1 On educational progressivism, see especially Lawrence A. Cremin, The Transformation of the School: Progressivism in American Education, 1876–1957 (New York: Vintage Books, 1964); Herbert M. Kliebard, The Struggle for the American Curriculum, 1893–1958 (Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1986); and Diane Ravitch, Left Back: A Century of Failed School Reforms (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000). E.D. Hirsch, Jr. contends that romantic, child-centered views triumphed in the twentieth century, and he blames Schools of Education for disseminating these and other harmful pedagogical ideals; see The Schools We Need: And Why We Don't Have Them (New York: Doubleday, 1996). The literature on progressivism more generally is too vast to cite, but the best recent contributions include Robert M. Crunden, Ministers of Reform: The Progressives’ Achievement in American Civilization, 1889–1920 (New York: Basic Books, 1982); Alan Dawley, Struggles for Justice: Social Responsibility and the Liberal State (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1991); and Daniel T. Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1998).Google Scholar

2 The phrase “new education” proliferated in editorials and articles in educational journals and various magazines after the Civil War. Similarly, book titles followed suit, as for example, Joseph Rhodes, The New Education: Moral, Industrial, Hygienic, Intellectual (Boston: Published by the Author, 1882); Mrs. [Elizabeth?] Peabody, The New Education (Cincinnati: Press of Robert Clarke & Co., 1879); and Robert H. Thurston, The New Education and the New Civilization: Their Unity (Columbus, OH: Press of Hahn & Adair, 1892).Google Scholar

3 On evangelical movements and nineteenth-century reform movements, read Ronald G. Walters, American Reformers, 1815–1860 (New York: Hill and Wang, rev. ed., 1997), chapter 1; Steven Mintz, Moralists & Modernizers: America's Pre-Civil War Reformers (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995); and Paul Boyer, Urban Masses and Moral Order in America, 1820–1920 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978). Dewey cleverly contrasted the old and new education in The School and Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1899); and Interest and Effort in Education (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, c. 1975). The latter was first published in 1913.Google Scholar

4 Keynes, Geoffrey “Introduction,“ in Blake, William, Songs of Innocence and of Experience (Oxford: Oxford University Press, c. 1967), 10; Peter Ackroyd, Blake (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995), chapter 1; and E.P. Thompson, Witness Against the Beast: William Blake and the Moral Law (New York: The New Press, 1995), on the complex dissenting religious traditions that shaped Blake's world.Google Scholar

5 Pestalozzi, Johann Heinrich How Gertrude Teaches Her Children: An Attempt to Help Mothers To Teach Their Own Children and An Account of the Method (London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., c. 1915, translation by Lucy E. Holland and Francis C. Turner), 6. Historians commonly note Pestalozzi's inconsistent views on education and society; see Gerald Lee Gutek, Pestalozzi and Education (New York: Random House, 1968), 53, 98–99, 157–58, 167–68; and Robert B. Downs, Heinrich Pestalozzi: Father of Modern Pedagogy (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1975).Google Scholar

6 Haskell, Thomas L. Objectivity Is Not Neutrality: Explanatory Schemes in History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), chapters 8–9.Google Scholar

7 Blumin, Stuart M. The Emergence of the Middle Class: Social Experiences in the American City, 1760–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Mary P. Ryan, Cradle of the Middle Class: The Family in Oneida County, New York, 1790–1865 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981); Karen Halltunen, Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Study of Middle-Class Culture in America, 1830–1880 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982); Barbara Finkelstein, “Casting Networks of Good Influence: The Reconstruction of Childhood in the United States, 1790–1830,” in American Childhood: A Research Guide and Historical Handbook, ed. Joseph M. Hawes and N. Ray Hiner (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1985), 127–28; Bernard Wishy, The Child and the Republic: The Dawn of Modern American Child Nurture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1968); Robert V. Wells, Revolutions in Americans’ Lives: A Demographic Perspective on the History of Americans, Their Families, and Their Society (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1982), chapters 5–6; Steven Mintz and Susan Kellogg, Domestic Revolutions: A Social History of American Family Life (New York: The Free Press, 1988), chapter 3; and William J. Reese, The Origins of the American High School (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995).Google Scholar

8 Cunningham, Hugh Children and Childhood in Western Society Since 1500 (London: Longman, 1985), chapter 3. On the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, see Viviana A. Zelizer, Pricing the Priceless Child: The Changing Social Value of Children (New York: Basic Books, 1985); and Ellen Condliffe Lagemann, An Elusive Science: The Troubling History of Education Research (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2000), chapter 1.Google Scholar

