Numerous historians have explored what happened to support for the four-year sequence of history courses in U.S. high schools between 1890 and 1916 as the curriculum transformed from chronological history to social studies. Gary Nash, Charlotte Crabtree, and Ross E. Dunn argue that the fall of the four-year chronological history sequence was the result of historians having “walked away” from the schools. The authors identify the National Education Association's (NEA) 1916 Committee on Social Studies report as finishing off the “golden age of the four-year history curriculum,” which “came to an abrupt end as community civics and problems of democracy courses became dominant features of the new social studies curriculum, a national pattern in place for the next seventy years.”Footnote ¹ N. Ray Hiner suggests that the rise and fall of the four-year history sequence can be traced to “changing relations” between professionalized social scientists, historians, and educators, a battle that was ultimately won by the new historians such as James Harvey Robinson, whose ideas aligned with the new educational professionals and social efficiency reformers.Footnote ² Similarly, Ian Tyrrell traces a division within the ranks of professional historians between “Progressive reformers” allied with social studies advocates and “more traditional historians” who withdrew from the scene altogether.Footnote ³ In contrast, Julie Rueben links the fall of the four-year history sequence to changing conceptions of citizenship put forth by social scientists—a shift that involved viewing citizens as “members of communities rather than as autonomous individuals.”Footnote ⁴

Although these interpretations accurately link curriculum reform to changing cultural and intellectual currents, they focus almost entirely on developments within and across the newly professionalized disciplines of history and the social sciences. As a result, they overlook two of the most relevant disciplines to teachers of history and professional educators of the time—psychology and pedagogy. In this essay I argue that a significant explanation for why the four-year chronological history sequence lost the support of educators was the development and application of the new psychology during the 1890s.

The rationale for teaching history proposed by most professional historians during this period was based on old-fashioned “faculty” psychology—the theory that the mind was composed of mental faculties such as memory and imagination that could be strengthened like muscles. However, over the course of the 1890s, the mental faculty (or mental discipline) approach, which was reinforced by professional historians' educational experiences in Germany, was gradually replaced by a functional approach to mind and society. The new approach also had roots in the German thought, specifically the new psychology of Wilhelm Wundt. This development was accompanied by a pedagogical shift in learning theory from an emphasis on exertion of students' will to engaging students' interest.Footnote ⁵ The transition from the rationalistic German “schoolmaster's psychology,” as John Dewey called it, to the functional rationale for teaching history based on the emerging instincts of the child can be attributed to the U.S. followers of German pedagogical theorist, Johann Frederich Herbart, and more significantly to pragmatic psychologists, Dewey and William James. These reformers directly challenged the faculty psychology of the German-inspired historians, though they still placed history at the center of their pedagogical schemes. History retained a central place in the U.S. elementary and secondary curriculum during these years. However, paradoxically, the new psychology gradually eroded the influence of professional historians' influence on the curriculum, in part because they failed to acknowledge these emerging pedagogical and psychological theories.

Faculty Psychology and the German Roots of History Education in the United States

Faculty psychology, the idea that the mind was composed of separate mental faculties such as imagination, reason, perception, and memory that could be strengthened through rigorous mental training, had deeps roots in European and American intellectual culture. For centuries the approach was used to justify mathematics, Greek, and Latin in the traditional curriculum. Appropriately, when historians and psychologists in the United States first began making a case for more history in the schools, they did so by asserting that, like the classics, history could also strengthen mental faculties. However, beyond this, history could also develop nationalism and a sense of social awareness, educational outcomes that many scholars had observed in German schools. Many professional historians aimed to implement in the United States the curriculum and ideas they learned abroad. Thus, as in Germany, the mental faculty approach to history education was used as a primary rationale for the expansion of the subject in U.S. schools.

Progressive Era historian and educational reformer Lucy Maynard Salmon remarked on a shift in U.S. interest in the pedagogical value of history, which she saw as stemming from the English translation of German educator Wilhelm Diesterweg's Instruction in History in 1883. Since that time, she asserted, discussions about the teaching of history were characterized by “recognition of the advantages of comparing of different methods of instruction” and “the predominant influence of German ideas.”Footnote ⁶ Indeed in the late nineteenth century German universities were considered the most advanced in the world, and thousands of American scholars studied there. Most of the prominent thinkers who participated in discussion of the teaching of history in United States in the 1890s had studied at German universities, including Albert Bushnell Hart, Herbert Baxter Adams, Charles Kendall Adams, and G. Stanley Hall. Moreover, those who studied in the United States, such as Salmon and Woodrow Wilson, had done so under the mentorship of German-trained historians. At first, these German-trained historians returned to the United States and reformed the methods of historical instruction in higher education, but they soon sought to reform the curricula of high schools and academies as well. At the turn of the century, the entire discussion of the pedagogical value and approach to history among psychologists, philosophers, and historians was colored by the theories and experiences of German and German-trained scholars. This influence included a lingering allegiance to faculty psychology.Footnote ⁷

At the end of the nineteenth century, many historians compared the U.S. educational system to those of France and Germany, in which history had a more central role in the curriculum. Salmon's admiration for the curriculum of German schools was first demonstrated in the 1891 article cited above. She expanded on her views in an 1898 essay about how history was taught in the German Gymnasium. The value of history for Germans, she reported, was that it “placed high ideals before the boy,” “developed his moral character through study of these ideals,” and “served as a means of intellectual training.” She witnessed how the use of maps, charts, busts of historical figures, historical pictures, posted quotations, and “the memorizing of historical poems and passages from historical dramas” made “history unconsciously grow into the boy and become part of his very self.”Footnote ⁸ Charles Kendall Adams concurred, insisting “in Germany, history is a constituent part of the regular intellectual nourishment of the pupil during the whole of his preparatory work.” He chided schools in the United States for their failure to address the subject adequately.Footnote ⁹

