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The Child, the Community, and Clio: The Uses of Cultural History in Elementary School Experiments of the Eighteen-Nineties

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 February 2017

Charles E. Strickland
Charles E. Strickland*
Affiliation:
Emory University
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Extract

When American educational reformers surveyed the elementary school in the eighteen-nineties, three problems in particular distressed them. First, too many children exhibited a lack of interest when confronted by the joyless and often meaningless routine of learning the three R's. Second, the curriculum seemed irrelevant to the crisis through which American culture was passing on its way to urbanization and industrialization. The third problem, which grew in part out of attempts to resolve the first two difficulties, was the danger of overloading the curriculum of the common school with a host of new subjects which an explosion of specialized knowledge had made available. Charles McMurry, a leading American Herbartian, rejoiced in 1892 that “the old classical monopoly is finally and completely broken,” but he went on to warn that the common school course had become a “batch of miscellanies.” We are, he said, “in danger of over-loading pupils, as well as of making a superficial hodgepodge of all branches,” Educators who regarded themselves as adherents of the New Education now cast about with some urgency for a new elementary program that would incorporate material more relevant to the modern age and more appealing to children, without at the same time stretching the program of the school to impossible limits.

Type
The New Democracy II
Information
History of Education Quarterly , Volume 7 , Issue 4 , Winter 1967 , pp. 474 - 492
Copyright
Copyright © 1967 by New York University 

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References

Notes

1. McMurry, Charles The Elements of General Method: Based on the Principles of Herbart (Bloomington, Illinois: Public School Publishing Company, 1892), pp. 16–17.Google Scholar

2. Eliot, Charles W. “Shortening and Enriching the Grammar School Course,” N.E.A., Proceedings (1892), pp. 617–25.Google Scholar

3. Parker, Francis Talks on Pedagogics: An Outline of the Theory of Concentration (New York: E. L. Kellogg and Co., 1894), pp. 421–22.Google Scholar

4. McMurry, Charles “Social Aspects of Moral Education,” National Herbart Society, Third Yearbook (1897), p. 40; John Dewey, “Ethical Principles Underlying Education,” National Herbart Society, Third Yearbook (1897), p. 23.Google Scholar

5. Dewey, John “The School and Society,” originally published in 1899 and reprinted in Dewey on Education, ed. Martin S. Dworkin (New York: Bureau of Publications, Teachers College, Columbia University, 1959), p. 49.Google Scholar

6. Murray Butler, Nicholas “The Status of Education at the Close of the Nineteenth Century,” The Meaning of Education (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1915), pp. 300–9.Google Scholar

7. Ibid., p. 310.Google Scholar

8. Dewey, “The School and Society,” loc. cit., p. 36.Google Scholar

9. Dewey, Review of Katharine Elizabeth Dopp's The Place of Industries in Elementary Education, in The Elementary School Teacher, III (June 1903), pp. 272-78.Google Scholar

10. For Hall's use of the recapitulation theory, see the introductory essay by Charles E. Strickland and Charles Burgess, in Health, Growth and Heredity: G. Stanley Hall on Natural Education (New York: Bureau of Publications, Teachers College, Columbia University, 1965), especially pp. 6-11.Google Scholar

11. Dewey, “The School and Society,” loc. cit., p. 61.Google Scholar

12. Dewey, “The Culture Epoch Theory,” The Cyclopaedia of Education, ed. Monroe, Paul (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1911), II, 241.Google Scholar

13. Dewey, “The Child and the Curriculum,” reprinted in Dewey on Education, ed. Martin S. Dworkin, op. cit. Google Scholar

14. McMurry, The Elements of General Method, pp. 90–99; McMurray, “What Has Been Accomplished in Co-ordination in the Field of History and Literature,” N.E.A., Proceedings (1895), pp. 104-9.Google Scholar

