The second half of the academic year 1910-11 I acted as visiting Lecturer on the History of Education at both Harvard University and Radcliffe College, and while serving in this capacity I began work on what has finally evolved into the present volume, together with the accompanying book of illustrative _Readings_. Other duties, and a deep interest in problems of school administration, largely engaged my energies and writing time until some three years ago, when, in rearranging courses at the university, it seemed desirable that I should again take over the instruction in the general history of education. Since then I have pushed through, as rapidly as conditions would permit, the organization of the parallel book of sources and documents, and the present volume of text. In doing so I have not tried to prepare another history of educational theories. Of such we already have a sufficient number. Instead, I have tried to prepare a history of the progress and practice and organization of education itself, and to give to such a history its proper setting as a phase of the history of the development and spread of our Western civilization. I have especially tried to present such a picture of the rise, struggle for existence, growth, and recent great expansion of the idea of the improvability of the race and the elevation and emancipation of the individual through education as would be most illuminating and useful to students of the subject. To this end I have traced the great forward steps in the emancipation of the intellect of man, and the efforts to perpetuate the progress made through the organization of educational institutions to pass on to others what had been attained. I have also tried to give a proper setting to the great historic forces which have shaped and moulded human progress, and have made the evolution of modern state school systems and the world-wide spread of Western civilization both possible and inevitable.