Man and His Changing Society: The Textbooks of Harold Rugg

Abstract

THE ESTABLISHMENT of the Lincoln School of Teachers College at Columbia University in September 1917 was a reaction against the rigid educational practices of the time. (i) The school developed from the ideas of Charles W. Eliot and Abraham Flexner, who were deeply concerned with the conservative philosophy and lock-step methods of education practiced in the existing schools and who advocated reform of these practices. The publication of Eliot's Changes Needed in Secondary Education (2) and Flexner's A Modern School (3) had influenced the General Education Board under the leadership of Mr. and Mrs. John D. Rockefeller Jr. and Mrs. Willard Straight to recommend to Teachers College that an institution be established that would incorporate the proposed ideas. Both Eliot and Flexner were extremely interested in what was being taught in the schools, feeling that tradition rather than individual or social needs were governing what was included in the curriculum. (4) The General Education Board, in a series of meetings with representatives of Teachers College, convinced them of the value of participating in such an undertaking, and agreement was announced in May 1916. (5) The agreement specified that the proposed modern school be a laboratory for the working out of an elementary and secondary school curriculum, which shall eliminate obsolete material and endeavor to work up in usable form, materials adapted to the needs of modern living. (6) The General Education Board agreed to underwrite the annual deficit incurred by the school, and instruction began in September 1917. (7) The Lincoln School opened with a