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Making Your Move: The Educational Significance of the American Board Game, 1832 to 1904

Any serious student of American educational history is fully cognizant of the fact that in the last fifteen years his field has undergone a major reawakening. It all began when Bernard Bailyn asked the first of all questions: What is education? He had his own answer, of course, and suggested that historians view education as the “entire process by which a culture transmits itself across the generations.” He then went on to say that once the historian begins from this point he “is prepared to see great variations in the role of formal institutions of instruction, to see schools and universities fade into relative insignificance next to other social agencies.” Finding Bailyn's definition of education too broad in its failure to distinguish between socialization and education, Lawrence A. Cremin has sought to restrict it while at the same time retaining Bailyn's insight of conceiving education in broader terms than the institution of the school. Cremin, in a recent work, has come to view education as the “deliberate, systematic, and sustained effort to transmit and evoke knowledge, attitudes, values, skills, and sensibilities.” But while Cremin is more concerned with the deliberateness of educational efforts than is Bailyn, he still regards it as the proper concern of the educational historian to ask “what agencies, formal and informal, have shaped American thought, character, and sensibility over the years and what have been the relationships between these agencies and the society that has sustained them.” Thus, in recent years our entire conception of what constitutes educational history has been substantially enlarged. This essay is in that tradition.