G. Stanley Hall and an American Social Darwinist Pedagogy: His Progressive Educational Ideas on Gender and Race

Abstract

President G. Stanley Hall hung only a portrait of Ralph Waldo Emerson in his office at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts. The philosopher embodied Hall's most cherished mid-nineteenth century ideas that comprised part of his intellectual worldview. In the 1840s, Emerson reflected on his transcendental concepts of the common mind and instinct, which held all innate human knowledge and behavioral patterns, in hisEssays:There is one mind common to all individual men. Every man is an inlet to the same and to all of the same…. In every man's mind, some images, words, and facts remain, without effort on his part to imprint them, which others forget, and afterwards these illustrate to him important laws. All our progress is an unfolding, like the vegetable bud. You have first an instinct, then an opinion, then a knowledge, as the plant has a root, bud, and fruit. Trust the instinct to the end, though you can render no reason.