On (Not) Defining Education

A Note to the Reader
This text is part of a long-term project under the initiative of Robbie McClintock. He presented a substantial version of the current text at the first Lawrence A. Cremin Seminar sponsored by the Department of International and Transcultural Studies on October 16, 2007 at Teachers College, Columbia University. An essay based on this work will appear as Chapter 2 of Theoretical Perspectives on Comprehensive Education: The Way Forward, edited by Hervé Varenne, Edmund W. Gordon, and Linda Lin (Lewiston, NY: The Edwin Mellen Press, in contract), pp. 26-57. As planned, the text will have a dozen chapters, for which seven currently have substantial drafts.

1. A Prolegomenon
2. What did Cremin leave out?
3. Did Bailyn deliver?
4. Who was Schleiermacher?
5. How does humanity educate itself?
6. Who will educate educators?
7. What was Barnard thinking?
8. Why did Zarathrustra speak?
9. What did Rein do?
10. How does truth get meaning?
11. How much does fear cost?
12. What concerned Conant?
13. Appendix: Neuhumanismus

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  Reflections on Historical Life and

  What Educates Therein

Robbie McClintock^[1]

1. A Prolegomenon

In history and education, Lawrence Cremin mentored and taught me.  His persona charmed me, the reach of his ready recall awed me, his embodiment of prudent judgment joined to a demanding vision won my allegiance.  Over the years, I felt humbled, a bit shamed, by his extraordinary ability to get his work done — so many books well crafted, so many students well taught, so many initiatives well directed.  I came into his circle at the age of 21 with an educational purpose of my own, which closely converged with his.  He helped me thread my way into academic life and promoted my prospects.  During the rest of his life, and my years since his death, I have remained within his circle, content to probe its boundaries at points of special interest.  But eventually, move on, one must.

Throughout his career, Cremin worked to nurture and strengthen the common school and the common weal by broadening and deepening the controlling meaning of education.  Historically, as nation-states have been building systems of universal education, the meaning of education for most persons has come to signify the work of those institutions, especially the work of their most universal component, the system of elementary and secondary schools.  This meaning leads to a portentous reification, to overlooking the real recipient of education: education ceases to be an experience of persons, and becomes a characteristic of cohorts, statistical groups whose tested attributes augur success or failure.  All of this is the rank superstition of our putatively enlightened age.  Écrasez l'infâme!  Cremin tried to counter the superstition by addressing the definition of education head on: "education is the deliberate, systematic, and sustained effort to transmit, evoke, or acquire knowledge, attitudes, skills, values, or sensibilities, and any learning that results from the effort, direct or indirect, intended or unintended."^[3]

This definition was implicit in his history of progressive schooling and explicit in most of the many books that followed, three large and several small.  Peers responded on both sides of the conjunction of history with education.  From the side of history, they awarded him both the Bancroft and the Pulitzer, and from that of education, they appointed him to the presidencies of Teachers College and the Spencer Foundation, influential roles he fulfilled with distinction.  But his ascendancy with living peers has not translated well into lasting change.  On one side, his books went quickly out of print, and historians have reverted back to dealing with education overwhelmingly as the work of schools, while on another, some institutional arrangements that he put in place persist nominally, although they now serve purposes contrary to his own, and others have been dismantled, their parts strewn, languishing in uncertain use.  One may rightly say that we, who followed, fumbled.  But to recover, we must look wide and deep at what went wrong.

An early diagnosis has some truth, but it serves poorly as a ground for attempting to recover critical leverage on the historical problems of thinking about education as a more comprehensive experience than the part of it consisting in instruction through the schools.  According to this diagnosis, Cremin rose in a fortuitous period of expansion in schools of education, which were pressing to meet teacher shortages while raising educational standards, and he tooled his powers to assert a more bracing vision on a senescent profession by converging the opportunities of expansion with those of the normal transfer of positions from elders to the young.  But fortuna granted fickle favor.  As he gained sufficient influence to exercise this strategy in the 1970s, the demographics of expansion became those of contraction, and the expected multiplier effect became a divider, seriously reducing his options for influence on becoming president of Teachers College in 1974.  To worsen matters, intellectually to his left, as he won public attention, Samuel Bowles and Herb Gintis, Michael Katz, Joel Spring, and others fashioned a mode of revisionist criticism different from his own, asserting a negative version of the old celebration of education as universal schooling.  This change in the prevailing historical interest siphoned off potential recruits who might have carried on in developing further histories informed by his very broad assumptions about the nature of the task. Such changes left Cremin caught, both within the profession and the society at large, between a prevailing culture and its counter, both locked in argument over whether the historical and social consequences of education, understood as school instruction, were positive or negative.  Cremin had to carry on with neither the intention nor the substance to contribute much to that altercation.  In this view, his later writings, doggedly produced, reflect the tenuousness of his position: the shorter books provided an Olympian perspective in place of a call to action, and the three tomes of American Education, ground out over a quarter century according to a fixed plan that had become a duty, not a work, stupefy readers with far too much detail.

This critique, most articulately expressed by Sol Cohen, another of Cremin's students, regretfully holds Cremin's vision of education and his sense of what a historian could do with that definition, to have been a delusion of hubris.  As he attempted a vain task under distracting conditions, Cremin made himself a critic of the profession with which he ought to have more narrowly identified and an author of a work beyond the scope of possibility, an approximation of which no one would really want to read.  Cohen's tone towards Cremin is obnoxiously condescending, posthumously hectoring "Larry" for making life decisions that Cohen believes to have been misguided.  Voiced after Cremin's death, these are immaterial, for they should have been raised in such a fashion to Cremin at a point in his life when the decisions were still open.  But Cohen voices his critique of Cremin's definition of education to living readers, successfully raising for them the question whether writing educational history should proceed from a broad or narrow conception of its subject.  Cohen, along with many peers contributing to the voluminous literature on educational historiography, have objected that Cremin's definition encompasses too much, leading in consequence to historical incoherence, evident in the literary muddiness of American Education, and to a productive paralysis, evident in the lugubrious pace with which Cremin completed his opus.^[4]  This criticism is important for it explains on the one hand real weaknesses in Cremin's American Education while  it counsels us, in its net effect, as educators and as scholars to get about the business of schooling without much attention to all that is peripheral to it.  This is a counsel of renunciation and we who held a different vision need to find a more vital diagnosis, one that we can offer, as we age, to those with the strength of youth to act upon the complacencies of these times. 

Cohen and and his colleagues center their critique of Cremin's work on the unfortunate effects of his definition of education, which they believe will diffuse historians' attention to an impossibly inclusive configuration of educative agencies, transforming educational history into a jabber of cultural history.  Occasionally, they suggest, work written according to an all inclusive idea of education may have some topical interest, but in the end it is unilluminating, touching on everything in general and not coming to grips with anything in particular.  They adduce his work itself as evidence of these dangers, suggesting that Cremin's definition led him to include far too much in American Education, three big tomes packed with mounting detail, deficient in narrative coherence and engaging tension.  Presently the consensus of contemporary history and of educational historians stands with Cohen: neither puts education as Cremin defined it front and center.  In the historical present, both the public and practitioners deal with education as if it is a synonym for schooling to the point, even, of calling a growing movement to educate children outside of schools "home schooling," as if one cannot imagine anything that educates without somehow equating it to schooling. 

As for educational history, the bulk of work, and the best of works, now concentrate on the history of schooling,^[5] and while a few historians of education still hold positions of influence in schools of education, the field has not acquired a strong presence in mainstream history departments and the subject has fallen into desuetude in schools of education.^[6]  There are a few topics in the history of schooling that may bear fresh treatment, but the area has long since ceased to be under worked. And these days, the royal road to educational knowledge calls for the complete depersonalization of educational experience through double-blind experiment with the resulting pedagogical prescriptions to be confirmed or questioned according to the outcomes evident through massive testing programs in which millions of pupils are merely incidental means for assessing the schools.  With the lived educational experience of particular children so completely in pedagogical abeyance, let us hypothesize that far from including too much, Cremin at least included a vast panorama of real human activity, but for some reason or other, something of great importance was still missing.

2. What did Cremin leave out?

In 1960, the Harvard historian, Bernard Bailyn, sensitized scholars to the importance of defining education effectively in efforts to show the role of education in American history.  Publication of his critique, Education in the Forming of American Society, caused a stir among educational historians.  Cremin was quick to review it, very favorably, in The Mississippi Valley Historical Review.  He commended Bailyn's call to deal with education "as an aspect of American history writ large," not as a parochial, internal history for a self-conscious profession.  He quoted Bailyn's broad understanding of education — "not only as formal pedagogy but rather as the entire process by which culture transmits itself across generations" — and he noted how it extended the educational historian's attention far beyond the development of schools and schooling.  Cremin concluded with the hope that Bailyn's hypotheses would "set in motion the kind of informed historical scholarship that to date has been all too rare in the field of American education."^[7] 

Bailyn issued a challenge; Cremin followed through in response.  In 1961, he published The Transformation of the School, a professional breakthrough for Cremin, just as Bailyn's essay was reaching its readers.  In The Transformation, Cremin showed little interest in questions of how the historian should define education, but he wrote a full, masterful narrative, clearly to the norms of mainstream history, for an inclusive audience interested in progressive education as an aspect of American history.  With this book Cremin demonstrated how historians could deal with education when they overcame the split between the professional schools and the historical profession, and he even managed to note, at a key juncture in his narrative, that "the unfortunate consequences of the split . . . are brilliantly discussed by Bernard Bailyn in Education in the Forming of American Society.^[8]  At 36 Cremin triumphed,  with a full academic career still ahead of him.  The Transformation of the School won the Bancroft Prize, awarded annually to recognize "books of enduring worth and impeccable scholarship that make a major contribution to understanding the American past."  As a youth from City College, rising through the ranks in a school of education, Cremin had established his scholarly reputation and showed that work in the history of education could meet the highest academic standards.

