When one reads the records of nineteenth-century educators as they wrestled with the question, “Is there a discipline of education?” one finds them very often assuming or flatly asserting that there is or can be such a science and then devoting a major part of their attention to the need for the development of it. Throughout the period this need reflected two concerns: the quality of education and professional status.

“It is said,” reported a very knowledgeable observer, that in 1880 when Francis Parker left Quincy after working a minor revolution in its schools, “he received this advice from Charles Francis Adams: get a new suit of clothes, a tall hat, and keep your mouth shut, if you wish to succeed.” The advice was excellent, for Parker was walking with his customary nonchalance into the hottest and most confused educational hassle that Boston had known since Horace Mann and the grammar school masters had engaged in a vitriolic clash in the 1840's. At first glance the sides looked similar; lay reformers were openly attacking grammar school masters and striving to reorganize the school system. However, unlike the situation in the forties there was now a superintendent, or rather three superintendents before the fight was over, and the roles of these varied successively from champion of the masters to ally of the reformers to seeker of compromise and truce. But this was not the only difference. In the earlier struggle it was the lay reformers who were championing a highly centralized, super-efficient model of educational administration while the beleaguered masters struggled to retain their traditional autonomy and freedom from supervision. By the 1870's, however, reformers had become disenchanted with the effects of a centralized educational system and championed an ideal that confusedly tried to combine bureaucracy and charisma. By this time, on the other hand, the schoolmen, more than they themselves knew, had accepted bureaucratic structure to which they now looked, ironically, for autonomy and protection; thus the grammar school masters and their supporters vigorously defended the concept of rational, professionally directed, hierarchical organization.

It was inevitable that from the beginning of the Christian era in England education would rest in the hands of the Church, so that “from the first, education was the creature of religion, the school was an adjunct of the church, and the schoolmaster was an ecclesiastical officer.” It was the mission of the Church to teach, and only by doing so could it widen its authority or, indeed, perpetuate itself. Its Influence gradually spread throughout the country, and many of its servants had the necessary leisure to give instruction not only in all that concerned religious doctrine but in reading, the study of Latin, and Whatever was necessary to ensure that the missionary, liturgical, and administrative needs of the Church were met. By a natural process the study of Latin would in suitable circumstances lead on to the Study of secular works, to which a knowledge of Latin provided the key. Of course there were fields of education outside the scope of the Church, but in a relatively uncomplicated society such acquirements as skill in arms, the social graces of aristocratic life, or knowledge of crafts could be learned from their practitioners. King Alfred, who had himself been taught, as he said, “by Plegmund, my archbishop, and Asser, my bishop, and Grimbold, my mass-priest, and John my Inass priest,” naturally asked for the Church's help to bring it about “as we can very easily do … that all the youth of our English freemen who can afford to devote themselves to it should be set to learning.”

From the time the first American edition issued forth from the pioneer Cambridge press of Stephen Daye in 1639, the almanac was destined to play a significant role in the education of the American people. Indeed, an almanac had played a not inconsiderable supporting role in the discovery of America itself, as it was one of the chief navigational aids of one Christopher Columbus.

The twentieth century has witnessed a major transformation of secondary schools from exclusive institutions serving the elite to inclusive institutions serving the general population. This transformation has been marked by radical changes in entrance and graduation requirements, increasing quantity and different quality of students, expansion and dilution of curriculum and a radically new role for the high school and the high school teacher. The rise of technological and urban society within the context of American middle-class ideology has been a fundamental cause of this transformation.

Saint Louis University, the first university west of the Mississippi and the first American Catholic institution of higher learning to develop in a predominantly Catholic city, displayed a remarkable broad-mindedness in its policies at a time when interdenominational strife gripped the land. Unfortunately, newcomers to the Midwest and nativists elsewhere in the nation failed to match the wide tolerance of the city and of the University. Open hostility on the part of nativists brought about the disaffiliation of one of Saint Louis University's finest colleges shortly before the Civil War and retarded the growth of the entire school for half a century. This sad but significant aspect of the social history of the United States throws new light on the ghetto attitudes that sometimes characterized denominational education in the latter part of the last century.

