“The true end of the education of women,” said a writer in the Contemporary Review in 1866, “is making good wives and mothers,” and similar assertions can be found scattered through the writings and speeches of almost all the nineteenth-century commentators on the education of women. On the face of it, one would assume that those expressing this view were unequivocally committed to the definitions of femininity of their period, either the domestic ideology of the first half of the century or the social Darwinism of the period after 1870, and therefore belonged to a conservative wing of the movement for the education of women. Yet this statement of their aims can be found in the writings of the whole spectrum of those interested in educational change: protofeminists like Mary Wollstonecraft and Emily Davies, comparative conservatives like Hannah More and Dorothea Beale, those defined by Sara Delamont as separatists who wanted to develop a specifically female curriculum and academic structure, and those she calls uncompromising who wanted to make the girls' curriculum identical with the boys’.

Contemporary Americans are experiencing an orgy of anxiety over material matters. There are books announcing the imminent demise of American economic supremacy in the world. There are prophets of doom announcing that material resources are dwindling and/or being appropriated by foreign nationals seeking to dominate our land. There is a national lament over the quality of work being done in the nation's manufactories, and there is a sense of moral outrage over the work habits of American laborers. There is high distress over the intellectual qualities of the nation's youth, and there is an outpouring of reports calling America's teachers to task. The calls for educational reform are not calls for justice or equality, but for technological productivity, military superiority, economic dominance, and cultural supremacy. Ironically, the reports call on schools to enhance the economic position of the United States, while urging a retreat from vocational emphases in the schools. Many calls for reform advocate new alliances among industry, government, and public schools, but champion a return to a traditional core curriculum or the imposition of national examinations as a solution.

Over the past decade, an increasing number of researchers in North America, Britain, and South America have become interested in the history of art education. Their work has had little impact on general educational history but high visibility in the art education network. In addition to numerous journal articles, there have been several books and seven international conferences on the topic since the early 1980s. Prior to then, however, very little was written about the subject, or at least very little that was new. Art education historiography has never had its Bernard Bailyn or its Lawrence Cremin, or even its Ellwood Cubberley. But in the United States it did have someone who served one of Cubberley's functions: to provide subsequent historians with a set, narrow interpretive framework. That person was Isaac Edwards Clarke.