True education means more than the pursual of a certain course of study. It means more than a preparation for the life that now is. It has to do with the whole being, and with the whole period of existence possible to man. It is the harmonious development of the physical, the mental, and the spiritual powers. It prepares the student for the joy of service in this world and for the higher joy of wider service in the world to come. —Education, 13.WEGW 161.1

Education, then, beyond all other devices of human origin, is the great equalizer of the conditions of men, the balance wheel of the social machinery.... It gives each man the independence and the means by which he can resist the selfishness of other men. It does better than to disarm the poor of their hostility towards the rich: it prevents being poor.... If this education should be universal and complete, it would do more than all things else to obliterate factitious distinctions in society.”WEGW 161.2

Thus wrote Horace Mann in 1848, near the end of his 12-year battle to provide the foundations for quality public elementary education in Massachusetts. He expressed a faith in the power of education that had grown out of eighteenth-century French thought regarding the intrinsic goodness of human nature. If people were good by nature, then they and the entire world could be transformed through universal education.WEGW 161.3

This optimistic view of education provided a mainspring for the educational revival that took place in New England in the 1830s and 1840s. Political factors, such as the expanding male suffrage and the election of Andrew Jackson in 1828 (variously viewed as the “triumph of the mob” or the “emergence of democracy”), also added urgency to the need to upgrade American education. After all, if every male had the right to vote, then he should be somewhat literate.WEGW 161.4

Coupled with these factors was the problem of an increasing stream of foreigners who needed to be Americanized and the fact that traditional modes of apprenticeship education in the workplace, in the home, and on the farm had begun to break down under the impact of increasing industrialization and urbanization.WEGW 162.1

Mann and his associates in other states (especially in New England and the Midwest) fought hard to improve existing educational standards and conditions in the three decades prior to the Civil War. They had a difficult battle on every front. For one thing, there were relatively few public schools before 1830. The rich sent their children to private elementary schools or had them tutored, while the poor often had “charity schools,” along with the social stigma implied in the name, as their only option.WEGW 162.2

One of the most popular institutional arrangements for the education of the masses was the monitorial school, in which one teacher instructed a number of older students, who, in turn, would each teach a group of younger pupils. By this method a solitary schoolmaster could instruct hundreds of students. Large schools had up to 1,000 students under one teacher. The low cost was a major attraction of this type of schooling. One of its founders claimed that monitorial education could be carried out for one dollar per student per year.WEGW 162.3

All types of public, and most private, schools suffered from a lack of quality. Instruction was largely by rote memorization; students were packed into rooms that did not have proper ventilation, desks, or lighting; teachers were poorly qualified and often hired for their physical ability to control students rather than their ability to teach; and instructional materials were primitive at best.WEGW 162.4

As if these problems were not enough, sanitary conditions were deplorable. The problem can be illuminated by the plea of one schoolmarm for the installation of outdoor privies. She was advised by her school board that “there were plenty of trees in the yard to get behind.” Her suggestion that the single well-dipper be replaced with more hygienic individual cups was denied as being “undemocratic.” No wonder Mann’s contemporaries could complain of “schoolhouses being not only dangerous to the health of the children but as being actually a cause of death to some of them.”WEGW 162.5

Against such abuses Mann and his fellow reformers fought with great vigor. They sought to reform every aspect of the schools. At the top of their list was the need to provide more healthful facilities and an accurate knowledge of physiology and hygiene.WEGW 163.1

The reforms of Mann and his colleagues were not acceptable to everyone. The Roman Catholic Church, in particular, took exception to public elementary education. The public schools, while generally prohibiting the teaching of denominational doctrines, did include a great deal of “Christian” material in their curricula. This “Christian” material, however, was actually those Protestant teachings that were held in common by the country’s leading denominations. There is no doubt that the public schools were one of the forces that Protestants were using in what Robert Handy has called their “strategy for a Christian America.”WEGW 163.2

Catholics in the 1830s and 1840s took exception to the use of Protestant hymns, prayers, and the King James Version of the Bible in the education of their children. Refusing to send their children to such institutions, they first sought to gain public monies for the support of Catholic “public” elementary education. Failing in this, they began to establish a parochial system of elementary schools that would operate on a parallel basis with the public schools. Thus they established a precedent for other denominations that were out of harmony with public school philosophy.WEGW 163.3

