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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 February 2017
In 1938 Michael Demiashkevich, professor of education at the George Peabody College for Teachers, and F. Alden Shaw, principal of the Detroit Country Day School, founded the Essentialist Movement at the annual meeting of the American Association of School Administrators. At that Atlantic City meeting, William Chandler Bagley delivered an address—“An Essentialist's Platform for the Advancement of American Education.” Like any tag, the essentialist tag that has been pinned on Bagley obscures as much as it designates. It has drawn attention away from the greater part of his career as an educationist, obscuring many of the problems he encountered and attempted to resolve.
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34. The topic of “educational values” turns out to be a very complicated one, and is, in itself, a topic worthy of another paper. In one sense, it is Bagley's attempt to answer Herbert Spencer's question: “What knowledge is of most worth?” For a discussion of Bagley's “educational values,” see my “A Study of William Chandler Bagley's Educational Doctrines and his Program for Teacher Preparation, 1895–1918” (Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Illinois, Urbana, III., 1967), pp. 160–63. Also see Bagley's Educational Values (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1911); and his “Educational Values,” Proceedings of the Pennsylvania State Educational Association (Lancaster, Pa., 1915).Google Scholar
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36. The method was set forth in Educational Values. Google Scholar
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39. Bagley, William C. and Alexander, Thomas, The Teacher of the Social Studies, Part XIV of the Commission on the Social Studies Reports, American Historical Association (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1937), p. 20. Bagley was credited with that part of the book from which this quotation was taken.Google Scholar
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46. For the text of the debate, see David Snedden, “Fundamental Distinctions between Liberal and Vocational Education, I,” NEA Proceedings (1914); and William C. Bagley, “Fundamental Distinctions between Liberal and Vocational Education, II,” ibid. For an account of the debate and others’ reactions to it, see Walter H. Drost, “Social Efficiency and the Curriculum: The Professional Career of David Snedden” (Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Wisconsin, Madison, Wis., 1965).Google Scholar
47. Bagley, “Fundamental Distinctions between Liberal and Vocational Education, II,“ p. 164.Google Scholar
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49. Twenty years before the Snedden-Bagley debate, Bagley was just being graduated from the Michigan Agricultural College and was about to begin his teaching at Garth. As was shown earlier in this paper, in the summer between his two years at Garth, he attended the University of Chicago where he studied psychology and physiology. From Garth, he went on to the University of Wisconsin and Cornell University where he studied psychology, education and the nervous system, and took his advanced degrees. Bagley's first book, The Educative Process (1905), reflected his studies. In it he accepted and built upon Titchener's definition of apperception “as ‘a perception whose character is determined wholly or chiefly by the peculiar tendencies of a nervous system rather than by the nature of the thing perceived’ “ (p. 91). The next book, Classroom Management (1907), was based on the distinction Bagley had made between habit and judgment in his first book. Bagley had also studied the relationship between teaching and periods of mental growth and attempted to give recommendations about the teaching of morality based on that study (see William C. Bagley, “The Pedagogy of Morality and Religion as Related to the Periods of Development,” Religious Education, IV, no. 1 [April 1909]). And he had even tried his hand at teaching genetic psychology at Teachers College, Columbia University in the summer of 1908.Google Scholar
50. Bagley, William C. to Edmund J. James, President, University of Illinois, April 27, 1915, University of Illinois Archives, Urbana, Ill.Google Scholar
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57. Ibid. Italics are mine.Google Scholar
58. Bagley, William C. “Curricula of the Normal Schools,“ in Learned, William S., Bagley, William C., et. al., The Professional Preparation of Teachers for American Public Schools, Bulletin Number 14 (New York: The Carnegie Foundation, 1920), pp. 179–17.Google Scholar
59. Ibid., p. 180.Google Scholar
60. Ibid. Google Scholar
61. Ibid. Google Scholar
62. Ibid. Google Scholar
63. Ibid., p. 181.Google Scholar
64. In Classroom Management, Bagley told the teacher that, in principle, he was directly responsible to the head of the school system, the superintendent. But in practice the “principal of the building” usually intervened between the teacher and the superintendent. The principal was responsible for the operation and the conduct of the school. To illustrate the power, responsibility and authority of the principal Bagley compared him to the captain of a ship. The captain read his orders—the course of study—and passed them on to the teacher. In turn, the teacher saw to it that the students learned the designated habits, skills, information and ideals. This scheme required a teacher to give his loyalty to the principal. Loyalty meant, Bagley wrote, “unquestioned obedience.” For the teacher who could not offer such obedience, said Bagley, “his resignation is the only alternative” (p. 262; italics are Bagley's).Google Scholar
65. Bagley, “Curricula of the Normal Schools,“ p. 180.Google Scholar
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68. Bagley, William C. “School Management,“ Cyclopedia of Education, Paul Monroe, ed. (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1911), V. 282.Google Scholar
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71. For a complete account of Bagley's interpretation and use of the hypotheses of emergent evolution, see Thomas David Moore, “Emergent Evolutionism and the Educational Theory of William Chandler Bagley” (Unpublished Ed.D. dissertation, Rutgers—The State University, New Brunswick, N.J., 1966).Google Scholar
72. Bagley, William C. Education and Emergent Man (New York: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1934), p. vii.Google Scholar
