Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 February 2017
Harold Rugg IS usually remembered as one of a group of professor-reformers (sometimes referred to as the “reconstructionist wing” of the progressive education movement) whose educational philosophy included the tenet that the school ought to be in the vanguard of social change. The nucleus of this group — which in addition to Rugg looked to John Dewey, Boyd H. Bode, William H. Kilpatrick, and John L. Childs, among others, for its intellectual leadership — was located at Teachers College, Columbia University, and reached the peak of its influence during the 1930s, notably in the pages of the journal, The Social Frontier.
1. The Social Frontier was published in New York between 1934 and 1943; after 1939 it was called Frontiers of Democracy. Counts, Kilpatrick, and Rugg all edited the journal at various times during its ten-year existence.Google Scholar
2. Published by Ginn and Company, Boston, Massachusetts, in the 1930s.Google Scholar
3. Rugg, Harold, Culture and Education in America (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1931), pp. 283–91.Google Scholar
4. Ibid., p. 254. 5 Rugg, Harold, That Men May Understand: An American in the Long Armistice (New York: Doubleday, Doran and Co., 1941), pp. 169–70.Google Scholar
6. Wyck, Van Brooks, America's Coming of Age (New York: B. W. Huebsch, 1915), p. 137.Google Scholar
7. Ibid., p. 3–8.Google Scholar
8. Ibid., p. 37–70.Google Scholar
9. Ibid., p. 79.Google Scholar
10. Ibid., pp. 112, 118–19.Google Scholar
11. Wyck, Van Brooks, Letters and Leadership (New York: B. W. Huebsch, 1918), p. 119.Google Scholar
12. Ibid., p. 127.Google Scholar
13. Rugg said that Waldo Frank had influenced him even more profoundly than had Brooks (That Men May Understand, p. 323). Be that as it may, the similarity in outlook between Brooks and Rugg is striking.Google Scholar
14. Brooks, America's Coming of Age, p. 33.Google Scholar
15. Ibid., p. 32.Google Scholar
16. Rugg, Culture and Education, pp. 4, 92.Google Scholar
17. Ibid., p. 145–46.Google Scholar
18. Rugg, That Men May Understand, p. 202.Google Scholar
19. Ibid., p. 320–22.Google Scholar
20. However this aspect of Rugg's work has been dealt with in Mark Phillips, “The Seven Arts and Harold Rugg: A Study in Intellectual History” (Master's thesis, Columbia University, 1961), and Peter F. Carbone Jr., “The Social and Educational Thought of Harold Rugg” (Ed.D. diss., Harvard University, 1967). My own treatment of this segment of Rugg's thought owes much to Phillips' earlier study.Google Scholar
21. Rugg, Culture and Education, pp. 163, 205–10.Google Scholar
22. Ibid., p. 165.Google Scholar
23. Ibid., p. 164.Google Scholar
24. Ibid., p. 179–211.Google Scholar
25. Rugg, Harold, The Great Technology: Social Chaos and the Public Mind (New York: John Day Co., 1933), p. 284.Google Scholar
26. Rugg, Culture and Education, p. 229.Google Scholar
27. Ibid., p. 230.Google Scholar
28. Here I am indebted to Boyd, H. Bode for his criticism of Rugg in “The Problem of Culture in Education,” Educational Research Bulletin 10 (September 30, 1931): 339–46.Google Scholar
29. Rugg, Culture and Education, p. 211.Google Scholar
30. Kazin, Alfred, On Native Grounds: An Interpretation of Modern American Prose Literature (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1942), p. 181.Google Scholar
31. Rugg, Culture and Education, pp. 230–32.Google Scholar
32. Rugg, Harold and Shumaker, Ann, The Child-Centered School: An Appraisal of the New Education (Yonkers-on-Hudson, N.Y.: World Book Co., 1928), pp. 282–86.Google Scholar
33. Rugg, Harold, American Life and the School Curriculum: Next Steps Toward Schools of Living (Boston: Ginn and Co., 1936), p. 440.Google Scholar
34. Rugg, Culture and Education, p. 232.Google Scholar
35. I have discussed this book at length in “A Critical Analysis of Harold Rugg's Views on Creativity and Knowledge,” The Journal of Creative Behavior 3, no. 2 (Spring 1969): 128–43.Google Scholar