What comes next?  That is the inevitable question on finishing a work and looking ahead to the rest of life.  Cremin had a powerful pedagogical presence in the classroom.  As a lecturer he was clear, engaging, endowed with a gift to make history meaningful to a large and diverse audience.  His big course, History of Education in the United States, drew numerous auditors Monday evenings, every autumn.  In 1964, opportunity arose for someone to write a work on the topic of his big course with sponsorship by the U.S. Department of Education as part of the nation's Bi-Centennial observances, which were beginning to loom in official minds.  Having taught, and taught well, the full scope of the narrative many times, Cremin expected to finish the work in three volumes by 1976, a miscalculation.  Thus it came about that from the mid-1960s until shortly before his death in 1990, writing a comprehensive history of American education dominated Cremin's scholarly labors.  And through it, developing and illustrating a historically sound definition of education was a key component of his effort. 

To define and to illustrate: that was Cremin's agenda.  Two short books laid the ground work for it: The Wonderful World of Ellwood Patterson Cubberley (1965) explained the problems of definition, and The Genius of American Education (1965) sketched the key themes illustrative of education, broadly defined, in American history.^[9]  Work on the first volume of American Education proceeded quickly, resulting in its publication in 1970.  In his "Preface," Cremin briefly explained the background to his formal definition of education and enunciated the initial version of it:

Throughout the work, I shall view education as the deliberate, systematic, and sustained effort to transmit or evoke knowledge, attitudes, values, skills, and sensibilities, a process that is more limited than what the anthropologist would term enculturation or the sociologist socialization, though obviously inclusive of some of the same elements.  Education, defined thus, clearly produces outcomes in the lives of individuals, many of them discernible, though other phenomena, varying from politics to commerce to technology to earthquakes, may prove more influential at particular times and in particular instances.^[10]

In nearly 600 pages, the book described with a panorama of particulars the colonial educational experience delimited by this definition.  Cremin detailed the cultural heritage brought to the British colonies and the educational configuration of it in household, church, school, college, and community; he then surveyed the appearance in this configuration of characteristic American qualities of denominationalism, utilitarianism, and republicanism; and finally he summed the first volume up by depicting the institutions, configurations, and characteristics of the first great era of American education, that of provincial education.

Attention by Cremin to his definition of education and to the historical elucidation of it continued apace.^[11]  At the University of Wisconsin, Cremin delivered The Merle Curti Lectures for 1976, giving three concise overviews of what each volume of his large work would cover, and he added "A Note on Problematics and Sources" to the published version of the lectures.  This 30-page note, combined with his Dewey Lecture for 1975, especially the second section, "Toward an Ecology of Education," constituted an important reflection on his definition of education, leading to a rewording that amplified it somewhat.^[12]  As a result of these considerations, in the subsequent two volumes of American Education (1980 and 1988), Cremin added a third key verb to his definition of education — "acquire," along with the original "transmit or evoke," — and he enlarged the summational part concluding each volume, originally comprising three chapters on "Institutions," "Configurations," and "Characteristics," to include one more, "Lives." 

All together the trilogy presents a great kaleidescope of pedagogical activity with thousands of people and groups twisting over time in endlessly different configurations producing a churn of distinctive results.   In three lectures at Harvard in 1989, Cremin presented as a coda to American Education the themes that stood out, in his judgment, from the whole of his survey:

First, popularization, the tendency to make education widely available in forms that are increasingly accessible to diverse peoples; second, multitudinousness, the proliferation and multiplication of institutions to provide that wide availability and that increasing accessibility; and third, politicization, the effort to solve certain social problems indirectly through education instead of directly through politics.^[13]

Almost as if he knew they would be his final words, these lectures, published as Popular Education, convey the implications of his life work for the practice of education.  Here he made the case for the value of defining education the way he did: first, it allowed educators to situate schooling in a more realistic pedagogical context; second, it enabled public leaders to appreciate the full scope of concerns that needed to be brought within the purview of educational policy; and lastly, it indicated the scholarly imperative to inform the pervasive, public urge to politicize educational issues with more knowledge, sound and comprehensive, about the human implications of educational action in all its forms.  These are big implications to a work fully achieved.

To those of us who knew the man, it has been astonishing how quickly after his death his work has lost influence.  Its burden continues to become all the more timely as schools operate as if in a pedagogical vacuum.  Cremin argued against the stupidity of concentrating public attention exclusively on formal educators while paying little attention to informal educators, despite their growing educational influence.  Yet the makers of public policy now bear more imperiously on formal educators, while they blithely ignore the educational role of informal educators as the custodians and owners of these, uncaring and indiscriminate, pursue more and more power and wealth. Cremin argued that education was something happening pervasively in the lived experience of each and every person.  Yet the establishment of educational researchers swells steadily with scholars pretending, ever more exclusively, to achieve universal findings valid for all, independent of time, place, and condition.  Something is missing to weaken the effects of very timely work.

For those of us who knew the man, Cremin's personal presence was so prepossessing that we projected it into our reading of his work, which would otherwise appear flat and hard to follow.  In comparison to The Transformation of the School, Cremin's trilogy lacked narrative flow, especially within each volume.  Historical exposition gains vigor from a strong sense of chronological direction but the text of each volume unfortunately cycled repetitively through its chronology, undercutting the overall sense of coherent movement through time.  Cremin would recount how each component of key educational configurations developed through the whole period in question and then he would flip back to the beginning again, explaining the development of the next component, and the next: it was exhaustive, but too exhausting for many readers.^[14]  Additionally, as his narrative cycled forwards and backwards in time, Cremin further burdened his readers by confronting them with a profusion of proper names, strings of organizations and individuals, with the role each played just briefly mentioned.^[15]  So showered with detail, a reader will easily loose the point, and many in his audience have undoubtedly put his work aside, partially read at best.  But these stylistic matters simply indicate that American Education is difficult work — many difficult works exert a powerful and lasting influence on an interested public.  Something more problematic than complexities of detail and chronology may have detracted from the power of Cremin's major work to win, hold, and shape a following of active influence.

Consider the key terms in Cremin's definition of education: "deliberate," "systematic," "sustained," "transmit," "evoke," "acquire," "knowledge," "values," "attitudes," "skills," "sensibilities," "learning," "effort," "direct," "indirect," "intended," and "unintended."  None of these are univocal.  Whether, when, where, how, and why an interpreter might apply each of these terms to characterize a specific human action requires the interpreter to make a nuanced judgment, about which different interpreters might undoubtedly disagree.  To become operative, Cremin's definition required complex criteria controlling its application to historical experience.  These criteria remain hidden in his work.  Of course, a scholar cannot make explicit in the formal statement of a carefully crafted definition all the criteria of judgment that he might use in applying it.  But surely, in the course of its voluminous use, readers can expect that those criteria will become increasingly clear to them.  Yet with Cremin's work they do not. 

Some 2,000 pages, rich in detail, convey little sense of Cremin's deliberations as he applied his definition within his vast scope of awareness.  He describes much; he explains little.  Why, given all the inclusions, did he exclude some things?  We do not learn, for instance, how something, which he might have excluded because it was deliberate and sustained but not systematic (social criticism?), or because it was systematic and sustained but not deliberate (technological innovation?), differed in his view from something like the influence of mass media, which he seems to have held to have been sufficiently deliberate, systematic, and sustained to merit extended treatment as an important twentieth-century educative agent.  Cremin chose to minimize notes that might have illuminated such judgments, and his bibliographies, mentioning nearly everything that he possibly could mention as remotely relevant to anything he included, discussed little of the literature in depth and does not illuminate the why and the wherefore of his judgments at all.  Cremin worked to inventory a diverse pantheon of educators, not to explain the distinctive particularities of how they functioned.  Thus, radically different efforts to evoke distinctive sensibilities appeared through his descriptions as if they were remarkably similar: for instance, Jonathan Edwards, in a seventeenth-century religious context, and Harvey Cox, in the twentieth, both step forth, bright young men getting a good education, then acquiring some experience, and then succeeding by speaking with conviction and insight to the needs of their parishioners.  In both cases, and in many others, Cremin gave readers an epitome of the messages delivered, glossing over the difficult, jarring particulars of each with a reassuring "of course" or "inevitably," but little hard analysis of just how and why each message worked in its unique way to educate those who responded to it.^[16]

Cremin pointed to a multitude of educational instances that fell within his definition of education, describing briefly what each did, but not explaining how each did what it did.  He was remarkably disengaged with respect to prominent efforts to explicate in depth a "deliberate, systematic, and sustained effort to transmit, evoke, or acquire knowledge, attitudes, skills, values, or sensibilities, and any learning that results from the effort, direct or indirect, intended or unintended."  For instance, in the first volume of American Education, Cremin mentioned Max Weber's Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism in describing Benjamin Franklin's life and character, but neither Cremin's text nor the associated bibliographical references recognize that an informed reader might see Weber's reflection as a remarkably full attempt to analyze how education, understood in a fashion similar to Cremin's definition, actually might work out, in the inner life of several generations of recipients, in historical consequences remarkably different from those who did the educating originally intended.  Cremin acknowledged a severely watered-down version of Weber's argument and merely noted that it had caused considerable controversy among scholars, neither taking nor explaining a position of his own about it.  Here is Cremin's discussion of Weber's reflection:

Whether Franklin's education was ultimately the source or the outcome of his enterprise must always remain problematical: at the least they were inextricably intertwined.  He may well have been, as Max Weber and others have portrayed him, the living embodiment of a secularized Puritanism, demonstrating in his life the explosive power of calling, though one can, of course find Catholics who were no less vigorous in their enterprise and Congregationalists who seemed called to nothing but lassitude.  However one resolves the time-honored controversy — and the interplay of men and traditions in the eighteenth century would seem to make any final resolution improbable — there can be no denying that a spirit of aggressive enterprise was widely manifest in provincial America and that it supported and was in turn strengthened by a variety of educational arrangements, both formal and informal.  In the process, men rose from rags to riches.^[17]

Weber wanted to explain a profound pedagogical irony: how could a culture of deep religious conviction, strongly averse to material pretense, engaging vigorously in the deliberate, systematic, and sustained effort to transmit and evoke profound angst over the prospect of eternal damnation, produce in the span of several generations such leading examples of a spirit of aggressive enterprise, like Franklin, raising men from rags to riches?  Such explanation does not seem to have been an important goal for Cremin.

