The essay focuses on curriculum history as the study of systems of reason. The first section considers curriculum as "converting ordinances", inscribing Puritan notions of education as evangelizing and calculating designs in American Progressive education. The second section examines the Social Question, a cross-Atlantic Protestant reformist movement concerned with the moral disorders of the city that underlie the new sociology and psychologies of schooling. The sciences embodied cosmopolitan cultural theses about modes of life and the urban child who threatened that envisioned future. Hall, Thorndike and Dewey, with different pedagogical implications, embodied these hopes and fears. The final section explores the formation of mathematics, literacy and music education as "converting ordinances" designed in relation to the Social Question. The essay is synoptic and goes against the grain of social and intellectual history through examining the grid of practices in which principles were generated regarding reflection and action. (Contains 75 footnotes.)