Kindergartens for civilisation: the intellectual origins of the St Louis public kindergarten

ABSTRACT

This article reexamines the intellectual history of the first public kindergartens, established in St Louis, Missouri, by William Torrey Harris and Elizabeth Blow in 1873. This piece argues that historians have overlooked a critical influence on the establishment of the first public kindergartens; namely, Harris and Blow’s conviction that children’s intellectual, psychological, and moral development recapitulated historical stages of human cultural and sociological evolution. This belief in cultural recapitulation deeply informed how they viewed the kindergarten curriculum and the role of public education—including the public kindergarten—in a liberal democratic society. Consequently, the first public kindergartens stand as a patent example, not of romantic reform, but of a late nineteenth-century state-centered liberalism grounded in Harris and Blow’s ethnocentric views of cultural and child development, as well as their Hegelian institutional idealism. Finally, this article illustrates how Harris and Blow transposed widely circulating theories of biological and cultural evolution, a belief in Western cultural superiority, and their vision of a civilised social order onto the biology and psychology of the child. As such, this paper illustrates how the metaphors and categories used to describe the stages of child development have made ethical claims with far-reaching implications.

KEYWORDS:

• kindergarten
• cultural recapitulation
• William Torrey Harris
• Susan Blow
• child development
• public education

Acknowledgment

A special thanks to Adam Nelson, Bill Reese, and Ben Kasten for their comments on previous drafts of this manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

¹ “The Kindergarten: An Infant School at Carondelet: The Work of a Noble Young Lady – A Democrat Reporter Among the Infants – A Hint for the Future,” The St Louis Democrat, October 14, 1873: 4.

² Ibid.

³ Selwyn K. Troen, The Public and the Schools: Shaping the St. Louis System, 1838–1920 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1975); William J. Reese, History, Education, and the Schools (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 61–78; Frances A. Karanovich and Linda C. Morice, “Managers of Virtue Revisited: The Missouri Anomaly, 1865–1915,” American Educational History Journal 36, no. 2 (2009): 255–68.

⁴ The most thorough intellectual history of the kindergarten movement in the United States, Michael Shapiro’s Child’s Garden (1983), discusses the St Louis kindergartens, but does not make note of Harris and Blow’s belief in cultural recapitulation. Michael Steven Shapiro, Child’s Garden: The Kindergarten Movement from Froebel to Dewey (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1983), 45–63.

⁵ Harris and Blow were not the only educational leaders to embrace a belief in cultural recapitulation. As historian Thomas Fallace concluded in his work on cultural recapitulation and progressive education, this belief was firmly entrenched within the mainstream of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century educational thought and embedded in the most progressive and humane educational innovations of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. The history of the St Louis public kindergartens supports Fallace’s claim while also extending it, revealing how the idea of cultural recapitulation motivated the founding of the first public kindergartens, and as early as the 1870s. Thomas Fallace, Race and the Origins of Progressive Education, 1880–1929 (New York: Teachers College Press, 2015), 145–7. In the historiography, Harris’ belief in cultural recapitulation is briefly mentioned in Fallace’s work when he discusses the relationship between imperialism and the new education, though he does not discuss its influence on the kindergarten (44–6). Susan Blow’s belief in cultural recapitulation is briefly mentioned but not explored in Weber’s The Kindergarten (1969), specifically in relation to the kindergarten songs and games. See Evelyn Weber, The Kindergarten: Its Encounter with Educational Thought in American (New York: Teachers College Press, 1969), 33.

⁶ For more on theories of cultural recapitulation and education in the late nineteenth century, see: Stephen Jay Gould, Ontogeny and Phylogeny (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1977), 135–54; Fallace, Race and the Origins of Progressive Education; Thomas Fallace, “Recapitulation Theory and the New Education: Race, Culture, Imperialism, and Pedagogy, 1894–1916,” Curriculum Inquiry 42, no. 4 (2012): 510–33; Thomas Fallace, “Repeating the Race Experience: John Dewey and the History Curriculum at the University of Chicago Laboratory School,” Curriculum Inquiry 39, no. 3 (2009): 381–405; Thomas Fallace, “The Savage Origins of Child-Centered Pedagogy, 1871–1913,” American Educational Research Journal 52, no. 1 (2015): 73–103; Charles E. Strickland, “The Child, the Community, and Clio: The Uses of Cultural History in Elementary School Experiments of the Eighteen-Nineties,” History of Education Quarterly 7, no. 4 (Winter 1967): 474–92.

