William Chandler Bagley

William Chandler Bagley (1874-1946) was an educator and theorist of educational "essentialism."

William Chandler Bagley was born March 15, 1874, in Detroit, Michigan, to William Chase and Ruth (Walker) Bagley. The family came originally from Massachusetts but moved west for his father's employment as a hospital superintendent in Detroit. Bagley attended high school in Detroit and in 1891 enrolled in the Michigan Agricultural College (now Michigan State University) to study scientific agriculture. He received his bachelor's degree in 1895, but finding no immediate employment in his field, he took a position as a teacher in a one-room school in the town of Garth, a lumber community in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.

His interest in teaching awakened with this experience, and in the summer of 1896 he began studies at the University of Chicago in the field of education and learning theory. Then, after a second year teaching at Garth, he enrolled as a full-time student, on borrowed money, at the University of Wisconsin, completing his master's degree in 1898. He then began work toward a doctorate in education and psychology at Cornell University, studying with Edward Bradford Titchener, a leading laboratory psychologist at that time. He completed the Ph.D. degree in 1900 with a dissertation entitled "The Apperception of the Spoken Sentence." In the following year he was appointed to an elementary school principalship in St. