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Forty years ago Bernard Bailyn remarked that American historians of education had carried out their work "in a special atmosphere of professional purpose" and had made the history of the public school the focus of their investigations. Lawrence Cremin seconded that observation and added that, for all intents and purposes, the history of American education had been "the history of the public school realizing itself over time." In the tradition of Ellwood Patterson Cubberley that self-realization of the American public school was portrayed as a progression from local roots to state-wide systems. It became synonymous with the evolution of school government from local control on the district and ward levels to direction and oversight by state administrators. For many school professionals and historians that progression meant progress. They saw it as overcoming local control which they regarded as a relic of the past denoting an endorsement of inequality, dis- crimination, and special privilege. It persuaded them to see the solution to the schools' problems in strengthened state and, eventually, federal control.
In ethnically and religiously homogeneous states and colonies with an established church like Prussia and Massachusetts the central government's influence over education, limited as it was, made itself felt more readily than in colonies of greater ethnic and religious diversity. There, the role of local agencies of civil society, assisting parents in providing elementary schooling for their children, was more pronounced. The prevalence in the colonies, and later in the United States, of social diversity, whether ethnic or religious, and the vastness of space in rural areas laid the foundations for the strong hold of local control in matters of elementary schooling.
A closer look at the German-speaking countries of premodern central Europe will show that, as in Europe generally, schooling had its beginning for a chosen few as a Latin education under the patronage of churches, princes, or local landlords. For most of the population, however, instruction in the vernacular in reading, writing, arithmetic, and religion, if it took place at all, remained a matter of parental responsibility in the home. In this educational task parents were aided by neighbors and relatives and prodded and supported by their churches and synagogues, their civil communities and, in rural areas, by their patrons, the manorial lords. Civic corporations, called Schulsozietdten or school societies, constituted school districts and carried most of the financial burden. Though in Prussia the Crown, as the head of the established church, had been indirectly involved in school sponsorship; it was not before the late eighteenth century that it asserted its role as an active source of educational policies. Until then schooling had been very much a responsibility of parents and civil society.
For settlers in the English-speaking colonies of North America the circumstances of migration and settlement largely determined the arrangements they made for schooling. In Massachusetts, for example, anxiety for collective survival in a precarious physical, as well as social, environment had prompted the provincial government six years after its landfall to authorize the funding of Harvard College to assure an advanced Latin education for their future secular and religious leaders. Within another six years it assigned responsibility for the elementary education of children to parents and masters of indentured servants. It took another five years for the General Court to step in once more and order towns of fifty families or more to appoint teachers for English reading and writing schools and towns of one hundred families or more to open a Latin grammar school to prepare boys for Harvard College. The Court thus imposed upon Massachusetts towns its vision of a state-wide educational system, even though Boston, Charlestown, Dorchester, and a handful of other towns, prodded by their local ministers and other concerned community leaders, had already hired Latin schoolmasters before Harvard College opened its doors.
As the following paragraphs will show, the pressure to consider a more active role for the state in education came not from teachers, parents, or local taxpayers but, as with Jefferson and Humboldt, from philosophers, statesmen, authors, and politicians. They initiated a debate over the desirability of state or national systems of education. They argued that only by gathering up and providing unified direction of their countries' educational energies could governments cope with the demands of economic modernization, social integration, and political stabilization. They asked that schooling be raised from its many diverse local levels to one of common effort and goals.