⁷ Bernard J. Kohlbrenner, “William Torrey Harries, Superintendent of Schools, St. Louis, 1868–1880, Part II,” History of Education Journal 2, no. 2 (1951): 54–61; Larry Cuban, “Why Some Reforms Last: The Case of the Kindergarten,” American Journal of Education 100, no. 2 (Feb 1992): 166–94; David Tyack and Larry Cuban, Tinkering Towards Utopia: A Century of Public School Reform (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 66; Troen, The Public and the Schools, 102; Barbara Beatty, Preschool Education in America: The Culture of Young Children from the Colonial Era to the Present (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), 67; Reese, History, Education, and the Schools, 69–70. Another motive for the founding of the public kindergarten mentioned in the historiography was Harris’ belief that the kindergarten was needed for the children of the newly rich social striders who were too busy to provide the proper nurture and who often left ill-suited servants to raise their children. See: Merle Curti, The Social Ideas of American Educators (Paterson, NJ: Pageant Books, 1959), 324; Troen, The Public and the Schools, 112; Beatty, Preschool Education in America, 67. Historians have also argued that Harris saw the kindergarten as a pedagogical innovation capable of instilling the proper discipline needed for success in primary school. See: Lawrence A. Cremin, The Transformation of the School: Progressivism in American Education, 1876–1957 (New York: Vintage Books, 1961), 18–19; William J. Reese, America’s Public Schools: From the Common School to “No Child Left Behind” (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), 97–8; William J. Reese, “The Philosopher King of St. Louis,” in Curriculum and Consequence: Herbert M. Kliebard and the Promise of Schooling, ed. Barry M. Franklin (New York: Teachers College Press, 2000); Reese, History, Education, and the Schools, 69; Troen, The Public and the Schools, 102, 107; Beatty, Preschool Education in America, 66.

⁸ Henry J. Perkinson, “Rousseau’s Emile: Political Theory and Education,” History of Education Quarterly 5, no. 2 (June 1965): 81–96; J.J. Chambliss, “Human Development in Plato and Rousseau: ‘Training From Childhood in Goodness’,” The Journal of Educational Thought 13, no. 2 (August 1979): 96–108; Beatty, Preschool Education in America, 7–9; Steven B. Smith, “Rousseau on Civilization and its Discontents,” in Political Philosophy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012), 189–213.

⁹ Ann Taylor Allen, The Transatlantic Kindergarten: Education and Women’s Movements in Germany and the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 33–86; Roberta Wollons, ed., Kindergartens and Cultures: The Global Diffusion of an Idea (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000); James C. Albisetti, “Froebel Crosses the Alps: Introducing the Kindergarten in Italy,” History of Education Quarterly 49, no. 2 (2009): 159–69.

¹⁰ Reese, America’s Public Schools, 80; Beatty, Preschool Education in America, 3–37; Shapiro, Child’s Garden, 1–17.

¹¹ G.R. Dodson, “An Interpretation of the St. Louis Philosophical Movement,” The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods 6, no. 13 (June 24, 1909): 337–45; Charles M. Perry, “William Torrey Harris and the St. Louis Movement in Philosophy,” The Monist 46, no. 1 (January 1939): 59–79; Richard D. Mosier, “Hegelianism in American Education,” Educational Theory 3, no. 2 (April 1953): 97–103; Bernard J. Kohlbremmer, “William Torrey Harris, Superintendent of Schools, St. Louis, 1868–1880, History of Education Journal 2, no. 2 (Winter 1951): 54–61; Kenneth Zimmerman, “William Torrey Harris: Forgotten Man in American Education,” Journal of Thought 20, no. 2 (Summer 1986): 76–89; Harold B. Dunkel, “W.T. Harris and Hegelianism in American Education,” The School Review 81, no. 2 (February 1973): 233–46; James A. Good, “A ‘World-Historical Idea’: The St. Louis Hegelians and the Civil War,” Journal of American Studies 34, no. 3 (December 2000): 447–64.

¹² Kurt F. Leidecker, Yankee Teacher: The Life of William Torrey Harris (New York: Philosophical Library, 1946), 1–78; Curti, Social Ideas of American Educators, 311–12.

¹³ Leidecker, Yankee Teacher, 69–78.

¹⁴ William Torrey Harris, Books That Have Helped Me (New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1888), 18.

¹⁵ Leidecker, Yankee Teacher, 257–8.

¹⁶ Ibid., 256–7.

