William Torrey Harris (1835-1909)

U.s. commissioner of education

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Advocate of Universal Education. The educator William Torrey Harris was graduated from Yale in 1855 and began teaching in Saint Louis in 1857. As a teacher, principal, superintendent, and eventually U.S. commissioner of education, Harris recognized that all children must be educated. “Education must relate first to citizenship,” he wrote in 1898. He claimed that especially in the industrial age, citizens had to “maintain mobility, for with the great inventions of our age, we find ourselves all living in a borderland.” Education, he argued, was the only way to “give people the power to climb up to better paid and more useful industries out of lives of drudgery.” Despite his advocacy of lifelong education, he counted the school as only one of several important educational institutions, the others being the church and family.

Economy in Education. Harris was the reformer of the schools in Saint Louis, establishing the first free public kindergarten under the direction of Susan Blow, as well as advocating serious public health initiatives such as school-based vaccinations and a board of health closely allied with the board of education. However, he was keenly aware of economy in government. He advocated forty to sixty children in a classroom and employed women exclusively as educators in the elementary grades. He acknowledged that women not only used milder forms of discipline but also worked for lower wages.

Harris’s Influence. Harris’s success in establishing excellent schools in Saint Louis, from the innovative public kindergarten through a much visited high school, served as a model for other educators. During his tenure as the U.S. commissioner of education (1889-1906) he participated in the National Education Association’s Committee of Ten’s Committee of Ten, a group appointed to determine the ideal national secondary school curriculum. Although Harris strongly believed that schools should teach material that is applicable to a student’s life, he resisted demands for trade and vocational education, espousing instead studies of classics and a rigorous academic preparation for college. He also raised standards of teacher preparation and oversaw the standardization of the academic calendar for most public schools at seven months in 1889.

Source

I. L. Kandel, ed., Twenty-Five Years of American Education (Freeport, N.Y.: Books for Libraries Press, 1966), p. 64.