EDUCATION

Herman Melville wrote in Moby-Dick (1851) that "a whale-ship was my Yale College and my Harvard" (p.156), and W. D. Howells noted three generations later that "till journalism became my university, the printing-office was my school" (pp. 15–16). Melville and Howells were exceptions to the rule, however. Most major American writers after the Civil War were not autodidacts; rather, they received formal educations. In fact, American education at every level was profoundly transformed by the prosperity and pragmatism of the Gilded Age. As the period opened, the dominant philosophy in educational circles was deterministic, emphasizing strict discipline, rote memorization, repetitive exercises, and declamations or recitations. This pedagogical method is perhaps best illustrated in Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889), in which "the Boss" establishes "man factories" throughout Camelot to train the most gifted boys in the kingdom. "Training is everything," he believes (p. 114). In the end, only the young men educated in these "factories" from childhood remain loyal to the hero and the republic he declares against the interdict of the church. "Did you think you had educated the superstition out of the people?" his assistant asks (p. 299). Obviously so. Similarly, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, the author of "The Yellow Wall-Paper" (1892) and Women and Economics (1898), asserted in Concerning Children (1900) the Lamarckian and racially inflected belief that early education by a staff of professional teachers would enable children, once grown, to transmit acquired characteristics to their own progeny and subsequent generations. By 1920 more progressive educational practices, inspired by the pragmatism or functionalism of William James and John Dewey, had dramatically changed the American school system from kindergarten to the university.

KINDERGARTENS

"Child gardens," public nurseries or preschools on the German model, were introduced in St. Louis in 1873 at the direction of the local school superintendent, William T. Harris, later the U.S. commissioner of education, the author of Psychologic Foundations of Education (1898), and the editor of the Journal of Speculative Philosophy. The kindergarten movement grew slowly in the United States during its first twenty years and then blossomed. From about 30,000 kindergartens open in 1890, the number grew to over 200,000 in operation in 1900. Immediately upon founding Hull-House in Chicago in 1889, for example, Jane Addams established a kindergarten. Sarah B. Cooper, a suffragist, journalist, and president of the Golden Gate Kindergarten Association, was instrumental in founding kindergartens in the Bay Area around the turn of the century.

PUBLIC EDUCATION

During the era of the oft-sentimentalized one-room schoolhouse, few students continued their educations past the eighth grade. As late as 1918, barely half of all American children aged five to seventeen attended school. The hero of Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), son of the town drunk, goes to school only "three or four months" and learns the rudiments of reading, writing, and spelling. He "could say the multiplication table up to six times seven is thirty-five" (p. 18). And the students whose families could afford to keep them in school were often poorly instructed by teachers hired by the local school committee and before the standardization of curricula and teacher credentials. Twain's Tom Sawyer must suffer the punishments meted out by the sadistic schoolmaster Dobbins, whose rod and ferule "were seldom idle" (p. 150). In the end-of-school-year declamation scene in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), Tom and his classmates recite such sentimental chestnuts as Felicia Heman's poem "Casabianca" (or "The Boy Stood on the Burning Deck") and Patrick Henry's "Give Me Liberty, or Give Me Death" speech.

Few public high schools existed outside the major cities, though the number of high schools increased manifold between the Civil War and World War I as the result of court decisions that permitted communities to levy taxes to support them. From only a few hundred public high schools in 1870 (including the original Boston Latin School), their number swelled to over six thousand by the turn of the twentieth century. And while fewer than 7 percent of American teenagers attended public or private high schools in 1890, about 32 percent of them attended high schools in 1920. Still, public schools had their critics. The architect Richard Grant White scoffed in his essay "The Public-School Failure" (1880), "The mass of the pupils of these public schools are unable to read intelligently, to spell correctly, to write legibly, to describe understandingly the geography of their own country, or to do anything that reasonably well-educated children should do with ease" (p. 541). In his autobiography Dawn (1931), Theodore Dreiser remembered his parochial school education in Indiana in the early 1880s in remarkably similar terms: "No curriculum worthy of the name. A mixed gibberish of minor arithmetic, beginner's grammar, reading, Bible history, spelling, catechism, and then at about twelve years of age most of these spiritually afflicted underlings turned out to begin the work of making a living and planning their careers!" (p. 130).