Unlike elementary education, the higher levels of education were not issues of popular concern in the antebellum period. Student enrollment in both secondary school and college was quite small, made up nearly exclusively of young people from the wealthier classes. Secondary education was conducted largely in private academies. The first public high school had opened in Boston in 1821, but the high school would not become the standard form of secondary education until the last decades of the nineteenth century. The best of the colleges in the period before the Civil War were also private, even though most states had established fledgling institutions of higher learning. Furthermore, most colleges were church-related.WEGW 163.4

The academic fare at both secondary and collegiate institutions was the classical languages (Greek and Latin), classical literature, higher mathematics, morals, religion, and a smattering of natural philosophy. All students took the prescribed course of studies; there were virtually no electives. Most secondary schools and colleges were small boarding institutions that consciously maintained a family-like communal existence, the teachers acting in loco parentis (in place of the parent).WEGW 163.5

That all were not happy with the curricular status quo is indicated by the need for the vigorous defense of the classical curriculum by the faculty and trustees of Yale in 1828. For nearly a half century their influential report largely quieted those critics who opposed the retention of the “dead” languages and proposed vocational and practical studies. “The two great points to be gained in intellectual culture,” claimed the report, “are the discipline and the furniture of the mind; expanding its powers and storing it with knowledge.” It was forcefully argued that these objects were best accomplished by the traditional curriculum. The practical subjects, while good in themselves, were not the business of the college.WEGW 164.1

Despite the pervasive influence of the Yale Report in buttressing the traditional curriculum, some institutions went their own way. In 1831, for example, the Society for Promoting Manual Labor in Literary Institutions was formed, with Theodore D. Weld as its general agent. It was the conviction of the founders of the society “that a reform in our seminaries of learning was greatly needed, both for the preservation of health and for giving energy to the character by habits of vigorous and useful exercise.”WEGW 164.2

One of the most influential schools in the movement for manual labor in literary institutions was Oberlin College in northeastern Ohio. Oberlin’s founder wrote in 1833 that “the system of education in this Institute will provide for the body and heart as well as the intellects; for it aims at the best education of the whole man.”WEGW 164.3

Part of the Oberlin reform thrust was to destroy the monopolistic hold of the classics on the curriculum. The First Annual Report of Oberlin in 1834 noted that “the Collegiate Department will afford as extensive and thorough a course of instruction as other colleges; varying from some, by substituting Hebrew and the sacred classics for the most objectionable pagan authors.”WEGW 164.4

By 1835 the Ohio Observer reported that President Mahan was proclaiming that the heathen classics were “better adapted to educate heathen ... than Christians. He believed the mind could be disciplined as well by the study of Hebrew and Greek Scriptures.... He would fill their minds with truth, facts, practical, available knowledge.” Some of the Oberlinites even went so far as to sponsor a burning of the classics—an occasion that brought a flood of abuse from the academic world.WEGW 164.5

A corollary to the position of the Oberlin reformers on the classics was their desire to uplift the Bible. They voiced this concern when they claimed that “the poetry of God’s inspired prophets is better for the heart, and at least as good for the head, as that of the pagans.... If we honored the Bible—if we put into its mold the youth committed to us—we must cast Homer, and his fellows, into the shade.” It was their desire to “make the Bible a textbook in all the departments of education.”WEGW 165.1

More radical than Oberlin’s attack on the classics was its emphasis on the physical and practical side of education. The school’s First Annual Report claimed that the manual labor department “is considered indispensable to a complete education.” Several reasons were given to buttress this assertion. First, manual labor was designed “to preserve the student’s health.” Thus students of both sexes were required to labor several hours daily. Second, “there being an intimate sympathy between soul and body, their labor promotes ... clear and strong thought with a happy moral temperament.”WEGW 165.2

Third, the manual labor system offered financial advantages. “For while taking that exercise necessary to health, a considerable portion of the student’s expense may be defrayed.” Fourth, the program aided “in forming habits of industry and economy.” Last, the system provided an acquaintance with the common things of daily life. “In a word, it meets the wants of man as a compound being, and prevents the common and amazing waste of money, time, health and life.”WEGW 165.3

