Church and School Triumphant: The Sources of American Catholic Educational Historiography

Abstract

DELEGATES to the 1907 Educational Association in Milwaukee expressed a remarkably optimistic mood. The twentieth century seemed to portend the fulfillment of American educational dreams. The Church had a magnificent educational past, declared the Reverend W\illiam Turner (1871-1936), scholar, religious journalist, professor and librarian at University, and future bishop of Buffalo, but it had long been distorted by anti-Catholic historians. There was desperate need for an accurate history of education written by a scholarly and the sources themselves. Though it was obvious that an historian should write this history, it was even more obvious that this historian also be a professional educator. For unless the person who writes a history of education has a knowledge of pedagogical methods and has some practice and experience, the history, I think, had better not be written. (1) Turner looked to some scholarly teaching nun who had also been in the field to perform this task. And yet he might have looked to his own University for such a person. The Reverend James A. Burns (1867-1940) had just completed a Ph.D. degree in philosophy and had written a dissertation on Catholic Education in the United States (1906) which examined schools in the New World from the Spanish Franciscans to the end of the colonial period. (2) Even while writing his dissertation he had considered enlarging it for future publication. He found it difficult to locate primary sources and complained about the scarcity of secondary works in American education. (3) But in 1908 he had completed the story of the 1840's and published it as The School System in the United States: Its