The 1883 translation of Diesterweg's text on teaching history included an introduction by Johns Hopkins psychologist, G. Stanley Hall, who was convinced that “no subject so widely taught is, on the whole, taught so poorly.” Hall had studied briefly in Germany under Wundt and originally adopted a Hegelian approach to psychology, but he soon abandoned it in favor of a more biological view of William James, whom he studied under at Harvard. Unlike James, however, Hall continued for a long time to espouse the German structural, faculty psychology approach. To improve history instruction in American schools, Hall suggested that two German ideas should be adopted in the United States. First, the subject should be taught by regional history specialists who travel from school to school. Second, “the time devoted to historical study in the public schools should be increased.” Hall suggested that American teachers had much to learn from the wisdom of German history instructors like Diesterweg, who had transcended the “purely colorless presentation of facts” that characterized the teaching of the topic in the United States.Footnote ¹⁰

Diesterweg's influential text specifically addressed the outcomes of meaningful historical study. He proposed that history would strengthen the student's faculties of will and perception, but “the mental faculty … which is most constantly taxed and made use of is the imagination.” Imagination allowed students to connect the facts they learned to create a vivid picture of the past and how historic individuals related to and transcended their social environments. “History accustoms man to see the life of an individual everywhere in relation to the whole” he argued. “[M]any times it rouses those loftier emotions within him which self-sacrifice awakens when contrasted with selfishness.” History, Diesterweg insisted, not only strengthened mental faculties, but it also cultivated the character and served as a source of inspiration.Footnote ¹¹

Another early and influential advocate of history education and the faculty psychology rationale was American educator-philosopher William Torrey Harris, who was superintendent of St. Louis schools and editor of the Journal of Speculative Philosophy.Footnote ¹² Although Harris did not study in Germany, his allegiance to the German system was equally as fervent, due to his faith in Hegelian idealism, which served as the foundation for all of his educational thought. In Harris's Committee of Fifteen report, issued in 1895, he outlined a rationale for the use of history that reflected his allegiance to both Christianity and the emerging social sciences. World history, Harris explained, “was the conception of the great Christian thinker, St. Augustine, who held that the world and its history is a sort of antiphonic hymn, in which God reads his counsels, and the earth and man read the responses.” Harris believed that such a Christian view did not need to be abandoned in light of the new scientific history. This accorded with his Hegelian idealism, which viewed history as the actualization of an idealized plan. Further revisions to history in light of emerging ethnological and anthropological research, Harris insisted, “will exhibit a plan in human history—an educative principle that leads nations towards freedom and science, because the Creator of all nature has made it, in its fundamental constitution, an evolution or progressive development of individuality.” For Harris, the revelation of truth in the individual revealed the historical revelation of truth of the universal will. Harris explained the centrality of world history to his deductive, Hegelian pedagogy this way:

In addition to providing insight into human nature, Harris argued that history provided a balance to the “one-sidedness of the method of science” by keeping students' eyes fixed “on human purposes” and the “genesis of national actions through the previous stages of feelings, convictions and conscious ideas.”Footnote ¹⁴ Reflecting the Kantian division between the scientific and moral realms, Harris explained that, as the knowledge of science continued to extend its explanatory grasp of the environment, the study of history reminded young people of the importance of individual self-actualization within historical progress. Thus, for Harris, history had a conservative function; it humanized individuals in an increasingly dehumanized, scientific world.

In 1895, Anna Boyston Thompson, a history instructor at Thayer Academy in Massachusetts, published a rationale for history instruction that drew on Hegelian assumptions and also demonstrated an allegiance to faculty psychology. History, she explained, was the “record of the world's search for the ideal harmony of relation of a rationalized whole, where each member persists in being through its universality, and of the world's effort to realize this ideal.” The first step in historical instruction, she explained, is to become familiar with the basic facts of the past. Once these facts have been committed to memory and recited, “they exist to be judged and related, and have value only in proportion to the thought wrought into them.” Learning was a two-step deductive process; facts first had to be committed to memory by applying discipline and will, then analysis and judgment could be applied to the facts by drawing out their significance. In the essay, Thompson shared a specific method she used in her class. First a student was called to the board and wrote an analytic summary of the facts. The class then challenged and discussed the analysis, until it was “boiled down” to its “synthetic link, which united several particulars.” In this manner, logical memory, imagination, and feelings were cultivated, and history became entrenched in the soul. Like Harris, Thompson compared the educative powers of history with other subjects and assigned certain faculties to each one. Whereas mathematics could develop the faculty of reason and science the ability to compile facts and formulate laws, history alone had psychological value because it could provide insight into human nature. History allowed students to appreciate how people's nature, feelings, intellect, and will contributed to the general movement of social progress.Footnote ¹⁵

Although significant differences existed between these scholars, Diesterweg, Hall, Salmon, Harris, and Thompson shared a number of pedagogical assumptions that emerged largely from European, and specifically German, ideas. First, education should be composed of an immersion in the accomplishments, products, and ideals of the most civilized nations. In this way the soul of the people was preserved and transmitted to future generations as it aligned with the souls of its individual members. For example, Harris insisted that education be directed towards the “high ground of the spirit of civilization”—a content-rich curriculum representing the five windows of the soul: mathematics, geography, literature, grammar, and history.Footnote ¹⁶ Second, preparing the civilized mind required the application of self-discipline in order to develop the mental faculties to their full potential. Harris considered “self-expression” as the third and highest stage in his own evolutionary scheme that involved movement from the “atomistic” stage to the “pantheistic” stage to the “self-activity” stage.Footnote ¹⁷ Third and most significantly, the development of society was based on the realization of the individual through the sheer force of his individual will. Self-control through exertion of the will strengthened the mental faculties and civilized the individual.

