In the United States and Canada, a school of education (or college of education; ed school) is a division within a university that is devoted to scholarship in the field of education, which is an interdisciplinary branch of the social sciences encompassing sociology, psychology, linguistics, economics, political science, public policy, history, and others, all applied to the topic of elementary, secondary, and post-secondary education. The U.S. has 1,206 schools, colleges and departments of education and they exist in 78% of all universities and colleges. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, 176,572 individuals were conferred masters’ degrees in education by degree-granting institutions in the United States in 2006-2007. The number of master’s degrees conferred has grown immensely since the 1990s and accounts for one of the discipline areas that awards the highest number of master’s degrees in the United States.

In the United Kingdom, following the recommendation in the 1963 Robbins Report into higher education, teacher training colleges were renamed colleges of education in the UK. For information about academic divisions devoted to this field outside of the United States and Canada, see Postgraduate Training in Education.

The tractate Of Education was published in 1644, first appearing anonymously as a single eight-page quarto sheet (Ainsworth 6). Presented as a letter written in response to a request from the Puritan educational reformer Samuel Hartlib, it represents John Milton's most comprehensive statement on educational reform (Viswanathan 352), and gives voice to his views “concerning the best and noblest way of education” (Milton 63). As outlined in the tractate, education carried for Milton a dual objective: one public, to “fit a man to perform justly, skillfully, and magnanimously all the offices, both private and public, of peace and war” (55); and the other private, to “repair the ruins of our first parents by regaining to know God aright, and out of that knowledge to love Him, to be like Him, as we may the nearest by possessing our soul of true virtue” (52).

The influences at work in the tractate are an interesting blend of Renaissance humanism with its emphasis on the via activa, tempered by the more contemplative medieval concern with personal redemption. It is clear, however, that the overwhelming thrust of Milton’s educational programme as outlined in the tractate is centred in the public objective. This is likely a reaction to the scholasticism that dominated the medieval university from the twelfth century, which still held sway in Milton’s time (Ainsworth 25).