Jane Addams wrote her 1910 book, “Twenty Years at Hull House”, in the form of a memoir. Education deserves this kind of treatment when what is being laid out is an experimental approach based on institutional innovation. Indeed, many of the writers in the Reform education movement of the Sixties and the Seventies, such as Jonathan Kozol and Herbert Kohl, pursue that same genre: how I came, in my own experience of the world of education and the people I met there, and the programs in which I took part, to develop my ideas about education. Addams supplies a biography of the institution she founded along with the interesting people she met there in addition to a good deal about herself: how she was as a little girl frightened at night and it was only the soothing voice of her father that calmed her down, which is very much the recipe she wants to apply to the poor. This shared writing strategy may be the result of the fact that educational reforms are always in the making, hardly ever completed and, by the way, almost inevitably disappointing, in that success stories don’t manage to get themselves replicated, and so you point out the success story as long as that lasts, rather than tell the statistical story which documents that success rarely lasts very long.