The nature of the American college during the Colonial and early national periods has concerned many educational historians. Questions of curricula, organization and finance have been frequently posed and often answered. Yet these approaches have ignored perhaps the most central element in the collegiate scene: the professors.

The present state of separatism in Canada has its cultural roots in the religious and political power struggles of the first half of the nineteenth century. During that period the Imperialists of England sought to maintain economic and political control of Canada while an emerging class of industrialists and commercial entrepreneurs within Canada were attempting to establish independent and autonomous political authority. At the same time the powerful Anglican and Roman Catholic Churches struggled vigorously to maintain their authoritative positions in administration of the colony. While many of the clergy were deeply involved in politics, the politicians were fighting political issues on religious principles; religion and politics were seriously interwoven.

As he prepared to leave office and active politics, George Washington offered the American people some advice based on a lifetime of thought and conviction.

“It is substantially true that virtue or morality is a necessary spring of popular government…. Promote, then, as an object of primary importance, institutions for the general diffusion of knowledge. In proportion as the structure of a government gives force to public opinion, it is essential that public opinion should be enlightened.” He went on to write in the same address that religion and morality were essential to national prosperity and to stability and happiness. Washington spoke as a gentleman, a republican it is true, but nevertheless a man schooled in a long tradition of courtesy.

No mistake about it. Francis Kenrick had his work cut out for him. It was 1830 and he had just been appointed as Coadjutor Bishop to Henry Conwell of Philadelphia. Conwell was in an enfeebled state of old age, truculent in spirit, and suspicious of his colleague's authority. The diocese of Philadelphia was badly disorganized because episcopal government was in a state of near collapse. There was no seminary or college, a single orphanage, few schools, and “a disheartened people.” In particular, the problem of “trusteeism” had created religious havoc in the diocese during the 1820's. A reserved, scholarly, and cautious person, Kenrick could not have found a less propitious vineyard in which to begin his episcopal career.

Carnegie hall was the setting for an anniversary celebration on the evening of October 24, 1912. William Henry Maxwell, Superintendent of Schools of New York City, was being honored for twenty-five years of service to public education. Present on the platform were such luminaries as Nicholas Murray Butler and Seth Low, while in the audience were many distinguished men and women who had been invited to join in the tribute. When Maxwell was finally called upon to address the group, he spoke on his favorite topic—the achievements of the public schools of the city during the past decade. Although the Superintendent did not take personal credit for the advances he recited, the audience was more than ready to pay him tribute, agreeing with The School Journal that he had “made a new educational New York, full of instruction for every other city in the land….”

On December 14, 1857, a Vermont Whig rose from his seat in the national House of Representatives and asked leave of his colleagues “to introduce a bill donating public lands to the several states and territories which may provide colleges for the benefit of agriculture and the mechanic arts.” Justin Morrill thus began a legislative debate over federal aid to higher education that has lost little of its heat and few of its basic propositions in subsequent contests. This paper is an effort to examine the nature of the arguments that appeared in one of the earliest phases of the struggle. Some description of Morrill's proposal and the context of the debate seems in order before proceeding.

The boston school board added to its problems by its choice of a successor to Philbrick. The man elected, Samuel Eliot (a relative of Harvard's president), had little practical experience in the administration of public education. Born in Boston in 1821, Eliot had graduated first in his class from Harvard at the age of eighteen. Following graduation he toured Europe and wrote a series of history books, including The History of Rome, The Early Christians and a Manual of U.S. History. In 1856 Eliot became Professor of History and Political Science in Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut, and from 1860 to 1866 he served as its president. In 1874 (the intervening eight years are vague) he became principal of the Girls' High and Normal School in Boston but resigned the position after only two years because of ill health and family bereavement. Eliot, a scholar and a nearly rank amateur in public school affairs, appealed to the reformist element of the school board, and his reports quickly made it evident that he sympathized with the faction that had deposed Philbrick. Eliot's difficulties were compounded by his snobbish social darwinism and isolation from the schools. As a practical administrator, he was generally inept. By contrast to Philbrick his reports were filled not with pragmatic discussions of practical subjects but with long and florid discourses more suitable to a late nineteenth-century literary magazine than to the report of an urban superintendent.