¹⁷ See also Richard Hofstadter, Social Darwinism in American Thought (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1992); Edward C. Rafferty, Apostle of Human Progress: Lester Frank Ward and American Political Thought, 1841–1913 (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003); Julie A. Reuben, The Making of the Modern University: Intellectual Transformation and the Marginalization of Morality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).

¹⁸ Gould, Ontogeny and Phylogeny, 69–88.

¹⁹ As Susan Blow wrote in 1895, “Development, with one step across the earth has taken possession of our science, with another step across the sky has appropriated our theology, and striding across the air has made psychology and education its own forever”. Susan Blow, Symbolic Education: A Commentary on Froebel’s “Mother Play” (New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1895), 21.

²⁰ Robert Nisbet, History of the Idea of Progress (New York: Basic Books, 1980), 232–35; J.D.Y. Peel, Herbert Spencer: The Evolution of a Sociologist (London: Heinemann, 1971), 100–2.

²¹ David E. Nye, American Technological Sublime (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994), 45–76, 109–42; Jackson Lears, Rebirth of a Nation: The Making of Modern America, 1877–1920 (New York: Harper, 2009), 59–60, 142–3, 223; Robert H. Wiebe, The Search for Order, 1877–1920 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1967), 15–16.

²² Denton J. Snider, The St. Louis Movement in Philosophy, Literature, Education, Psychology, with Chapters of Autobiography (St. Louis, MO: Sigma Publishing Co., 1920).

²³ Ibid., 14–15.

²⁴ For a glimpse of how the era’s confidence was embodied by and projected onto the physical landscape of St Louis, see Denton Snider’s exuberant description of the Eads Bridge. When finished in 1874, the bridge spanned the Mississippi River and stood as the longest arch bridge in the world. Snider’s descriptions of its construction are positively rapturous. “Every Sunday worshipful, week after week,” he wrote, “I would saunter down to the Bridge and contemplate it in a sort of adoration and with a soul-renewing wonder and sympathy … . When I saw those caissons, piers, arches rise up from old turbid Mississippi … I said to myself: There! Behold now God’s Thought creating the world … see your gossamer abstractions turning concrete and practical; and just watch your Hegel’s Logic with its intricate fine-spun web of Pure Essences realizing itself in yonder structure with all its turns, nodes, iron rods and braces.” The bridge stood as “the chief reality of that otherwise phantasmal epoch”. To Snider, it was a sacrament of sorts – a physical manifestation of the providential grace St Louis was bound to receive. Snider, The St. Louis Movement, 109, 111. For more on the Eads bridge, see: Henry Petroski, Engineers of Dreams: Great Bridge Builders and the Spanning of America (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995), 22–65; Quinta Scott and Howard S. Miller, The Eads Bridge (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1979), 67–140; John A. Kouwenhoven, “The Designing of the Eads Bridge,” Technology and Culture 23, no. 4 (1982): 535–68; Leidecker, Yankee Teacher, 316–27.

²⁵ Thomas F. Gosset, Race: The History of an Idea in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 44–51, 63–7, 152, 163–4.

²⁶ Snider, The St. Louis Movement, 7–13; John O. Riedl, “The Hegelians of St. Louis Missouri and their Influence in the United States,” in The Legacy of Hegel: Proceedings of the Marquette Hegel Symposium 1970, ed. J.J. O’Malley et al. (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1973), 268–87; Matt Erlin, “Absolute Speculation: The St. Louis Hegelians and the Question of American National Identity,” in German Culture in Nineteenth Century America: Reception, Adaptation, Transformation, ed. Lynne Tatlock and Matt Erlin (New York: Camden House, 2005), 89–92; William H. Goetzmann, ed., The American Hegelians: An Intellectual Episode in the History of Western America (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1973), 3–19.

²⁷ See above note 5 for the historiography on Harris’ Hegelianism.

²⁸ Harris, Books That Have Helped Me, 21.

²⁹ William Torrey Harris, Twenty-Fifth Annual Report of the Board of Directors of the St. Louis Public Schools, For the Year Ending August 1, 1879 (St Louis: Democrat Litho. and Printing Co., 1880), 217.

³⁰ Goetzmann, The American Hegelians, 14.

³¹ Marx Wartofsky, “On the Creation and Transformation of Norms of Human Development,” in Value Presuppositions in the Theories of Human Development, ed. Leonard Cirillo and Semour Wapner (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1986), 112.

³² William Kessen, The Child (New York: Wiley, 1965), 115. See also: Lears, No Place of Grace, 147.