Despite the many shortcomings in public education, teachers were often depicted in fiction of the period as agents of civilization and culture. The lineal descendants of the eastern teacher Miss Mary in Bret Harte's story "The Idyl of Red Gulch" (1869) include the hero of Edward Eggleston's The Hoosier Schoolmaster (1871), the heroine of Horatio Alger Jr.'s The New Schoolma'am (1877), and the eastern schoolmarm Molly Wood in Owen Wister's The Virginian (1902). Sherwood Anderson revised the type in Winesburg, Ohio (1919), in the character of Kate Swift, the most lonely and intellectually starved soul in the town.

The increased numbers of students attending public schools soon led to the professionalization of teaching. The National Bureau of Education, fore-runner of the U.S. Department of Education, was established in 1867, and the National Educational Association, an organization of professional educators, was founded in 1898. Among the American authors who taught in public schools during this period were Willa Cather, Mary Austin, and Charles W. Chesnutt. The number of normal schools, forerunners of teachers' colleges, also dramatically increased from twenty-two in 1870 to about a hundred in 1900. Some of these normal schools (e.g., Illinois State Normal School, Indiana State Normal School, and Pittsburg Normal School) later became universities (Illinois State University, Ball State University, and Pittsburg State University in Kansas, respectively). Parallel to the standardization of the curriculum was the emergence of standard textbooks in fields such as American literature. Henry Houghton, to repay the debt he assumed when he bought a Boston publishing house and renamed it Houghton, Mifflin and Company, urged the editor Horace Scudder to repackage the books on his list for every level of the market. For his part, Scudder believed that the textbook was a tool of social engineering. He edited perhaps the most influential literature anthologies in the history of American education, simply entitled American Poems (1879) and American Prose (1880). In 1891 he unveiled another textbook, Masterpieces of American Literature. Hundreds of thousands of cheap classroom editions in the Riverside Literature series, which included dozens of classic texts by American writers, virtually cornered the textbook market through the end of the century, and as late as 1917 they were still selling about a million copies a year. The same year, the first volume of the monumental Columbia History of American Literature also appeared.

PRIVATE EDUCATION

Among the alternatives to public education available to the children of privileged families were, of course, private tutors and preparatory schools. Their teachers were often improvident college graduates. Although he is best known in the early twenty-first century for his dozens of juvenile novels, Horatio Alger Jr., a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Harvard, tutored such children as Edwin R. A. Seligman, later professor of economics at Columbia; Benjamin Cardozo, later associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court; and Robert Grant, later a distinguished jurist and novelist. Similarly, George Herbert Mead, later a noted social theorist, tutored the children of William James, brother of the author Henry James. The younger James's tale "The Pupil" (1891) tells of an impecunious Yale graduate who tutors a precocious eleven-year-old boy, preparing him for admission to Oxford. As James's narrator caustically observes, the pupil "had the general quality of a child for whom life had not been simplified by school" (p. 418). (James, too, had largely been home-taught.) In "The Turn of the Screw" (1898), James depicted a much more peculiar relationship between a crazed governess and her charges. In addition, some seventy private academies or prep schools, still in existence in the early twenty-first century (e.g., the Groton School and Randolph-Macon), were founded between 1870 and 1920. But as Henry James famously lamented in his study of Nathaniel Hawthorne (1879), the United States had "no great Universities nor public schools—no Oxford, nor Eton" (p. 43). F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940) similarly sneered in This Side of Paradise (1920) that "we have no Eton to create the self-consciousness of a governing class; we have, instead, clean, flaccid, and innocuous preparatory schools" (p. 27).