The mental faculty rationale for history was reinforced by the Committees of Ten and Seven, which both issued specific course sequences for U.S. high schools. In 1893 the NEA summoned the Committee of Ten to establish uniformity between high school programs and college entrance requirements. Headed by Charles Eliot, president of Harvard and prominent proponent of the mental faculty approach, the committee went beyond its original mandate by ultimately suggesting a complete reformulation of the curriculum. In preparation for the report, the committee had divided its subject areas into subcommittees, including the History Ten, which met in Madison, Wisconsin the year before. The Ten was composed of historians, social scientists, and high school principals, including the German-trained historians Albert Bushnell Hart and Charles Kendall Adams.Footnote ¹⁸ In its report the committee suggested greater inclusion of history in the curriculum and expansion of study beyond American history. In addition, like the historians cited above, the committee members suggested that the teaching of history extend beyond the mere memorization of isolated facts. “Very few teachers know any other system,” the authors complained, “than simple recitation by rote from text-books.”Footnote ¹⁹ They still endorsed the memorization of facts, but they stressed that “facts in history are like digits in arithmetic; they are learned only as means to an end.” The committee asserted that the purpose of learning history was to inform “the mental power which we call judgment.” Because “judgment” was not technically one of the mental faculties (such as memory, reason, imagination, or will) that history had traditionally been used to enhance, this recommendation was innovative. The committee explained that history provided the raw materials for students to make comparisons, ponder the relationships between cause and effect, accumulate data in support of an opinion, estimate character, and “apply the lessons of history to current events.” In essence, history could inspire the scientific habit of mind that democratic citizens needed.Footnote ²⁰

The Committee of Ten report was followed a decade later by the American Historical Association's (AHA) Committee of Seven. Although the Seven's report did not differ much in its curricular recommendations, it did endorse many of the ideas put forth by the Ten. The Committee of Seven also suggested, “History cultivates judgment by leading the pupil to see the relationship between cause and effect” and deemphasized the memorization of factual knowledge for its own sake. “The study of history,” they explained, “gives training not only in acquiring facts, but in arranging and systematizing them.”Footnote ²¹ The AHA committee's concept of “judgment” did not entail making moral evaluations of historical figures. Instead these historians considered judgment to be open-minded inquiry without prejudice—the scientific habit of mind. Students should learn to consider the facts of history independent of their own beliefs and perceptions. Above all, they should learn to trust the authority of historians. This represented a pedagogical shift from passive student-learning to more active student-learning, but it nevertheless conceptualized learning as the acquisition of facts, which in some way would contribute to students' faculty of judgment.

Pedagogically speaking, professional historians in the 1890s interested in reforming the schools consistently denounced the rote recitation of facts without making any attempt to find synthesis and/or metaphysical order within these facts through application of the mental faculties. They asserted that history had more to offer the development of the student's mind than merely strengthening the faculty of memory; it also could be used to engage and grow the higher mental faculties like imagination, reason, will, and judgment. Although the introduction of the idea of judgment by the Committees of Ten and Seven moved beyond these earlier approaches, faculty psychology still underpinned these reports. In light of alternative theories of learning (examined below), the NEA and AHA studies' psychological approach was moderate, if not conservative. “The idea of mental discipline, of training the faculties,” educator Charles McMurry complained, “is so grained into all our educational thinking that it crops out in a hundred ways and holds our courses of study in the beaten track of formal training with a steadiness that is astonishing.”Footnote ²² As we shall see, there were many alternative psychological theories available, including the biological recapitulation theory of G. Stanley Hall, the functional psychology of William James and John Dewey, and the apperception and correlation of the American Herbartians. By the mid-1890s, there was a pedagogical revolution brewing beneath professional historians, about which they seemed to be ignorant or at least apathetic.

The New Psychologies

The “new psychology” referred to the emerging findings based on empirical observation and scientific study. In opposition to previous psychological theories, based mainly on philosophical speculation and metaphysics, the new psychologists struggled with how to apply the biological ideas of Darwin and the results of scientific experimentation to analysis of the human mind. The new psychology began with Wilhelm Wundt's empirical studies of the faculty of attention. However, many psychologists rejected Wundt's Kantian dualistic distinctions between mind and matter and instead searched for purely materialist and biological explanations of mental states and evolution. In the United States, the new psychology developed into three successive camps: structuralism, functionalism, and behaviorism. Structuralism was based on Wundt's physiological study of consciousness through introspection. Functionalism viewed mind as a mediator between biological instincts and emerging problems in the environment. Behaviorism rejected the study of consciousness altogether and focused on observable behaviors.Footnote ²³ Professional historians did not recognize or cite these new schools of psychology. In the short term, this did not matter much because structural psychology largely supported the mental faculty rationale for the history. Functionalists directly challenged the mental faculty rationale but still supported the place of history in the curriculum. Behaviorists, however, attacked the place of history in the curriculum and demanded its reformation. Over the 1890s and 1900s, the faculty psychology rationale for history was challenged by these successive waves of new psychologies.

In addition to these psychological camps, differing theories over mechanisms of psychic growth divided the field. The Darwinian camp of psychologists argued that human evolution occurred as natural variations that were useful in particular environments and were biologically passed on to subsequent members of the human race through natural selection. In contrast, the neo-Lamarckian camp agued that characteristics acquired in the lifetime of the organism through interaction with the environment were biologically passed on to subsequent members of the human race. The Darwinian camp viewed mind in passive, biological terms, but the neo-Lamarckian camp viewed mind as a volitional, generative contributor to the evolutionary process.Footnote ²⁴ By the 1890s psychologists in Germany, Britain, and the United States were divided into three groups based on this issue. Ernst Haeckel, originator of the biogenetic law that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, considered both natural selection and acquired characteristics as contributors to psychic evolution. Others such as Wundt barely recognized natural selection at all and instead (in accordance with Kant and Hegel) considered human will as the driving force behind evolution. Ultra-Darwinians like August Weismann drew on his own empirical studies to disregard neo-Lamarckianism altogether.Footnote ²⁵ Many psychologists interested in pedagogy in some way subscribed to schemes that accepted the mechanism of acquired characteristics because it was most closely linked to genetic psychology—the idea that the mind developed through distinct stages of growth, which either analogously or biologically retraced the intellectual history of the human race.