During a period of several decades before and after the American Revolution, France played an influential if not formative role in numerous attempts to create a new American higher learning. After independence, the English college model, dominant for well over a century, no longer inspired or satisfied a small but influential group who demanded republican form and content in higher education as in government. It was to France, the protector of the revolution, that these leading Americans looked for a continuation of inspiration and example in their attempts to found institutions of higher education befitting, to use Seymour Lipset's term, the first new nation.

In 1870, on May 16, Massachusetts passed a law permitting drawing (industrial and mechanical) to be “freely” taught in any city and town, and making “free” instruction compulsory in cities and towns of over ten-thousand people. The city of Boston also passed a compulsory art education law. The why is simple. The French had sent up a “sputnik.” This is explained tersely by Ware in his articles on drawing: At the Universal Exhibition of 1851, England found herself, by general Consent, almost at the bottom of the list, among all the countries of the World, in respect of her art-manufactures. Only the United States of the great nations stood below her. The first result of this discovery was the establishment of schools of art in every large town. At the Paris Exposition of 1867, England stood among the foremost, and in some branches of manuacture distanced the most artistic nations. It was the schools of art and the great collections of works of industrial art at the South Kensington Museum that accomplished this result. The United States still held her place at the foot of the column.

The Army and Navy Journal was considerably understating the situation when it commented in 1873 that “our Army is not, as a whole, alive to the subject of education….” Although a significant minority of army officers managed to keep themselves intellectually alive on the frontier, most officers were opposed to any elaborate scheme of formal education because it detracted from the enlisted man's regular duties and because they believed the “school of hard knocks” to be the best educational force. They also commonly assumed, with a great deal of justice in many cases, that enlisted men were not favorably disposed toward classroom instruction and were too dense to benefit by it.

C. A. Bower's recent article “The Ideologies of Progresive Education” (H.E.Q., Winter 1967) was a much needed effort to clarify some of the muddied waters flowing from various interpretations of Cremin's The Transformation of the School. Bowers was quite right in distinguishing the social reconstructionists from the other educators Cremin lumped together as progressives. Ironically the one possible flaw in Bowers's argument might have been caused by his reliance upon Cremin's interpretation of the early phases of progressive education. Bowers's basic thesis was that the social reconstructionist educators of the nineteen-thirties represented a new breed of progressive educators. Bowers argued that previous to the nineteen-thirties progressive politicans and educators set as their goal the emancipation of the individual. During the nineteen-thirties social reconstructions rejected this objective for an education that would train the individual to work harmoniously in a collective society. Now the one possible error in this argument lies in calling this a new form of progressivism and progressive education.

In south mound cemetery at New Castle, Indiana, lie the remains of William Henry Harrison Beard, his wife Mary Payne Beard, and one of their two sons, Clarence Beard. The fourth member of that Hoosier family, whose name elevates a simple fact of life and death to a level of national significance, was historian Charles Austin Beard (1874–1948).

American participation in international education started much earlier than the twentieth century. The activities of Franklin and Jefferson, although American, were international at the same time (see my two articles in the Proceedings of A.P.S. for 1952 and 1954). As an example of American interest in foreign education the project of transplanting the Genevan Academy to America could be mentioned. The details are taken from Jefferson Papers (Library of Congress, Washington) and Sir Francis D'Ivernois Papers (The Library of the University of Geneva).

Identification of American college professors prior to 1800 is a difficult task. Those below were listed as professors at the nineteen American colleges that granted degrees before 1800. Faculty registers, school catalogs and school histories were used in compiling a tentative list. When biographical study indicated that a man was probably a tutor rather than a professor, his name was removed. Some names, for which no data exist, remain, which probably should have been removed.