9 Coveney, Peter The Image of Childhood: The Individual and Society, A Study of the Theme in English Literature (London: Penguin Books, c. 1967), 29; Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Nature,” in Ralph Waldo Emerson, Selected Essays, ed. Larzer Ziff, (New York: Penguin Books, c. 1982), 13; and Barbara Beatty, Preschool Education in America: The Culture of Young Children from the Colonial Era to the Present (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 28.Google Scholar

10 Williams, Raymond Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (New York: Oxford University Press, c. 1976), 219, 274–75. As Alan Richardson notes, “In the Romantic poet's appeal to nature lay the basis for a potentially radical critique of the disciplinary forms of contemporary educational theory and practice.” See Literature, Education, and Romanticism: Reading as Social Practice, 1780–1832 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 104.Google Scholar

11 Lovejoy, Arthur O. Essays in the History of Ideas (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, c. 1960), 229, 231, 235, 252. Also see Richardson, Literature, 9–10, 30; and the essays in Romanticism in National Context, eds. Roy Porter and Mikulas Teich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). For the ongoing debates among educators, see the essays in John Willinsky, ed., The Educational Legacy of Romanticism (Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1990).Google Scholar

12 Blake, William “Mock On, Mock On, Voltaire, Rousseau,“ in The Portable Romantic Poets: Blake to Poe, ed. Auden, W.H. and Holmes Pearson, Norman (New York: Penguin Books, c. 1978), 13. Also see Isaiah Berlin, The Roots of Romanticism, ed. Henry Hardy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 49–50.Google Scholar

13 On Blake's views on children, institutions, and politics, read S. Foster Damon, A Blake Dictionary: The Ideas and Symbols of William Blake (Hanover: University Press of New England, c. 1988), 81, 145; Coveney, Image, 54–55; and David V. Erdman, Blake: Prophet Against Empire (New York: Dover Publications, c. 1977), 120–22, 271–72. In various editions of Songs of Innocence and of Experience, Blake rearranged the placement of some poems, showing that he did not place “hard and fast” boundaries on the two contrary “States of the Human Soul.” See Andrew Lincoln's “Introduction,” in William Blake, Songs of Innocence and of Experience (Princeton: Princeton University Press, c. 1991), 17. Wordsworth's politics, poetry, and views of children have generated an enormous list of secondary sources; consult at least Stephen Gill, William Wordsworth: A Life (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989); Aidan Day, Romanticism (London: Routledge, 1996), 33, 56–58; and Nicholas Riasanovsky, The Emergence of Romanticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), chapter 1.Google Scholar

14 Thoreau, Henry David Walden (New York: Penguin Books, c. 1986), 154. On Emerson and teaching, read Robert D. Richardson, Jr., Emerson: The Mind on Fire (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 41, 57.Google Scholar

15 Whitman, Walt “An Old Man's Thought of School, For the Inauguration of a Public School, Camden, New Jersey, 1874,“ in Walt Whitman: The Complete Poems, ed. Murphy, Francis (New York: Penguin Books, c. 1986), 418–19. In “Song of Myself,” he typically wrote “A morning-glory at my windows satisfies me more than the metaphysics of books.” But, as a former teacher, he often showed great respect for teachers and their labors, and was quite familiar with Locke's writings and the soft pedagogical ideals of Horace Mann and other contemporaries. See Florence Bernstein Freedman, Walt Whitman Looks at the Schools (New York: King's Crown Press, Columbia University, 1950); and David S. Reynolds, Walt Whitman's America: A Cultural Biography (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995), 15–16, 34–35, 52–63, 75.Google Scholar

16 White, E.E. “Address to Graduates,“ Pennsylvania School Journal 38 (October 1889): 153.Google Scholar

17 “The Educational World,” The School Journal 51 (October 5, 1895): 289.Google Scholar

18 On testing and the controversies surrounding it, see Reese, Origins, 142–61. On the traditional emphasis on rote memorization and didactic teaching, see Carl F. Kaestle, Pillars of the Republic: Common Schools and American Society, 1180–1860 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1983), 18, 45–46, 97; Reese, Origins, 132–41; and Cremin, Transformation, 20–21.Google Scholar

