This article examines cases of governors who established a foundation for school choice between 1980 and 1996. Education was a strategic issue around which they sought to alleviate economic concerns and anxieties about desegregation to realize their vision of building, yet again, a New South. As part of this process, southern governors extolled the values of the free market in deracialized ways and networked to pass comprehensive education reform grounded in neoliberal ideologies including individualism and competition.

This essay reflects on my research and teaching on the history of gender and education, specifically with respect to the schooling history of Chinese women in the colonial world. In doing so, it aims to propose an alternate way of seeing the silent and missing figures in the colonial archives: the subordinated, marginalized, feminine colonial subjects. Commonly framed as orphaned, wounded, and diseased bodies in the historical research on the colonial era, these women were rendered as part of the “problem” that the colonial government ought to fix. It was through “them,” the disenfranchised Chinese females, that the missionary and the colonial state found their meaning and purpose. By the early twentieth century, although Chinese women’s education in the colonial context shifted from a discourse of evangelization to one of modernization, the function of women’s schooling remained constant: The feminine figure was still a platform through which the colonial government projected much of its civilizing ambition and desires for modernity. However, if one reads beyond the colonial archives and the paradigm of colonial subject as “recipient” and focuses instead on the archives of everyday life, one can see Chinese feminine figures as the triumphant masters of modern life. This essay traces this paradigm shift and argues that “gender” is an analytical tool capable of unearthing the hidden figures of modernity.

This forum contribution considers the complexities and importance of gender in the historiography of LGBTQ+ college students. After a brief introduction, we focus on four key areas in the existing historiography: women’s romantic relationships in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, higher education leaders’ enforcement of gender norms and purges of LGBTQ+ students through the mid-twentieth century, the gender dynamics within LGBTQ+ student organizations from the 1970s onward, and trans and other LGBTQ+ students’ expansion of gender possibilities, including through the use of drag. In so doing, we argue that gender analysis is important to the historiography of LGBTQ+ students, though most often that analysis has been implicit rather than explicit. Considering both the gaps in our historical knowledge and the rising attacks on LGBTQ+ individuals, we contend that continued gendered analyses are not only warranted but also needed.

As a field, the history of education contains scant analyses of power, deprivation, or privilege from a white, patriarchal, or masculine viewpoint, a concerning limitation that obscures how power works to reinscribe, sustain, and proliferate itself. This claim reflects that to some degree, gender is racialized and race is gendered. To support this contention, I discuss the small body of history of education scholarship that has interrogated white, masculine, and/or patriarchal power, highlighting in particular the work of feminist scholars of Color.1 I also underscore what we as a field might gain in analyzing masculine, patriarchal, and/or white power with the same fervor many pay to racially, ethnically, and sexually marginalized communities, pointing out some seminal works and figures that stand to be further enhanced by gendered or racial analysis. I end with questions that could inform research directions toward these ends.

Often overshadowed by the GI Bill, the National Youth Administration (NYA) supervised the first federal need-based financial aid program in the United States. Tracing the origin of federal aid back to the era of the NYA reveals that the rationale for need-based assistance rests closer to the core of the American policymaking tradition. This article contributes to previous histories of the NYA by demonstrating how its decentralized implementation empowered local college officials who jeopardized the program’s needs-based intent. Meanwhile, this localized administration also facilitated the NYA’s unusual and relatively successful support for Black college students.

This article traces the unique set of factors that allowed mid-nineteenth-century coeducation at a medical college traditionally reserved for men. I argue that in the period 1850-1856, a window of opportunity offered a small group of women the chance to pursue medical education at the traditionally all-male regular Cleveland Medical College, at a time when medical training was inaccessible to women. A unique confluence of factors inspired this development, including a temporary fluidity of standards in medical training and practice, rising prospects for women’s access to higher education, the rapidly changing Cleveland urban environment and its progressive women’s network, and the College’s internal dynamics. The female graduates of the Cleveland Medical College joined a pioneer generation of women physicians in the mid-nineteenth-century US who chipped away at long-standing barriers limiting the role of women in medicine.

The historiography of African American education has stressed the work of education professionals, tensions over curricula, and the desegregation of schools. Informal learning settings, while recognized as important educative spaces, have remained tangential to the broader narrative of the struggle for education. Thus, the influence of Black civic voluntary organizations is largely underexplored. In this essay I posit that instead of being on the margins, Black associations supplemented, guided, supported, and funded the education of African Americans through overlapping organizational networks that comprised autonomous counterpublic spaces. In these spaces, a wide variety of voluntary groups worked collaboratively to improve local public schools, to develop curricula centered on Black culture, and to provide educational opportunities for youth and adults. Recognizing that the history of African American education cannot be fully told without investigating informal spaces, this essay offers a roadmap for the investigation of Black civic voluntary organizations.

Spain’s greatest modern philosopher, José Ortega y Gasset (1883-1955), wrote about many aspects of education including its aims; the education of children, nations, and elites; types of pedagogy; the reform of the university; and the challenges facing educators in an era of “triumphant plebeianism.” The article examines all aspects of Ortega’s educational thought, with a particular focus on his ideas about elites and their education, drawing on writings unavailable in English, including texts not published during his lifetime. At the heart of his writing is a vision of the qualities needed to enable individuals to make what he called a “project” out of their lives along with a powerful advocacy of the non-utilitarian and Socratic pedagogies that would help achieve that vision. The article looks at the balance of radical and conservative elements within Ortega’s educational thought and its relation to earlier “progressive” thinkers, and concludes with an evaluation of his legacy.