Beyond manual labor, in the Oberlin Covenant of 1833 the founders agreed to eat only plain and wholesome food and renounce smoking and all strong drink, “even tea and coffee.” Physiology was made a required course; John J. Shipherd, Oberlin’s founder, considered “Biblical Instruction, and Physiology, including Manual Labor,“ the most important departments of the school. “If these departments wane, the life current will flow out, and the heart of Oberlin die.”WEGW 165.4

By the early 1840s most Oberlinites were following the health teachings of Sylvester Graham, who advocated a vegetarian diet, the avoidance of rich foods, abstinence from stimulants, the use of whole-grain foods, plain cooking, regular exercise in the open air, adequate sleep in well-ventilated rooms, frequent bathing, and abstinence from eating between meals.WEGW 166.1

Oberlin, with its emphasis on the whole man in his physical, mental, and spiritual aspects, stood for total educational reform within the context of evangelical Christianity. Unfortunately, from the perspective of those who advocated educational reform, Oberlin (along with many of its sister institutions) did not persevere in the path of reform. By the late 1860s its reforming ideals and practices had fallen by the wayside, and Oberlin had become a respectable academic institution with an early heritage of radical reform. John Barnard, a specialist in Oberlin history, noted that by 1865 Oberlin “more closely conformed to the academic, moral, and social patterns that prevailed in other American colleges.”WEGW 166.2

In summary, by 1860 the public elementary school system had been established in most states, being especially strong in the North and Midwest; the Roman Catholic Church had launched a parallel system of elementary schools for its constituents; secondary and higher education was still mostly private and was still following the traditional curriculum; and major attempts at educational reform at the higher levels had been attempted, but had largely failed. Momentous changes, however, were on the horizon.WEGW 166.3

In the first half of the nineteenth century the population of the United States was largely Protestant, rural, agricultural, and of British, Northern European, or Western European origin. This would all change in the decades following the Civil War. The country itself became involved in an ever-escalating process of urbanization and industrialization, while immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe radically shifted the social and religious balance of the nation. The new immigration added large Roman Catholic and Jewish segments to the population. These newcomers had value systems and lifestyles that threatened many Americans of older stock. These changes would all affect education.WEGW 166.4

Equally important for education were developments in the intellectual world. Such movements as the rise of science, Darwinism, and higher biblical criticism had an impact on both church-related and public education.WEGW 167.1

The most revolutionary educational transformations in post-Civil War America took place at the collegiate level. Most of the changes were a result of the expanding field of knowledge, especially in the areas of science and its stepchild, technology. The coming battle was heralded by British philosopher Herbert Spencer, who had challenged the educational world in 1854 with its most provocative question: “What Knowledge Is of Most Worth?” To Spencer this was the question of questions. “Before there can be a rational curriculum,” he penned, “we must settle which things it most concerns us to know; ... we must determine the relative value of knowledges.” For Spencer the answer was obvious—“science” was the most valuable knowledge for every field of human endeavor.WEGW 167.2

Others, however, did not agree with him. The curricular battle covering the last half of the nineteenth century found varying answers to Spencer’s all-important question. Some held that the classics were the knowledge of most value, while others suggested vocational knowledge. Christian writers, of course, often suggested that a personal knowledge of Jesus Christ was the most essential knowledge.WEGW 167.3

In the long run, it was Spencer’s answer and its variants that captured the bulk of the field. No matter what position one took on the issue of the most essential knowledge, all of education had to make room for the burgeoning sciences, both pure and applied.WEGW 167.4

The teaching of science in colleges was not completely new. It had been taught in courses in natural philosophy since 1727 at Harvard and had gradually found its way into other schools. Nowhere, however, was it dignified as a course of study for which a degree could be offered. This all changed in 1851 when Harvard granted the first Bachelor of Science degree to graduates from its recently established Lawrence Scientific School. Yale followed suit in 1852 with a Bachelor of Philosophy degree.WEGW 167.5

These degrees, based on a three-year rather than a four-year program, had been invented to protect the classical Bachelor of Arts degree from dilution and contamination. In the early years the scientific students were considered second-class citizens, too backward to aspire to the only worthy degree. Their status at Yale is indicated by the fact that scientific students were not permitted to sit with regular academic students in chapel.WEGW 167.6

