Americans in the 20th century made tremendous efforts to create, in the words of Noah Webster, "a system of education that should embrace every part of the community."

In January 1999, Education Week began a yearlong series chronicling the successes and setbacks in those efforts over the past 100 years. Lessons of a Century appeared in 10 monthly installments, both in the print edition and on the World Wide Web. The series, now complete, examines all aspects of the educational landscape--people, trends, historical milestones, enduring controversies--with an emphasis on their continuing relevance. Essays by leading scholars and other observers offer additional perspective.

You can read all 10 parts here as they originally appeared in Education Week on the Web by choosing selections on this page, or you can order the softbound book by clicking on the banner above.

Part One: Jan. 27, 1999

"Opening the Doors: Introduction."

• "Timeline." Milestones in American public education from 1900 to 2000.

• "The Common Good." Providing a free public education to all has been a success for the United States, but ensuring equal quality in what is offered continues to challenge the nation.

• "The Foundation of Universal Education." Horace Mann and other advocates of universal schooling had an almost boundless faith in the ability of public education to advance both national and individual progress.

• "GI Bill Paved the Way for a Nation of Higher Learners." The law's greatest legacy was that it provided the same opportunities to every veteran, regardless of the person's background.

• "Bringing Special Education Students Into the Classroom." For much of the 20th century, the practice of educating disabled students in regular schools and classrooms was exceedingly rare, almost unheard of. Today, it's a common occurrence--and a sign of how far students with disabilities have come.

• "Immigrants: Providing a Lesson in How To Adapt." Beginning with the huge influxes of immigrants to the United States in the early part of the century, public schools have had to adapt to immigrant students, and, in turn, help those students adapt to America.

• "The Rise of the Big Yellow Bus." In 1937, Frank W. Cyr, a young professor of rural education at Teachers College, Columbia University, conducted a first-of-its-kind survey to find out how students across the nation were getting from their homes to school. What he discovered was, any which way they could.

• "Growth in the Garden." They dug irrigation ditches and used pumps, first powered by windmill, later by gasoline or electricity, to siphon water from the Arkansas River. Eventually, deep-well turbine pumps allowed farmers to make this corner of southwest Kansas one of the nation's most productive agricultural areas. It's that same relentless spirit that has kept Garden City's first public school open for more than a century. First built in 1886, Garfield has occupied four buildings--two of which were leveled by fire.

Perspectives

• "Delineating the Boundaries of a People's Aspiration." Academic learning, as important as it is, is not the only desirable end of schooling in this society, says Harvard professor Patricia Albjerg Graham.

• "Access, Outcomes, and Educational Opportunity." University of Pennsylvania Professor Marvin Lazerson calls it one of America's great triumphs: the 20th-century enrollment of vast numbers of children, adolescents, and, increasingly, adults in schools for ever-increasing periods of time. Yet access has also been a moving target: Near-universal attendance has been paralleled by failures and changing expectations, so that frustration with the outcomes of schooling has often dominated the public mood.

• "The Changing Meaning of a Continuing Challenge." This is a discouraging moment to be writing about access to education in the United States, writes Ellen Condliffe Lagemann, president of the National Academy of Education. For the first time since such statistics have been collected, the United States has fallen behind most other industrialized countries in its high school graduation rates. How could we have allowed that to happen?