Classical Education

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The Classical Education

When the Reverend Obadiah B. Brown, President of the Board of Trustees, formally announced the opening of Columbian College in December of 1821, higher education in America was already one hundred eighty-five years old and feeling the tugs of change from various quarters. Until the early nineteenth century, little of the educational philosophy among the colleges had changed other than the expansion of subjects, especially in science, and the broadening of entrance requirements, the colleges striving for higher levels of instruction by relying more upon the burgeoning preparatory schools. Harvard’s original entrance requirements demanded only proficiency in Greek and Latin; its curriculum in 1642 included the classical and Semitic languages, ethics, politics, physics, mathematics, botany, and divinity. Admission requirements at Columbian College in 1821 demanded of the applicant “an acquaintance with English Grammar, common Arithmetic . . . [and] geography” besides a thorough knowledge of Greek and Latin. Columbian College supplemented Harvard’s seventeenth century curriculum with studies in history, geography, surveying, navigation, conic sections, natural philosophy, astronomy, law, metaphysics, and moral philosophy, to name only a few of the additions.

The expanded curriculum at Columbian College was representative and reflected the influence of the eighteenth century New Learning on what was initially a theologically dominated course of study designed to educate the community leader of the early seventeenth century, the clergyman. Yet even by the late seventeenth century, college administrators recognized that the college should be a training ground for other community leaders as well and tried to accommodate studies accordingly. Of course, in the colonies the influence of the English universities was ever-present. After Parliament’s passage of the Act of Uniformity in 1662 and the resulting establishment of the English “dissenting academies,” the eighteenth century American college felt the force of the European Enlightenment with the introduction of courses and texts in Newtonian science, Cartesianism, and Neoplatonism, and by mid-century the strong influence of the Scottish scientists. By the time of the American Revolution, national leaders—Jefferson and Franklin, in particular—were calling for modern subjects and utilitarian courses to supplement the classical curriculum.

Through the first century and a half, then, educators developed a wider breadth of disciplines, more of what was to be taught. American colleges clearly were to be the training grounds for the next generation of civic and political leaders, what Jefferson called “the natural aristocracy” who would lead and enlighten their fellow citizens. Commenting upon a faculty statement of 1770 from the College of William and Mary, two educational historians note rather waggishly that the college’s aim was to train young men to become clergymen, lawyers, doctors, and gentlemen, the latter “which was evidently regarded by the aristocratic Virginia society of the time as being equivalent to a fourth profession” (Brubacher and Rudy, Higher Education in Transition). Becoming a gentleman, however, was hardly the cavalier role Brubacher and Rudy infer since the gentleman in eighteenth century colonial America was usually the landowner with civic responsibility equal to that of the minister, lawyer, or doctor. Becoming a gentleman implied an intellectual background required of the other civic leaders and, in so many words, affirmed the necessity for a broad, liberal arts education founded in the classical curriculum.

By the turn of the nineteenth century, curriculum innovations had branched into educational movements that set experimentation against tradition. On the experimental side, one school of thought favored introducing business training into the curriculum, the better to train America's leaders for rapid advancement in the ever more complicated world market. As early as 1750, Benjamin Franklin suggested business courses to parallel the more traditional curriculum at King’s College. The firm establishment of a “utilitarian” curriculum did not come, however, until the founding of Rennselaer Polytechnic Institute in 1824. On another experimental front, Thomas Jefferson proposed concentrated, elective subject study to supplement some basic requirements as the means of educating Americans more fully. By the end of the eighteenth century, Jefferson and several other American leaders suggested that a national university could best combine the intellectual resources and best educate America’s youth. George Washington bequeathed shares in the Potomac Company toward the founding of such an institution, and Joel Barlow in 1806 made a formal proposal to that end (see his Prospectus of a National Institution). But as we know, the national institution as such never materialized, and Jefferson's idea for a curriculum made up primarily of elective subjects was diverted to experimentation in private colleges, notably his own University of Virginia, which opened in 1825.