TRADE SCHOOLS AND INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION

As for the children of the working class, they might choose among apprenticeships, vocational and trade schools, or business and commercial colleges. The scoundrel Bartley Hubbard studies law privately with Squire Gaylord in W. D. Howells's A Modern Instance (1882), for example. The title character of Frank Norris's McTeague (1899) is apprenticed to an itinerant dentist, earns the nickname "Doc," and practices dentistry in the Polk Street neighborhood of San Francisco, though he has no other professional training. Charlotte Perkins Gilman briefly attended the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence in 1878, and in her story "The Yellow Wall-Paper" (1892), the narrator remarks in passing that she knows "a little of the principle of design" (pp. 19–20). As Jane Addams details in Twenty Years at Hull-House (1910), moreover, the settlement house movement often went hand in glove with industrial education for immigrants and the underclasses. Some mission schools were also established by religious groups, such as the Presbyterian-sponsored Menaul School in Albuquerque, founded in 1881 to educate Spanish-speaking boys.

Other industrial or trade schools were race specific, particularly the Reservation Boarding School System in the United States. In 1870 Congress appropriated $100,000 to support industrial and other schools for Native American children. Unfortunately, the goal of these schools was forced assimilation of Native Americans ("kill the Indian, save the man"). No language except English was permitted in the classroom or elsewhere on campus. Indian schools were founded across the country in such towns as Albuquerque, Santa Fe, Phoenix, and Carlisle, Pennsylvania (the latter best known in the early twenty-first century for its student Jim Thorpe, one of the greatest athletes of the twentieth century). As early as August 1889, the American artist and novelist Frederic Remington criticized the system of Indian boarding schools:

The present scheme of taking a few boys and girls away from the camps to put them in school where they are taught English, morals, and trades has nothing reprehensible about it, except that it is absolutely of no consequence. . . . The few boys return to the camps with their English, their school clothes, and their short hair. They know a trade also, but have no opportunity to be employed in it. . . . They go back to the camps, go back to the blanket, let their hair grow, and forget their English. (P. 43)

In "An Indian Boy's Story" (1903), an example of a captivity narrative, Daniel La France chronicled his personal experience with Indian schools in the early- and mid-1890s, first on the Mohawk reservation. "There were four Indian day schools" there, "all taught by young white women" (p. 1781). But he learned "practically nothing" because "the teachers did not understand our language, and we knew nothing of theirs" (p. 1781). At the age of thirteen, La France was sent to a government-contract boarding school to learn to be a tailor but was soon disillusioned by the education there.

There were endless rules for us to study and abide by, and hardest of all was the rule against speaking to each other in our own language. We must speak English or remain silent, and those who knew no English were forced to be dumb or else break the rules in secret. This last we did quite frequently, and were punished, when detected, by being made to stand in the 'public hall' for a long time or to march about the yard while the other boys were at play. (P. 1783)

Similarly, Charles Eastman, a native Sioux, reminisced in From the Deep Woods to Civilization (1916) about his experience as a student at the Indian school at Santee Agency, Nebraska, in the 1870s:

How well I remember the first time we were called upon to recite! In the same primer class were Eagle-Crane, Kite, and their compatriot from up the river. For a whole week we youthful warriors were held up and harassed with words of three letters. Like raspberry bushes in the path, they tore, bled, and sweated us—those little words—rat, cat, and so forth, until not a semblance of our native dignity and self-respect was left. (P. 215)

Eventually, Eastman attended Dartmouth College Indian school and was educated as a physician.

Booker T. Washington, a graduate of the Hampton Institute, founded the most famous trade and industrial school for African American students, Tuskegee Institute, near Tuskegee, Alabama, in 1881. Only about thirty applicants were admitted to the first class, most of them public school teachers. As Washington reminisced in his autobiography Up from Slavery (1901), he tried to offer "such an education as would fit a large proportion of them to be teachers, and at the same time cause them to return to the plantation districts and show the people there how to put new energy and new ideas into farming, as well as into the intellectual and moral and religious life of the people" (p. 94). Black Americans, particularly in the South, suffered from Jim Crow laws and racial segregation of public facilities, including schools, a "separate but equal" doctrine sanctioned by the landmark Supreme Court decision Plessy v. Ferguson (1896). Within a few years of its founding, Tuskegee became a showpiece if not a model of industrial education, and Washington was hailed as one of the most important black leaders of his era. He was the first African American to dine at the White House, with Theodore Roosevelt in 1901. Yet Washington's policies, his acquiescence to segregation, and his insistence on industrial education as the sole means of racial uplift, were strongly criticized by such figures as the author and activist W. E. B. Du Bois and Charles W. Chesnutt. In the last novel he published during his lifetime, The Colonel's Dream (1905), Chesnutt excoriates the racial paternalism of whites who finance industrial schools for blacks modeled on Tuskegee.