Gunnar Myrdal's extensive analysis of An American Dilemma provides another prominent example of Cremin's reluctance to engage in the causal analysis of educational processes as he identified them.  Cremin mentioned Myrdal's extensive work in introducing the educational activities of the NAACP in his third volume and returned to it in summing up the characteristics of metropolitan education at the end of the volume.  Cremin accentuated Myrdal's recognition of national idealism, the "American creed," an amalgam of values derived from the Enlightenment, with roots in Christianity and English law, that Americans shared with many other peoples, while identifying with it more strongly and more vocally than others.  Myrdal perceived this creed "of progress, liberty, equality, and humanitarianism" to function as a real social force in American public life, the point with which Cremin most fully resonated.  For Myrdal this creed interacted in a complex reciprocal tension with baser motivations, no less real, "where personal and local interests; economic, social, and sexual jealousies; considerations of community prestige and conformity; group prejudice against particular persons or types of people; and all sorts of miscellanous wants, impulses, and habits dominate [the American's] outlook."  For Myrdal, these two sides of the American character were interacting according to what Myrdal called "the principle of cumulation."  In it, all sorts of different developments, potentially positive and potentially negative, would interact in patterns of reinforcement in which the cycle could persist, with the adverse status of African-Americans unchanged, or degenerate into a vicious circle of further degradation, or ascend in a virtuous circle of achieved equality and integration.  For Myrdal, the dynamic operated, embedded in American historical life, its outcome contingent on political choice and public effort.  Cremin acknowledged the tension, but de-emphasized the degree to which Myrdal held the outcome to be contingent on sound social engineering informed by a thorough analysis of the many different causal factors at work.  By leaving out a key qualification in Myrdal's text, Cremin quoted him as if the American dilemma were simply a matter of serious cultural lag, whereas Myrdal was actually asserting that the dilemma consisted in the still contingent struggle between the best and the worst in American character, which the American people had to resolve, overcoming deep-seated weaknesses pervasively embedded in all the structures of American life and character.  That was the moral urgency motivating the full and many-sided causal analysis that Myrdal's work comprised, an anxious urgency that Cremin's optimism too easily obscured.^[18]

Characteristically, in American Education Cremin described, but did not explain.  He depicted numerous educators acting in complex configurations occasioning a complexity of results.  He rarely sought to explain their actions or deeply interpret their meaning.  At the end of Traditions of American Education, Cremin concluded his "Note on Problematics and Sources," declaring the importance of "a clear, consistent, and precise theory of education."  This declaration merits close attention.  Alluding to the authority of the philosopher, John Herman Randall, Cremin observed that "any history is always the history of something in particular, and the explanatory categories the historian uses in writing about that something in particular are almost invariably drawn from other domains — from politics or philosophy or economics, or from ordinary common sense."  Cremin then, perhaps unwittingly, declared that the source of truth and meaning in any account of historical experience would derive from sources external to the historical, lived experiences that people suffer and enjoy.

As soon as the historian attempts to go beyond mere chronicle, as soon as he seeks not only to arrange events in the order in which they occurred, as soon as he tries to view events in their multifarious relations, he must perforce reach beyond the events themselves to some set of laws, principles, or generalizations that will help make sense of them.  And those laws, principles, or generalizations almost always come from outside the discipline of history.

Here is a basic problem in the philosophy of history.  Is the meaning of lived experience something immanent in the experience that the interpreter has to draw out of it, making explicit what is immanent?  Or is the meaning something external to the historical experience that the historian finds elsewhere and applies to it?  In general, Cremin was very reticent about such questions, but here he seemed to adopt the second view, for he again invoked the authority of Randall and averred: "apart from some intelligent conception of education itself, there can be no truly intelligent conception of the history of education."  This conviction puts a significant constraint on what is possible in the history of education, namely the correct and fruitful understanding of education cannot emerge from the study of historical experience, but must be brought to the historical experience from other sources of formal knowledge.  In this view, the history of education will illustrate an understanding of education generated through modes of reflection and inquiry other than the historical.^[19]  Cremin went out of his way to avoid debating both alternative explanations pertinent to events he interpreted and his reasoning for and against the many judgments that went into his work.  Was this avoidance sound?  Does historical scholarship secure its proper place in the study of education by deriving ideas about education from other sources and applying them to past educational experience?  These questions are important and difficult, and to pursue them, we need to turn again to the educational historiography of Bernard Bailyn, for Cremin's answers to them were not at all unique, but ones widely shared among the academic historians from whom Cremin sought to win some recognition.

3. Did Bailyn deliver?

Mid December, 1954, Clarence Faust (1901-1975), president of the Fund for the Advancement of Education hosted some American historians and educators in New York.  Faust was a specialist on Jonathan Edwards and prior to coming to the Fund in 1951, he had been a successful university administrator, having served as Dean of the College at Chicago and then Dean of Humanities and Sciences at Stanford.  The Fund for the Advancement of Education really served as an arm of the Ford Foundation, and in a few years it would become Ford's Education Division, with Faust as the vice-president in charge.  Through the 1950s, the Fund used substantial resources to help schools, colleges, and universities cope with shortages of teachers during the rapid post-War expansion, it led efforts to develop educational television, and it facilitated desegregation following Brown v. the Board of Education.  The December meeting was a bit different, however.  Faust, and O. Meredith Wilson (1910-1998), who had been secretary of the Fund and had just started as president of the University of Oregon, had invited an influential group to spend two days discussing how to strengthen scholarship on the role of education in shaping American history. 

Faust drew a significant group together.  Paul H. Buck (1899-1978), whose Road to Reunion, 1865-1900 had won the Pulitzer in 1937, chaired the meetings.  A gifted administrator, he had been Dean of the Harvard University faculty of arts and sciences from 1942 to 1953 as well as Provost of the University from 1946 to 1953, stepping down from these posts when James B. Conant left the Harvard presidency.  The group included several pillars of the American historical profession.  Arthur M. Schlesinger (1888-1965) would be a key leader in the work of the group.  He had established social history as an important field through a prolific and influential career as a powerful professor at Harvard and leader in the historical profession.  The group included the two most prominent historians of American thought, Mere Curti (1897-1996), from Wisconsin, and Ralph H. Gabriel (1890-1987) from Yale.  A few days after the meeting, Curti would deliver his presidential address on "Intellectuals and Other People" to the American Historical Association.  The fourth senior historian was Edward Chase Kirkland (1894-1975), for many years a widely recognized historian at Bowdoin, who had just finished a year as president of the American Economic History Association.  The curriculum theorist, Ralph W. Tyler (1902-1994) was also a senior member of the group, then just starting as the founding director of the Palo Alto Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, having previously been Dean of Social Sciences at the University of Chicago.

Four more scholars, a generation younger, yet highly accomplished, completed the group.  Francis Keppel (1916-1990) had become Dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Education in 1948 and had already successfully solicited substantial funds from Faust to recruit strong liberal arts graduates into the teaching profession through a reinvigorated MAT program.  An up and coming instructor, whom Keppel had recruited to strengthen the history of education at Harvard, Bernard Bailyn (1922-  ), also participated.  Bailyn was then revising his dissertation, a highly successful one sponsored by Oscar Handlin, into his first book, The New England Merchants in the Seventeenth Century.  The other two were from Columbia, Richard Hofstadter (1916-1970) and Walter P. Metzger (1922-  ).  Both were already well-published, Hofstadter especially so, with Social Darwinism in American Thought, the American Political Tradition, and The Development and Scope of Higher Education in the United States (co-authored with C. De Witt Hardy).  At the time of the meeting, Hofstadter and Metzger were together finishing up their timely history of academic freedom in American higher education.^[20]

Paul Buck described the meeting briefly in his preface to a pamphlet the Fund published in 1957, The Role of Education in American History, which solicited proposals from American historians in response to the group's concerns and announced the availability of funding for fellowships and research grants, publication subsidies, and support of conferences and summer seminars.  As Buck explained, the group spoke to their peers as leaders among academic historians and called on the profession to change the writing of American history by examining how educational processes could serve as causal factors indicating and explaining the salient characteristics of American experience.  They began with a broad understanding of education, for their purpose "was to discuss the need of studying the role of education, not in its institutional forms alone, but in terms of all the influences that have helped shape the mind and character of the rising generation."