It is interesting to note that the 1820's proved to be the time when the experimental programs began to realize some of their significant goals and also the time when the value of the classical education was more clearly defined. Jefferson's system at Virginia influenced the introduction of similar elective programs elsewhere, notably at Harvard under Ticknor’s pressure. If these experiments in elective courses were slow to develop initially, it was due in part to the poor mixture of more advanced study with the prescriptive instructional methods of the historical lecture and the recitation. Until the elective curriculum was firmly established in the latter half of the nineteenth century, accompanied by additional methods of independent research and interpretive lecturing, the historical lecture and the recitation only preserved knowledge and did little to encourage new inquiry and research. The elective experiments in the 1820’s, while taking a great first step toward advanced study, was ahead of its time. Secondary education was insufficient preparation, and college teaching as yet was not up to the task.

While these various experiments were in process, traditional education was also examining itself and reconfirming the values of the classical curriculum. Probably the most famous statement in its support and in reaction to the Harvard and Virginia experiments appeared in Yale University’s Report on the Courses of Instruction . . . 1828. Many educators then and since have misinterpreted the Yale report by labeling it a conservative impediment to the expansion of learning. It certainly did delay the development of the elective curriculum but only to the point when the colleges were able to accommodate independent research and interpretative lecturing instead of the rote learning of the recitation. The Yale report, in fact, probably did more to foster the sense of university education than any other document of the century, for it did not renounce elective study, but rather placed it in the more realistic position of post-baccalaureate education. The youthful undergraduate, the report maintained, could not select an area of concentrated study without having first studied “the common foundation of all high intellectual attainments,” a prescribed curriculum in classical languages, philosophy, mathematics, science, etc., which would not only give him a solid liberal arts background, but more importantly teach him “how to learn.” As Yale saw it, its role at the undergraduate level was to begin a student's education, not finish it: “... no one factor in a system of intellectual education is of greater moment than such an arrangement of duties and motives, as will most effectively throw the student upon the resources of his own mind.”

At the time the traditionalists were pleading the just cause for the classical education, it got further support from another quarter-the revivalists. Columbian College was among the many colleges in the early nineteenth century which grew out of such “denominational loyalty and a sense of mission in the churches,” as Elmer Kayser has already pointed out in his history of George Washington University, Bricks Without Straw. The revivalist movement was well underway by the close of the eighteenth century and gained impetus through the first four decades of the nineteenth. In a young country founded in one sense in opposition to the union of church and state, the First Amendment provided intellectual freedom for denominational education, and a favorable ruling by the United States Supreme Court in the Dartmouth College Case of 1819 (freeing privately organized educational institutions from governmental controls) opened the way for denominational colleges, especially at the coincident time of great frontier expansions.

Ideologically, the denominational college embraced the liberal arts curriculum that had developed from the Enlightenment and combined it with the seventeenth century ideas for religious training upon which the earliest American colleges were founded. In his Address . . . at the Opening of the Columbian College . . . January 9, 1822 (see Friends Keepsake 1, 1974), William Staughton, the college’s first president, remarked that “a liberal education is an essential qualification in a Christian minister,” an echo of the colonial sentiment toward higher education. Prior to the college’s opening, the Board of Trustees had discussed the college's educational structure and “resolved, that the College be divided into Two Branches: The Popular (later renamed the Classical) and the Theological departments” (Minutes of the Board of Trustees, 6 March 1821). A survey of the course of study in the 1822 “Laws of the Columbian College. . .” further illustrates the admixture of the eighteenth century New Learning with classical and theological subjects:

Freshman Class.-English, Latin and Greek languages; Geography, Arithmetic and Algebra; History and Antiquities; and exercises in Reading, Speaking, and Composition.

Sophomore Class.-Geography, History and Elements of Chronology; Rhetoric and Logic; Logarithms, Geometry, Trigonometry, Mensuration, Surveying, Navigation, Conic Sections, and Euclid's Elements.

Junior Class.-Natural Philosophy, Astronomy, Chemistry, Fluxions, Natural History, History of Civil Society, Natural Religion, and Revelation.

Senior Class.-Natural and Political Law, Metaphysics, Moral Philosophy, and Analogy of Religion to Nature.

Through the whole four years attention will be paid to the Learned Languages, Criticism, Rhetoric and Oratory.