19 Gutek, Pestalozzi and Education, 6–8, 70–73.Google Scholar

20 Pestalozzi, How Gertrude, 192. On Owen, see Beatty, Preschool Education, 1–2, 17–19; and Arthur Bestor, Backwoods Utopias: The Sectarian Origins and the Owenite Phase of Communitarian Socialism in America, 1663–1829 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, c. 1970), 138–39.Google Scholar

21 Gutek, Pestalozzi and Education, 61–67; Beatty, Preschool Education, 11–12; and Pestalozzi, How Gertrude, where the themes of motherhood, morality, Christianity, and educational goodness intertwine. The significance of images of motherhood and a feminine Nature in romantic poetry is underscored in Barbara Shapiro, The Romantic Mother: Narcissistic Patterns in Romantic Poetry (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983), ix. Feminist criticism of male romantic poets and writers are extensive and diverse; they often critique the men for appropriating “female” virtues such as empathy and nurture, already important themes in women's writings by the eighteenth century. For a small sampling of this literary criticism, see Anne K. Mellor, ed., Romanticism and Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988); and Meena Alexander, Women in Romanticism: Mary Wollstonecraft, Dorothy Wordsworth, and Mary Shelly (Savage, MD: Barnes and Noble Books, 1989).Google Scholar

22 See Pestalozzi, How Gertrude, 46 104, 146, 153, where he offers slurs on “monkish” education and barbarian peoples, presumably Slavs and Italians, and calls for the elimination of “Gothic monkish educational rubbish.”Google Scholar

23 Reese, Origins, 52. For a taste of Bushnell's views, see Horace Bushnell, Common Schools: A Discourse on the Modifications Demanded by the Roman Catholics, Delivered in the North Church, Hartford, On the Day of the Last Fast, March 25, 1853. (Hartford, CT: Press of Cass, Tiffany, and Company, 1853). Unless Catholics (and Jews) were willing to send their children to Catholic schools, and the former end their campaign to divide the school fund, Bushnell urged them all to leave the country.Google Scholar

24 Downs, Pestalozzi, 117–18; and Gutek, Pestalozzi and Education, 159–60.Google Scholar

25 Middle-class Americans were also attracted to Pestalozzi's emphasis on the individual, which appealed to those who wanted to nurture an ethos of personal responsibility among the young. Emerson even cited him in his famous call for American literary independence, “The American Scholar,” in Ziff, Selected Essays, 103.Google Scholar

26 Quoted in Downs, Pestalozzi, 71.Google Scholar

27 Quoted in Cremin, Transformation, 237.Google Scholar

28 Pestalozzi, How Getrude, 113. Pestalozzi added that it was understandable that those in the expensive seats at the theater scorned those in the pit, that employers complained about workers not following orders, and so forth. As a result of faulty teaching methods in the lower schools, he concluded, society bore the blame for the depressed state of Christianity in Europe among the poor and the resulting low state of moral life.Google Scholar

29 Beatty, Preschool Education, chapters 5–6; Robert Wollons, “Introduction,” in Kindergartens and Cultures: The Global Diffusion of an Idea, ed. Roberta Wollons (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 7; Barbara Beatty, “‘The Letter Killeth’: Americanization and Multicultural Education in Kindergartens in the United States, 1856–1920,” in Kindergartens and Cultures, 42–55; and Selwyn K. Troen, The Public and the Schools: Shaping the St. Louis System, 1838–1920 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1975), chapter 5, on the early establishment of kindergartens in a major city.Google Scholar

30 For a sense of the range of intellectual and social forces that shaped Froebel's life and educational views, see Robert B. Downs, Friedrich Froebel (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1978); Beatty, Preschool Education, chapter 3; Michael Steven Shapiro, Child's Garden: The Kindergarten Movement from Froebel to Dewey (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1983), chapter 2; and the innovative volume by Norman Brosterman, Inventing Kindergarten (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., Publishers, 1997), chapter 1.Google Scholar

31 Quoted in Downs, Froebel, 19.Google Scholar

32 Ibid., 42. Froebel thus wrote of the child in Pedagogics of the Kindergarten, Or, His Ideas Concerning the Play and Playthings of the Child (New York: D. Appleton, c. 1899, translated by Josephine Jarvis), 7: “Man, as child, resembles the flower on the plant, the blossom on the tree; as these are in relation to the tree, so is the child in relation to humanity: a young bud, a blossom; and as such, it bears, includes, and proclaims the ceaseless reappearance of new human life.”Google Scholar