Genetic psychology was only one possible organizational scheme for the findings of new psychology, but it was the most influential approach in America in the 1890s. In one form or another, leading U.S. scholars such as G. Stanley Hall, William James, Charles Hubbard Judd, James Mark Baldwin, John Dewey, and the American Herbartians based their learning theories on historicist and genetic theories of social and cultural development. To collect data for their genetic, evolutionary, and historicist themes, anthropologists, sociologists, and psychologists employed the comparative method. This involved studying pre-modern cultures that still existed in the present, as well as animal behavior, for what this revealed about the laws of social development. It also entailed studying the biological impulses and instincts of children for what they revealed about psychical growth. Because researchers could not go back in time, the empirical data for these evolutionary laws had to come from these two sources: child study and ethnology. As Hall outlined in his explanation of the influence of anthropology on psychology, “The origin of language, character temperament, will probably never have any solution unless [it is] found in the study of infancy, the growth of which epitomizes under our eyes the history of the race, each day sometimes representing perhaps the race-development of centuries.”Footnote ²⁶ Thus, tracing the biological and social history of humanity became a central component of the application of the new psychology to pedagogy, which led many scholars to consult and study the work of historians and social scientists.

Hall was one of the first Americans to incorporate biological conceptions of human development into a pedagogical scheme. Hall studied psychology in both the United States and Germany. His conception of the educational value of history was a strange amalgam of Christian piety (“the Bible is being re-revealed as man's great text-book in psychology”), inherited biological impulse (“life shows a wisdom beneath us which we cannot escape”), and romanticist notions of the soul (“the soul and body of the young is freighted with potentialities and reverberations from the past”). Drawing on his laboratory work, classroom surveys, and readings in evolutionary anthropology, Hall confirmed Haeckel's popular “recapitulation” theory of human development—that the stages of child development corresponded with the historical development of the society. The traces of the past could be discovered through the comparative method of ethnological study and child observation. “If psychology is truly historical,” Hall explained, “it goes back of all finished systems to their roots in the primary thoughts, sensations, and feelings of early man, which grow more sacredly secret and hard to extract as tribes lose their ethnic originality.” The secrets of human evolution, known fully only by God, were revealed through the remnants of primitive societies and the inherited impulses and instincts of children. For Hall, the content of the curriculum needed to be carefully selected to align with the history of the social development of the West so that students could purge themselves of the biological history they carried within them. Failure to do so, he insisted, could have negative consequences for the development of the individual and society.Footnote ²⁷ His views did not completely contradict the mental faculty approach of the professional historians outlined above, which is why he wrote the introduction to Diesterweg's Instruction in History. However, Hall recognized and incorporated the biological aspects of the new psychology and made the content of the past a central component of his pedagogical scheme.

Although John Dewey studied under Hall, it was William James who most directly influenced Dewey's functional approach to the psychology and led him away from his early Hegelianism. As Dewey later reflected, James's “substitution of the ‘stream of consciousness’ for discreet elementary states” and his “biological conception of the psyche … worked its way more and more into all my ideas and acted as a ferment to transform my beliefs.”Footnote ²⁸ One of Dewey's first references to James was in an 1894 essay on the theory of emotion. A decade earlier James had argued that emotion was a consequence of willful behavior, not a mere mechanical reaction of the brain. Humans perceived certain objects or events, their bodies instinctively reacted, and then the mind and body felt the emotion. Therefore, the mind did not directly cause emotions, as structuralists suggested, but rather the mind mediated the response to emerging instincts as the body discharged these motor and organic responses into consciousness. In his 1894 essay on emotion Dewey expressed his appreciation for James's functionalist theory. Emotion for Dewey was the “felt process of the realization of ideas” or the unity of body and mind in reaction to a felt need or problem. Thus, the mind was not a passive recipient of stimuli but rather approached a stimulus (or object) with a purpose and focus that affected what course the response would take. Through action the mind mediated the relationship between the spontaneously arising instincts and the emerging problem in the environment.

Dewey insisted repeatedly in his discussions of the origins of thought and emotion that the Darwinian natural selection model of spontaneously emerging thoughts, actions, and reactions assigned purpose (or teleology) to an activity only after the fact—an inadequate approach because it located the meaning of the activity outside of the act itself. By contrast, his functionalist view located the teleological process of growth within the mind and body of the child. This rescued the individuality and volition of the child, making him an active contributor to his learning—an important factor in Dewey's view of social evolution and personal growth. Drawing on his functional view of the mind, Dewey attacked the dualistic assumptions behind the faculty psychology, which according to Dewey, reduced the mind to “an empty gymnastic.” Faculty psychology, he explained, makes learning “a mere formal training of certain distinct powers called perception, memory, judgment, which are assumed to exist and operate by themselves, without organic reference to subject matter.”Footnote ²⁹ Dewey specifically singled out William Torrey Harris as a proponent of this misguided view. Regarding history, for Dewey the facts of the past were not to be memorized and then mentally analyzed. Instead the facts of the past were to be organically incorporated with previous knowledge in the context of an emerging action, problem, or issue.

The new conception of viewing the human mind through a functional paradigm had a profound effect on the thoughts of University of Chicago sociologist, Albion Small. In an essay titled, “Demands of Sociology upon Pedagogy,”—which was published in a pamphlet with Dewey's “My Pedagogic Creed” in 1896—Small also attacked the dualistic assumptions of the Committee of Ten. He suggested that its judgment rationale was based on a “medieval psychology” that pieced together “educational courses out of subjects which are supposed to exercise, first, the perceptive faculty, then the memory, then the language faculty, then the logical, etc, etc.” In contrast, Small suggested a unified theory of mind, wherein students engaged with the wholeness of reality and adapted to its changing circumstances. “The prime problem of education,” Small insisted, “is how to promote adaptation of the individual to the conditions natural and artificial within which individuals live and move and have their being.” History should not be approached as a record of the past, but rather as how the current anatomy, physiology, and psychology of social relations came to be. The study of history, he specifically outlined, should focus on the sociological aspects of interdependence, order, and progress and continuity. Students should appreciate that “beginning with the family, and extending to the compass of the race, society is a network of interdependences.” The biographical aspects of the history supported by the German-trained historians that emphasized individual achievement should be replaced by the evolution of social forces. Relations between cause and effect should be considered in light of the present.Footnote ³⁰ Focus should be on the aspects of history that are immediately and organically present in the current world.

