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The Theological Seminary in the Configuration of American Higher Education: The Ante-Bellum Years

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 February 2017

Natalie A. Naylor
Natalie A. Naylor*
Affiliation:
Hofstra University
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Extract

An important new educational institution was created in America in the early nineteenth century—the theological seminary. The development of seminaries, although almost completely ignored by twentieth-century educational historians, was an important achievement with far-reaching consequences for religion, education, and society. Education for the ministry became formally organized, systematized, and extended in the specialized theological seminaries which substantially improved professional preparation. Within a generation of the founding of Andover in 1807, the theological seminary became the accepted pattern of professional training for the educated and learned ministry in Protestant churches. Alumni of seminaries and divinity schools not only preached the gospel, but also extended education throughout the land by establishing and supporting literally thousands of educational agencies and institutions: colleges and seminaries, academies and common schools, churches and Sunday schools, libraries and the religious press, and benevolent and reform societies.

Type
Article II
Information
History of Education Quarterly , Volume 17 , Issue 1 , Spring 1977 , pp. 17 - 30
Copyright
Copyright © 1977 by New York University 

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References

Notes

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The development of Catholic theological education in America is similar in many respects to the Protestant. The first Catholic seminary in America was St. Mary's in Baltimore, whose faculty and students were transplanted from France in 1791. Through much of the nineteenth century, however, most priests were either European-born and educated or received their theological training in a domestic seminary conducted by a bishop. See McDonald, Lloyd Paul, The Seminary Movement in the United States: Projects, Foundations and Early Developments, 1784–1833 (Washington, D.C., 1927); and Morris, William Stephen, The Seminary Movement in the United States: Projects, Foundations and Early Developments, 1833–1866 (Washington, D.C., 1932). Google Scholar

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25. Herbst reports a total of only about a hundred Americans studying in three German universities. European study became more important in the decades after the Civil War when there was an upsurge of Americans pursuing the natural and social sciences. The German universities then surpassed the theological seminaries in this country in preparing college faculty. By the early twentieth century, the graduate schools of arts and sciences in the American Universities became the primary source of college professors. See Herbst, , German Historical Scholarship, pp. 1–8.Google Scholar

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27. Smith, Wilson, Professors and Public Ethics (Ithaca, 1956), p. 11.Google Scholar

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