33 Wollons, “Introduction,“ 1–14; Ann Taylor Allen, “Children Between Public and Private Worlds: The Kindergarten and Public Policy in Germany, 1856–1920,” in Kindergartens and Cultures, 16–37; and Joachim Liebschner, A Child's Work: Freedom and Play in Froebel's Educational Theory and Practice (Cambridge: The Lutterworth Press, c. 1992), chapter 8.Google Scholar

34 Peabody, On see Hall Tharp, Louise, The Peabody Sisters of Salem (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1950), chapter 25; Beatty, Preschool Education, 57–64; and Beatty, “‘The Letter Killeth’,” 46.Google Scholar

35 In addition to the previously cited scholarship by Beatty and Wollons, also read Evelyn Weber, The Kindergarten: Its Encounter with Educational Thought in America (New York: Teachers College Press, 1969), x, chapters 3–4; and Shapiro, Child's Garden, chapters 5–6.Google Scholar

36 Beatty, Preschool Education, chapter 4.Google Scholar

37 Woodward, C. M. untitled contribution, Journal of Education 22 (December 24, 1885): 411.Google Scholar

38 “Cooking and Sewing in Colored Grade School of Durham, N.C.,” North Carolina Journal of Education 3 (November 1899): 10–11. On the opposition of African-Americans to white attempts to water down their academic instruction, see James D. Anderson, The Education of Blacks in the South, 1860–1935 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1988).Google Scholar

39 Parker, Col. F. W. “Training that Educates,“ Wisconsin Journal of Education 13 (November 1883): 445.Google Scholar

40 Sheldon, E. A. A Manual of Elementary Instruction, For the Use of Public and Private Schools and Normal Classes; Containing a Graduated Course of OBJECT LESSONS for the Training [of] the Senses and Developing the Faculties of Children (New York: Charles Scribner & Co., c. 1869), 5, 15, 96; Mary Sheldon Barnes, ed., Autobiography of Edward Austin Sheldon (New York: Ives-Butler Company, 1911), 124; and Ned Harland Dearborn, The Oswego Movement in American Education (New York: Teachers College, Columbia University, 1925), 16–17, which perceptively notes the messianic, religious, and educational views shared by Sheldon and Pestalozzi. The commanding place of textbooks in the Oswego, New York, schools remained an impediment to the rise of object teaching, as a committee of educators reported to the National Teachers’ Association in 1865. See S.S. Greene, “Object Teaching: Its General Principles, and the Oswego System,” in Pestalozzi and His Educational System, ed. Henry Barnard (Syracuse: C.W. Bardeen, Publisher, 1881), 455.Google Scholar

41 The Emile of Jean Jacques Rousseau, edited by William Boyd (New York: Teachers College Press, c. 1971), 51; Pestalozzi, How Gertrude, 25 (the volume is filled with slurs on books); and William Wordsworth, “The Tables Turned: An Evening Scene on the Same Subject,” in William Wordsworth: The Poems, ed. John O. Hayden (New York: Penguin Books, c. 1990): 1: 357.Google Scholar

42 Hofstadter, Richard Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (New York: Vintage Books, 1962).Google Scholar

43 Hailmann, See W.N. Law of Childhood, and Other Papers (Chicago: Alice B. Stockham & Co., 1889), among his many writings.Google Scholar

44 Hopkins, Louisa Parsons The Spirit of the New Education (Boston: Lee and Shepard Publishers, 1892), 9, 20–21.Google Scholar

45 On urban middle-class Protestant fascination with Catholicism, see T.J. Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880–1920 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1981).Google Scholar

46 Ballantine, William L. “Examinations,“ Pennsylvania School Journal 32 (May 1883): 437.Google Scholar

47 Reese, William J. “The Philosopher-King of St. Louis,“ in Curriculum & Consequence: Herbert M. Kliebard and the Promise of Schooling, ed. Franklin, Barry M. (New York: Teachers College Press, 2000), 165, 171–72.Google Scholar

48 “Manual Training,” Journal of Education 35 (March 3, 1892): 134. The same article quoted William Hailmann, who wrote approvingly of manual training as essential in teaching social cooperation, work habits, and hand and eye coordination, arguments common at the time.Google Scholar

49 “Drift,” Journal of Education 19 (May 22, 1884): 326. This editorial takes a swipe at Hailmann and other kindergarten enthusiasts.Google Scholar

