By Gene Leach

 

Henry Barnard, educator, reformer, and the first U.S. commissioner of education, modeled earnest civic endeavor in Victorian America. In a country brimming with movements to improve civilizing institutions, Barnard helped lead a campaign to reform the most universal institution of all, the common schools. By the midpoint of his long career “in the cause of true education” (his own phrase), Barnard had already received honorary degrees from Harvard and Yale and addressed the legislatures of 11 states.

Yet in histories of American education, Barnard usually figures as the drudging sidekick of Horace Mann. Barnard saluted Mann for his captivating ability to clothe “a very prosaic subject with the adornment of eloquence and poetry,” probably suspecting he was fated to personify the prose (“Autobiography Notes, c. 1894,” Henry Barnard Collection, Watkinson Library, Trinity College). Edith Nye MacMullen, Barnard’s most judicious biographer, questions whether he qualifies as a reformer since he devoted most of his career to high-profile proselytizing for schools and very little of it to advocating any particular theory or technique of schooling (In the Cause of True Education, Yale University Press, 1991). He was no crusader in the mold of the charismatic Mann; he was rather a genial generalist, indeed something of a dilettante. Yet for the sheer volume and scope of his labors, Barnard was the equal of his Massachusetts colleague in establishing public education at the center of American culture.

Born in 1811 in a house facing Hartford’s South Green, Barnard was the son of a prosperous farmer. If we can trust his reminiscences, he toddled happily through childhood until, at age five, he entered the local common school, the 19th-century equivalent of today’s public school. It was hardly love at first sight. Barnard recalled in his “Notes for ‘Reminiscences and Illustrative Papers of 50 Years of Educational Activities’” (Barnard Collection) that the South District school house was “thoroughly bad,” “discipline [was] harsh and demoralizing,” “methods [were] utterly abominable,” and out of these ingredients came “meager results in knowledge and training.” When the boy began to dream of running away to sea, his father sent him to the private Monson Academy in Wilbraham, Massachusetts. Barnard remembered his year there as an idyll of skillful teaching, spirited student camaraderie, and rural beauty.

After further study at the Hartford Grammar School, Barnard was a month short of his 16th birthday when he enrolled at Yale College in 1826. Noah Porter, the minister in Farmington, wrote that Barnard recalled owing “to books, libraries, and debate . . . more than to school, college, and professors” Connecticut Common School Journal, II, 1 (January 1855), quoted by MacMullen). Along with opportunities for self-education, student Barnard even found occasion for a bit of devilry: participation in a “bread and butter rebellion” that got him and the rest of his class sent home for a while.

Not sure what to do with the degree he received in 1831, Barnard took a position at a Pennsylvania academy on the recommendation of Yale’s president, Reverend Jeremiah Day. Though Barnard would exalt the glories of effective pedagogy for the rest of his life, his lone try at teaching failed miserably. In Henry Barnard: American Educator (Teachers College Press, 1974), Vincent P. Lannie noted the experiment lasted less than a year. “I have not enough with a clay of Job,” Barnard wrote in his diary, “to make me endure the wear and tear of spirits to which a pedagogue is subjected.” He spent the next few years studying law and polishing his skills as an uplifting public speaker back in Hartford.

In 1837, the young attorney’s Hartford elected him to the Connecticut General Assembly. A staunch Whig with a warm conscience, Barnard backed legislation to aid poor and disabled people before addressing a public need he knew firsthand. He championed the creation of a state board of commissioners to survey the condition of Connecticut’s common schools. He had no doubt they had been neglected. He aimed to assemble the forlorn facts into a compelling case for decent public support for the schools.

Barnard hoped his friend Thomas Gallaudet, the great pioneer of deaf education, would accept the secretaryship of the new board, but when Gallaudet declined, Barnard took the post himself. A year earlier, another ambitious Whig lawyer, Horace Mann, had followed a similar path in Massachusetts, first helping to establish a state board and then becoming its secretary. Barnard immediately sought the advice of Mann, and the two remained collaborators until Mann’s death.

Why did Henry Barnard become an indefatigable advocate of public schools? Certainly, he was motivated by his dismal experiences in schoolhouses, his sincere yen to be a useful citizen, and his bookish tastes. But he was guided too by a mingled sense of crisis and mission that he shared with thousands of other idealists of his time and class. During Barnard’s youth, Connecticut was fast losing its once-celebrated steadiness and cohesiveness. Rapid economic, religious, and demographic transformations further roiled the social order in the wake of the Revolution. Booming commercial capitalism split rich from poor, bosses from bossed, more jaggedly than the class divisions of earlier times. Civic and moral authority no longer passed automatically into the hands of propertied and educated gentlefolk.