³³ Joseph M. Menius, Susan Blow: “Mother of the Kindergarten” (St Clair, MO: Page One Publishing, 1993), 11–24. For a description of Blow’s demeanour and pedagogy, see: Elizabeth Harrison, Sketches Along Life’s Road (Boston: The Stratford Company, 1930), 63–4.

³⁴ Menius, Susan Blow, 25–30.

³⁵ For more on Froebel, see: W.H.G. Armytage, “Friedrich Froebel: A Centennial Appreciation,” History of Education Journal 3, no. 4 (Summer 1952): 107–13; Jessie White, The Educational Ideas of Froebel (London: University Tutorial Press, 1916); Denton J. Snider and Johannes Froebel-Parker, The Life of Frederick Froebel: Founder of the Kindergarten (Bloomington, IN: AuthorHouse, 2013); Matilda H. Kriege, Friedrich Froebel: A Biographical Sketch (New York: E. Steiger, 1875).

³⁶ Weber, The Kindergarten, 1–10; Beatty, Preschool Education in America, 41–7.

³⁷ Beatty, Preschool Education in America, 52–64; Shapiro, Child’s Garden, 29–44.

³⁸ Menius, Susan Blow, 31–8; Beatty, Preschool Education in America, 65; Shapiro, Child’s Garden, 47–50.

³⁹ Menius, Susan Blow, 34–6; Beatty, Preschool Education in America, 65–6; Troen, The Public and the Schools, 103–4; Shapiro, Child’s Garden, 51–5.

⁴⁰ William Torrey Harris, Seventeenth Annual Report of the Board of Directors of the St. Louis Public Schools, for the Year Ending August 1, 1871 (St Louis: Plate, Olshausen & Co., Printers and Binders, 1872), 9.

⁴¹ William Torrey Harris, Twenty-Second Annual Report of the Board of Directors of the St. Louis Public Schools, for the Year Ending August 1, 1876 (St Louis: Slawson, Printer, 1877), 79.

⁴² William Torrey Harris, “The Kindergarten as a Preparation for the Highest Civilization,” School and Home Education 22, no. 9 (May 1903).

⁴³ Harris, Twenty-Second Annual Report, 79–81.

⁴⁴ There is some historiographical confusion about when the first public kindergarten for African American students was founded in St Louis. My research indicates that the first kindergarten for African American students was founded in 1882. The first mention of support for a kindergarten for African Americans appeared in the 1881 Annual Report. In the 1882 report, Superintendent Long wrote, “With the present school year a kindergarten was opened in connection with no. 1 (colored) school”, referring to the 1882–3 school year. Numerous newspaper articles confirm that the first kindergarten for African Americans was founded in 1882, though Susan Blow had advocated for them for some time. For one example, see: C.E.L., “The Colored Kindergarten: Great Success of a New Enterprise,” St. Louis Globe-Democrat, September 10, 1882: 4. For discussion of kindergartens for African Americans in the Annual Reports, see: Twenty-Seventh Annual Report of the Board of President and Directors of the St. Louis Public Schools for the Year Ending August 1, 1881 (St Louis: Slawson & Co., Printers, 1882), 30; Twenty-Eighth Annual Report of the Board of President and Directors of the St. Louis Public Schools for the Year Ending August 1, 1882 (St Louis: Slawson & Co., Printers, 1883), 50. For the historiography of the first public kindergarten for African Americans in St Louis, see: Reese, “The Philosopher King of St. Louis,” 172; Leidecker, Yankee Teacher, 272; Troen, The Public and the Schools, 108; Elinor Mondale Gersman, “The Development of Public Education for Blacks in Nineteenth Century St. Louis, Missouri,” The Journal of Negro Education 41, no. 1 (Winter 1972): 45.

⁴⁵ Harris, Twenty-Fifth Annual Report, 216–17.

⁴⁶ Harris, Twenty-Second Annual Report, 96; See also Harris, Twenty-Fifth Annual Report, 218; Harris described the nature of the child by making a distinction between a child’s “true nature”, which was “Reason”, and the child’s “actual nature”, which was “lashed by the scourges” of one’s human and bodily “appetite and passion”. Living a life governed by “Reason” was then a self-actualization of one’s true nature; William Torrey Harris, Psychologic Foundations of Education: An Attempt to Show the Genesis of the Higher Faculties of the Mind (New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1898), 256.

⁴⁷ Harris, Twenty-Second Annual Report, 96–7.

⁴⁸ Ibid., 96.

