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Linking life experiences and social changes, this essay focuses on Horace Mann's early educational experiences in New England as the source of a vision of public education so persuasive as to form the intellectual and moral scaffolding on which public education would be built and the lives of the young irreversibly altered.

Contemporary Americans are experiencing an orgy of anxiety over ma terial matters. There are books announcing the imminent demise of Amer ican economic supremacy in the world. There are prophets of doom announcing that material resources are dwindling and/or being appro priated by foreign nationals seeking to dominate our land. There is a national lament over the quality of work being done in the nation's manufactories, and there is a sense of moral outrage over the work habits of American laborers. There is high distress over the intellectual qualities of the nation's youth, and there is an outpouring of reports calling Amer ica's teachers to task. The calls for educational reform are not calls for justice or equality, but for technological productivity, military superi ority, economic dominance, and cultural supremacy. Ironically, the re ports call on schools to enhance the economic position of the United States, while urging a retreat from vocational emphases in the schools. Many calls for reform advocate new alliances among industry, govern ment, and public schools, but champion a return to a traditional core curriculum or the imposition of national examinations as a solution. 1

Lurking in the shadows of education history are networks of human interaction, transcultural encounters, forms of global connection, and dispersed sites of cultural teaching and learning that are barely visible in the master narratives of education history. This is no surprise really. Who would have thought a half-century ago that we would become witnesses and participants in an increasingly interconnected world, bound together by global systems of commerce, transnational structures of communication, tsunami-proportion migratory flows, and ever more complex and puzzling transcultural encounters? Who could have imagined that a rising generation of globally conscious, mobile, and empowered young people—the progeny of Marshall McLuhan, Bill Gates, and Mark Zuckerberg—could refashion social and cultural networks, produce novel communicative and linguistic forms, mobilize worldwide social movements, inspire political action, unravel regimes of governance, and shape the contours of cultural life worldwide? Who could have imagined that historians of education would need to situate education history in relationship to newly evolving educational contexts of dazzling and unprecedented diversities: where encounters between total strangers from around the globe are the stuff of daily life in schools; the contours of community life and bonds of affiliation are trans-local, poly-focal, and subject to negotiation; where time-honored habits of heart, mind, and association are multitudinous and deeply challenged; where the languages of instruction, communication, and daily discourse are continually shifting and fusing; where designations of insiders and outsiders are manifold and fluid? Who could have imagined that sites of teaching and learning could become geographically unbound, disentangled from life in face-to-face communities, and the traditional boundaries of nation-state and imperial empire?

There is no greater professional identity crisis than that which has befallen educators presiding over and teaching in schools, departments, and colleges of education.Uneasiness is reflected in the almost endless discussions of the meaning of professionalism in education. It is reflected in unceasing dialogue about what ought to be taught and/or required of professional educators. It is reflected in a multiplicity of reorganization schemes that seek, through systematic re-scrambling of faculty and programs, to infuse new purpose and dimension into the curriculum. Like most identity crises, the one overtaking schools of education is as pregnant with possibilities as it is marked with pitfalls. What follows is a biased argument: that those who study the Foundations of Education are, of all education scholars, the most likely ones to identify the possibilities and illuminate the pitfalls awaiting professional educators. It is not meant to be a celebration of Foundations, but a reminder of what we as educators might aspire to, imagine, reconstruct, and recreate in our effort to preserve and enhance the possibilities of deliberate education.The barrage of criticism issuing from universities and from government agencies and agents, political activists, enraged parents, and disinterested young people all reflect disillusion. It is disillusion with the capacity of teachers to enhance the ability of students to express themselves communally and individually, to sustain moral commitments, to harmonize tradition, to create new expressive modes, and to engage the world competently and critically. It is disillusion with the intellectual, moral, and technical capacities of professional teacher educators as well. demographic transformations. It might even be incorrect or inappropriate. Whatever its sources, whatever its inspiration, the barrage of criticism compels a response.In an atmosphere of challenge, perplexity, and moral and intellectual crisis, we have available to us at least three different sorts of responses. Two of them are traditional.The third is novel. Each of the responses proceeds from different assumptions about the meaning, purpose, and uses of professional education. Each reflects different traditions of discourse, distinct visions of professionalIn an atmosphere of challenge, perplexity, and moral and intellectual crisis, we have available to us at least three different sorts of responses. Two of them are traditional. The third is novel.community and culture. First, there is a technicist response, involving teacher educators in a kind of strategic retreat into scientism and into a community dotted with machines, laboratories, and computers.Second, there is a Mandarin response, involving an attempt to attach teacher educators closely to traditional centers of learning in the universities among books and inspirational prose. Finally, there is a mediator's response, representing neither a retreat into split-level houses of intellect, nor a withdrawal into labs and clinics, but into shifting communities compris...