William T. Harris (1835-1909)

Sources

Educational philosopher, administrator

Early Years. Without slighting the accomplishments of educational giants such as Henry Barnard or Horace Mann, historian Lawrence Cremin has described William Torrey Harris as “the commanding figure of his pedagogical era.” Born in Killingly, Connecticut, on 10 September 1835, Harris came of age after the foundations for public education had already been laid by Mann, Barnard, and others, and his public life straddled two critical periods: the formative years around midcentury, when the public school system was beginning to take definite shape in urban areas throughout the country, and the period following the Civil War, when the strains of industrialization, urbanization, and immigration threatened to bring the system tumbling down. His own philosophy thus embodied both the optimistic faith of the reformers who had preceded him and the growing conservatism of those alarmed by new potential for social instability and unrest. He was born into a well-to-do farming family and attended the district school for several years before finishing his elementary education in Providence, Rhode Island. Following this, he was enrolled in one academy after another before attending Yale College in 1854. His restlessness and dissatisfaction with the curriculum at Yale led him to leave after only two and one-half years, and shortly thereafter he began his career as an educator in Saint Louis.

Saint Louis Public Schools. Harris began teaching in the Saint Louis public school system in 1857 and was married a year later to Sarah T. Bugbee. By all accounts, he did well in his capacity as teacher and won the respect of his colleagues. Within several years he was made principal of the Clay School, became assistant superintendent of the city’s public schools in 1866, and two years later was elevated to the office of superintendent. Under his energetic direction, the Saint Louis public-school system became an object of national acclaim, and his name became a household word among reformers. With its large German and working-class population, the city provided a vast laboratory for broad implementation of Harris’s educational philosophy, and his thirteen Annual Reports were regarded by contemporaries as a mine of practical guidance and information. Unlike many reformers Harris viewed the Pestalozzian fad with some skepticism. “It is false psychology which says we derive all our knowledge from sense-perception,” he complained, positing instead a uniform curriculum, built around his concept of the “five windows of the soul.” It was through the study of grammar, art and literature, mathematics, geography, and history that students would find the key to the common storehouse of culture, Harris maintained, a body of knowledge that would serve them in any endeavor. His opposition to “sense-learning” did not prevent Harris from adopting other reforms, however, when they fit with his overall philosophy. It was under his direction, after all, that Saint Louis became the first public school system in the country to operate kindergartens.

The Hegelian Influence. Harris’s management of the Saint Louis public schools and his later career as United States Commissioner of Education were intimately bound up with his philosophical ideas. Shortly after his arrival in Saint Louis, Harris made the acquaintance of Henry C. Brokmeyer and a small circle of German émigrés influenced by the ideas of the German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, a relationship that would deeply influence Harris’s outlook for the rest of his life. Harris became the most prominent exponent of Hegel’s idealist philosophy in the United States, and the influence of the so-called Saint Louis Movement would in turn reflect his educational ideas. According to Hegel the elevation of the state as an arbiter of the shortcomings of individuals “justified the existing order and authorities by declaring that whatever is, is an inevitable stage in the unfolding of objective reason or the world spirit, and is therefore right.”

Conservatism. Harris’s version of Hegelian theory was a philosophy ready-made for preserving the status quo against the chaos and confusion of the mid nineteenth century; social unrest, in the view of Harris, was not symptomatic of social injustice, or of defects in the social order, but of a people who had not been sufficiently reconciled to obedience and self-discipline. “All the evils which we suffer politically,” he told a convention of the National Education Association in 1874, “may be traced to the existence of an immense mass of ignorant, illiterate, or semi-educated people who assist in governing the country while they possess no insight into the true nature of the issues which they attempt to decide.” Where his contemporaries had struggled to reconcile their reformist optimism with the need for social stability, Harris’s conservative course was implicit in his outlook. He emphasized the school as a means for instilling “punctuality,” “regularity,” “attention,” and “silence,” traits which would “preserve and save our civil order.” He also viewed the kindergarten as the means by which a “divine sense of shame” could develop among children who might otherwise be lost to “all manner of corruption and immorality.”

Commissioner of Education. In keeping with his philosophical interests, Harris had founded the Journal of’Speculative Philosophy in 1867, and when in 1880 he resigned his position in Saint Louis, he moved to Concord, Massachusetts, where he devoted himself full-time to aiding the establishment of the Concord School of Philosophy. After nine years with little success in this endeavor, Harris accepted an appointment as U.S. Commissioner of Education, a position he held from 12 September 1889 until 30 June 1906. During this period he wrote hundreds of articles in magazines and journals and exerted an influence upon American schooling that was unmatched among his contemporaries. He continued to attempt to develop a philosophical basis for educational practice and to advocate a leading role for industrialists and corporations in formulating educational policy. Harris voluntarily resigned his position in 1906 and died in Providence three years later.

Sources

Neil Gerard McCluskey, Public Schools and Moral Education: The Influence of Horace Mann, William Torrey Harris, and John Dewey (Greenwood, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1975);

John Stacey Roberts, William T. Harris: A Critical Study of His Educational and Religious Philosophical Views (Washington, D.C.: National Educational Association, 1924);

Selwyn Troen, The Public and the Schools: Shaping the St. Louis System, 1838–1920 (Saint Louis: University of Missouri Press, 1975).