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.