Hall, Granville Stanley

(b. Ashfield, Massachusetts, 1 February 1846; d. Worcester, Massachusetts, 24 April 1924)

psychology, education.

Born on his grandfather’s farm, Hall grew up in a conservative, rural environment. His parents, Granville Bascom Hall and Abigail Beals Hall, were descended from earliest New England colonists. Both had taught school but had moved onto a farm near Ashfield, Massachusetts, soon after their marriage. They urged education and instilled its value into their three children. Hall’s father was a state legislator on the Know-Nothing ticket and active in civic affairs. His mother was especially pious.

For his early schooling Hall attended several oneroom schools in and near Ashfield. He taught at such schools himself for a year but, determined to continue his education, attended Williston Academy in Easthampton, Massachusetts, for college preparation and in 1863 entered Williams College. He had overcome his shyness at his first entry into the wider world and at Williams was active in school events, especially in debates and in a literary club that he helped found. During his college years he developed a lifelong habit of omnivorous reading, chiefly in philosophy, literature, and all aspects of evolution. Professors at Williams, especially John Bascom, A. L. Perry, and Mark Hopkins, encouraged his wide-ranging selections. Hall received his B.A. in 1867 and M.A. in 1870.

Considering entering the ministry, Hall attended Union Theological Seminary in 1867 and took advantage of its location to explore thoroughly New York City. He became acquainted with Henry Ward Beecher, who, by arranging a loan, provided the young man with the chance to fulfill his keenest ambition, a trip to Europe. From 1868 to 1871 Hall studied at Bonn, Berlin, and Heidelberg. For the rest of his life he held European universities and teaching methods, especially German ones, in the highest regard.

On his return to the United States, uncertain of his future plans, Hall taught in boys’ schools and tutored the family of banker Jesse Seligman. In 1872 he accepted an offer to teach English literature at Antioch College, and he later added modern languages and philosophy to his courses there. Very impressed by Wilhelm Max Wundt’s Grundzüge der physiologischen Psychologie (1874), Hall resigned to study under Wundt but postponed the trip for a year to be an instructor of English at Harvard, where he began an acquaintance with William James. For the next two years he studied in Leipzig under Wundt, Carl Ludwig, and others, and in Berlin under Helmholtz and Hugo Kronecker; he also visited other European countries and centers of learning.

On his second return from Europe, Hall completed his work for the Ph.D. at Harvard, under Bowditch in physiology, then wrote and lectured until 1881, when an offer to give a semipublic lecture series at Johns Hopkins University led to his becoming professor of psychology and pedagogy there. In 1888 he accepted the presidency of Clark University, then being founded in Worcester, Massachusetts, by Jonas G. Clark, who proved to be rich but unpredictable. Hall spent the remainder of his career, until retirement in 1920, at Clark University, where he struggled against the early financial setbacks to establish a graduate and research institution of outstanding faculty. Much of his early effort was lost to the more securely financed fledgling University of Chicago.

Hall was a member of Phi Beta Kappa, received a B.D. degree from Union Theological Seminary in 1871, and was awarded the LL.D. by the University of Michigan (1888), by Williams College (1889), and by Johns Hopkins University (1902).

From his studies in philosophy, physiology, and psychology, Hall began his professional work “intensely impressed with the idea... of subjecting psychic processes to the control of scientific and experimental methods” (Life and Confessions of a Psychologist, p. 355). This work was directly influenced by G. T. Fechner’s work in sensory stimuli, Helmholtz’s measurements of visual and auditory responses, and especially by Wundt’s experimental studies in physiological psychology. At Johns Hopkins, Hall established the first formal laboratory in psychology in the United States, one which drew to it such brilliant workers as John Dewey, Joseph Jastrow, and James McKeen Cattell. The studies were chiefly aimed at measuring psychic responses precisely. Hall encouraged others in these studies and participated in them somewhat, but his own early enthusiasm in laboratory work waned.

He turned his attention to what is considered his greatest contribution: studies of the mental development of children and adolescents. He adopted the questionnaire method of the German philosopher Moritz Lazarus to determine what children think and know but modified and enlarged his questionnaires to cover all aspects of a child’s world, including such diverse subjects as toys, animals, and religion. The questionnaires were used especially in schools in Baltimore, Boston, and Worcester. Hall’s pioneering work in this field, especially his early paper “The Contents of Children’s Minds” (1883), gave a great impetus to many other studies on the development of children. Hall and his students, both at Johns Hopkins and at Clark, made great use of the 60,000 sheets of child-gathered information on traits of schoolchildren previously accumulated by E. H. Russell. Adolescence. Its Psychology and Its Relations to Physiology, Anthropology, Sociology, Sex, Crime, Religion and Education (1904) is considered Hall’s most influential publication.

Hall’s studies of children led him into pioneering work on educational methods. His approach to education and to teaching was historical, his interest chiefly in the development, or what he preferred to call the evolution, of education. His studies of children convinced him that education, which he considered the salvation of the world, must be adapted to the natures and needs of children, not the reverse. Hall participated in the development and extensive use of psychological and intelligence testing of students, an advance in educational psychology that considerably improved teaching methods. He was tolerant of, but not an advocate of, John Dewey’s educational techniques.

A uniform philosophy running throughout all of Hall’s publications was evolution. While a student he discovered Darwinism and the writings of many evolutionary philosophers, such as Thomas Henry Huxley, Herbert Spencer, John Tyndall, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Ernst Heinrich Haeckel; and he developed a personal philosophy of evolution from the beginning of the cosmos to what he considered the ultimate product, man and his soul. His studies of children and his attitudes toward education, psychology, and religion were unified by his belief in a continual evolution. Children, he believed, recapitulated the development of the human race in their development. For many years Hall taught a broad course, which he called psychogenesis, in evolution, and another on the psychology of Christianity.

In psychology Hall was not a proponent of Freudianism—in fact, he was skeptical of its value, though he enjoyed taking psychological tests himself and was psychoanalyzed. His interest in psychology was concerned much more with the normal than the abnormal person.

Hall founded and for many years edited the first American journal in his profession, American Journal of Psychology (1887). In 1904 he began Journal of Religious Psychology but, to his regret, it survived only eleven years. At Clark University he helped found Journal of Applied Psychology (1917).

A pioneer in the application of psychology to education in the United States, Hall in his lifetime saw the profession advance from a scattered handful of workers to a multitude. His influence on education practice was extensive: through his many writings, through even more public speeches, through a great number of students at two universities, and through the emphasis he gave to educational research at Clark University.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

I. Original Work. of more than 400 publications, Hall’s most significant books were Adolescence... (New York, 1904); Education Problems (New York, 1911); Founders of Modern Psychology (New York, 1912); Jesus the Christ in the Light of Psychology (New York, 1917); Senescence; the Last Half of Life (New York, 1922); and two refreshing autobiographical accounts: Recreations of a Psychologist (New York, 1920) and Life and Confessions of a Psychologist (New York, 1923). His especially significantarticle “The Contents of Children’s Minds,” in Princeton Review, 11 (1883), 249–272, was reprinted in several other publications. A full bibliography is in Thorndike (see below).

II. Secondary Literature. Life and Confessions of a Psycholgist (see above) provides a great deal of biographical material and an explanation of the early problems at Clark University. Other biographical material and an unusual assessment of Hall as a psychologist is in the memorial to him by Edward L. Thorndike in Biographical Memoirs. National Academy of Sciences, 12 (1925), 133–180.

Elizabeth Noble Shor