Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-gvvz8 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-27T09:36:33.929Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The Yale Report of 1828 and Liberal Education: A Neorepublican Manifesto

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 February 2017

Jack C. Lane
Jack C. Lane*
Affiliation:
American History at Rollins College
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

In recent years, historians of higher education have mercifully taken us beyond the pinched and narrow conventional view of the nineteenth-century college curriculum to a more meaningful contextual interpretation of that much maligned institution. In the process they have reinterpreted the “Old College's” principal manifesto: the Yale Report of 1828. Earlier studies had depicted the Yale Report as either a document cementing a collegiate education to the past or as one aimed at maintaining “a numerically tiny social elite against the hostile pressure of a rising Jacksonian equalitarianism.” Recent studies have revised this interpretation, on the one hand by arguing that the report simply reaffirmed the liberal arts as taught through the classical curriculum, and on the other by contending that it was “actually a thoughtful, responsible attempt to consider the place of the undergraduate college in the totality of the American educational scheme.” Instead of representing the last “bulwark of educational reactionism, elitism, and authoritarianism,” the revisionists argue, the report did not significantly differ “in its essentials from the vision held by most of America's foremost champions of university reform.”

Type
Articles
Information
History of Education Quarterly , Volume 27 , Issue 3 , Fall 1987 , pp. 325 - 338
Copyright
Copyright © 1987 by the History of Education Society 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Notes

1 The first quotation (“tiny social elite”) is from Laurence Veysey, “Stability and Experiment in American Undergraduate Curriculum,” in Content and Context: Essays on College Education, ed. Kaysen, Carl (New York, 1973), 2. The other quotations are from Douglas Sloan, “Harmony, Chaos, and Consensus: The American College Curriculum,” Teachers College Record 73 (Dec. 1971): 221–51. See pages 242–47 for a discussion of the Yale Report. Other writers who have interpreted the Yale Report as a conservative, even reactionary, statement are Hofstadter, Richard and Hardy, E. Dewitt The Development and Scope of Higher Education in the United States (New York, 1952), 15–16; Urofsky, Melvin I. “Reforms and Response: The Yale Report of 1828,” History of Education Quarterly 5 (Mar. 1965): 53–67; Schmidt, George P. The Liberal Arts College: A Chapter in American Cultural History (New Brunswick, N.J., 1957), 55–57, and especially “Intellectual Crosscurrents in American Colleges, 1825–1855,” American Historical Review 42 (Oct. 1936): 46–47; Rudolph, Frederick The American College and University: A History (New York, 1962), 134–35; Rudolph was more generous with the report in his later work, Curriculum: A History of the American Undergraduate Course of Study since 1636 (San Francisco, 1977), 67–76, but still depicted it as a retreat to the past; Brubacher, John and Rudy, Willis Higher Education in Transition: A History of American Colleges and Universities, 1636–1976 (New York, 1958), 101–2; R. Butts, Freeman The College Charts Its Course: Historical Conceptions and Current Proposals (New York, 1939), 118–25; Snow, Louis Franklin The College Curriculum in the United States (New York, 1907), 149–54. Less harsh in their judgments of the report are, in addition to Sloan, Kelley, Brooks M. Yale: A History (New Haven, Conn., 1974), 160–65; Gabriel, Ralph Religion and Learning at Yale: The Church of Christ in the College and University (New Haven, Conn., 1958), 98–108, who correctly see the report as reaffirming the liberal arts as taught through the classical curriculum; Church, Robert L. Education in the United States: An Interpretive History (New York, 1976), 32–33; Cremin, Lawrence A. American Education: The National Experience, 1783–1876 (New York, 1980), 272–73; and Hall, Peter Dobkin The Organization of American Culture, 1700–1900: Private Institutions, Elites, and the Origins of American Nationality (New York, 1982), 151–67.Google Scholar

2 “Original Papers in Relation to a Course of Liberal Education,” American journal of Science and Arts 25 (Jan. 1829): 197–351. Hereafter cited as the Yale Report.Google Scholar

3 Berthoff, Rowland “Peasants and Artisans, Puritans and Republicans: Personal Liberty and Communal Equality in American History,“ journal of American History 69 (Dec. 1982): 579–98.Google Scholar

4 For a seminal study of the meaning of liberal education in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England and Europe, see Rothblatt, Sheldon Tradition and Change in English Liberal Education: An Essay in History and Culture (London, 1976). For a history of the idea of liberal education from the ancient world to the present, see Bruce, A. Kimball's recent book, Orators and Philosophers: A History of the Idea of Liberal Education (New York, 1986).Google Scholar

5 Hofstadter, Richard and Smith, Wilson American Higher Education: A Documentary History (Chicago, 1961), I: 10–12, 33.Google Scholar

