The nonwhite as child: G. Stanley Hall on the education of nonwhite peoples

Abstract

Although he was a significant educational reformer during the progressive era, a founder of various journals in psychology and pedagogy, a profile writer, and the individual who brought Freud and Jung to the United States, G. Stanley Hall's ideas on the education of nonwhites were, for his period, quite conventional. Unlike those of some of his contemporaries, Hall's racial ideas were not overtly vicious. He argued that nonwhites were the children of the human race and that their education, like that of children of particular ages, should be based on an understanding of their indigenous culture and inherent capabilities. This argument, although reformist in tone, supported a policy of nonwhite subservience.