50 For a masterful history of Herbartian ideas and their American expressions, see Kathleen Anne Cruikshank, “The Rise and Fall of American Herbartianism: Dynamics of an Educational Reform Movement,” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1993).Google Scholar

51 Editorial, The School Journal 53 (September/October 1896): 388.Google Scholar

52 Editorial, Wisconsin Journal of Education 28 (August 1898): 169.Google Scholar

53 Adams, Charles F. Jr., The New Departure in the Common Schools of Quincy and Other Papers on Educational Topics (Boston: Estes and Lauriat, 1879), 33, 43.Google Scholar

54 Gregory, John M. “Some Fundamental Inquiries Concerning the Common School Studies,“ Circulars of Information of the Bureau of Education (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1882), 87.Google Scholar

55 Fitch, J.G. Notes on American Schools and Training Colleges (London: Macmillan and Company, 1890), 51.Google Scholar

56 Rice, Joseph Mayer The Public-School System of the United States (New York: Century, 1893).Google Scholar

57 Rice, Public-School System, 93 101–15; and Laura Gaus, “Nebraska Cropsey,” in The Encyclopedia of Indianapolis, ed. David J. Bodenhamer and Robert G. Barrows (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 483.Google Scholar

58 Harris, William T. “The Present Status of Education in the United States,“ Journal of Education 34 (August 13, 1891): 101, where he wrote: “The elementary school will always have the character of memory work stamped upon it, no matter how much the educational reforms may improve its methods. It is not easy to over-value the impulse of such men as Pestalozzi and Froebel; but the child's mind cannot seize great syntheses.”Google Scholar

59 Dewey's, See John perceptive comments in Democracy and Education: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Education (New York: The Free Press, c. 1944), 58–59, 198–99. The book was originally published in 1916.Google Scholar

60 Manen, Max van “Romantic Roots of Human Science in Education,“ in Educational Legacy, ed. Willinsky, , 115–39.Google Scholar

61 Graham, Patricia Albjerg Progressive Education: From Arcady to Academe, A History of The Progressive Education Association (New York: Teachers College Press, 1967), 8–16; and Arthur Zilversmit, Changing Schools: Progressive Education Theory and Practice, 1930–1960 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993).Google Scholar

62 Shapiro, Child's Garden, 60–63; and Barbara Beatty, “Susan Elizabeth Blow,” in Historical Dictionary of American Education, ed. Richard J. Altenbaugh (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1999), 48.Google Scholar

63 Monroe, Will S. History of the Pestalozzian Movement in the United States (Syracuse: C.W. Bardeen, Publisher, 1907), 179, briefly describes the reaction against Sheldon's system by local residents. After serving as superintendent of schools in LaPorte, Indiana, for nine years, Hailmann reported continued resistance from parents, since he reduced the traditional emphasis on textbooks and increased classroom time spent on drawing and manual training and “experimental” methods. See Report of the Public Schools of LaPorte, Indiana, for the School Year 1891–1892 (LaPorte, Indiana: Wadsworth & Kessler, 1892), 11. On Hailmann's varied career, see Beatty, Preschool Education; William J. Reese, “Urban School Reform in the Progressive Era,” in Hoosier Schools: Past & Present, ed. William J. Reese (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), 44; and Ted Stahly, “Curricular Reform in an Industrial Age,” in Hoosier Schools, 62–63, 65–66.Google Scholar

64 Dyzhuizen, George The Life and Mind of John Dewey (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1973), 25; Lagemann, Elusive Science, 52; and Russell B. Goodman, American Philosophy and the Romantic Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 92.Google Scholar

65 In recent years, scholars have increasingly and properly recognized that Dewey opposed child-centered education. See, for example, Robert Westbrook, John Dewey and American Democracy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), 108–09; and Alan Ryan, John Dewey and the High Tide of American Liberalism (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1995), 134.Google Scholar

66 Dewey, John “My Pedagogical Creed,“ in Dewey on Education, ed. Dworkin, Martin S. (New York: Teachers College Press, 1959), 32. On the moral foundations of progressive reform generally, see Crunden, Ministers of Reform; and Timothy L. Smith, “Progressivism in American Education, 1880–1900,” Harvard Educational Review 31 (Spring 1961): 173–74. Cruikshank notes that the moral and spiritual foundations of Herbart's ideas, which drew inspiration in part from Pestalozzi, helped in their popularization in America. See “The Rise and Fall,” 873–74.Google Scholar

67 Wordsworth, William “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood,“ in The Portable Romantics, 199.Google Scholar