In accordance with his colleague Small, Dewey viewed the discipline of history in functional and genetic terms, meaning that he considered the modern discipline of history a product of the historical development of the civilization itself, which he believed corresponded with the development of the child and adult. The past existed independent of cognition, but it only took on value and meaning when it was put to a particular use or framed in a particular narrative in the present. Like many of his contemporaries, Dewey agreed that a theory of historical change was the key to understanding the present: “The great sciences of the present century have been the historical and social sciences, taken from a historical point of view.”Footnote ³¹ Dewey viewed the past, organized around a narrative of social and intellectual progress, as the organizational scheme for his entire curriculum at his famous University of Chicago laboratory school (1896–1904). As Dewey explained, the study of history should “introduce the child to a consciousness of the makeup or structure of social life,” as well as give him “command over, the instrumentalities through which the society carries itself along … The former is the content value and the latter is the form value.”Footnote ³² The content of history (that is, the facts) determined the form of history, but the form of history (that is, method) produced the content. In other words, through a study of the content of history, students learned how and why the historical method (form) had come about, but the content of history about which these students learned was itself the product of the historical method, so both sides of the circuit needed to be taught simultaneously.

The Dewey School curriculum was organized as a carefully selected reenacted history of the human race. Regarding the selection of content, Dewey explained that the “type phases of historical development may be selected which will exhibit as through a telescope, the essential constituents of the existing order.”Footnote ³³ The idea was that the historical content presented to students would not be historical as such, but rather it would be presented as immediate problems, which also happened to have historical significance. After students had mastered the corresponding and chronologically arranged form and content for each stage, they would eventually arrive at the modern world. However, students would only appreciate the current social environment if they learned to view it as a natural progression from prior social forms. Living through (or experiencing) the history of social development represented the key to appreciating the “organic relationship to real ends and values” inherent in the modernist stage. However, Dewey insisted that the content and form of this final stage should not be taught directly during prior stages. Instead, this appreciation could only take place after previous stages had been “adequately lived through.”Footnote ³⁴

Armed with his genetically based functional psychology, Dewey set out to challenge all pedagogical theories that either subscribed to a dualistic approach, which viewed mind as purely rationalistic (such as structuralism and the faculty psychology), or theories that severed or abstracted the products of investigation (that is, historical facts) from the processes that originally engendered them. For Dewey, history could demonstrate to the child that his or her actions could solve present problems with solutions that had been historically worked out in a manner that would unite knowledge with action, theory with practice, form with content, and students' interests with the material of the curriculum. Such an approach had little room for the rote memorization of historical facts.

Herbartianism in America

Dewey's functionalist approach challenged professional historians' mental faculty rationale for history, but it also reinforced the significance of the subject. For Dewey knowledge did not exist prior to inquiry. Therefore, all knowledge emerged through classroom experiences. Because social knowledge could not be demonstrated through experiments as in science, teachers had to draw on the past to teach humanities and social sciences. History, in essence, was the way Dewey organized and demonstrated all knowledge. Likewise, the American followers of Herbart challenged the mental faculty rationale for history but also made the subject a central component of their genetic pedagogical scheme. Specifically, the Herbartian idea of “apperception” reflected a view of the mind as a unity building on and synthesizing prior knowledge instead of a group of distinct faculties. In addition, the Herbartian idea of “interest” undermined the exertion of “will” as a pedagogical necessity to learning, which was a key component of the mental faculty approach.

Herbartianism was the first educational fad to engage the American imagination. The theory generated a great deal of excitement among many educators in the 1880s and 1890s, yet by the 1900s the theory disappeared as quickly as it had arrived. Nevertheless, Herbartianism reinforced the movement to pursue a greater place for history in the curriculum. Herbart was a German philosopher who tutored three Swiss boys in the late eighteenth century. Based on this experience he constructed an innovative educational scheme, which was further developed by his German disciplines Karl Volkmar Stoy, Tuiskon Ziller, and Wilhelm Rein. Ziller compiled the specific Herbartian steps of learning, which included: 1) the analysis and/or explanation of facts; 2) the synthesis, assimilation of these facts; 3) identification of the most important facts; and 4) the applications of the learned principles. Through this process the content was not only learned, but “apperceived.” The term apperception—the idea of making one's experience clear in one's consciousness—was coined by Wundt, who borrowed it from Kant.Footnote ³⁵ By apperception the Herbartians meant that the facts had been incorporated into a psychic command-center of the mind, which controlled the organization and apperception of all subsequently acquired knowledge. These “apperceptive masses” were coterminous with the soul. They guided the tastes and aided in the cultivation of the mind. Learning had not truly taken place until the content was associated with previously apperceived content and directed toward more complicated, difficult material. To make the internal apperception of material occur more naturally, according to Herbartians, content was externally arranged in relation to one another through “correlation” or “concentration.” Teachers were encouraged to explore the connections among the different disciplines and bodies of knowledge and present them in a correlated manner. History was considered the great synthetic subject, within which all other subjects could be incorporated.Footnote ³⁶ Like most genetic psychologists, the Herbartians also applied the theory of racial recapitulation, which they referred to specifically as the culture-epoch theory. The recapitulation approach to the curriculum emphasized the historical arrangement of content.

In the 1880s, a number of influential American pedagogues, including Charles DeGarmo, Charles and Frank McMurry, and C.C. Van Liew, had studied the pedagogical and philosophical theories of Herbert in Germany. When they returned to the United States they began disseminating Herbart's ideas, including the culture-epoch theory, in educational journals, lectures, and textbooks such as DeGarmo's Essential of Methods, published in 1889.Footnote ³⁷ As Van Liew explained, “There are certain very distinct and striking parallel lines in the development of the child and the race, both from the formal and material points of view. These parallel lines are traceable in the intellectual, emotional, and volitional development of both.”Footnote ³⁸ Hall believed that his laboratory research had confirmed the validity of this theory, and most other American social scientists subscribed to the scheme. However, the most controversial Herbartian theory—and the one from the Herbartians diverged most from the ideas of Hall, Harris, and the professional historians—was the concept of interest.