COLLEGES AND UNIVERSITIES

What court decisions permitting taxation in support of local education were for high schools the Morrill Act of 1862 was for state colleges and universities. The legislation encouraged states to accept grants of land from the federal government to found vocational colleges for the working class. The curriculum of these colleges included courses in agriculture, veterinary science, and mechanics. Many of these land-grant colleges evolved into distinguished universities (e.g., Storrs Agricultural College, forerunner of the University of Connecticut; Iowa State Agricultural College and Model Farm, forerunner of Iowa State University; and Agricultural College of Pennsylvania, forerunner of Pennsylvania State University). Fred Lewis Pattee of Pennsylvania State College, the author of A History of American Literature (1896) and A History of American Literature since 1870 (1915), was in fact the first professor of American literature at any college or university in the nation when he was awarded the title in 1920. Many of the land-grant institutions also pioneered the trend toward coeducation. The University of Illinois (originally the Illinois Industrial University), the University of Nebraska, the University of Maine (originally the Maine College of Agriculture and the Mechanic Arts), Iowa State, the University of Wisconsin, and Cornell University all admitted women shortly after the Civil War. Both Willa Cather (Nebraska) and Jessie Fauset (Cornell) graduated from land-grant schools around the turn of the twentieth century. In all, about a quarter-million undergraduate students were enrolled in schools in 1900, most of them in public universities.

With rare exceptions, most private colleges and professional schools (theological seminaries, law and medical schools) remained closed to women. In response, several colleges that admitted only women opened during the 1870s and 1880s, among them Smith (1871), Wellesley (1875), the "Harvard Annex" subsequently renamed Radcliffe (1879), Bryn Mawr (1888), and Barnard (1889). Mount Holyoke Female Seminary, where Mary E. Wilkins studied in 1870–1871, also earned collegiate status in 1888. Gertrude Stein attended the Harvard Annex in 1893; H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) attended Bryn Mawr between 1904 and 1906; Marianne Moore graduated from Bryn Mawr in 1909; and both Adelaide Crapsey (1901) and Edna St. Vincent Millay (1917) graduated from Vassar. Not surprisingly, however, the education of women remained a contentious issue into the twentieth century. Gilman argued in "Does the Higher Education of Women Tend to Happiness in Marriage?" (1903) that career and family were not mutually exclusive. Still, women schoolteachers were not only paid less than men on the ground they were not "heads of households" but were also routinely dismissed when they married. And with rare exceptions (e.g., Harvard, which admitted Jews and African Americans), racial and ethnic minorities were denied higher education entirely.

The American critic and author Van Wyck Brooks claimed in 1908 that only at Harvard "are literary students so exclusively literary, for the Harvard man is left to himself" (p. 612). The claim would be difficult to deny on the basis of available evidence. Among the men of letters who graduated from Harvard between 1870 and 1920 were Du Bois, Owen Wister, Robert Herrick, e. e. cummings, John Dos Passos, Robert Grant, Witter Brynner, Hutchins Hapgood, Percy Mackay, and John Reed. The poets Edwin Arlington Robinson, T. S. Eliot, and Wallace Stevens also attended Harvard without taking a degree, and Henry James briefly studied at the Harvard Law School. Frank Norris was a student in Lewis E. Gates's creative writing course at Harvard in 1895–1896, and the playwrights Philip Barry and Sidney Howard were students in the famous 47 Workshop there directed by George Pierce Baker. The faculty included such luminaries as the historian Henry Adams, the philosopher and psychologist William James, and the philosopher and novelist George Santayana.