A deficiency in the work of the history profession, not schools of education, motivated the group, which "was unanimous in its conviction that, relative to its importance in the development of American society, the history of education in this country, both in the schoolroom and outside, has been shamefully neglected by American historians."  Historians paid too little attention to the effects of education in its many forms, on the main developments characterizing American history.  Buck then added a further declaration, which, on stopping to consider it, stands in tension with the first and raises perplexing questions.  Speaking on behalf of a group immensely sophisticated about history and about education, he stated that "it was also our firm belief that the imperfect knowledge of this history has affected adversely the planning of curricula, the formulation of policy, and the administration of education agencies in the present crisis of American education."  Here was an unusual claim, namely that the failure by professional historians to account to the general public for the role of education in American experience adversely affected the quality and effects of American education.^[21]

A smaller committee, drawn from the group that Faust had convened, drafted the 1957 pamphlet with the help of a new member, Richard J. Storr (1915-  ). Storr had been one of Arthur M. Schlesinger's students and had recently published his dissertation as The Beginnings of Graduate Education in America^[22].  This smaller group — Buck (chair), Faust, Hofstadter, Schlesinger, and Storr (secretary) — became the Committee on the Role of Education in American History, making decisions on the uses of monies provided by the Fund for the Advancement of Education to support work by historians on the role of education in American history.  Over the next ten years, this Committee managed these funds with careful attention to the purposes they spelled out in the pamphlet.  They identified eight "great movements in American history" in which they believed "the role of educational forces" had been significant.  A quick look at the eight movements the Committee singled out makes their commitment to American history in its entirety clearly evident.^[23]

1. The building of new communities on the frontier.  The Committee wanted historians to give a fuller account of what happened "as pioneering ended and the life of the town and countryside matured."
2. The transformation of the immigrant into an American.  The Committee invited a thorough, deep account of the process of Americanization in its many forms.  "If the American is partially a work of conscious art, we must discover how the artist whose medium is mind and character and whose tool is teaching has accomplished his purpose."
3. The fulfillment of the promise of American life.  The Committee perceived that "the concrete meaning of America as a land of opportunity" depended on whether educational forces effectively promoted equality or furthered existing inequalities.
4. The growth of distinctively American political institutions.  The Committee recognized that republicanism and democracy were historically contingent and whether they would develop and endure depended in large part on what knowledge, skills, and values Americans and their leaders acquired.  Here was a pedagogical problem of historical dimension: "The nature of true democracy and of right education is subject to controversy; but the mutual dependence of the two is an article of common faith."
5. The transformation of American society.  The Committee noted that numerous transformations in social institutions and attitudes had occurred in American experience, none more profound than the shift from a rural, agrarian society to an urban, industrial one.  Reflecting the dominance of consensus history, they asserted that "the fact that a revolution has occurred in American society without apocalyptic violence cannot be explained until the role of [educational] efforts is carefully examined."
6. The utilization of the immensely rich material resources of the nation.  The Committee commended the "penetrating insight" of economic historians into the extraordinary material development characteristic of American history, while adding that "we have much to learn about the development of the human resources which make the intensive use of the endowment of nature possible."
7. The adjustment of the foreign policy of the United States to its growing responsibilities as a world power.  The Committee reflected a realism about the all-out power conflicts between states evoked by the traumas of the twentieth century and observed that successful studies of propaganda will not suffice as a basis of national leadership "unless they are related to the use of education to produce particular responses toward other nations and to the uses of American power."
8. The growth of a distinctive American culture over a vast continental area.  The Committee called attention "to the relevance of education to the spread and advancement of American culture."  What have been the educational foundations of American cultural achievements, helping to explain both their strengths and their limitations?

Leading up to these topics, the Committee gave a short disquisition on the historical role of education.  According to Storr, writing in 1976, Arthur Schlesinger had provided the key ideas the Committee advanced.^[24]  At the 1954 meeting, Schlesinger had presented the inclusive conception of education essential to the whole effort and that conception continued to be the controlling idea of education throughout the Committee's work.  "Any person living in the United States is shaped by a flood of influences or forces sweeping in upon him from nature, government, the farm, the factory, the region, family life, the periodical press, advertising, the churches, libraries, clubs, schools, etc." 

There followed an artful solution to the problem of distinguishing educational history from intellectual and cultural history, a problem that comes into play whenever a historian adopts a conception of education as inclusive as this one the Committee adopted.  "Education in the broadest sense" comprised all sorts of influences and forces.   Within this assemblage, educational action was sometimes incidental and sometimes deliberate.  And within the comprehensive process, deliberate education had a special role as a multiplier and modulator.  The whole set of forces, intentional and accidental, put ideas into operation among a people, but the intentional part had a crucial reciprocal influence on all of it, shaping what ideas people could accidentally appropriate and how they might absord or tansform it.  As a consequence, "the student of education seeks to find out how systematic instruction and information affect the reception of those ideas and so contribute to their efficacy."^[25]  Thus the full historical effect of educational activity would aggregate both the incidental and the deliberate dissemination of ideas with the latter, deliberate educating, amplifying and modulating the action of the former, incidental educating.  Cultural history would describe the various components of the culture; educational history would explain how people worked with these general components, finding themselves possessing the interests and skills to activate them or lacking the abilities to do so.

Members of the Committee were all skilled historians with an appreciation of the craft.  They noted that the importance of documents would slant inquiry into the role of education towards institutions and activities that might generate a documentary record.  Thus a locus of documentation would most likely be an institution, large or small, and it would be in tension with the enveloping society, of which it was a part, in the fashion of text and context.  Reciprocal influence between society and the institution would be taking place.  Consequently, the Committee observed, the historian could examine the tension between education and society from either of two directions, the effects of society on education or the influence of education on society.  They noted that the effects of society on education have been studied far more fully than the effects of education on society and consequently indicated their disposition "to give particular encouragement to scholars who wish to examine education  as a creative force in United States history."^[26]

At this point, the Committee noted a problem that would come to the fore in the decade of the 70s with the second wave of revisionism in educational history: are the determining effects exerted by society on education so powerful that education cannot act as an independent agent having effects from its side on the encompassing society.  The Committee recognized, of course, that educational influences are largely socially determined and therefore work significantly to reproduce existing social realities.  Yet educational forces had "a modicum of power to act on their own," enabling effects to build over time into "a shift of several degrees in [the social] course."^[27]  For the Committee, historians needed to search out in nuanced ways the limited elements of educational agency that diverse historical subjects might exercise.  Thus they called for work on educational leaders, different educational institutions and forces, teachers and other sources of instruction and guidance, curricula and less formal pedagogical programs, and policy processes including the routinizing of programs through bureaucracies.  Many detailed inquiries needed to uncover the ways in which educational forces acted independently through individuals and institutions to the degree they could do so in the midst of powerful constraints.

Over the next ten years the Committee used its influence and funds to promote such inquiry.  In 1958, representatives of a dozen or so history departments met at Princeton to discuss how they might advance the Committee's goals.  A second conference, October 16-17, 1959, at Williamsburg, Virginia, seemed directed ostensibly to a limited group of specialists on colonial American history.  Two years later, a third two-day conference took place at Berkeley, where Richard Hofstadter presented two essays on anti-intellectualism and education, which became part of his study of Anti-Intellectualism in American Life.  A fourth meeting was held at the University of Minnesota to talk about education for immigrant groups.  Finally, an extended invitational conference took place on Cape Cod at which historians presented papers on 19th-century education.^[28]

Of these meetings, the second two-day conference had the most evident effect.  A select group of twenty colonial historians gathered for the third in an ongoing series on "Needs and Opportunities", sponsored by the Institute of Early American History and Culture at Williamsburg, to consider two papers presented by Bernard Bailyn about the historiography of colonial education.^[29]  His first essay sketched a hypothetical history interpreting how less predictable, more expansive conditions on the colonies elicited changes in the English heritage.  Frontier conditions stimulated newly settled colonists to turn away from the educational practices they had brought with them on crossing the Atlantic.  Hence, the educational uses of family and household as the site of apprenticeship and the local community, particularly its church, were changed and weakened in order to build up more formal, officially supported educational institutions.  The conjugal unit of the family persisted, but its extension over time and space became more tenuous; intergenerational authority weakened; and its sufficiency as the primary educative agent diminished.  The same forces weakened apprenticeship structures and turned those that survived more exclusively towards a vocational quid pro quo between a labor hungry master and a skill hungry journeyman.  The new land opened careers to talent and energy in ways that broke the old-world inheritance of vocations: Smith became a name, not an ascribed function.  Yet the transfer of culture from one generation to another could not be taken for granted, especially in a world where the pressure of nature was imperious and the mark of culture on the environment contingent and tenuous.  In response, education became "an act of will."^[30]  The role of schools and colleges became amplified while support for them, and control over their goals and policies, came to depend on willed community action in the form of taxes or recurrent gifts, not the more passive earnings of endowed land, characteristic in England.  The Revolution confirmed, but did not alter this essential transformation of the medieval heritage in education, "which was not unique to America, but like much else of the modern world, it appeared here first."^[31]

At the end of his interpretative essay, Bailyn turned from his exploration of how conditions in the colonies transformed the educational presumptions brought from England to indicate, through a paragraph each, the two most important ways in which the transformation of education in America shaped "the development of American society," the ostensible subject of the book.  First, it served as a powerful accelerator of social change, releasing "the restless energies and ambitions of groups and individuals," the very forces stimulated by the American environment to turn education in its willful, non-traditional directions in the first place.  Second, the transformation "contributed much to the forming of national character."^[32]  The new education broke the household cocoon, made authority acquired, not ascripted, and turned the individual towards self-reliance  — the pedagogical grounds of "typical American individualism, optimism, and enterprise."^[33]  Bailyn delivered these dicta as ungrounded assertions, thereby finessing the really difficult task of showing how pedagogical tendencies actually take hold in the character formation of individuals and then spread to a sufficient proportion of a people to mark their collective character.  He identified the role of education, but he did not explain the pedagogical processes by which it wrought this role.  And in his bibliographic essay, which was immensely rich in the discussion of historical particulars about educational agencies at work in the colonial origins and experience, Bailyn paid little attention to sources or literature pertaining to how educational actions operated as causal determinants of general historical developments.

Yet the Committee on the Role of Education in American History had hoped to elicit answers to precisely those pedagogical processes pertaining to the way education actually shaped historical experience.  They wanted clarification of how educational activities served as agencies determining American history, not how American historical experience served as agencies shaping educational activities.  Taken by itself, Bailyn's discussion of educational agencies in colonial America would appear as a highly competent specialist work, one indicating many opportunities for research showing how conditions in a sparsely settled land shaped educational practices adapted originally to very different conditions of life.  But one can imagine Arthur Schlesinger, Sr., harrumphing that Bailyn framed his hypothetical history exactly as he, Schlesinger, had done in "What Then Is the American, This New Man?", his 1942 Presidential Address to the American Historical Association^[34]  What had Bailyn added?  The Committee had made clear the importance of examining "education as a creative force in United States history," yet the substantive strength of Bailyn's essays was in showing the effects of social changes under novel circumstances on the educational arrangements brought to the colonies.