What resources supported this sort of curriculum? In an instructional system which, to reiterate for a moment, relied heavily upon textual recitation, libraries played a secondary, if not tertiary, role. Students were expected to buy their own books, and professors in quoting other sources in their lectures did not do so with the idea that these sources were required for the course. Yet the history of almost every American college’s founding records the recognition of the need for a library from the examples set by the great European institutions. These universities already had well-developed curricula in advanced studies, however, and strong libraries to support research. But libraries in American colleges and universities up to the mid-nineteenth century did not function similarly, as the following brief digression illustrates: John Harvard included four hundred books from his personal library as part of his bequest in 1638 to Harvard College. Two hundred thirty years later, after the Civil War, this number had increased only to 122,000 volumes. Thus, almost ninety-nine percent of Harvard’s present holdings of 9,206,670 volumes have been acquired only in the last one hundred or so years, beginning notably with Harvard’s development of an elective curriculum under Charles W. Eliot’s presidency, 1869-1909. Slow library development through the colonial period can also be attributed in part to the general scarcity of books in America, but the prescriptive curriculum pervading colleges through the seventeenth, eighteenth, and half of the nineteenth centuries was probably most responsible for the slow growth in library resources.

Columbian College showed no variation from this pattern of development. At the same March 6th meeting at which the Popular and Theological Branches of the college were established, Board President Brown also appointed a committee of three, Messr. J.H. Cone, Thomas Sewall, and Luther Rice, “to solicit donations of Books, Maps, Mathematical Instruments, Philosophical Apparatus, etc. ... for the Columbian College . . . .” This was not, however, the first effort toward building the library nor the last, as Dean Kayser has already noted in Bricks Without Straw. As early as 1818 when the Baptist Triennial Convention was considering granting a charter for the college, a committee was appointed to solicit books for the library at the same time one was sent to solicit money. Then, after the 1821 committee mentioned above, President Staughton sent Professor Alva Woods to England and the continent in 1823 for teaching supplies, including more books for the library. Which of these three attempts at library acquisitions solicited what books we cannot say, but from an 1827 deed of trust we do know that the college’s catalogue in 1825 listed 3034 volumes, the first record of the college's library holdings.

One fact, however, concerning the subjective sources of this collection warrants amplification. Columbian College's founder, Luther Rice, was a graduate of Williams College and, in fact, got the inspiration for establishing a denominational college while still an undergraduate there. Special Collections has Luther Rice’s copy of the Catalogue of Books in the Library of Williams College, 1821 which he undoubtedly obtained, as the inscription suggests, from a colleague at his alma mater to help carry out his duties as a member of the 1821 committee.

To date we do not know how many of the 1825 Columbian College books duplicate the 1821 Williams list since we are still in the process of reassembling the Columbian College library. A review of the subject headings in the 1821 Williams catalogue further corroborates its influence when compared with the Columbian College curriculum outlined above. Almost one third of the Williams subjects are theological, including headings such as “Bibles, Evidences of Revelation, Systems of Divinity, Sermons, Theological Treatises and Ecclesiastical History.” Secular subjects include “Greek and Latin Classics, History, Geography, Chemistry and Natural History, Natural Philosophy and Astronomy, Mathematics, Anatomy and Physic, Law and Government, Philology and Rhetoric, Ethics, Logic, and Metaphysics, Poetry, Grammars and Rudiments.”

The curriculum and library of Columbian College at the time of its founding reflected the development of higher education in America. Through the 1820’s various educational experiments, particularly those at Virginia and Harvard, tested the value of the classical education; Yale’s 1828 statement reconfirmed its value; all these efforts went far in advancing American higher education into its next phase - the development of university education. Probably the best result from the theoretical controversies of the decade was the realization that the various educational curricula did not have to be tested and resolved with an either/or choice. The resolutions most colleges made showed that the basic liberal arts education was firmly established and that post-baccalaureate, elective study in subjects other than the traditional law, medicine, and divinity was an idea whose time had come. University education was to flourish anchored in the strong roots of the classical education.

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Author or Source: Exhibit program, The Classical Education: The College Curriculum of the Early Nineteenth Century,Special Collections Department, 1977
Document Location: University Archives
Date Added to Encyclopedia: December 21, 2006
Prepared by: Lyle Slovick, Assistant University Archivist

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