To pacify their communities and reestablish their leadership, enlightened conservatives like Barnard fell back on Protestant piety and took up Whig politics. But they also founded new bastions of Yankee civilization, some benevolent, some disciplinary. Henry Barnard’s “Autobiography Notes” reveal his recollections about how many of these modern organs had been erected in the Hartford of his youth: the Hartford Retreat for the Insane, Hartford Hospital, an old people’s home, an orphans’ asylum, Gallaudet’s American School for the Deaf. He might have also cited Wethersfield State Prison, Trinity College, the Wadsworth Atheneum, and other newly founded institutions.

Speaking at Horace Bushnell’s prestigious North Church—his family’s church—in 1834, Barnard said, “All that gives value to human life, security to human happiness, protection to personal rights, to private property, and public liberty, has been wrought out by the agency of institutions.” A republic, Barnard carefully observed, had to rest on the idea that “every man, by the power of reason and the sense of duty, shall be fit to be voters, jurors, witnesses, legislators…” It followed that “the only security for the highest and wealthiest is in the enlargement of the understanding and a purification of the affections of every individual” (Barnard Collection).

But there was a cavernous gap in the stockade guarding property and rights in Connecticut, the redoubtable Bushnell himself pointed out. Hartford’s leading pastor contrasted “the fine institutions of other kinds” with the wretchedness of the one institution that could improve almost everybody, the common schools (“Common Schools in Cities,” Connecticut Common School Journal 4 (December 1, 1841)). Here lay Barnard’s mission: to strengthen this most necessary, yet most neglected, of American social institutions.

As Christopher Collier argues in his comprehensive study, Connecticut’s Public Schools: A History, 1650–2000 (Clearwater Press, 2009), schooling in Connecticut had originally gotten off to a remarkably forward-looking start. In 1650, the Connecticut Colony was far ahead of its time in requiring that all children be taught “perfectly to read the English tongue” and that every town with fifty households establish a school. To pay schoolmasters, towns were authorized to levy taxes, charge tuition, or both. The reading mandate, rooted in the necessity that Christians know the Bible, was widely honored. Colonial Connecticut could boast of near-universal literacy.

The paying mandate was another story. By the 1670s, the colonial legislature was already chiding towns for failing to fund their schools properly. Eventually, school taxes were made compulsory, though at rates too low to maintain buildings adequately and hire competent teachers. Finally, the General Assembly reassigned responsibility for schools from the towns to local districts, assuming that people would be likely to provide adequate resources for the instruction of their own children. The assumption proved wrong. Parents and the childless alike balked at paying taxes for schools.

In the 1790s, a windfall seemed to answer Connecticans’ parsimonious prayers. Their governors had always claimed the charter the colony received from King Charles II granted it territory extending well beyond its original western borders. After the Revolution, the new state deftly managed to hold onto a million fertile acres in what is now northeastern Ohio. The sale of the “Western Reserve” garnered $1.2 million that the General Assembly invested in a permanent Connecticut School Fund. Giddy citizens expected this jackpot to relieve them of school taxes forever. In reality, it relieved them of their last shreds of conscience. The actual fund never provided enough revenue. Collier found, however, that the myth of the fund further hardened public resistance to paying for schools.

Chronically shortchanged, Connecticut’s common schools fell into the sorry state that student Henry Barnard experienced and Horace Bushnell deplored. Largely on the strength of the School Fund fairy tale, Connecticut acquired a reputation as a national model for education. It was deserved only to the extent that elsewhere in America schools were even weaker—if they existed at all.

Reformers were undaunted. In an 1840 letter to Barnard, Horace Mann called “the Great movement of Education . . . a part of the Providence of God, by which the human race is to be redeemed” (quoted by Lannie). What Barnard lacked in Mann’s prophetic flair, he made up in relentlessness. As secretary of the Connecticut Board of School Commissioners, he was less a bureaucrat—he had no agency to administer—than a tireless itinerant preacher. To spread the common schooling gospel, Barnard made “home missionary circuits” across the state, gathering information, giving addresses, organizing meetings of teachers, school committees, and parents, and editing a lively Connecticut Common School Journal. By 1840, he estimated he had visited more than 1,000 schools. His purpose, as he wrote in his First Annual Report of the Board of Commissioners of Common Schools in Connecticut, May, 1839, was always to stimulate public dedication to “the holy work of elevating the character of our common schools.”