At the time, it was generally believed that children and adolescents spent their leisure time pursuing their childish and trivial (and savage) interests. School was deliberately designed to combat these tendencies by exercising and strengthening children's will and by inculcating children with culture and knowledge they would need as adults. “Only concentrated and prolonged efforts in one direction,” Hall insisted in 1892, “really train the mind, because only they train the will beneath it.”Footnote ³⁹ Likewise, Diesterweg insisted that historical ideas are “only fruitful if I arrived at them by exertion … possession without toil means nothing; exertion everything.”Footnote ⁴⁰ The process of learning was supposed to be difficult and develop the mental faculties. Of course, there were precedents for the use of interest in education, including the pedagogical ideas of Rousseau, Pestalozzi, and Froebel, but these romanticists aimed their schemes mainly at very young children. The Herbartians used interest, rather than will, as the foundation for the entire age-range of their educational scheme.

Interest accorded with the culture-epoch theory because it brought structure and sequence to historical and cultural content in a way that recognized the evolution of social systems. According to Herbartians, the interests of children were perfectly coordinated with the historical interests of humanity. This interest was not necessarily based in biological impulse and inherited instinct in the way that Hall had outlined. In fact, the Herbartians remained ambiguous regarding from exactly where “interest” originated. At first, they relied more on logic and metaphysics than any kind of biological research, but later they attempted to incorporate evolutionary notions of “inherited energies.”Footnote ⁴¹ However, in his 1895 outline of the culture-epoch theory, Van Liew presented an impressive list of scholars past and present—including Hegel, Froebel, Pestalozzi, Darwin, Spencer, Comte, and Baldwin—who all subscribed to the recapitulation theory in one form or another. The idea had deep roots in the intellectual traditions of Western philosophy and social science.

Regarding the pedagogical value of history, the Herbartians placed the subject at the absolute center of the curriculum. Not only did history serve to instill national pride and develop character, but it served as the organizational scheme for the entire school program. History, according to Charles McMurry, contained “the essence of moral culture” and therefore should serve as the “chief mental foods of young people.”Footnote ⁴² Herbartianism provided a tremendous boost to the movement of making history a central part of the curriculum. It served as a bridge between older but still influential notions of faculty psychology and the new functional psychology. However, by the mid 1890s the Herbartian theory was already being challenged by functional and organic theories of mind and society, which were believed to be more appropriate for the American democratic society.

The Fall of Will and the Rise of Interest

German-influenced scholars such as Hall and Harris immediately viewed the Herbartian doctrine of interest with suspicion because it potentially undermined the faculty rationale for history in the curriculum. The idea of strengthening faculties, by its very definition, required exertion and discipline. Despite his allegiance to the new psychology, Hall was still a strong advocate of training the will, which he asserted was a direct product of the psychical inheritance of the human race. “History and character,” Hall explained, “are written in the habits of muscles, which constitute about one-half of the human body and are preeminently the organs of the will.” For Hall the soul represented the harmony between the inherited physical attributes and impulses of the body and the divine force present in the individual. The will was the main instrument for bringing about this alignment. “This power of totalizing, rather than any transcendent relation of elements, constitutes at least the practical unity of the soul,” he explained, “and this unimpeded association of its elements is true or inner freedom of will.” The will was a crucial element in the process of uniting the laws of nature with development of the individual. The process should be driven by exertion but assured by the continual revelation of nature's plan. The effort needed to be both physical and mental, because the will was both the product of the body and the divine guidance of the mind.Footnote ⁴³

In contrast, Harris had little use for the physical attributes of the body or its inherited instincts and impulses. His Hegelian educational scheme was entirely rationalistic. As a result, the will was even more central to his theory, because the will of the individual represented the objective alignment with the universal will of God. Without the universal will present in the individual, all was subjective. In an 1895 essay, Harris directly attacked the Herbartian idea of interest, which he asserted was being used in place of will as the guiding purpose of education. The Herbartians “had no place in their psychology for the will as the free self-determination of the soul” and made it “devoid of self-activity and of all multiplicity of attributes.” If self-activity was directed by interest instead of the soul-as-will, Harris explained, morality would have nothing to appertain to, resulting in subjectivity and selfishness. The soul, Harris insisted, should always be treated as something transcendental, which could never be linked to individual interests. The argument was more philosophical than psychological, but nevertheless, Harris reinforced the centrality of self-discipline and exertion to the educative process, an idea he shared with Hall and proponents of the mental faculty approach, such as the professional historians cited above.Footnote ⁴⁴ History was important to Hall and Harris because it directly strengthened the will.

Dewey used the interest/will debate to apply his functional psychology directly to the issue. In a rhetorical move Dewey would use numerous times over the next fifty years, he asserted that will and interest should be not viewed as opposites, but rather, if refashioned into “self-expression,” they should be viewed as the same thing. (The term “self-expression” was a poor choice because, as explained above, Harris used the term as the highest stage of rational development in his Hegelian scheme. In a later version of the essay, Dewey changed the term to “growth.”) Dewey denied the idea that any cultural object or product—that is, historical figure—was inherently more interesting to the child than another. This erroneous idea, supported by both Harris and the Herbartians, Dewey explained, was the German “schoolmaster's psychology, not the psychology of the child”; it was used to emphasize authority and the formation of individual character towards a predetermined path. Instead education should be based on “securing in the school the conditions of direct experience and the gradual evolution of ideas in and through the constructive activities.” The interest of a child should functionally emerge and be linked to an emerging problem. Interest for Dewey, employing a definition that confused many, was “primarily a form of self-expressive activity—that is growth through acting upon nascent tendencies.” Interest was expressed through action, not prior to it, and it was expressed through an external product in relation to this action, not drawn to particular products on a priori basis.Footnote ⁴⁵ In regard to history, this meant that particular historical facts—that is, figures and events—had no intrinsic interest. Instead the value of facts emerged as they were applied to a current problem or issue.