Adams reminisced about his years as a Harvard student between 1854 and 1858 in The Education of Henry Adams (1906), and he pulled no punches in his indictment. "No one took Harvard College seriously," Adams contended. "All went there because their friends went there, and the College was their ideal of social self-respect" (p. 54). Later, when offered a job there, he noted the irony: "Nothing in the vanity of life struck him as more humiliating than that Harvard College, which he had persistently criticized, abused, abandoned, and neglected, should alone have offered him a dollar, an office, an encouragement, or a kindness" (p. 305). The difference between the Harvard of Adams's undergraduate years and the Harvard whose faculty he joined was the curricular revision initiated by Charles W. Eliot, president of the university between 1869 and 1909 and editor of the "five-foot shelf" of Harvard Classics. Eliot introduced an elective system that effectively abolished the prescribed course of study at Harvard with its requirements in classical languages. Despite the reform, the social hierarchy at Harvard remained intact, as Howells illustrated in The Landlord at Lion's Head (1897), a precursor of the genre of academic novels, and many students still failed to exploit their opportunities, a point Wister made in his story "Philosophy 4" (1904).

Other distinguished universities also outgrew the tenets of orthodox Christianity on which they had been founded or reformed their curricula. Yale University finally inaugurated the first of its presidents not to be an ordained minister in 1899. Significantly, the villain of Mark Twain's Pudd'nhead Wilson (1894) is a Yalie, though in reality the graduates of Yale included the writers Stephen Vincent Benét, Waldo Frank, and Sinclair Lewis. The preceptorial system of teaching was introduced at Princeton University by Woodrow Wilson, who presided over the university between 1902 and 1910 before he was elected president of the United States in 1912. He was the only American president ever to earn a Ph.D. (Johns Hopkins, 1886). The playwright Eugene O'Neill studied briefly at Princeton (1908–1909). Much as Adams's Education ridiculed the respectability of Harvard students in the years before the Civil War, Fitzgerald's This Side of Paradise depicted the snobbery and shallow pretensions of Princeton students on the eve of World War I. Johns Hopkins University, primarily a graduate school on the German model and the first research university in the United States, was founded in Baltimore in 1876.

In addition to producing writers, universities were a boon to literary culture in other ways, particularly as sponsors of literary journals and presses. William P. Trent founded the Sewanee Review at the University of the South in 1892, and John Spencer Bassett established the South Atlantic Quarterly at Trinity College in 1901. By 1913 at least seven major university presses were in operation, including those at Cornell (1869), Chicago (1891), California (1893), Columbia (1893), Princeton (1905), Yale (1910), and Harvard (1913). In 1919 the Yale press inaugurated the Yale Younger Poets Prize, the first literary award to be granted annually in the United States.

Many other authors of the period were college graduates, among them Upton Sinclair (City College of New York), James Branch Cabell (William and Mary), Robinson Jeffers (Occidental), Charles Dudley Warner and Ezra Pound (Hamilton), Vachel Lindsay (Hiram), James Weldon Johnson (Atlanta University), Sidney Howard and Lincoln Steffens (California), Jean Toomer (New York University), Richard Harding Davis (Lehigh), and William Carlos Williams (University of Pennsylvania). Other writers attended college without taking a degree, including William Faulkner (University of Mississippi), Theodore Dreiser (Indiana), and Stephen Crane (Lafayette and Syracuse). Still other writers enjoyed sinecures as professors: Du Bois (Atlanta University), Robert Herrick (Chicago), Charles Warren Stoddard (Catholic University), Katharine Lee Bates (Wellesley). Pound taught for two years (1906–1908) at Wabash College in Indiana before he was fired for sequestering a woman in his room. Conversely, Bret Harte declined an invitation to become a professor of modern literature at the University of California soon after it opened, and Howells declined offers of professorships in literature at both Johns Hopkins and Harvard. Neither wanted academic commitments to interfere with his literary career.