6 Quoted in Warch, Richard School of the Prophets: Yale College, 1701–1740 (New Haven, Conn., 1973), 186. For a discussion of the role of ministers in colonial society, see Rutman, Darrett B. American Puritanism: Faith and Practice (Philadelphia, 1970), 91–97.Google Scholar

7 Wood, Gordon A. The Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1787 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1969), 47–53. The literature on republicanism is extensive and growing. For an evaluation of the most recent, see Shalhope, Robert E. “Toward a Republican Synthesis: The Emergence of an Understanding of Republicanism in American Historiography,” William and Mary Quarterly 29 (Jan. 1972): 49–80, and “Republicans and Early American Historiography,” William and Mary Quarterly 39 (Apr. 1982): 334–56. See also the American Quarterly 37 (1985), which devotes the entire fall issue to “Republicanism in the History and historiography of the United States.”Google Scholar

8 Wood, Creation of the Republic, 69.Google Scholar

9 Robson, David W. “College Founding in the New Republic, 1776–1800,“ History of Education Quarterly 23 (Fall 1983): 323–42, and his recent book, Educating Republicans: The College in the Era of the American Revolution, 1750–1800 (Westport, Conn., 1985). Robson points out that the major topic of college commencement addresses during this period was the role of virtue in the new republic.Google Scholar

10 Robson, “College Founding,“ 323 325. For a discussion of the neo-classical revival, see Wood, Creation of the Republic, 47.Google Scholar

11 Robson, “College Founding,“ 326.Google Scholar

12 Matson, Cathy and Onuf, Peter “Toward a Republican Empire: Interest and Ideology in Revolutionary America,“ American Quarterly 37 (Fall 1985): 496–531; Baker, Jean “From Belief into Culture: Republicanism in the Antebellum North,” ibid., 532–50. For an extended discussion of this issue, see McCoy, Drew R. The Elusive Republic: Political Economy in Jeffersonian America (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1980).Google Scholar

13 Kramnick, Isaac “Republican Revision Revisited,“ American Historical Review 87 (June 1982): 629–64.Google Scholar

14 Berthoff, “Peasants and Artisans,“ 579–98.Google Scholar

15 See chapter 4, “Salvaging the Classical Tradition,” in Kerber, Linda K. Federalists in Dissent: Imagery and Ideology in Jeffersonian America (Ithaca, N.Y., 1970), for a good discussion of the debate over classical learning after the Revolution.Google Scholar

16 For a general discussion, see Rudolph, American Colleges, 116–24; and Brubacher, and Rudy, Higher Education, 97–110. Criticism of the prescribed classical curriculum was by no means new. Reinhold, Meyer found discontent with it as early as the first decade of the eighteenth century, and evidence of scattered charges that the “dead languages” were of little benefit in the American environment could be found throughout the century. The “classical revival” during the revolutionary period stilled criticism momentarily until it broke out anew immediately after the Revolution and reached greater intensity during the 1820s. Reinhold, Meyer “Opponents of Classical Learning in America during the Revolutionary Period,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 112 (1968): 221–34. See also Middlekauff, Robert “A Persistent Tradition: The Classical Curriculum in Eighteenth-Century New England,” William and Mary Quarterly 18 (Jan. 1961): 54–67. For the debate after the revolutionary period, see Kerber, Federalists in Dissent.Google Scholar

17 Tyler, William A History of Amherst College… 1821 to 1891 (New York, 1895), 65. See also Ticknor, George Remarks on Changes Lately Proposed or Adopted in Harvard University (Boston, 1825).Google Scholar

18 Yale Report 298.Google Scholar

19 Rudolph, Curriculum, 67. For an evaluation of Day's presidency at Yale and background to the report, see Kelley, Yale, 156–66.Google Scholar

20 Report, Yale 300–301.Google Scholar

21 Ibid.Google Scholar

22 Ibid., 324.Google Scholar

23 Quoted in Kerber, Federalists in Dissent, 118–19.Google Scholar

24 Report, Yale 345.Google Scholar

25 Ibid., 309.Google Scholar

26 Ibid., 301–2.Google Scholar

27 Humphrey, David D. From King's College to Columbia, 1746–1800 (New York, 1976), 158; Ellis, Joseph J. The New England Mind in Transition: Samuel Johnson of Connecticut, 1696–1772 (New Haven, Conn., 1973), 239–40.Google Scholar

28 Church, Education in the U.S., 35. For a full discussion of this topic, see Kolesnik, Walter B. Mental Discipline in Modern Education (Madison, Wis., 1958). My thinking on mental discipline as a means not an end was shaped by Rothblatt, Tradition and Change. Google Scholar

29 Hall, Organization of American Culture, 160.Google Scholar

30 Boorstin, Daniel J. The Americans: The National Experience (New York, 1967), 34.Google Scholar

31 Report, Yale 324.Google Scholar

32 Ibid., 303, 307, 323.Google Scholar

33 Rudolph, Curriculum, 71.Google Scholar

34 Report, Yale 309.Google Scholar