Education History in the History of Teachers College Record : A Long and Distinguished Record

In nearly two decades serving on the editorial advisory board of The Record, I’ve encountered a good deal of historical writing. Among the country’s premier comprehensive periodicals of disciplined inquiry and commentary, it has been identified as a “core” journal in the very broad field of educational research and scholarship (Goodyear et al., 2009). And history has long been a focal point. Much of this has concerned the teaching of history, naturally, but the history of education received considerable attention, too. In fact, it was arguably a principal venue for such work well before more specialized journals appeared in the postwar era, and it continues to be one today.

In the very first issue of Teachers College Record (TCR), Dean James E. Russell (1900) declared that Teachers College was neither a normal school nor a university department. Rather, it was a professional school for teachers, aiming to provide them with (among other things) “professional knowledge” about education, embracing “entire course of instruction in its relations to the child and to society” (p.1) And the history of educational ideas and practices was to become an integral part of this.

Educational research had not yet developed into the extensive scholarly enterprise that it represents today, and the American Educational Research Association would not be founded for another 16 years, so many of the early TCR contributions were descriptive accounts of particular schools or curricular questions by Teachers College faculty or educators elsewhere. Among them was an account, written by Professor Paul Monroe, of how history of education was taught there. Published five years before his 760-page opus, A Textbook in the History of Education (1905), it featured readings such as Plato’s Republic and Rousseau’s Emile, along with works by Froebel, Pestalozzi, and Herbert Spencer. A text on American educational history and a biography of Horace Mann were included as well. As such, it represented an expansive perspective on educational thought, extending from ancient Greece to the 19th-century United States. Both comprehensive and rigorous, its intent was to provide professional educators—and leaders especially—with the full range of educational ideas and their historical development. It also reflected the state of educational history as a field of inquiry and teaching.

Other early contributions to TCR focused on the history of particular facets of education. These included an article by Nina C. Vandewalker of the Wisconsin state normal school in Milwaukee about the history of kindergarten education in 1907, a prelude to her book on the topic published a year later. A TCR article about museums of education around the world appeared in 1908, written by Benjamin Andrews, who had served as director of Teachers College’s own museum. And articles on the history of mental testing were written by Leonard Ayres of the Russell Sage Foundation in 1918 and graduate student Andrew Wylie in 1922. These and similar contributions demonstrated the journal’s role in highlighting historical scholarship and commentary, even if it wasn’t always offered by trained historians.

As the foregoing contributions suggest, the range of scholarship on education was growing more complex, and this held implications for history as a subfield within it. Commentary about its status appeared in the pages of TCR. In 1922, for instance, Professor Fletcher Harper Swift of the University of Minnesota, a Teachers College graduate, pointed out that many other courses were crowding the professional education field. “The history of education,” he wrote, “must now complete not with logic, ethics and philosophy, but with courses in applied psychology, courses in school administration, courses in school finance, secondary education, the junior high school, elementary education, and various other studies” (Swift, 1922, p. 1). Himself an expert of the history of school finance, Swift argued that history could provide depth of comprehension and a wider perspective to the many specialized topics and new fields of study then beginning to take root in schools and colleges of education.

Another perspective emphasized new approaches to history, focusing on the social and cultural context of education, past and present. Writing in 1938, Merle Curti noted that Teachers College had become a leader in offering courses with this orientation. Curti was himself an important contributor to this work, publishing a landmark book titled The Social Ideas of American Educators. A faculty member at Teachers College for 11 years, Curti moved on to the University of Wisconsin in 1942, where he completed his masterwork, The Growth of American Thought, which won the Pulitzer Prize for history in 1944. But he retained an interest in education, contributing articles to TCR in 1941-42 about the challenges facing American schools in a time of totalitarianism and war (Curti, 1941, 1942). Curti became a prominent historian, and president of national history organizations, but continued to be interested in the social history of American education throughout his career.

Two other influential historians worked at Teachers College following Curti’s departure, R. Freeman Butts and Lawrence Cremin, both of whom published regularly in TCR. Butts arrived in the latter 1930s after completing his graduate studies at Wisconsin, and he contributed some 16 TRC articles over the next four decades. These dealt with a wide range of topics, often adding historical perspective to issues of the day. He became best known as an internationalist, publishing widely used texts on Western education traditions. This interest was reflected in a 1969 TCR article, “America’s Role in International Education,” which characteristically framed the topic in historical terms.

Cremin was a Teachers College graduate and native New Yorker who joined the faculty shortly after completing his 1951 dissertation on the common school era. Cremin’s TCR pieces reflected his efforts to expand the purview of education history beyond conventional attention to institutions, focusing in the 1950s on progressive era reformers and the extent of their interests, and later on the family as an educational factor (Cremin, 1959, 1978). This work prefaced his best-known books, The Transformation of the School, a Bancroft Prize winner in 1962, and the American Education trilogy published between 1970 and 1988. He also was a Pulitzer Prize winner in 1981, and eventually became president of Teachers College, before his sudden death in 1990. Altogether, Cremin published a dozen articles in TCR, work that contributed to his groundbreaking historical interpretations over the course of several decades.

Of course, many other historians contributed to TCR over the years. Ellen Condliffe Lagemann served as editor during the 1990s and coauthored a biographical memoir of Cremin with Patricia Albjerg Graham in 1994. David Tyack coauthored a number of articles exploring historical dimensions of concurrent issues and explored themes in his own historical research. Other contemporary historian contributors include such familiar names (among historians) as Derrick Alridge, James Anderson, Nancy Beady, Barbara Beatty, Scott Baker, Zoe Burkholder, Larry Cuban, Charles Dorn, Sherman Dorn, Ansley Erickson, Barbara Finkelstein, Vincent Franklin, James Fraser, David Gamson, Ethan Hutt, Benjamin Justice, Carl Kaestle, Judith Kafka, Michael Katz, Matthew Kelly, Adam Laats, David Labaree, Marvin Lazerson, Christopher Loss, Jeffrey Mirel, Thomas O’Brien, Youn Pak, Michelle Purdy, William Reese, Jack Schnieder, Noah Sobe, Christopher Span, Sevan Terzian, Kim Tolley, Wayne Urban, Vanessa Siddle Walker, Walter Stern, Christine Woyshner, Maris Vinovskis, and Jonathan Zimmerman, among others in the recent past. And I’ve made some contributions too. The sheer volume of this incomplete list is testimony to the vital role that TCR continues to play in historical scholarship and commentary. It is a tradition that has been vital both to the field of educational history and to the larger educational research enterprise.