank Klassen's paper is not a dramatically novel interpretation but, nonetheless, a very substantial and well-documented treatment of eighteenth century American educational thought and practice. Basically, of course, Klassen is reasserting and supporting the claim that American education in the eighteenth century was dominated by Renaissance and Reformation views—which is to say, in Klassen's words, by the classics and by religion. Religious humanism in American education, Klassen reminds us, persisted throughout the eighteenth century despite the fact of some rather remarkable and far-reaching changes in the contemporaneous culture. Klassen's essential claim, then, is that until toward the end of the eighteenth century, the social and scientific innovations of the Enlightenment influenced American education only peripherally and then in a somewhat limited way at the level of higher education.

The past few years have been particularly troublesome for the American people, not the least of the worries being a concern with the Russian challenge to the American way of life. The incredible successes of the Russians in orbiting satellites and exploding nuclear weapons has been both a disturbing and a sobering thought to the United States, long secure in its isolation and power, and in the belief that it was the best society on earth. More than a decade ago an enduring Pax Americana based upon the unilateral possession of the atomic bomb disappeared; with the launching of various Sputniki since 1958 morale has dropped even lower.

In the political ferment which followed economic collapse in 1929, many hallowed business symbols lost their luster. Politicians mocked openly at “rugged individualism” and “natural economic law.” In President Roosevelt's speeches the major domestic enemies appeared as the “unscrupulous money changers” and the “resplendent economic autocracy,” who sought “to carry the property and interest entrusted to them into the arena of partisan politics.” A proliferation of unorthodox political ideas and movements threatened the status quo. “Technocracy,” for example, was widely discussed as a method of bringing about a planned Utopia under the direction of the engineers. New concepts potentially dangerous to the status quo emerged from the “Keynesian Revolution.” The shock of economic collapse, followed by uncertainty and New Deal attacks, marked the beginning of the most formidable challenge to the business community in American history.

In the last decade of the seventeenth century a comment made by a colonial official foreshadowed the conflict in values and modes of behavior that developed in eighteenth century America. By 1691 Virginia appeared ready to foster an institution of higher education within the colony. London was requested by the colonial government to support the establishment of a college. An appeal was made to the Lords of the Treasury by the Reverend James Blair, a ranking official of the Church of England in Virginia. In his appeal he emphasized the value of a college in training ministers to save colonial souls. “Souls!” exclaimed Sir Edward Seymour, a treasury official, “Damn your souls! Make tobacco!” Despite this expression of a utilitarian and commercial view of the function of the colonies, a charter for the College of William and Mary was granted in 1693.

In 1888 a Midwestern school official remarked, “I find people everywhere interested in a general way in schools but too much absorbed in other matters to give them much time or thought.” This candid appraisal, near the turn of the nineteenth century, was particularly applicable to the attitudes of Americans toward their rural schools. Staffed by poorly qualified and even more poorly paid teachers who came and went, given but minimal support by parents as token acceptance of the need for some sort of an education, the rural school was all too frequently a “hopelessly gloomy and forbidding” place where little of interest to farm children was taught.

There seems little doubt that comparative studies are the vogue in these days of “new frontiers” and “new directions.” There is even a new quarterly entitled Comparative Studies in Society and History. To be sure, comparative studies are as old as historiography, but there is a new insistence about them today that is unmistakable. Geographers have so expanded their specialty in depth as superficially to become historians. Anthropologists are no longer content merely to delineate present-day primitive cultures. They have broadened their discipline to include other cultures “not quite up to our date,” earlier cultures, and even our own. What is more, they have begun to explore behind the facade, to be aware of the influence of the past and thus, superficially at least, to become historians. A like tendency has long been afoot among sociologists, economists, political scientists, students of literature, students of the arts, and philosophers.

One of the most outstanding classical scholars in the twelfth century was John of Salisbury, who, steeped in the literature of the Latin writers, seems to echo Cicero when he remarks that to be properly literate one must be familiar with mathematics and history as well as with the poets and the orators. The twelfth century as a whole reflected a deep interest in history and historical writing, to such an extent that Haskins calls it one of the greatest periods of medieval historiography. But history as it was understood by men like John of Salisbury, Hugo of St. Victor, and other learned clerics of the age was the history of St. Augustine, not the “narration of past events” of the Greek and Roman historians. The classical historians had regarded history as a branch of the art of rhetoric, written to please public taste, or to relate anecdotes, or to set examples, or to display the literary powers of the authors. Their theory of world cycles, in which the order of the universe was pessimistically regarded as a degeneration from the Golden Age of the past to the Iron Age of the present, and in which the present reproduced the past and the future the present, was supplanted by a new philosophy of history as formulated by St. Augustine. St. Augustine asserted that the whole record of the world turned upon the divine concern for man, which had eventuated in the life of Christ. Prior to this miracle of Incarnation, all mankind had been doomed; after it, all of the elect were to be saved.

The idea of genius has intrigued and baffled generations of thinkers interested in the problems of human excellence, leadership, and creativity. Until the early twentieth century, it was generally assumed that the man of genius, whatever his mode of expression, was qualitatively different from the rest of humanity—that he possessed some mysterious, inborn element that made his achievements possible. Because of the supposed mystery surrounding the origin and nature of genius, there grew up over the years a veritable mythology linking the man of genius with phenomena ranging from Deity to insanity.

Giambattista Vico was born in 1668, at a time when Italy was just beginning to recover from the enervating effects of more than a century of clerical and foreign domination. In 1559, a century before Vico's birth, the long contest between France and Spain for supremacy in the peninsula had been decided in favor of Spain by the treaty of Cateau-Cambresia. Following this, hope for the independence of Italy had definitely been abandoned. The minor princes submitted to being Spanish vassals, and the Spanish rulers joined hands with the Roman Curia in a strict surveillance of the thought and action of the Italian people. The Church, fearful of the spread of Protestantism, drew more straight and narrow the way of orthodoxy, increasing at the same time the degree of punishment for those who strayed. The decadence and torpor that engulfed Italy during this period has come to be called secentismo or baroque.

Twenty years of diligent labor on the part of New Englanders in Ohio, the Western Literary Institute, and other groups resulted in the creation by the legislature, in March 1837, of the office of State Superintendent of Common Schools. The resolution of the General Assembly providing for the position stressed the two chief duties of this new official: (1) collecting information on the schools of the state; and (2) seeing that the school laws were being properly observed.