Possibly disappointed, the Committee members may equally have been a bit surprised.  Despite its brevity, Education in the Forming of American Society included more than a review of the professional historians' treatment of colonial education — a devastating critique of the existing literature in the history of education as it had been developed and used in schools of education.  Whatever the response at Williamsburg to this part of his presentation, it caught the attention of scholars in education.  Bailyn opened his interpretative essay by observing that unlike the prior topics, colonial science and early relations with indigenous peoples, which were suffering from neglect, his topic, the early history of American education had become part of "the patristic literature of a powerful academic ecclesia" securely ensconced in schools of education since the 1890s.^[35]  It was inbred, isolated, and anachronistic.  Bailyn critiqued the histories of education written from the 1890s into the 1920s in the formative period for use in university-based schools of education, boosting compulsory mass schooling.  As educational missionaries, the authors condescended to the past, seeing it as the present writ small, blinding themselves and their readers to the unexpected.  Obsessed with the development of public school systems, their purposes caused thought to short-circuit; they could see in the past only primitive intimations of the present and as a result they could only chronicle continuities, unable to perceive, let alone explain interesting change.  Bailyn's target was ripe and his anathema provided a short, dry book with a powerful, attention-getting hook.  The effects on the history of education changed its writing and uses  substantially, perhaps for the better, perhaps for the worse.

Doubtless Bailyn's unexpected critique elicited in ensuing years much serious scholarship in the history of education.  But it did so by deflecting effort away from what the Committee on the Role of Education in American History had sought to support.  Sol Cohen has developed the very interesting possibility that Bailyn's critique, as it became amplified by Cremin and others, really aimed to bring to a head a power struggle then current in schools of education, securing the influence of scholars there who wanted to regulate research in education by applying academic, disciplinary norms rather than those of professional, field-oriented practice.  Such a purpose suited Keppel's purposes at Harvard.  And Cremin's at Columbia (of the eight reviews of Bailyn's essay that JSTOR retrieves, four just happen to be by Cremin and his colleagues at TC).  Certainly Bailyn's critique hastened the decline of the social foundations movement, large composite courses for all students in schools of education that had flourished from the 1930s into the 50s.  Further, publication of Bailyn's essays, followed closely by Cremin's Transformation of the School: Progressivism in American Education, 1876-1956, consolidated the prestige of disciplinary based scholarship at Teachers College and other schools of education.  Cohen correctly judged that while the call Bailyn and the Committee were issuing had some influence among professional historians, they "had more influence . . . among historians of education on faculties at teachers colleges and schools of education."^[36]

Victory in this power struggle, played out in the name of contrasting intellectual visions, carried within it the grounds for its own collapse.  First, Bailyn's critique had very little effect in actually shifting the institutional base.  It instead actually left the history of education and related social science inquiries into education still situated primarily in schools of education, where their institutional rationale remained to be justified through their functionality in the work of the professional school.  Within schools of education, the enhanced academic prestige won by the new historians was largely cosmetic.  But that was useful in the early 60s, for the perennial pressure on schools of education to raise academic standards had been particularly high in the aftermath of Sputnik and both enrollments and research funding were relatively flush, lowering the pressures on academic units in schools of education to justify their costs against income.  In these circumstances, power came easily to those with academic prestige and it did not seem particularly important to plan strategies for keeping that power should the favorable circumstances change.  Consequently, no one paid much attention to the second seed of future collapse, a more subtle one, namely that Bailyn's critique did little to change the role and function within the professional schools of education served by the knowledge that historians and other social scientists generated about education.

Bailyn stigmatized the way historians in schools of education had played to their audience.  In his view, history written by and for members of a profession other than the historical profession would be bad history.  There was not much one could do about it other than have history written by and for members of the historical profession and he did not say much about why members of the educational profession should support such history when the pressures began to pinch.  Here one might hoist Bailyn upon his own petard, for he displayed a singular lack of curiosity about why educators in schools of education at the turn of the 20th century had come to write the peculiar kind of history that he showed them to have written.  Interviewing Bailyn in 1994, Edward Connery Lathem asked Bailyn whether he thought professionals could write good history about their profession and Bailyn hearkened back to Education in the Forming of American Society and suggested that the temptation to foreshorten history in a search for the antecedents of the present was nearly irresistible.  Better leave it to academic historians interested in the past for its own sake.^[37]

We come here to a crux of the matter.  What is the relationship between historical inquiry and a sound causal interpretation of what educates?  We have seen how Cremin felt a need to turn to other forms of inquiry in order to arrive at a clear theory of education and we have noted that he used that theory, in a rather opaque way, primarily to identify diverse examples of educative activity and to describe what they did.  In a similar way, Bailyn seems to evidence similar proclivities.  He identified a strong susceptibility among educators writing the history of their field to produce anachronistic inquiries into a past understood as the present writ small.  But he seemed uninterested in why they did that and incurious whether they might have done otherwise.  Revisiting the matter years later he suggested that such foibles are merely natural, for "they seem impelled," allowing only that a few, on becoming highly sensitized to the danger might "try to correct for it."^[38]  Neither Cremin nor Bailyn, it would seem, would claim history, in particular the history of education, to be an independent source of positive knowledge about how education can and should take place.  Their definitions of education generate descriptive agendas.  Let us put the question that Bailyn left unasked: is there a historical explanation why the historians of education in schools of education wrote the sorts of foreshortened, anachronistic histories that they chose to write?  To say simply that they were impelled to do it is a mystification, not an explanation.  Might they have done otherwise and if so why did they do what they did?

4. Who was Schleiermacher?

Pick up a German Geschichte der Pädagogik and peruse the contents.  The cast of characters will largely be familiar from most any History of Educational Thought, except for the chapter on Schleiermacher, prominent in the German histories and absent in the American.  Chances are, unless interested in Protestant theology, an American educator will have no inkling who Friedrich Schleiermacher was.^[39]  Interest in many educators who wrote in German, especially Pestalozzi, Herbart, and Froebel, came to the American schools of education as these developed in the decades before and after 1900, largely by importing German pedagogical thought and practice.  Schleiermacher did not make the crossing because Americans imported a particular historical variant of the available German repertoire, one in which Schleiermacher, and a few others as well, were persona non grata.  The issue in contention had to do with the role of educational history in the proper study of education, an issue not irrelevant to the story that Bailyn told.  And the issue that was in contention may still be relevant to the study of education, and to the study of much else of human import as well.

To describe Schleiermacher as a key founder of liberal Protestant theology is accurate but unsatisfactory, for that description leaves much out.  He absorbed, integrated, and advanced the powerful thinking of his time, acting as a many-sided public intellectual, sometimes in official favor and sometimes not.  He won a diverse audience as a writer and preacher who proved inwardly meaningful to many persons with diverse casts of mind. He secured important advances in the theory of interpretation and translation and applied his ideas about these in practice, not only on religious texts, but on the classics as well, translating almost all of Plato's dialogues into German versions that still stand as among the best.^[40]   He collaborated in effecting major educational reforms in both secondary and higher education.  For many years a prominent professor at the most innovative university of his time, he taught engaged students in tension with the likes of Fichte and Hegel across a repertoire of big subjects — the major branches of theology (philosophical, historical, and practical), dialectics, aesthetics, hermeneutics, ethics, pedagogy, and on. If his ideas did not make his time, they did move his time in a humane, constructive direction, helping people to find and nourish meaning in their lives.^[41]

It may seem to some to be an oxymoron to call Schleiermacher a great humanistic theologian, but that oxymoron arises only when overly circumscribed views of the human and the divine fail to overlap.  In a doctrinaire sense, Schleiermacher was neither a believer nor a skeptic; the starting point was not a matter of belief or non-belief, but a simple recognition — he found himself living a life that was somehow given, he knew not how or why, and it required him to act, to engage in a process of determining the doing of something that moves from the future, through the present, and into the past.  I might next write any one of many words — perhaps with some hesitation, I think this and then that, but then the fingers start to move in the active present, and then, looking now at what I did, the determinate words are there, fixed by the active present for past time from the indeterminate future.  Schleiermacher thought all people sensed their life in such a way.  We recognize ourslves dependent on making all sorts of irrevocable determinations in the midst of an encompassing unknown.  He understood that this recognition was the source and substance of all experience and most importantly of religious experience in the historical reality of life, and the source and substance of any organized religion would be the historical actuality of the lived experience that resulted as people determined their lives, coping with their unique circumstances while sensing their contingency as a living element supporting itself in the given world.  In this way, from his initial success in 1799 with On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers, Schleiermacher offered a wide channel for thinking seriously about lived experience in which neither doctrinaire belief nor adamant denial, those imaginary poles grasped at by all those who need certain knowledge, would take precedence over sound understanding as the basis for lived fulfillment.^[42]

Historical life, sustained by groups and experienced by individuals, preoccupied Schleiermacher.  In living a historical life, the basic challenge was interpretive, hermeneutical, to find oneself having to make sense within an immense and powerful otherness, having in endless ways to determine the indeterminate and to suffer the consequences.  Each person faced the vital imperative inherent in the condition of finding oneself alive in a complex world: develop some understanding with which to act, to endure, perhaps to flourish.  This imperative was not an external ought, but an immanent necessity.  As interpretation was essential in writing history and in reading texts, it was even more omnipresent and inescapable in living life.  Within philosophy, Schleiermacher gave hermeneutics, the theory of interpretation, greater importance relative to epistemology, the theory of knowledge.  In theology, revealed doctrine did not define a church; a church, understood as a historical, social interaction of living persons, revealed its doctrines through the meanings its members manifested in the historical experiencing of their lives.^[43]  These lives incarnated their interpretation of their religiosity, of their feeling of contingency within the mysterious givenness of their lives and the world in which they live them.  A historical theology emerged into history through the cumulative experience of the members of an historical church.  This vital situation was circular, as it must be, for interpretation works on and through reciprocal interactions, which were what the given life consisted in: to live is to cope continuously with all the circumstantial reactions to every action that one takes.  Fulfillment and decline come, not through direct progressions, but through spirals of interaction that prove virtuous or vicious in their cumulative effects.^[44]

This primacy of historical life and the concomitant centrality of interpretation in it led to a distinctive understanding of educational relationships between persons, who constituted in their sphere of shared life a commonality of differences, each the source of an increment of pedagogical potential.  Schleiermacher found that what educated came from within the living person through their continuous acts of interpretation by means of which the person contended with others, who were like but different, and in doing so disclosed and brought his or her potentialities into actuality.  Through formative interaction with specific circumstances, a person could actualize himself only through a bounded set of possibilities suited to those circumstances, but the actualizing was immanent, from within, for the drive and impetus to make sense of those possibilities came not from those circumstances, but from within each living person.  Among other things, Schleiermacher was a great translator of Plato because he brought to fruition in himself a deep and profound interpretation of the difficult, important understandings of life and education embedded in Plato's thought and work. 

