The purpose of this collection of documents of American education is
to make easily available to students and teachers of the subject carefully
selected original sources of the educational and social history of the United
States. The documents here brought together begin with those on Henrico
College and East India School in Virginia in the early part of the seven-
teenth century--the first educational efforts in English North America--
and continue into 1950.

Interpretations of history are likely to vary, according to the interpreters.
The late Charles A. Beard referred to written history as "the historian's act
of faith," but it is generally recognized that faiths differ widely from one
another. One result of this condition is that few teachers of educational
and social history would say that they are entirely satisfied with the con-
ventional textbooks. Nor are students today, particularly at the collegiate
level, as ready and as willing as they once seemed to be to accept at face
value all the statements found in their prescribed textbooks, however emi-
nent the writers of these may be. In recent years, particularly with the influx
of students under the G.I. Bill of Rights, collegiate classrooms have become
pervaded more than formerly by a critical and sometimes even a skeptical
attitude.

For many reasons an increasing number of teachers of educational and
social history should like to provide their students with primary sources in
the subject rather than to have them confine their reading to one or more
textbooks. Moreover, acquaintance with original sources is encouragingly
becoming properly recognized as the foundation of all sound historical
knowledge; and nowadays good practice in teaching history, whether edu-
cational and social, political, economic, or of other aspects, requires that
students of the subject have access to and acquaintance with the original
sources. One difficulty in providing for such acquaintance in educational
and social history has generally been the inaccessibility of such material. In
an effort partially to remove this difficulty, the present volume has been prepared.

When George H. Martin in 1894 published the Evolution of the Massa-
chusetts Public School System he said in the preface that a complete history
of education in that state could never be prepared until the source materials,

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