This situation rapidly changed. Under the leadership of Harvard’s Charles Eliot and Cornell’s Andrew White the old classical curriculum was shattered as the newer subjects—including science, technology, engineering, agriculture, social science, the modern languages, and a host of practical and professional offerings—invaded the older colleges and the rising universities. Frederick Rudolph, a leading historian of American higher education, has referred to the period from 1875 to 1914 as one of curricular “disarray.” By World War I the classics and the classical languages had been unseated from their dominant position. The mentality of the 1828 Yale Report defending the classics had given way to a shifting intellectual and industrial order.WEGW 168.1

A great boost to the teaching of the applied sciences came with the passage of the Morrill Federal Land Grant Act in 1862. This law provided 30,000 acres of public land for each congressman to endow a college in each state “to teach such branches of learning as are related to agriculture and the mechanic arts,” in addition to classical and scientific studies, “in order to promote the liberal and practical education of the industrial classes in the several pursuits and professions in life.”WEGW 168.2

Further federal acts in 1890, 1905, and 1907 provided continuing funds for the same purpose. Some states used their land-grant funds to found separate “A&M” (Agriculture and Mechanical) colleges, while other states used the money to add agricultural and practical schools to their state universities.WEGW 168.3

The very fact that the federal government provided these monies for higher education eventually changed the shape of American collegiate and university education. This transformation, of course, was not immediate. After all, it was difficult to convince a nineteenth-century farmer’s son to go to college so that he could study farming. A college education had been seen by such young men as an escape from the physical work of the farm. If farmers were “hicks” and “hayseeds” in the eyes of the “better” classes, why would anyone want to go to college to become a better hick?WEGW 168.4

It should be recognized that many of the early attempts at practical education were not too exalted. Daniel Boorstin has pointed out that some of the early land-grant institutions “were hardly more than a few experienced farmers or mechanics talking to the neighborhood boys.”WEGW 169.1

Slowly but surely, however, the last quarter of the nineteenth century saw the advance of the practical subjects in higher education. The classical languages found a progressively smaller place in the curriculum. Even the rigidity of the lofty Bachelor of Arts degree gave way to the elective system that allowed students to select all sorts of newfangled subjects.WEGW 169.2

Related to the rise of utilitarian subjects in colleges was the development of the American university, with its professional schools and its research emphasis. The last quarter of the nineteenth century and the early part of the twentieth saw the preparation of professionals for such fields as medicine, law, and teaching shift from apprenticeship training and specialized institutions to the rapidly expanding universities. This change in the locus of professional preparation was part of a general movement toward raising standards for entrance into practice. Eventually, regional and professional accrediting associations would step in to further the standard-raising process, but this was not a practice in the nineteenth or early twentieth centuries. The first effective effort to raise professional standards through accrediting procedures was the American Medical Association’s use of Abraham Flexner’s Carnegie Foundation-sponsored report, “Medical Education in the United States and Canada,” in 1910. Flexner’s pivotal report eventually led to the closing of more than half the medical schools in the United States. Subsequent to this success, other accrediting agencies developed increasing power in the second and third decades of the twentieth century.WEGW 169.3

The ideal of the university as a research institution to generate new knowledge, rather than a teaching institution to pass on previously discovered knowledge, also arose in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. This ideal was imported from Germany, where the tendency toward advanced and detailed investigation of both scientific phenomena in laboratories and historical study in libraries and archives reached its peak between 1860 and 1880. Young American scholars, studying abroad for advanced degrees, returned from Germany enamored with this ideal.WEGW 169.4

The first American university to epitomize the German research model was Johns Hopkins University, which was founded in Baltimore in 1876. Johns Hopkins was soon followed by other newly established research universities such as Clark and Chicago, and by established institutions like Harvard and the University of Michigan, which added the research ideal to existing programs. The laboratory, the lecture, and the seminar became the instructional formats at these schools.WEGW 170.1

The new directions of the university not only affected its curriculum but also created new models for the faculty. The professor in a traditional American college was a fatherlike figure who served as a kind of a spiritual guide through a four-year series of courses that he, as a generalist, had largely mastered. President James McCosh, of Princeton, could write in the 1860s that “religion should burn in the hearts, and shine ... from the faces of the teachers: and it should have a living power in our meetings for worship, and should sanctify the air of the rooms in which the students reside. And in regard to religious truth, there will be no uncertain sound uttered within these walls.”WEGW 170.2