In a vocabulary suited to thinking about lived experience, substituting gerunds for abstract nouns leads to greater clarity, for meaning inheres in the acting.  Thus, educating happened in experiences lived by active, thinking persons engaging in forming themselves by pursuing fulfillment, by developing skills, and by construing intentions within all the key domains of life — familial, social, political, and intellectual.  What educated was participating in a common, shared life that arose as persons of different ages, capacities, and characteristics interacted across all their differences.  Engaging in all the constituent elements of life was what educated, a process by which each differentiates and incarnates his or her unique personhood.  Educating would take place pervasively through all the main components of the common life — family, language, community, civic association, the state, religion, thought and knowledge.  Additionally, educating occurred through participating in specialized instructional arrangements, which served special purposes within the encompassing educative sphere: what these arrangements could and should offer and how they could best offer it depended significantly on the circumstances with which each participant coped and how each understood what he could and should make of himself. 

For Schleiermacher, each person lived a pedagogical drama by striving towards a human fulfillment through an interpretative interaction between Fertigkeit, realized skill, capacity, accomplishment, and Gesinnung, motivating disposition, intention, sentiment, conviction.  One had some skill and acted with it according to some motivation and the experienced results gave clues about what might follow, with it all orienting itself by a longing for a fulfillment that was always a real feeling, however variable and subject to reinterpretation its object would always be.  Educating was an ongoing, ubiquitous hermeneutic activity, continuously interpreting oneself and the world, through which persons living in a given world formed their capacities to anticipate and act within it.  A protean intention would lead to a tentative forming of a skill and the new skill would enable intention to differentiate and concretize in a drama of pedagogical contingencies.  Geist or spirit — living intelligence and thought — must pervade all instruction: beware method lest it become mechanical, for "the mechanical is death."^[45]  In scant outline, these were the educational views that the founders of the study of education in the United States did not incorporate into the repertoire of educational ideas they derived from their European heritage. 

Let us pause for a moment to orient ourselves within our own inquiry.  We began by recognizing the importance and timeliness to the way Lawrence Cremin used a broad, inclusive definition of education to structure his extensive inquiries into the history of American education.  Conceiving of educative experience comprehensively would more effectively contextualize educative work through formal arrangements such as schools, channeling more effort to the improvement of informal educational arrangements in our culture and encouraging work within formal structures to proceed with a stronger sense of purpose and a greater capacity to take the differing circumstances of different individuals into appropriate educative consideration.  We observed that Cremin's broad definition of education, however sound, has had little effect on the historical practice of education in American life over the past fifty or so years and that it has largely been abandoned by current historians of education.  We took a first step in trying to resuscitate it by suggesting that the broad definition of education that Cremin used might not have been, as critics have alleged, the source of the evident deficiencies that they perceived in Cremin's writings.  Instead, we suggested that those deficiencies arose because Cremin evidenced a strong disposition to confine his scholarship to historical description, not exposing the reasoned grounds for his historical judgments or joining in debate about the soundness of them.  This reticence, we suggested, made his work far less interesting and compelling that it might have been and we attributed the reticence, not to a quirk of Cremin, but to norms characterizing the historical profession during the late 20th century.  Bernard Bailyn, the other great exponent of the broad definition of education, also manifested this reticence, which was evident in his critique of the educational history written in schools of education early in the 20th century.  As a result of that reticence, Bailyn had been content merely to identify and describe the deficiencies in the work, not to interpret how and why the work had come to be deficient beyond saying that it was in the nature of that kind of historian to write that kind of history, a classic virtus dormativa.

In search of a better explanation, we compared American histories of educational thought with those written in Germany, the place from which the founders of American educational scholarship, so denigrated by Bailyn, were drawing their inspiration.  We noticed a difference: from the early 20th-century on, American educational historians have said virtually nothing about Schleiermacher, whereas German educational historians have said, and still say, a lot.  We have taken a superficial look at what Schleiermacher had to say in general and more specifically about education.  We now need to carry our inquiry to its conclusion by asking three questions.  First, was Schleiermacher representative of anything of substance and importance and does it have potential intrinsic interest to those of us concerned with education?  Second, how and why did it happen that Schleiermacher's work, and the movement of thought and experience that it might represent, did not get incorporated into the American study of education and does that have anything to do with the sort of histories that American educators wrote?  And third, what agenda of scholarship might lead to our recovering the possibilities the work of Schleiermacher and his peers might bring to us and would the benefits of recovering it commensurate with the scale of effort it would entail?  With these questions, let us resume our inquiry, having sampled Schleiermacher, still uncertain what his life and work might represent.

5. How does humanity educate itself?

Schleiermacher explained his understanding of education with minimal reference to the thought of others, but his views were representative of a movement, often identified in German as Neuhumanismus, a humanism that was new relative to that of the Renaissance.  For those of us interested in education, the term Neuhumanismus serves a useful purpose, for it permits attending to a movement of thought and experience in a way that draws attention to a sphere of human activity that would otherwise disperse across several of our more familiar retrospective groupings such as the Enlightenment and Romanticism.  Neuhumanismus centers on the advanced German humanism of Schleiermacher's time, ideas and activities schooled in Kant's critiques of reason, inspired by the revolution in France, awakened by Napoleon to an awareness at once national and cosmopolitan, enthused by a romantic sense of the past, and supported by bourgeois civic involvements.^[46] 

Pressed by many commitments and demands, preoccupied by other writing projects, Schleiermacher left his main educational works unpublished among his papers.  But he was not without pedagogical influence in his time.  He had a concrete role in the Prussian educational reforms early in the 19th century, working with Wilhelm von Humboldt and others, and he became one of the most prominent examples of the new professorial ideal associated with the University of Berlin, conscientiously exercising his Lehrfreiheit, a freedom to teach, through which he set forth in course after course his considered views of many subjects to those who wished to attend to them.  Such teaching, in combination with that of peers such as Hegel, had significant influence on the the professionalization of education through the work of Adolf Diesterweg and others.^[47]  And like the whole thrust of his thought, Schleiermacher's  posthumously published ideas about education provided a representative summation of the pedagogical ideas that he and his contemporaries had been forming.

Here we can make only a cursory inventory of Neuhumanismus, which drew on important ingredients from across enlightened Europe and emerged powerfully in the late 18th century.  These ideas flourished as writers, primarily German Protestants, advanced a critical pedagogy in the Kantian sense, asking how the self-determination of mankind was possible.  Currents of advanced thought coursing through Europe, particularly Hume's skeptical arguments about causality, awakened not only Kant from dogmatic slumber, but others as well, undercutting the assurance that mankind generally and oneself specifically enjoyed a secure place in a providential chain of being.  18th-century German rationalism had held that human reason, for some by itself and for others with the aid of divine revelation, attained certain knowledge that redemption and salvation in a transcendent eternity was a real prospect, open to each, regardless of his or her present station in life.  This assurance came into general doubt, forcing even those who decided like Kant's colleague, Johann Georg Hamann, to believe nonetheless, to entertain deep uncertainties about the powers of human reason.  Such an awakening was taking place all over Europe and to some degree it came a bit late to German areas, but when it came there the conditions were both somewhat peculiar and ripe.  A reading public, a salaried economic base and little prospect for political influence channeled its awakening awareness into directions more cultural and pedagogical than political or entrepreneurial.  It did so at a time when a quickening of communications invigorated life in towns and the many small cities dotting the German lands and a stronger trade in books, journals, and pamphlets, diverse tools for cultural and pedagogical action, were emerging as significant means for realizing human aspiration.  The upshot was a bright fluorescence of intellectual and cultural striving that took as a point of departure the recognition that to be human entailed living as a self-directing, indeterminate actor in a big, recalcitrant world.  Finding ourselves in this situation, can we understand what makes it possible for us to do what we seem able to do?  And with that critical self-awareness, can we soundly select from among all the possibilities which ones are the ones that we should rightly pursue? 

Thinkers, poets, writers, critics, teachers, preachers, scholars: all faced up to problems of human freedom, no longer assured of a benevolent deity, providentially succoring and guiding them.  The movement of thought, which we can call Neuhumanismus drew together one of those unusual concentrations of concern and capacity that occasionally arise in history and to sample their achievements well we need to adopt a careful perspective.  In college and beyond, students like ourselves almost always experience the work of past thinkers as a name with some tags attached, and if we inquire further, we usually encounter a summative discussion of a thinker's life and work, as if it had sprung forth all at once, a completed corpus of thought for study in and for itself.  When we think about influence on or by such a finished figure, our retrospection creates the impression of ideas transmitted from one historical bucket to the next, Fichte getting Kant whole, and Hegel Fichte whole, and with others standing by as mere onlookers, performing, if at all, the role of a chorus.  In such a view, influence and originality seem only to flow forward in time from source to destination, much like typical school instruction in which teachers teach and students learn.  The actualities of people thinking together under the conditions of their lived experience are very different, however. 