Many of these colleges and universities had their critics. According to Laurence R. Veysey:

Of the five hundred institutions of higher learning in the United States in 1903, a majority may not even have deserved the title of "college." It was estimated that only a hundred colleges held to standards that would permit their students to begin immediate study for the Doctorate after receiving the A.B., and only a dozen or so were clearly universities "of the first rank." (P. 359)

American literature as a discipline was also slow to enter the curriculum. Only fourteen colleges offered American literature courses in 1880, and only four Ph.D.s had been offered in the field by 1900. In a lament that has become increasingly familiar, the scholar and educator Irving Babbitt (1865–1933) insisted in Literature and the American College (1908) that "the humanities need to be defended to-day against the encroachments of physical science, as they once needed to be against the encroachments of theology" (p. 87). The economist Thorstein Veblen was even more blunt in The Higher Learning in America (1918). The American university, Veblen asserted, is merely a "corporation of learning" staffed by "captains of erudition" in departments that are headed by "chiefs of bureau" (pp. 88, 89, 112). In another lament that has become increasingly familiar, Veblen declared that "the intrusion of business principles in the universities goes to weaken and retard the pursuit of learning" (p. 224). As early as 1903, with only about six thousand graduate students enrolled in U.S. universities, William James indicted the trend toward credentialism in lieu of higher education in "The Ph.D. Octopus" (1903):

The truth is that the Doctor-Monopoly in teaching, which is becoming so rooted an American custom, can show no serious grounds whatsoever for itself in reason. As it actually prevails and grows in vogue among us, it is due to childish motives exclusively. In reality it is but a sham, a bauble, a dodge, whereby to decorate the catalogues of schools and colleges. (P. 1115)

Such complaints continue to resonate in the early twenty-first century.

See alsoAdolescence; Indians; Lectures; Libraries; Reform; Up from Slavery

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Works

Adams, Henry. The Education of Henry Adams. 1906. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1961.

Brooks, Van Wyck. "Harvard and American Life." Contemporary Review 94 (1908): 610–618.

Dreiser, Theodore. Dawn. New York: Liveright, 1931.

Eastman, Charles. From the Deep Woods to Civilization. 1916. Chicago: Lakeside Press, 2001.

Fitzgerald, F. Scott. This Side of Paradise. New York: Scribners, 1920.

Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. The Yellow Wall-Paper. 1892. New York: Feminist Press, 1973.

Howells, William Dean. Years of My Youth. 1916. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1975.

James, Henry. Hawthorne. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1879.

James, Henry. "The Pupil." 1891. In The Complete Tales of Henry James, 1888–1891, pp. 409–460. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1963.

James, William. "The Ph.D. Octopus." 1903. In Writings 1902–1910. New York: Library of America, 1987.

La France, Daniel. "An Indian Boy's Story." Independent, 30 July 1903, pp. 1780–1787.

Melville, Herman. Moby-Dick. 1851. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1964.

Remington, Frederic. Collected Writings of Frederic Remington. New York: Doubleday, 1979.

Twain, Mark. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. 1885. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985.

Twain, Mark. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. 1876. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980.

Twain, Mark. A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. 1889. New York: Signet, 1963.

Washington, Booker T. Up from Slavery. 1901. New York: Doubleday, 1998.

White, Richard Grant. "The Public-School Failure." North American Review 131, no. 289 (1880): 537–551.

Secondary Works

Babbitt, Irving. Literature and the American College. 1908. Washington, D.C.: National Humanities Institute, 1986.

Good, Harry. A History of American Education. New York: Macmillan, 1962.

Graff, Gerald. Professing Literature: An Institutional History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987.

Gross, Carl Henry, and Charles C. Chandler. The History of American Education through Readings. 2nd ed. Boston: Heath, 1964.

Vanderbilt, Kermit. American Literature and the Academy: The Roots, Growth, and Maturity of a Profession. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1986.

Veblen, Thorstein. The Higher Learning in America: A Memorandum on the Conduct of Universities by Business Men. New York: Huebsch, 1918.

Veysey, Laurence R. The Emergence of the American University. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965.

Gary Scharnhorst