Increased subsidization of education by foundations, corporations, and individuals, as well as the federal government, has caused many citizens again to question the influence of such programs. The thoughtful individual inquires about both the positive and negative potential of aid to education: the capacity to improve public education, as well as to weaken local and state interest in, and control of, the schools. Hence, it appears timely to review an early program of aid to public schools, that of the Peabody Education Fund, and to analyze its effects upon educational programs and local initiative.

Today American elementary and secondary education is under active attack for alleged failures or shortcomings of various kinds. In the minds of those responsible for running the schools, much, if not most, of the criticism is distinctly ill-founded and irresponsible. School personnel have long been decrying outmoded practices and promoting new ones, many of the latter bearing the brunt of current condemnations. But present lay criticism seems to have caught a large segment of school personnel quite unprepared to meet it; hence responses are often unconvincing, recriminatory, or yielding. If the educational profession is to maintain past and present gains and to achieve new ones, it must know what has been done in the past, what has proven unsatisfactory and what satisfactory, what innovations have been tried and what has come of them, and why we have come to do what we are now doing. This perspective requires a study of the growth of American educational thought and practice, for if we do not know history, how can we avoid repeating the errors of our predecessors?

It is strange that Charles W. Eliot, William Torrey Harris, and Nicholas Murray Butler are so little remembered. For a generation their counsels dominated American education, yet few histories of education give them more than passing notice. Eliot does receive some attention as father of the elective principle, and Harris enjoys at least a dubious reputation as high priest of conservative idealism. Butler, if mentioned at all, appears as Harris's acolyte and is variously described as a classical humanist, an intellectualist, and an idealist with faintly liberal tendencies. It has been his misfortune to be cast in the role of educational philosopher, the role to which he aspired, but to which he could bring the least talent. Butler was an independent thinker, but not a creative one, a man of action, not of contemplation. Comparing him with Harris is like comparing Alexander with Aristotle. “Nicholas Miraculous” was, in truth, that rare combination of insights, practicality, and force that makes a philosopher king. Never content to contemplate ends, his vast energies were concentrated on means. He fathered organizations, not ideas.

Faced with the ubiquitous problem of financial solvency, Pennsylvania's denominational colleges, in the nineteenth century, adopted an unusual—and unsound—method of securing prepaid tuition. Temporary and permanent scholarships were sold at varying prices, frequently far below the normal charge for tuition, presumably on the assumption that the large sum of money so collected and invested would realize an income adequate to meet the operating expenses of the institution.

Perhaps one of the mostly highly complex developments in the history of American higher education has been that of majoring, or the ever-growing specialization in the undergraduate curriculum. Certainly much of this has stemmed from the modern industrial revolution, which has produced a need for trained experts in a vast number of specialized fields. Institutions of higher learning have become divisive and differentiated, and the principle of election and the requirements of graduate schools have served as entering wedges for undergraduate concentration of studies in one or a few closely related subjects.

In this quotation is recorded the beginnings of the first successful effort to establish higher education within what came to be the continental United States. There may be some disagreement concerning the role of Master Harvard, but that there was an immediate involvement of religion in this educational undertaking is very obvious. There has been, however, no single interpretation of the role of religion in this the first of our colleges. Some students of the subject find here the beginnings of a narrow ecclesiastical training from which American higher education was to suffer for many decades. Others, on the contrary, see this as the origin of liberal education available to all acceptable students, bent on careers in both state and church.

The early American colleges were smaller and poorer counterparts of the universities of Great Britain, rather than indigenous institutions, and the mother country was the source of their curriculum. At Cambridge University, which became the intellectual center of the Puritan movement, the curriculum of studies had evolved from the medieval trivium (grammar, rhetoric, logic) and quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, music) and from the three philosophies (natural, moral, mental). But interest in mathematics had dwindled by 1700, and the study of classical authors was revived. The universities were still governed by the Elizabethan statutes of 1561, which required that each student be proficient in rhetoric, logic, and philosophy, and that they be tested in these subjects by public disputations before being admitted to a degree. Beyond these requirements, the subjects to be studied were determined by a tutor, who was responsible for the four or five students assigned to him.

In the state university, Henry Pritchett once claimed, we find, “a conception of education from the standpoint of a whole people.…” If, he continued, “our American democracy were today called to give proof of its constructive ability, the State University and the public school which it crowns would be the strongest evidence of its fitness which it could offer.”

In the eighteenth century, American education, like American culture, was not self-sufficient: its acropolis lay in Britain. Students interested in medicine took their training at London or Edinburgh; ministers were continually recruited in the mother country; a few years at one of the Inns of Court still provided the best training in law; significant numbers of Americans attended Oxford or Cambridge, seeking “a gentleman's education.”

The vast complexity of a modern American university and the manifold duties of the man who serves as its executive are well known. Administration has become a more demanding operation than it was when James Madison, an Episcopal bishop and late eighteenth-century president of the College of William and Mary, described the vicissitudes of the College's early days: “The first plan of our College was imperfect. It consisted of a President, whose only business was to superintend….” Obviously, superintending is not what it used to be.

In a noteworthy address delivered to the Fulton County, New York, Teachers' Institute in 1869, Miss Julia Colman, a temperance writer, stressed the need for school temperance instruction. During the next few years other spokesmen made similar appeals, and in 1873 the National Temperance Society officially advocated the introduction into public and private schools of a physiology textbook that would discuss the origin, nature, and effects upon the human system of alcohol. Between 1874 and 1878 the Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) actively attempted to further the scientific temperance campaign by creating numerous departments and committees of work. Not until Mrs. Mary Hanchett Hunt assumed leadership, however, did the campaign receive disciplined direction.