Each person crafts and projects a mix of originalities and appropriations within an encompassing field of shared, active thinking, extended in scope and duration, where ideas and concerns of confused paternity circulate in complicated interactions, actual and potential.   We technologists are learning to see such interactions as being endowed with "affordances," potentialities for insight and action for those who will use them.  Within a living, historical locus of concern, participants use the affordances they find in and about them to labor at works, large and small, struggling to say what they have to say within the murmur of many voices, uncertain, uncaring about the mix of novelty and repetition in it, as long as it bears with some fit and effect within the flow of interaction into which it projects.  When the affordances derived from their concerns are unusually powerful and their work coheres with extensive communicative interactions among them, a movement of thought can become unusually extensive in scope and strong in power.  Schleiermacher lived and worked as a late representative of such a field of effective intellectual interaction, one of the great ones, an important one for thinking about what educates.

Glance over the appended table of names, dates, and tags: it crudely displays the overlap of interaction of a sampling of participants in this discussion of what educates called Neuhumanism.  Let us allow ourselves a historical hypothesis here, for after all we are still discussing Bailyn's hypothetical history: like its great predecessor in Classical Athens, where an unusual concentration of good thinkers joined to worry the question whether virtue, arete, human excellence could be taught, here an unusual grouping of good minds gathered over several generations to argue out what would best educate, recognizing, as J. G. Herder put it, that "each can contribute to the betterment of humanity only what he himself makes of what he can and should become."^[48]  Singly and together, what can and should human persons make of themselves?  Here was a shared search for the educative capacities that were immanent in human persons, singly and collectively.  Here was the living source of critical philosophy and its follow through in critical idealism (Kant, Fichte, etc.), of the poetic and artistic celebrations of self-constituting selves (Goethe, Schiller, etc.), of fast-spreading historical inquiry into the many-sided human capacity for creative self-differentiation (Lessing, Herder, etc.), of the deep probing about how the human uses of language in their different varieties and forms generate cultural traditions flourishing across time and space (Hamann, Wilhelm von Humboldt, etc.), of the phenomenological reflection on the unfolding of human possibility through the self-creation of Geist, that is, spirited thinking by persons alive in a world (Hegel).  Let us try to grasp this concern in its full complexity as best we can in order to weigh what may have been at stake by leaving it behind as American educators constructed a pedagogical past for use in schools of education.

One might object that in a larger sense the work grouped as Neuhumanismus has not been left behind at all, for students of literature, poetry, drama, history, philosophy, linguistics, religion, and even education are likely to study works by a few of those listed and in the cases of literature and philosophy, by many of them.  Remarkably few on the list are thoroughly obscure; remarkably many are highly preeminent.  One can too easily break this grouping apart under separate headings of philosophy, poetry, the novel, history, criticism, politics, pedagogy, and on.  That may be fine for different purposes.  But for our purposes, for educational purposes, that would arbitrarily break apart what holds together.  The ideas gathered together as Neuhumanismus concern constitutive educational experience, the formative self-determination of human possibilities.  All this work cohered around the historical actuality of a comprehensive, ubiquitous educational experience self-activated through philosophy, poetry, the novel, history, criticism, politics, pedagogy, and all of social life.  Our hypothesis here is simply that the challenge of fulfilling oneself through human self-formation within one's historical life was not only a frequent topic within all this work, but was the generative principle giving rise to and running through it all, the experience out of which its creators brought their work into being and the context of concern from which its most important meanings flow.^[49]  Can humans, living historical lives, dependent on themselves and human peers, achieve a meaningful fulfillment?  This question puts the challenge of modernity.  And it put it as a challenge ultimately both historical and pedagogical in character.

While the parts of what Schleiermacher represents have a presence in various components of American cultural life, that presence is dispersed and decentered.  All of it together was an important movement of thought and concern about the immanence throughout historical life of all that educates and about the historical imperative of human self-determination.  What can I make of what I can and should become?  What can we make of what we can and should become?  Breaking it all apart had direct costs for incorporating the pedagogical past into the American schools of education.  The few components that were appropriated were taken out of context.  For instance, American and British educational scholars produced a spate of books about great educators, and among them they wrote about Kant as a great thinker who addressed education, attending primarily to Über Pädagogik.  By narrowing Kant's educational significance to that text, a commentary narrowed the understanding of the whole movement, for a major strand developed out of Kant's whole practice of critical philosophizing, asking how different forms of reason were possible in order to determine how persons could and should try to reason about their world and their potentialities for action in it. 

Likewise, scholars constructing the American variant of educational history avidly imported Pestalozzi, but his work cannot stand in isolation as an adequate representative of the movement of which he was a part.  Broken from the context of Neuhumanismus, Pestalozzi too easily became another Swiss curiosity, like Edelweiss at home in rarefied places, tinged with a nostalgia for a village pedagogy best suited to a world we have lost.^[50]  Additionally, they attended to the work of Rousseau, but its educational implications had been most fully examined in the context of Neuhumanismus, and without that context, his pedagogy seemed awkward to implement on first impression.  Uncertain what to make of it in practice, they attended to Rousseau's person, which invited a din of ad hominem attack by straight-laced Victorians ever on guard against seduction by a dissolute soul.  Finally, much in American transcendentalism and in the British movement of thought from Wordsworth through Coleridge and Carlyle to Newman and Arnold would have gained both sense and import had it been seen in interaction with the writers of German Neuhumanismus.  By glossing over the German background of transcendentalist ideas, American educators diminished the richness of our own traditions.^[51]

In these ways, American educators incurred costs in leaving Schleiermacher and his contemporaries behind.  Unfortunately by the late nineteenth century when the development of American educational scholarship got seriously underway, it had become easy to misconstrue the work of Neuhumanismus, mainly for two reasons.  To concentrate on historical life, and to become preoccupied with the task of the new humanist, contributing to humanity what one makes of what one can and should become, requires a minimal sense of affluence and security, a willingness to put economic and political worries in the background while concentrating on creative choices.  A sense that one could not assume a sustaining order immediately at hand, from which to manage the unexpected, and a feeling that the future was open, replete with positive possibilities, relative to which one had not yet fully achieved or exhausted one's potential efficacy, were important characteristics shared by persons like Kant, Lessing, Wieland, Herder, Pestalozzi, Goethe, Fichte, von Humboldt, Schleiermacher, Hegel, and on.  Generalizations about such dispositions always turn on marginal differences and ecological shifts in which small changes in external circumstances trigger a displacement of dominant types.  Events conspired to convert the eighteenth-century experience of nationality as a cultural and educational experience into nineteenth-century experience of it as a matter of large-scale political mobilization.  Those primarily concerned with historical life as the ground and locus of human existence very literally shifted their attention, ceasing to perceive the essential process in it to be the phenomenological self-creation of the creative spirit and asserting that the key to what human beings can and should make of themselves lay in the historical interworking of labor and capital.

6. Who will educate educators?

What gives a professional the warrant to act on another's behalf?  This question, which naturally adheres to any pretense to expertise, became more difficult as dogmatic certainty broke down in the late 18th century.  Claims to an inherent authority, derived from the natural, divinely sanctioned order of things, diminished in their power to prepossess deference.  It was a virtuous question in the sense that asking it and having to answer it probably made elites associated with many functions more responsible and responsive in their ministration to human needs.  Across many professions the education of prospective members sharpened up, the recruitment of talent broadened, slowly but perceptibly, and attentive cultivation of the stock of skill and knowledge that gave it expertise deepened and improved.  With this situation, there arose the opportunity for significant disagreement, internal to each profession and elite, about the source of the authority with which its members could best develop their functions and assert their control over who could and could not perform them.

In late 18th-century Germany, such attention began to spread to the recruitment and preparation of teachers who would staff increasingly organized systems of schools.  This is not the place to recount these developments.  In the largest sense they are everywhere still unfolding and encompass many matters worthy of consideration.  Within the larger, ongoing movement, we need to narrow our attention to the milieu from which the founders of educational scholarship in the United States drew much of their inspiration, namely the professionalizing of education in 19th-century Germany.  That itself is an immensely complicated story, and within it, we can concentrate here only on the emergence of developments that deeply affected the way American educational scholars dealt with the historical aspects of education.  Many contributors to the movement of thought we have been calling Neuhumanismus, among them Basedow, Kant, Herder, Salzmann, Trapp, Campe, Villaume, Pestalozzi, Niemeyer, Wolf, Fichte, Niethammer, Wilhelm von Humboldt, Hegel, and Schleiermacher, participated in the early efforts towards developing the educational profession.^[52] Suffice it to say that by the early 19th century, they and their peers had amassed an extensive stock of well-described educational principles and practices with increasing attention to how to systematize it for effective presentation to prospective educators.  To be sure, writers would frequently work with it ad hoc, according to their personal convictions, justifying their version of the whole by dogmatic appeal to external authority, be it theological, political, or conventional — a perennial practice, still vigorous, of which Raumer's work is a good example. 

To sharper minds, however, it was (and is) evident that prestige, power, and positive effect would better accrue to those who could show convincingly that their organization of the field was fully consistent with rationally persuasive principles.  The essence of our story is simply this: from the give and take of intensive activity associated with Neuhumanismus, two essentially different ways of organizing acquired know-how and principles emerged, with both having distinctive strengths and values, and over time these have spiraled around each other, somewhat like a double helix, but with a tendency at times to conflict.  Let us concentrate here on identifying the modes of organization in these movements of thought in order to understand their interaction with each other and then to see what specifically happened as scholars founded the study of education in the United States, drawing important resources from their European peers and predecessors.  To avoid unnecessary complications, let us pick a starting point and follow only the main developments that ensued relevant to the founding of American educational scholarship.

