To every thing, said the Preacher, there is a season, a time to be born and a time to die. But sometimes the students of Life misread its signs and prematurely bury one whose time has yet to come. Historians no less than journalists sometimes write obituaries when they should be appraising the tenacity of age. Over the past twenty years historians of American higher education have fallen deeply into the trap of prematurity; the obituary they wrote reads something like this:

Washington, D.C., 2 July 1862. The American Liberal Arts College died today after a prolonged illness. It was 226 years old.

American Colleges during the half century after the Civil War — usually small, under strong religious influence, and located away from cities — have been largely neglected by historians of higher education, although used as foils to set off the merits of new universities. This survey of how early university presidents viewed the colleges cannot right the historiographical balance, but it may reveal certain slogans of our academic Whig history in their original setting and thereby provide critical distance.

The general contours of nineteenth-century collegiate development, as found in the histories of American higher education, probably need substantial reexamination and extensive reshaping. Traditionally, colleges associated with various denominations are characterized largely in terms of sect-like religious zeal and are assigned the early nineteenth century as their period of importance. The few monographic studies of late nineteenth-century colleges and the more numerous works on the emergence of universities are correspondingly cast in a framework of increasing secularism in higher education. It seems more likely, however, that the current historical conception of the denominational college more closely coincides with realities of institutional development after rather than before 1850. In terms of support, control, and functions, there is evidence of a strong and increasing denominationalism in a large majority of late nineteenth-century colleges. For most of the institutions with founding dates prior to 1850 this degree of denominationalism is a departure from the primary role played by localism in founding and nurturing these educational enterprises during their earliest years. Although additional research will be necessary to confirm this contrast, there is good reason to anticipate that the traditional generalization concerning a basic trend from sectarianism toward secularism, when applied to American collegiate history during the nineteenth century, will have to be inverted.

Within the small buildings and gatherings of young men at New England colleges in the early nineteenth century, a social transformation began to work that would alter the experience of being a student. Unlike the conscious reforms introduced by the rise of universities after the Civil War, the transformation of the early nineteenth century proceeded without plan. No theorist designed it according to conscious pedagogical aims, and no institution either anticipated or really controlled the changes between 1800 and 1840. Only after 1840, when New England colleges already had assumed new forms, did a consciousness arise concerning what had transpired. The material conditions of collegiate life, the old communal arrangements that had controlled the behavior and intellectual activity of students through most of the colonial period had been demolished, creating a new disorder. Only after 1840 did plans arise for dealing with this disorder, a consequence of social changes sweeping over every New England institution of higher education. Long before the rise of universities, antebellum colleges had become places of dynamic change through the needs and workings of the student population itself.

This paper seeks to determine, in effect, why educational psychology as it professionalized and assumed the mantle of “science” after 1905 rejected the social point of view that characterized the thought of so many of the period's educational reformers and practicing educators. The principal components of this social point of view were the efforts to broaden the concept of education from training in academic disciplines to education for life in the community; to see education as a part of a larger social process and to shape educational policy accordingly; and to see education in general and schooling in particular as engines for reforming American society. This cluster of attitudes —which I will group under the term socialized education, following Jane Addams, emerged in the progressive era as the foundation underlying both Dewey's efforts to ally the school and society and, to take a single example from the other side of the coin, David Snedden's commitment to using education to promote social efficiency. But the leading educational psychologists of our period did not share this expanded educational point of view; indeed they can be said to have reverted to the view that education was predominantly the teaching of academic disciplines in schools. The questions that occur to me are “why?” and “so what?” I have no sure answers to either question, but I do have some suggestions that I hope will be provocative.

I have three broad purposes in this brief sketch: First, to describe the conception of education as a subject matter that in 1890 was generally held by teachers of education in American colleges and universities; second, to describe how this conception broke down in the next three decades under the forces of professionalization and specialization in both university research and in educational practice; and finally, to show how the resulting structure of the study of education reinforced a narrow view of human learning within educational psychology.