By way of contrast to the traditional college teacher, who served in loco parentis, the new brand of professor was to be a specialist who was hired for his knowledge rather than for his ability to communicate with students. A Ph.D. as a proof of research ability became the accepted standard for entry into a faculty. Once appointed, he was expected to do original research and publish the results if he desired to remain on the payroll.WEGW 170.3

While the specialist faculty ideal made its first impact on graduate and professional schools, it gradually affected undergraduate teaching as more and more Ph.D’s were granted and as undergraduate education increasingly came to be seen as specialized preparation for graduate work. The problems raised by the conflict between the old professorial ideal and the new were pointed out by President William Rainey Harper, of the University of Chicago, in 1900. He complained that “it is difficult ... to find men who are strong intellectually and at the same time possessed by a distinct and aggressive interest in Christian work.”WEGW 170.4

Not all sectors of the public were enthusiastic about the new intellectual trends and the new directions in higher education. One such group was the premillennial fundamentalists who began the Bible institute and missionary college movement. These evangelicals eschewed academic degrees and those types of academic achievements that might open prospective workers to corruption from the Darwinism, higher biblical criticism, and “apostate scholarship” tainted with unbelief that were beginning to dominate much of higher education—even in Christian institutions.WEGW 171.1

The first Bible institute was Nyack Missionary College, founded in New York as the Missionary Training College for Home and Foreign Missionaries and Evangelists in 1883. Since 1880 its founder had been pressing for a “missionary training college, to prepare persons who may not be able to take a full scholastic course for missionary service.” His idea was that the church could “dispense with full technical preparation” of these workers if they possessed “other qualifications for humble usefulness.”WEGW 171.2

In a similar vein, James H. Brookes pressed for a school that would train Christian workers for mission service “who have neither means nor time to attend college and seminary.... They would receive more instruction out of the Scripture in one month at such a school, than in three years at most of the theological institutions.”WEGW 171.3

Dwight L. Moody, the founder of America’s second Bible institute, was much of the same mind. “I believe,” remarked Moody in 1886, “we have got to have gapmen—men to stand between the laity and the ministers; men who are trained to do city mission work.” Part of the ideal of the Bible institutes was to use the “Bible as a textbook.”WEGW 171.4

It was the graduates of these institutes who helped provide the recruits for what Ernest R. Sandeen has called “the greatest demonstration of missionary interest ever known in the United States.” The 1890s was a decade of America’s greatest expansion of foreign mission outreach. One of the main stimulants of that interest was the Student Volunteer Movement for Foreign Missions, which had grown out of an appeal made by Moody in 1886 for college students to devote their lives to mission service. The movement’s motto was “The Evangelization of the World in This Generation.” The missionary colleges and Bible institutes developed alongside this great push for foreign and city missions with the goal of preaching the gospel to all the world so that Christ might come.WEGW 171.5

In the last decades of the nineteenth and early part of the twentieth centuries, secondary education was passing through the same curricular turmoils as higher education. In post-Civil War America the public high school came into its own as the foremost type of secondary education. The spread of the high school’s influence was aided immeasurably by the decision of the Michigan courts regarding the Kalamazoo school district in 1874. The Kalamazoo decision established the legal right of school districts to collect taxes for the support of public secondary schools. This decision, which had national implications, paved the way for the high school gradually to become a democratic institution available to all children, rather than being an elitist institution in line with the historic function of secondary education. Many Americans eventually viewed the high school as a social tool to aid the elementary school in the Americanization of the “hordes of foreigners” that were invading the nation’s cities.WEGW 172.1

The democratization of secondary education—along with urbanization, industrialization, and the curriculum changes in higher education—set the stage for a battle between the classics and the practical and vocational subjects that paralleled the struggle taking place in the colleges. The 1880s saw a widespread movement for introducing manual training and vocational education into the public schools. Manual training, noted D. C. Gilman, not only improved physical health but also “increased mental vigor.” Furthermore, it was widely depicted as developing character, perseverance, self-respect, self-reliance, and habits of order, accuracy, and neatness.WEGW 172.2