At the end of the 1790s, August Hermann Niemeyer (1754-1828) published his Principles of Education and Instruction in 3 volumes and starting in 1802, Friedrich Heinrich Christian Schwarz (1766-1837) followed with the first volume of Erziehungslehre, completing it with publication of the 4th volume in 1813.  In 1806, a third educational theorist, Johann Friedrich Herbart (1776-1841) published a slimmer, but equally important work, Allgemeine Pädagogik.  These works formed the intellectual foundations for the study of education in German universities.  In doing so, they set out two rather distinct paths for educational inquiry, one proceeding primarily through reflection on lived educational experience, (an historical-anthropological paradigm) and the other by deducing principles from the goals of education (an ethical-psychological paradigm).  Here were the roots of the two potential paths for American educational research that our colleague, Ellen Condliffe Lagemann, has shown John Dewey and Edward L. Thorndike to have set forth, the one diffusely and the other with clear effect.^[53]  These two ways of thinking about education came to the United States in a condition of significant imbalance, which accounts substantially for why the history of education and related modes of inquiry have had a rather ancillary role in American educational scholarship.

Early in the 19th century, the work of Niemeyer and Schwarz had great prestige.  Adolph Diesterweg, the influential Prussian educator, called Schwarz and Niemeyer, "the Nestors of German pedagogy," and of the two, Diesterweg thought Niemeyer the more practical, but Schwarz the more important one, "deeper, many-sided."^[54]  Both were scholars of genuine stature, fully the peers of more famed figures from their era such as Kant, Herder, Fichte, Hegel, or Schleiermacher.  It is important in approaching their work to do so with some self-awareness, suspending the tendency in present-day academia to denigrate a preoccupation with education as a peripheral, second-rate intellectual commitment.  The topic of education, of what people could and should make of themselves, stood at the center of serious cultural work.  First-rate intellects addressed it, not by the mere historical accident, which arose frequently enough as one or another of them happened to serve as a tutor or a school teacher while struggling through his studies.  Education was an important topic that no serious writer could wholly avoid and Niemeyer and Schwarz were the most respected writers to  concentrate fully on it.

Niemeyer was a theologian and educational reformer, who spent most of his career at the University of Halle.  His great uncle, August Hermann Francke, had founded in Halle an influential orphan asylum and associated schools early in the 18th century, which exerted considerable influence on educational practice and grew into a large, well-endowed complex. Niemeyer grew up in highly cultured surroundings and was at home throughout his life in the intellectual elite of the German world.  Trained in theology and philology, he started publishing, at 21, an influential, multi-volumed theological study, Charakteristik der Bibel, the fifth volume of which appeared in 1782, the whole thereafter going through several later editions.  At 23 he was appointed to teach theology and at 30 became ordinarius, a full professor, at the University of Halle, then one of the more progressive universities.  Niemeyer was a leader among his academic colleagues, a strong voice against Napoleonic expansion, and as a result he was remanded to Paris in 1807 as a kind of intellectual hostage when the French occupiers closed the University of Halle.  He became rector of it in 1808 on its reopening, serving in that role until 1816.  In 1784 he had started a life-long administrative career in the Francke Stiftung, of which he proved to be a most effective leader.

In 1796, Niemeyer published his Grundsätze der Erziehung und des Unterrichts, which became a very popular book on education, valued for its warm humanity and the wealth of educational experience it communicated. Starting with the third edition in 1799, Niemeyer appended to it an overview of educational history, concentrating on the 18th century.  To Niemeyer, his historical work was simply a start towards "a complete history of what, from earliest times up to our own, has been thought theoretically and done practically with respect to education and instruction, of the men who have had the most significant influence, of the institutions which have been dedicated to this end, of the literary works which have been written to this purpose. . . .  The materials for the whole lie dispersed in the most heterogeneous writings." Niemeyer suggested that educators would find his outline informative and that presenting it might occasion further investigation and treatment of the subject.^[55]

Education cultivated the moral and functional autonomy of the real person living in real conditions, and to do that well one had to work at each part of the process effectively, ever alert to the relation of particulars to the whole endeavor.  Hence Niemeyer concentrated on the principles of education, for by comprehending these, one would have the capacity to comprehend better how particular aspects of education related to the whole.  For instance, in his historical section on the 18th century, the most fully developed section, he first spoke about the general principles of pedagogy being developed in school contexts and then turned to the way four different types of schools — those of religious orders, of German Humanists, of the Philanthropists, and finally of what he called the eclectic schools, popping up here and there.  Although he did not develop his historical overview very fully, the way he approached topics in it suggests that he viewed the history of education as an opportunity to search out the principles of education as they operated in the real contexts of human experience and to learn how better to use such principles to understand the inter-working of pedagogical particulars in the whole of people's educations.  Thus he ended his historical overview with a sustained reflection on the larger human meaning of good educational practices.  "Head and heart, understanding and feeling in harmony — these constitute human fulfillment, happiness, and dignity."  These were the goals with each student shaping sound school practices.^[56]  Niemeyer had practical intentions, specifically addressing parents, tutors, and teachers but he did not aim to provide them with a set of readily applicable methods.  Rather he wanted to cultivate their capacity to think "as educators."  Hence, he introduced extensive annotations throughout his Grundsätze, giving readers access to regnant scholarship in classical and biblical philology, as well as cultural history.  He wanted to engage readers in a process of inquiry, not to communicate a conclusive set of findings and methods.

Niemeyer based this undertaking on an important conception of the relation between history and education. Education took place in concrete situations in which an extremely complicated repertoire of developing personal capacities for both good and bad interacted with the manifold particulars of the surrounding cultural environment, which particulars were likewise an all-too-human mix of the constructive and the destructive.  To be helpful in this process, the educator needed experience and insight, which one built up from three sources, first, from pedagogical introspection concerning one's own educational situation as it had unfolded in one's experience, second, from pedagogical reflection on the historical experience of the educational process that had been accumulated, observing how individuals and groups had, faced with diverse cultural configurations, succeeded and failed to make these conduce to their human development, and third, from pedagogical consideration of whatever other thinkers one could find who had thought deeply about educational experience, their own and that of others. Thus history was an essential source of knowledge for the educator. Basic pedagogical principles existed, but they could not be understood in the abstract, for they were principles that existed and functioned only in the full texture of historical life.^[57]

A few years later, Friedrich Heinrich Christian Schwarz started to fulfill Niemeyer's hope that the "Uberblick" might engender further efforts, for Schwarz wrote the first full and coherent history of education in German. Like Niemeyer, Schwarz was both theologian and educational reformer, the first Protestant theologian at the University of Heidelberg and he founded there a successful seminar for teachers.  He acquired extensive experience as a pastor, teacher, and professor; he possessed learning, both deep and broad; he had a mind at once clear, deeply religious, open, suffused with a simple optimism about human potentiality.  In 1804 Schwarz became a theology professor at the University of Heidelberg, where for many years he ran the pädagogische Seminar, which for the first ten years or so met jointly with the philology seminar.  In 1808 he spent some time visiting and working with Pestalozzi, whose pedagogy he greatly respected, albeit with some reservation for its excessive reliance on method.  Schwarz was a person not entirely free of the Biedermeier sentiments so strong in Raumer, but one whose religious beliefs were fully integrated into his commitment to thoughtful inquiry and intellect.  He died in 1837, after having, from 1834, served briefly as the successor to Schleiermacher at the University of Berlin.  Schwarz left behind a variety of theological writings and the most respected treatises on education at the time, works of very substantial scholarship.

Schwarz fully stated his pedagogical views in Erziehungslehre, originally published between 1802 and 1813, and then in a somewhat reworked 1829 edition.  This version began with an 1100 page volume on the Geschichte der Erziehung, which Schwarz intended as foundation for the whole work.  By current standards, the historical substance of his coverage was quite thin, for he had few predecessors upon whose work he could build.  But he was seeking to make history an effective way to ground and nurture pedagogical thinking.  He tried to touch on everything — India, China, the ancient world, medieval and modern Europe.  He sought to find and understand differences, to explore how practice linked with purpose, and to set the reader thinking by showing how different educators differed from and with each other.  Schwarz thought that a sound theory of education should be based on a historical foundation, on the cumulative educational experience of mankind, in which the "Geschichte der Erziehungsidee," the idea of education, was essential.  The history was not to be the history of educational ideas in their multiplicity, but of one idea, the idea of education.  The human capacity to educate had unfolded in history as people had acted, generation after generation, in manifold concrete situations, guided by the idea of education. What the achievements and possibilities wrought with reference to this idea might eventually be were never immediately manifest to anyone.^[58]

Possibilities inhering in the idea of education would endlessly unfold.  To bring an optimal repertory of these possibilities to bear in educational effort, to define the problems of education and to extend and improve the work of education, people needed to engage the idea of education historically, to reflect on the sum of activity that had been guided by it.  People could learn to think "as educators" by thinking about past educational experience, not to find in it repeatable methods, but to develop the insight and skill to interpret educational possibilities in complicated, concrete situations of life.  The history of education did more, for Schwarz, than illustrate sound and unsound methods; it did more than inspire educators with professional pride. The history of education empowered people to think and act educationally; it enabled people to grasp the range of educational possibilities that had been given life and to realize that any further possibilities to be achieved would be done as further extensions of educational history.  Schwarz tried to touch on all the different times and peoples, refraining from from saying that this was good and that was bad, instead giving something of a conceptual framework for thinking about forms of historical experience in education, social reproduction, emerging efforts to understand the child as a potentially autonomous being, and more fully developed conceptions of education that did not simply end in freedom, but worked with it throughout the educational experience of each person.  For Schwarz, educating took place in history and was to be studied through history and one had to be careful not to impose ideas external to the history in trying to understand it.

Like Niemeyer, Schwarz thought that history was the source of knowledge from which the educator could g