⁴⁹ Harris leaned heavily on Blow, including unpublished lectures by Blow that described the kindergarten-aged child’s stage of psychological development in his Annual Reports. See: Susan Blow, “The Symbolic Phase of Education,” in Harris, Twenty-Fifth Annual Report, 207–9.

⁵⁰ As Harris wrote in his Psychologic Foundations of Education (1898), he aimed to understand the development of the mind through rational psychology. Though not entirely opposed to the new psychology of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century (he thought it was useful for understanding arrested development), Harris believed that the contents of the mind could only be understood through one’s own reflection and insight. “By reflecting on the forms of mental activity, we enter the province of rational psychology, and come for the first time to see the real nature of the mind.” Harris, Psychologic Foundations of Education, 3.

⁵¹ Ibid., 241; Philosophic knowing also made it possible for the individual to recognise, in Hegelian terms, the mutual dependence of all things as a single unity of dependent beings. Reason would lead the individual to the conclusion that such a unity was, by definition, not dependent on any other whole, but that it was a first cause, self-active. As individuals came to understand themselves as self-determining and self-made through their own experience – or as self-active – likewise, they could discern the self-active unity of all things, the absolute.

⁵² Shapiro, Child’s Garden, 56; Blow, “The Symbolic Phase of Education,” 207–8; See also Harris, Psychologic Foundations of Education, 308–12.

⁵³ Harris, Twenty-Second Annual Report, 97.

⁵⁴ Blow, Symbolic Education, 127.

⁵⁵ Susan Blow, “The Educational Value of the Gifts and Occupations,” in Harris, Twenty-Fifth Annual Report, 205.

⁵⁶ Ibid., 206.

⁵⁷ Blow, Symbolic Education, 127, 134.

⁵⁸ Blow, “The Symbolic Phase of Education,” 209.

⁵⁹ Blow, Symbolic Education, 249.

⁶⁰ Menius, Susan Blow, 43–6; Shapiro, Child’s Garden, 165–86.

⁶¹ Leidecker, Yankee Teacher, 403–96.

⁶² William Torrey Harris, “My Pedagogical Creed,” The School Journal 54, no. 26 (June 26, 1897): 813, Box 29, Folder 637, William Torrey Harris papers, 1865–1908, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC; see also Harris, Twenty-Fifth Annual Report, 218; William Torrey Harris, Eighteenth Annual Report of the Board of Directors of the St. Louis Public Schools, for the Year Ending August 1, 1872 (St Louis: Democrat Litho. and Printing Co., 1873), 76.

⁶³ William Torrey Harris, “The Kindergarten and the Primary School,” Box 16, Folder 352, William Torrey Harris papers, 1865–1908, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

⁶⁴ William Torrey Harris, “In What Does Spiritual Evolution Consist?” Education (1896), 6, Box 16, Folder 337, William Torrey Harris papers, 1865–1908, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

⁶⁵ William Torrey Harris, “Address Before the Graduates at the Commencement Exercises of the Indian Industrial School, Carlisle, PA, March 2,1899,” microfiche 5004, no. 3188, History of Education Collection, Milbank Memorial Library, Teachers College.

⁶⁶ Ibid., 1; see also William Torrey Harris, “The Church, The State, and The School,” North American Review 132, no. 298 (September 1881): 15.

⁶⁷ Harris, “Address Before the Graduates at the Commencement Exercises of the Indian Industrial School,” 1.

⁶⁸ Ibid., 1. As Harris saw it, his message was a deeply humane one, deliberately opposed to policies that argued for the extermination of Native Americans (which he mentioned multiple times in his address).

⁶⁹ William Torrey Harris, “The Kindergarten as a Preparation for the Highest Civilization,” School and Home Education 22, no. 9 (May 1903): 425–6.

⁷⁰ William Torrey Harris, “The Old Psychology vs. the New,” in The Old Psychology and the New: Addresses Before the Massachusetts Schoolmasters Club, April 27, 1895 (Boston, MA: New England Publishing Co., 1895), 32; see also Harris, “The Church, the State, and the School,” 15.

⁷¹ Harris, “The Old Psychology vs. the New,” 32.

⁷² Harris, “The Church, the State, and the School,” 15.

⁷³ Harris, “The Old Psychology vs. the New,” 33.

⁷⁴ Harris, Psychologic Foundations of Education, 311–12. The transition from one stage of development to another was not a matter of clear gradations. Blow, quoting Froebel, insisted that “sharp limits and definite subdivisions within the continuous series of the years of development” are “highly pernicious and even destructive in their influence”. Blow, Symbolic Education, 30.

