The age which was not only that of Dr. Johnson but also that of Pope, Addison, Gay, Goldsmith, Fielding, Lord Chesterfield, Gibbon, Horace Walpole, Gainsborough, and Garrick is surely to be reckoned among the brilliant periods of English history. And, as William Sydney notes, these great figures lived, moved, and had their being against a strange, quaint, frivolous, and corrupt English background in which beaux strutted about Pall Mall displaying all their finery such as embroidered velvet coats, cocked hats, lace cravats, and ten guinea clouded canes; when belles, “accompanied by black boys and curly lap-dogs,” promenaded in St. James's Park, attracting attention by beauty patches stuck on their faces, by pyramidical headdresses, by hooped petticoats, and by oversized decorated fans; when people of quality, so-called, repaired to their pleasure haunts in sedan chairs and gilded chariots; when travelers quailed at “the thought and prospect of traveling after nightfall because of the armed and mounted desperadoes on the highways.”

In the winter of 1835, when he was a student at Harvard College, Henry Thoreau briefly “kept school” in Canton, Massachusetts. In 1837, after his graduation, he kept the town school in Concord for a fortnight but gave it up because he was unwilling to punish pupils by whipping. “I have ever been disposed to regard the cowhide as a non-conductor,” he wrote, at the end of the year, to Orestes Brownson, at whose home he had stayed while he was a “practice teacher” in Canton, “…. We should seek to be fellow-students with the pupil, and we should learn of, as well as with him, if we would be most helpful to him.”

One might say that Horace Mann's influence began to be felt in South America when he wrote his famous Seventh Annual Report concerning his trip to Europe to inspect schools, though the actual reading of it by the man whom it most impressed did not occur until four years later, in 1847. This man, Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, later famous as the “schoolmaster president” of Argentina, spread far and wide the doctrines Mann preached in Massachusetts, and at least three Latin-American nations are the richer because these two leaders of disparate background and destiny met briefly and exchanged ideas.

Very few pieces of educational writing have been subject to so much confused criticism as the brief tract which, with its laconic title, Of Education, was launched anonymously upon the public on June 5, 1644.

The urge to organize and coordinate intellectual and educational activities on a grand scale has seldom been more dynamic than under the changing governments in France from the National Revolution in 1789 to the mounting powers of a Napoleonic Empire a few years later. The dynamism came largely from a group of intellectuals who styled themselves Ideologues. They held uppermost the causes of education, scholarship, and philosophy; and they hailed the possible support of successive governments in the decades immediately before and after 1800. As one political administration grew disappointing, they wished for its downfall and lauded the next. With each new government they anticipated a further break with the past and a revived hope for wider acceptance of their views. In developing these they valued highly the influence of Voltaire, Montesquieu, Helvétius, and the Encyclopedists of the French Enlightenment.

Charles W. Eliot brought to the chairmanship of the Committee of Ten a background of more than twenty years' concern about and interest in secondary schools. In April 1892, the president of the Massachusetts Association of Classical and High School Teachers said that Eliot had been “with us” since 1870 as “a most original, stimulating, inspiring, and, I may almost say, provoking force.” He added that it was “no small distinction to this body that President Eliot, by all odds the leader in American education today, got some portion of his training in the arena of debate which we provided him.”