Granville Stanley Hall (1844-1924)

President of clark university

Source

Science and Education. Granville Stanley Hall was graduated from Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts, and received a Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1878. He studied theology and philosophy in Germany and reported the Franco-Prussian War for American newspapers from 1868 to 1871. After teaching at Antioch College in Ohio and at Harvard, he returned to Germany to study physics, physiology, and experimental psychology. In 1882 he was granted $1,000 to establish a psychological laboratory at Johns Hopkins University, where he pursued his research in experimental psychology and trained men who would become eminent scholars, including James Cattell and John Dewey. Hall’s research into the psychology of learning contributed significantly to the growing debate over the differences between schooling and education. His research, which focused carefully on childhood and adolescent psychology and the accumulation of life data, helped put the study of education on a firm scientific basis.

Educator and Philosopher. Hall’s reputation as an educational philosopher grew during the 1880s. In 1889 he became president and professor of psychology at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, positions he maintained until his retirement in 1920. Hall became an inspiring speaker and writer as well as a respected psychological researcher, and he was instrumental in making Americans familiar with the pathbreaking psychological work of Sigmund Freud. One of his contemporaries hailed him as one of the few “great personalities” of the day. Hall’s influence was not only on “American education, but also for American life,” an admirer claimed, citing as evidence Hall’s claim that “The best of all uses of public benefactions is not for charity to the poor . . . beneficent as these are, but rather for affording the very best opportunities for the highest possible training of the very best minds in universities, because in training these the whole work of church, state, school, and charity is raised to a higher level, and in this service all other causes are best advanced.”

Source

Charles Franklin Thwing, A History of Education in the United States Since the Civil War (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1910), pp. 66, 180, 325.