⁷⁵ Throughout his Psychologic Foundations of Education (1898), Harris lumped the child and savage together when describing their capacities of mind. See Harris, Psychologic Foundations of Education, 39, 117, 142–3, 265, 353.

⁷⁶ Blow, Symbolic Education, 52.

⁷⁷ Ibid., 51–77.

⁷⁸ Blow, Symbolic Education, 94, 97.

⁷⁹ Even biological recapitulation had an idealist interpretation. As Blow put it, “[s]ince physical evolution culminates in man, the reproduction of the race within the individual makes actual the ideal under whose blind impulsion Nature mounts the ascending spires of being”. Blow, Symbolic Education, 35.

⁸⁰ Ibid., 126–7.

⁸¹ Reese, America’s Public Schools, 80.

⁸² Ibid.; Beatty, Preschool Education in America, 3–37; Shapiro, Child’s Garden, 1–17.

⁸³ Rafferty, Apostle of Human Progress, 8–10. For more on state-centred liberalism in the late nineteenth century, see: Michael J. Lacey, “The World of the Bureaus: Government and the Positivist Project in the Late Nineteenth Century,” in The State and Social Investigation in Britain and the United States, ed. Michael J. Lacey and Marry O. Furner (New York: Woodrow Wilson Center Press and Cambridge University Press, 1993), 127–70; Mary O. Furner, “The Republican Tradition and the New Liberalism: Social Investigation, State Building, and Social Learning in the Gilded Age,” Lacey and Furner, The State and Social Investigation, 171–241; Andrew Jewett, Science Democracy, and the American University: From the Civil War to the Cold War (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 77–8.

⁸⁴ Leidecker, Yankee Teacher, 456–84.

⁸⁵ For Blow’s critiques of Rousseauian early childhood education, see: Blow, Symbolic Education, 3–18; Susan Blow, Educational Issues in the Kindergarten (New York: Appleton and Co., 1908), 190–238.

⁸⁶ Even as Commissioner of Education, Harris’ recapitulative views were inseparable from his belief in a state-centred liberalism. Even Harris’ most bizarre accomplishment at the Bureau of Education, namely, the introduction of reindeer to Alaska, was motivated by his belief in the linear progress of civilisations. As an educational initiative, Harris argued that the introduction of reindeer herding to the natives of Alaska would help them “take the long first step from nomadic fishermen and hunters to dwellers in villages with permanent employments”, that is, “a step further toward civilization”. William Torrey Harris, “Civilizing the Natives of Alaska,” Ainslee’s Magazine 6, no. 2 (September 1900): 174. See also, Leidecker, Yankee Teacher, 479–84.

⁸⁷ This position (among others) led to Harris’ reputation as a conservative within the historiography of education. See: Herbert M. Kliebard, The Struggle for the American Curriculum: 1893–1958 (New York: Routledge, 1995); Cremin, The Transformation of the School, 14–20; Curti, Social Ideas of American Educators, 310–47.

⁸⁸ For more on Harris’ institution building and alignment with nineteenth-century industry, see: David Tyack and Elizabeth Hansot, Managers of Virtue: Public School Leadership in America, 1820–1980 (New York: Basic Books, 1982); Karanovich and Morice, “Managers of Virtue Revisited: The Missouri Anomaly, 1865–1915,” 260; David Tyack, The One Best System: A History of American Urban Education (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974), 43.

⁸⁹ Blow, Educational Issues in the Kindergarten, 63.

⁹⁰ Steven Mintz, Huck’s Raft: A History of American Childhood (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 152.

⁹¹ For an account that foregrounds this type of analysis, see Thomas S. Popkewitz, Cosmopolitanism and the Age of School Reform: Science, Education, and Making Society by Making the Child (New York: Routledge, 2008), 63–94.

⁹² Fallace argues that the legacy of cultural recapitulation continued to be felt in the deficit models of cultural and sociological development, like Oscar Lewis’ “culture of poverty” thesis, and in the application of genetic psychology and stage theory to curricula. Fallace, Race and the Origins of Progressive Education, 145–7.

⁹³ Richard Lerner, ed., Developmental Psychology: Historical and Philosophical Perspectives (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1983); Leonard Cirillo and Seymour Wapner, eds., Value Presuppositions in Theories of Human Development (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1986).

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Eric Luckey

Eric Luckey is a PhD candidate in the Department of Educational Policy Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.