Nineteenth‐Century Schools between Community and State: The Cases of Prussia and the United States

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."2 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, discrimination, and special privilege. It persuaded them to see the solution to the schools' problems in strengthened state and, eventually, federal control. Since then many historians have come to question this "progressive" interpretation of the history of the public school and to qualify their distrust of local control and their faith in the efficacy of state intervention. In fact, today, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, some historians suggest a reverse trend and write that "in countries around the world the power of the central state over the educational system has diminished in