Barnard approached the work from every conceivable angle. He called on local school committees to increase tax levies and tighten their visiting authority and campaigned for equitable distribution of School Fund money among Connecticut towns. In 1842, he published a stunningly comprehensive book on school architecture. He proposed to rationalize what went on inside classrooms by standardizing textbooks, liberally using blackboards and globes, publishing codes of conduct, introducing systems of grades, and creating high schools. Most insistently, Barnard campaigned for the professionalization of teaching, chiefly through the founding of normal schools.

Of all the social ills that cried out for common schools, the one that most troubled Barnard was the deepening division of classes, especially in Connecticut’s burgeoning cities and mill villages. Bushnell brilliantly framed the problem in an 1841 statement that Barnard heartily endorsed. In contrast to private schools that cloistered privileged children, Bushnell wrote, the common schools permitted “distinctions of rank but . . . but not separation of rank, for separation is non-acquaintance, and that is too close on the verge of hostility. . . . There is no danger to our institutions as long as we do not separate.” Common schools were at once “eminently republican” and “the strongest conservative influence; for here the children are put upon a common footing together” (“Common Schools in Cities,” Connecticut Common School Journal).

Surveying the state’s 8,000 unschooled children in 1839, Barnard wrote in the First Annual Report that “from the ranks of such, if they are allowed to grow up without the restraining influence which education institutes, will come forward with the idle, vicious, the criminal.” Making the schools “the balance wheel of the social machinery”—Horace Mann’s memorable slogan—became a theme of all of Barnard’s labors. By mingling children of all backgrounds, the schools would exert a “harmonizing influence” on a cacophonous society (“Public High School,” American Journal of Education 8, March 1857).

To many Connecticans, all this idealism came across as mere sanctimony. It flew over their heads and threatened to dig into their pockets. Moreover, Democrats opposed state oversight of local schools, particularly when Whigs were the overseers. Thus, a new Democratic majority in the General Assembly summarily disbanded Barnard’s Board of Common School Commissioners. In 1842, the secretary was suddenly out of a job.

But Barnard retained the ambitions that had already won him a national reputation. He devoted the remainder of his career—40 years of it—to championing common schools across the continent. From 1842 to 1843, he toured the country, speaking in every state except Texas while gathering materials for a projected national history of education. Soon, according to MacMullen, he was called to be the first commissioner of the public schools of Rhode Island, a post in which, over five years, he “reached the pinnacle of his powers,” materially ameliorating the state’s schools and laying the foundations for future progress.

Barnard had long called for the establishment of normal schools to train teachers. His family friend Thomas Gallaudet developed an early proposal for such a Connecticut “seminary.” In 1837, Calvin Stowe (future husband of Harriet Beecher) published a Report on Elementary Public Instruction in Europe that lauded a Prussian system with rigorous teacher preparation at its heart. Finally, in 1849, the Connecticut General Assembly acted to found the State Normal School in New Britain, the ancestor of Central Connecticut State University.

The school’s principal would double as state superintendent of schools. The legislative committee unanimously chose Barnard to fill this position.

Sadly, Barnard’s stint in New Britain proved one of the most barren periods of his career. He had no gifts for administration or navigating through political landscapes; he preferred talking up noble causes to the gritty toils of staying on budget and managing staff. And whenever he ran into difficulties, he was prone to flee home to Hartford.

Barnard’s practical shortcomings plagued him in other prestigious postings as well, as chancellor of the University of Wisconsin from 1859 to 1861 and president of St. John’s College in Maryland. MacMullen said his bitterest tenure came when he served as the first U.S. Commissioner of Education from 1867 to 1870. He once hoped the position would function as a potent force for advancing the nation’s schools, but he failed when given the opportunity to implement his vision.

In 1855, Barnard took on the great task of his career by compiling an encyclopedic American Journal of Education. This august periodical likely had few readers among busy teachers, but it brought out the best of Barnard, always more editor and publicist than scholar or activist. He made it a powerful engine for permanently establishing the dignity and professionalism of teaching in the United States.

Barnard’s active professional life extended to 1880, when the last volume of the Journal appeared. By then, he was an honored sage, receiving florid tributes from all sectors of an education profession he had done as much as any American to establish. Barnard died in 1900 in the Hartford home where he was born.

 

Gene Leach is professor of history and American studies emeritus at Trinity College and a frequent contributor to Connecticut Explored.