ABSTRACT
IN 1935, HISTORIAN Merle Curti published the first edition of his landmark study The Social Ideas of American Educators.2 Hailed by one reviewer as “one of the most important contributions ever made to the literature of American social and intellectual history,” Curti’s book sought to explore how the social ideology of prominent 19th-and early 20th-century educators influenced the kinds of pedagogical approaches they advocated.3 Curti carefully examined the biographies of such key figures as Henry Barnard, Booker T.Washington, William T.Harris, Francis Parker, G.Stanley Hall, Edward L.Thorndike, John Dewey, and others, for insight into how their views on what was deemed as socially “necessary, possible, and desirable” translated into their various educational practices and programs. Acknowledging that, in some instances, these educators were not fully aware of the social philosophy their educational work reflected, Curti maintained that in each case this social philosophy was conditioned by a complex web of factors that included their personal temperament, the social and economic class to which they belonged, the circumstances of their own education, the prevailing intellectual currents of the time in which they lived and worked, and so on. These factors, in turn, shaped how they explicitly and implicitly came down on the big questions concerning the nature of human beings, the conception of the ideal social order, the basis for making judgments about knowledge and truth, and so on. Curti was especially interested in understanding how the social ideas held by prominent educational leaders were reflected in their thinking about the education of women and other subjugated and marginalized people, their views on the role of education in issues of war and peace, and their attitudes concerning the function of education in relation to the expansion of nationalism in the United States and around the world.