Dewey presented a functional theory of mind and society that combined the generative and creative elements of the rational mind with the inherited biological impulses. According to Dewey, Hall had not adequately accounted for rational mind, whereas Harris and the Herbartians ignored inherited impulses. Interest did not merely emerge from biological impulses toward particular bodies of knowledge from the history of the social development. Rather, interest was a product of the biological impulse—mediated by the mind—toward any object that met the immediate demands of an emerging problem. For Dewey, interest was the “annihilation of the distance between the person and the materials and results of his action; it is the instrument which effects [sic] their organic union.”Footnote ⁴⁶ What others had called will through exertion, Dewey refashioned as need directed towards satisfaction. The natural human impulse of the child desired exertion (or will) towards resolution of an immediate felt need or problem.

Dewey's interest/will compromise was immediately recognized and endorsed by some history teachers. For example, Henry Tucker, an instructor at a high school in St. Louis, agreed that interest and exertion needed to be considered in conjunction with one another. Citing Dewey as an influence, Tucker explained, “Effort must be exercised and interest must be maintained in reasonable proportion; the relative ratio of the two will depend upon the subject, the topic and the ability of the teacher.” He suggested that historical instruction needed to be connected immediately to the present social world and to current events. “As history teachers,” Tucker argued, “we need to arouse the interest of the pupil in order to get the fullest expression of his mind.” However, these historical connections to the present would enhance instruction in history, “so long as such consideration serves only as a sidelight and does not overshadow the lesson in hand.”Footnote ⁴⁷ That is, a survey of the chronological facts of the past was still desired, but the facts would be more effectively delivered if they were presented in relation to an enduring problem and not merely as a means of strengthening a mental faculty such as memory.

Dewey's pedagogical approach to the subject also directly influenced Frank Blair, a history teacher in Buffalo, New York. “The most effective form of analysis, as Professor Dewey suggests,” Blair stated, quoting Dewey, “is to take the ‘telescope of history’ and turn it upon the more primitive forms of society.” Blair's essay, “The Social Function of History,” presented a lesson on the development of the idea of toleration. The lesson consisted of a series of excerpts from primary source documents of colonial North American law concerning clothing and religion. Through these sources students were led to a present appreciation of how far Americans had come in regard to tolerance. The general movement, Blair summarized, “was from the child's more or less vague idea of toleration, as he saw it in society as a whole, to the more particular form as presented in Roger Williams and his times, and back with this enlarged notion to its application in the present social life.”Footnote ⁴⁸ Blair had successfully used this method in his own class. His lesson demonstrated how, under the new education (at least initially), chronological historical content was not replaced, but rather it was focused on the development of social ideas that were of most use in the present. It represented an example of the approach suggested by Small and Dewey that teaching history was most effective when the instructor demonstrated how remnants of the past were organically contained in the present.

Overall, the shift from will to interest represented a significant intellectual realignment from the rationalistic system of the professional historians to the functionalist approach of James and Dewey. For proponents of the new education, knowledge was conceived of something that emerged through the interaction of the individual with some external and/or environmental stimulus. Unlike the dualistic, deductive mental faculty approach of Hall, Harris and the professional historians, which asserted that historical facts first had to be embedded in the mind before the higher faculties could derive meaning from them, the new education and functional psychology posited that the acquisition and analysis of facts happened simultaneously in response to an emerging interest or problem. The mind was reconceptualized as a unity-in-process. The concept of interest shifted attention away from inherited cultural products of the past (that is, free standing and distant facts) toward the content of more immediate concern.

The Fall of Faculty Psychology

As demonstrated above, the new education based on interest was not antagonistic to history. Nevertheless, it did present a challenge to historians who used concepts of mental faculties to defend their subject's place in the schools. Throughout the 1900s, historians continued to make claims about the applicability of history to the lives of citizens based on the mental-faculties approach. For example, in 1911 the AHA's Committee of Five insisted that it did not wish to “materially alter” the recommendations of the Committee of Seven. Accordingly, the 1911 study repeated that history could provide students with “training in judgment.”Footnote ⁴⁹ However, in light of the new psychology and, more significantly, empirical studies on educational transfer undertaken early in the twentieth century by behavioral psychologists such as Edward Thorndike, the burden of proof was on the historians to demonstrate the validity of these assertions.

Thorndike had received his psychology degree under James at Harvard; he was one of the first American psychologists not to study in Germany. Having abandoned the nonobservable, imprecise methods of his functionalist mentor, Thorndike focused his inquiry on the more precise, scientific, and observable relationships of S-R (stimulus-response) bonds. His first experiments were on animals, but he soon began conducting experiments on human subjects. In 1901 he published an empirical study on the effects of one mental function on the efficiency of others. Thorndike concluded, “Improvement in any single mental function rarely brings about equal improvement in any other function, no matter how similar.” In other words, Thorndike's laboratory research suggested that improvement in historical judgment, enhanced by, say, critical thought about the causes of the American Revolution, would not necessarily improve a student's ability to judge the contents of the daily newspaper, as the Committees of Ten and Seven had suggested.Footnote ⁵⁰ Professional historians were, therefore, basing their claims about the mental and moral outcomes of historical study on a theory that had been psychologically disproved.Footnote ⁵¹

Significantly, there were at least two historians, Mary Sheldon Barnes and Fred Marrow Fling, who suggested a more interactionist approach to history instruction in the 1890s, but their ideas were rejected outright by the Committee of Seven. Barnes argued that students should engage in the construction of historical narrative through the reading and combination of several primary sources. Fling went even farther, suggesting that students needed to learn to analyze and assess the validity of the sources themselves by judging their accuracy and bias. Fling suggested that by analyzing primary sources, students would appreciate “how difficult it is to arrive at certainty.” Ultimately, Fling hoped students would be able to distinguish “between good and bad, scientific and popular secondary [historical] works.”Footnote ⁵² However, the Committee of Seven considered these approaches too extreme, “since it is not to be expected that inexperienced and immature minds can form correct notions without some systematic survey of the field.” Instead students should get a sense of the “difficulties of ascertaining historical truth, and of the necessity for impartiality and accuracy.” By engaging in the occasional guided reading of a primary source, the Seven argued, students could learn “the nature of the historical process and at the same time may make the people and events of bygone times more real to him.”Footnote ⁵³ The AHA committee wanted students to understand the complexity and difficulty of constructing historical narratives but not to engage in such activity themselves. On this point, the Seven were quite clear: “The aim of historical study in the secondary school, let it be repeated, is the training of pupils, not so much in the art of historical investigation as in that of thinking historically.”Footnote ⁵⁴ In retrospect, the student-centered approach of Barnes and Fling could have potentially provided a means of alignment between professional historians and the functional psychologists, but the opportunity was squandered. Most historians clung to the rationalistic, faculty psychology mindset.

