Henry Barnard

American educator Henry Barnard (1811-1900) was influential in improving public schools and in promoting an educational literature in the United States.

Henry Barnard was born in Hartford, Conn., on Jan. 24, 1811. He graduated from Yale in 1830, taught briefly in Pennsylvania, and returned to Yale to study law. He was admitted to the bar in 1833-1834. Barnard's tours of the South and West and, in 1835, of Europe nourished growing interests in education and in politics that were finally combined when he was elected to the Connecticut Legislature in 1837. He secured passage of a bill creating a board of commissioners to supervise the state's faltering common schools, was appointed to the board, and in 1838 became its executive secretary.

Barnard, who found the schools poorly maintained and attended, wanted public education "good enough for the best and cheap enough for the poorest." He believed that thorough moral training in the common schools was the surest safeguard of the community's happiness. An intensive campaign featuring public meetings and teachers' institutes, the creation of the Connecticut Common School Journal, which he edited, and a series of annual reports describing school conditions and suggesting remedies yielded legislation reorganizing the schools. But in 1842 a hostile assembly disbanded the board as "a useless expense."

Barnard accepted a similar position in Rhode Island, where, employing techniques developed in Connecticut, he energetically canvassed the state to express his belief that social unity and stability could be achieved through education. The result, in 1845, was an act creating the state's first school system.

In poor health, Barnard resigned in 1849 to return to Connecticut as head of the state normal school, a post which also included superintendency of the state's common schools. He tirelessly sought to keep educational issues before the people. His annual reports covered a vast array of educational topics and exerted a wide influence. Barnard's report for 1853 was later published as a history of Connecticut education; in 1854 he wrote an authoritative book on school architecture. Trips to Europe in 1852 and 1854 disclosed that his fame had become international. But, again in uncertain health, he resigned in 1855 to develop a new project, the American Journal of Education.

For 25 years the Journal provided a unique professional literature, disseminating all types of educational information at precisely the time that the nation was striving to establish public schooling on a secure footing. Carefully edited and frequently published by Barnard at his own expense, the Journal came to overshadow his other achievements. From 1858 to 1860 he served as chancellor of the University of Wisconsin and in 1866-1867 as president of St. John's College in Maryland. As the nation's outstanding educator, he was appointed the first U.S. commissioner of education in 1867, resigning three years later. He continued to edit the Journal, eventually producing thirty-two 800-page volumes, until his retirement in 1880. He died in Hartford on July 5, 1900.

Further Reading

John S. Brubacher, ed., Henry Barnard on Education (1931), contains selections from Barnard's Journal. Bernard C. Steiner, Life of Henry Barnard (1919), although old, is complete and thoroughly documented. Richard Emmons Thursfield, Henry Barnard's American Journal of Education (1945), analyzes the content and impact of the Journal.

Additional Sources

Downs, Robert Bingham, Henry Barnard, Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1977.

MacMullen, Edith Nye, In the cause of true education: Henry Barnard & nineteenth-century school reform, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991. □

Henry Barnard 1811–1900, American educator, b. Hartford, Conn., grad. Yale, 1830. He studied law and was admitted to the bar in 1835. As a member (1837–39) of the Connecticut legislature, he originated and secured the passage in 1838 of an act to provide for the better supervision of the common schools. Horace Mann had carried through a similar reform in Massachusetts in 1837, and the two men became leaders in the movement to reform the common schools of the country. Barnard was secretary of the Connecticut board of commissioners of common schools from 1838 to 1842. He performed pioneer work in school inspection, recommendation of textbooks, organization of teachers' institutes and associations of parents and teachers, and the framing of additional legislative measures on education. He also edited the Connecticut Common School Journal and made valuable reports, including a survey of the existing school system. A political reversal in Connecticut in 1842 abolished his office and entire program. In 1843, Barnard was selected to survey the common school system of Rhode Island and instituted similar reforms there, as well as starting school libraries and revising examination methods. In 1849 he returned to Connecticut, where his program had been reestablished, to serve as superintendent of schools and principal of the new state normal school at New Britain. Ill health compelled his resignation in 1855. In 1858 he accepted the chancellorship of the Univ. of Wisconsin, and in two years there he did much for the state's common school system. He became president of St. John's College, Annapolis, in 1866, but resigned in 1867 to become the first U.S. commissioner of education. Barnard had long urged the establishment of a federal agency to gather and disseminate educational information and statistics, which had been collected for the first time in the census of 1840. As commissioner he planned and organized the work of this agency and prepared extensive reports on education in this country and abroad and on school legislation. Barnard resigned in 1870. He continued the publication of the American Journal of Education (31 vol., 1855–81; reissued in 1902 with an additional volume dated 1882). This journal, subsidized by Barnard, included translations of many previously unavailable European educational classics. Approximately 50 of these treatises were reprinted as Barnard's "Library of Education."

Bibliography: See his Memoirs on Teachers and Educators (1861, repr. 1969) and biography by E. N. MacMullen (1990).