Recapitulation Theory and the New Education: Race, Culture, Imperialism, and Pedagogy, 1894–1916

Abstract

In this historical study the author argues that the most influential pre–World War I educational theorists subscribed to different forms of the recapitulation theory that conceptualized non‐White cultures as childlike, prior steps toward the more advanced, industrialized West. The author demonstrates how the pedagogies of William Torrey Harris, Frank Lester Ward, Charles McMurray, John Dewey, Charles Hubbard Judd, and G. Stanley Hall all reflected some form of the recapitulation approach. Therefore, racism was built right into the underlying structure of almost all of the proposed reforms of the new education and appeared in some of the most widely used educational materials of the period (1894–1916).