The diminishing power of the classics was publicly displayed by the influential report of the Committee of Ten regarding the secondary curriculum. The committee, chaired by Harvard’s President Eliot, pointed to new directions for secondary education when it proclaimed that “the preparation of a few pupils for college or scientific school should in the ordinary secondary school be the incidental, and not the principal object.” Then, in a history-making pronouncement, the report declared that there were good arguments “to make all the main subjects taught in the secondary schools of equal rank for the purposes of admission to college or scientific school.” This recommendation was the death knell for the stranglehold of the classics on the secondary curriculum. By 1900 the public high school was well on its way to becoming a school for all the people, rather than an institution for the college-bound.WEGW 172.3

The elementary schools were also being affected by the same forces that were breaking down the traditional curriculum in high schools and colleges in post-Civil War America. Francis Wayland Parker became the acknowledged leader of the new elementary pedagogy. As superintendent of schools in Quincy, Massachusetts, he set programs in motion that totally fractured the conventional formalism of elementary education with its “old, stiff, and unnatural order.”WEGW 173.1

In place of silence and stillness, Parker recommended active “work with all the whispering and noise compatible with the best results.” He emphasized practical knowledge in the curriculum. For example, he made geography the “study of the earth as the home of man.” Thus he held that it was more important in such study for a child to grasp the significant features of his surrounding neighborhood than it was for him to know the location of Anatolia. Memorization, the primary instructional technique of the old education, should be kept at a minimum. In the study of language, Parker held that it was more important to be able to communicate what one had seen, heard, and felt in one’s native tongue than to be able to mindlessly rattle off the various cases of nouns or the moods of verbs. Parker also introduced the arts and crafts into his schools, brought nature study into the laboratory, and bolstered such study with trips into field and forest.WEGW 173.2

For these educational heresies Parker was brought to trial before the Massachusetts Board of Education in 1879 at the insistence of his detractors. His pupils at Quincy were given a special examination to see if they were up to par with students in districts following the traditional curriculum. To the shock and discomfort of the traditionalists, Parker’s charges could read, write, spell, and figure with accuracy and confidence. They also came through the ordeal with high marks in history and geography. In fact, they performed in a manner superior to that of the rest of the Bay State pupils except in the area of mental arithmetic.WEGW 173.3

By the turn of the century John Dewey had joined Parker in his campaign to revolutionize elementary instruction. Their ideas and educational experiments eventually led to the total transformation of American elementary education.WEGW 174.1

Along with the new teaching methods came advances in the training of professional teachers and school administrators. The last decades of the nineteenth century saw the rise of independent colleges to train teachers and the development of departments and schools of education in existing universities and colleges. In these institutions and departments the theories of Pestalozzi, Herbart, and the rising science of psychology found a platform from which they aided the transformation of classroom practice.WEGW 174.2

The end result of these changes was that by 1915 the American educational world was nearly unrecognizable from that of the 1820s. Schooling had changed more in those nine decades than it had during all previous recorded history. Elementary schooling had become well-nigh universal, its teaching methods and instructional materials had been made more effective, its treatment of students humanized, and its teachers professionalized.WEGW 174.3

Secondary schooling, a rare commodity in the 1820s, was also well on its way to becoming available to all American youth. The elitist classical curriculum of the academy and Latin grammar school had been largely transformed into the broad curriculum of what was to become the comprehensive high school—a school that purported to serve the needs of every young person.WEGW 174.4

The small family-like college had metamorphosed into a myriad of institutional formats. Whereas American higher education once had the single function of developing gentlemen who had a basic cultural knowledge of the Greek and Roman heritage, by 1915 it performed such varying functions as providing original research, training professionals and technicians in a large number of fields, and developing a cultured populace. In virtually all institutions of higher learning the old classical curriculum had been shattered.WEGW 174.5

In short, education at all levels had been practicalized and democratized. By 1915 a public educational system extending from the kindergarten to the graduate school had been provided for America’s youth.WEGW 174.6

Beyond public education were those educational systems that had been developed by religious bodies—a natural outcome in a nation seeking to separate church and state. The most influential of these religious schools were those operated by the Roman Catholic Church, which had found their genesis as a parallel system to public education in the stormy religious conflicts of the 1840s. In many ways Roman Catholic education provided a model for those Protestant denominations that were also out of harmony with the philosophy of the public schools.WEGW 175.1

Bibliographical Note