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Hegelianism and the Curriculum: The Educational Philosophy of William Torrey Harris
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19926 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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4 / 1992 |
3,371 Words |
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Stephen J. Sneigoski
Stephen J. Sniegoski is a historian with the U.S Department of
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Much concern is expressed today about students' lack of academic knowledge. A number of recent best-selling books have focused on this subject, including E.D. Hirsch's Cultural Literacy and Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind. Chester E. Finn, former assistant secretary of education under William J. Bennett, and current Assistant Secretary of Education Diane Ravitch authored What Do Our Seventeen-Year-Olds Know, which found that students know very little indeed in the subjects of geography, history, and literature.
This current concern about academic content goes against the conventional educational thinking of most of the twentieth century. Academic content had been relegated to the background for a number of reasons. First, john Dewey redefined education to mean the fostering of thinking, which he radically distinguished from the transmission of knowledge. Second, the idea that schools must deal with all manner of knowledge that possessed social utility--family living, sex, auto safety, health, vocational training-squeezed the amount of time available for academic material. Furthermore, numerous educators emphasized that the curriculum should appeal to children, a most children regard academic subjects as boring. Moreover, since such academic subjects are difficult and cannot be mastered by everyone, egalitarian educationists rejected them as elitist.
Some object that by transmitting knowledge of the past, academics fail to indoctrinate children with current ideas of social reform, which some educators regard as the sine qua non of education. In fact, in some quarters, traditional academic teachings are perceived a s opposed to social change because they provide ideas that are currently deemed racist or sexist. All of this is not to say that academic subjects have ever been completely abandoned in America's schools: They have remained, to some degree, and this despite, not because of, the ideas of leading twentieth-century educationists.
William Torrey Harris
In the nineteenth century, however, things were different. The educational establishment openly championed the academic nature of the schools. And the individual who best provided the philosophical rationale for this academic orientation was William Torrey Harris.
Although little remembered now, Harris was the dominant figure in education in the latter part of the nineteenth century, a period during which American public education underwent
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