15. McMurry, “Round Table Report,…” N.E.A. Proceedings (1895), pp. 475-76.Google Scholar

16. McMurry was to acknowledge several years later that the early American, admirable though he had been in his sturdiness and simplicity, was at the same time a “non-social” type of individual, who did not display the “cooperative spirit” necessary for the reform of American society. This may have reflected the influence of Dewey on McMurry's thought. See “Social Aspects of Moral Education,” National Herbart Society, Third Yearbook (1897), p. 40.Google Scholar

17. “Report of the Committee of Fifteen,” N.E.A., Proceedings (1895), pp. 233-34; “Report of the Sub-Committee on the Correlation of Studies in Elementary Education,” N.E.A., Proceedings (1895), pp. 287, 321-22; “Discussion,” N.E.A., Proceedings (1895), pp. 343-50. For discussions of culture-epochs at the first two annual meetings of the National Herbart Society, see the Society's First Yearbook (1895), pp. 67-114, 141-62, 188-97; and Second Yearbook (1896), pp. 56-140.Google Scholar

18. Buck, Gertrude “Another Phase of the New Education,” The Forum, XXII (November 1896), 376–84; Arthur B. Moehlman, Public Education in Detroit (Bloomington, Illinois, 1925), pp. 148-52.Google Scholar

19. Buck, loc. cit. Google Scholar

20. Ibid. Google Scholar

21. Ibid. Google Scholar

22. Ibid. In 1897, Miss Scott presented a more elaborate description of the program in Organic Education (Ann Arbor, 1897), passim. Google Scholar

23. I have relied chiefly on the published reports of the school appearing in the University Record, and in The Dewey School (New York: D. Appleton-Century Company, Inc., 1936), prepared by Katharine Camp Mayhew and Anna Camp Edwards, the two first teachers. Since completing the first draft of the paper, however, I came across Arthur G. Wirth's John Dewey as Educator: His Design for Work in Education (1894-1904) (New York: John Wiley and Sons, Inc., 1966), which has compelled some revision. Wirth neglected the difficulties encountered by Dewey and his staff with the use of cultural history, but such events were not, of course, central to the impressive story that Wirth tells. I am grateful to Merle Borrowman for calling my attention to this book.Google Scholar

24. Dewey, “Ethical Principles Underlying Education,” National Herbart Society, Third Yearbook (1897), pp. 7–34; see especially pp. 21-23.Google Scholar

25. Dewey, “Poetry and Philosophy,” The Andover Review, XVI (August 1891), pp. 107–8.Google Scholar

26. Dewey, “Interpretation of the Culture-Epoch Theory,” National Herbart Society, Second Yearbook (1896), p. 94.Google Scholar

27. Ibid., p. 90.Google Scholar

28. McMurry, “The Culture Epochs,” National Herbart Society, Second Yearbook (1896), pp. 96–97.Google Scholar

29. Mayhew and Edwards, op. cit., pp. 7, 465.Google Scholar

30. Ibid., pp. 97-100; “University of Chicago School,” University Record, II (May 14, 1897), 57; Dewey, “University Elementary School: History and Character,” University Record, II (May 21, 1897), 72-73; “Report of the University Elementary School,” University Record, II (December 3, 1897), 290-92.Google Scholar

31. Dewey, “The School and Society,” loc. cit., p. 61.Google Scholar

32. Mayhew and Edwards, op. cit., pp. 99-113; “University of Chicago School,” University Record, II (May 28, 1897), 80; Dewey, “The School and Society,” loc. cit., pp. 43-44.Google Scholar

33. “Report of the University Elementary School,” University Record, II (December 3, 1897), 290-92; “Report of the University Elementary School,” University Record, III (April 1, 1898), 2-3.Google Scholar

34. Dewey, “University Elementary School: History and Character,” University Record, II (May 21, 1897), 72-73.Google Scholar

35. “Report of the University Elementary School,” University Record, III (April 1, 1898), 2-3. After 1898, the staff substituted American for Roman history, but still found that the biographical approach aroused most interest among the pupils: Georgia F. Bacon, “History,” Elementary School Record, I (November 1900), 204-8.Google Scholar