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History first entered the American curriculum in the 1880s in a significant way by employing a rationale that the subject strengthened the mental faculties of memory, perception, imagination, and judgment. This rationale was generally supported by the German structuralist psychology of Wundt and his U.S. followers. History retained its significance throughout the 1890s, but its rationale was reorganized subtly in accordance with the functional and genetic approaches of Dewey and the Herbartians, who introduced the significance of student interest in the study of history. However, by the beginning of the twentieth century, behavioral psychologists began questioning the centrality of chronological history altogether. Because professional historians never adequately responded to the new developments in psychology, their influence in the schools was gradually diminished.

David Snedden, Massachusetts commissioner of education, used the alleged demise of faculty psychology to attack directly the place of history in the curriculum. “We have abundant evidence now, based upon psychological experimentation,” Snedden insisted, “that the training of memory or reasoning achieved through historical study did not transfer to other subjects.” To suggest otherwise, he explained, “is of course, in light of modern knowledge, an educational fallacy.”Footnote ⁵⁵ Snedden insisted that the new curriculum should be based on enhancing present experience and knowledge through an “assimilationist” psychological approach suggested by the interest-apperception approach of the Herbartians, the functional psychology of Dewey, and the S-R bond behaviorism of Thorndike. As Snedden explained, “This [assimilationist approach] is the natural method evoking fundamental interest and it is the method that in all lines of sound pedagogical development we are striving to attain.”Footnote ⁵⁶ Similarly, Romiett Stevens, a professor of education at Teachers College, Columbia University, argued that, although the rationales for history suggested by the Committee of Seven were not necessarily wrong, they were too sprawling and unfocused. “Until the ideal utilitarian purposes [of history] are defined,” Stevens insisted, “it would seem to be an economic and sensible measure to select one purpose that is consistent with the psychology of the teaching process and to teach history in accordance with it.”Footnote ⁵⁷ Proponents of reform argued that the new psychological approach to history was not only more scientific, but also more efficient and effective. However, most professional historians were uninterested in updating their psychological views to accommodate the new psychology and new education. In certain cases, historians dismissed suggestions that they should do so. As one historian complained in 1904, teachers were more concerned with “those high flown, philosophical, Herbartian businesses which in great measure lose sight of the character for history altogether.” He regretted that many teachers were no longer “willing to see that history ought to be studied as history.”Footnote ⁵⁸

Likewise, in his 1916 textbook on teaching history, which was completed a year before the publication of the Committee on Social Studies report, historian Henry Johnson expressed his sense that chronological history was on the wane. He lamented how the subject seemed to be losing rather than gaining favor with school administrators. “The demand is for social studies of direct and immediate concern to individual communities,” he explained. “Questions relating to public health, to housing and homes, to good roads, and the like, in the present, are coming to be viewed as greater importance than questions relating to how people lived in the past.” Foreshadowing a century of disdain and derision historians would hurl at social studies educators, Johnson quipped, “It is becoming increasingly clear that children should know something about the duties of the garbage collector and the gas inspector, it is becoming less clear that they should know something about the deeds of Alexander and Charlemagne.”Footnote ⁵⁹ Johnson expressed his fears that schools would completely abandon the historical facts of the distant past in light of recent history and social science. This new approach, he believed, would inevitably lead to the erosion of history altogether.

On the other hand, professor of education C.R. Robbins took a more circumspect approach to the future of history in the curriculum and its relationship to the new psychology. As Robbins argued, “If the teacher of history lays great stress upon the necessity of having material which is true and which is accurately stated, he may be able to produce in his pupils a development of habits or attitudes which reflect his own ideas so far as the work in history is concerned.” In other words, if a history teacher trained his students to deduct, induct, synthesize, and analyze as a historian does, the student will indeed be thinking at a higher level. However, Robbins continued, “There is considerable likelihood that what he does will not be transferred to their work in other fields.” On the other hand, if the teacher raised his “practice of seeking the truth to the level of conscious purpose, to connect it with other phases of life,” then the value of historical study will be broadened and enriched. “When the teacher of history … is only a teacher of such and is not consciously a worker in a larger field,” Robbins concluded, “little can be expected in the way of real moral education.”Footnote ⁶⁰

Robbins astutely pointed out that any claims about the benefit of history and its relationship to other areas of life were inherently moral. Developing “judgment” and “the scientific habit of mind,” as suggested by the Committees of Ten and Seven, was believed to make students better citizens and better people. However, this benefit was assumed, never demonstrated. Historians mostly ignored the issue of the transferability of historical knowledge and skills to other areas of life, which, in light of the functional and behavioral psychological theories, could no longer be taken for granted. Rather than attack history outright, however, educators like Stevens and Robbins were simply asking history teachers to make explicit what had been implicit in their teaching all along—the relationship between the past and present. The educationally minded “new historians” led by James Harvey Robinson and Charles Beard, quickly stepped in to fill this void. To many professional historians, their presentist approach betrayed the intellectual rigor of chronological history.Footnote ⁶¹

In conclusion, the inability of the historical profession to respond effectively to significant changes in the fields of psychology and pedagogy helped lead to the decline of the four-year chronological history sequence. The new psychology of interest better served the growing high school population, which along with trends in immigration, urbanization, industrialization, the professionalization of educators and social scientists, and the emergence of the new history, underscored the necessity for a more modernist approach to the curriculum. The failure of professional historians to update their psychological views and to engage with professional educators made the fall of the four-year history sequence a more likely outcome by the first decade of the twentieth century.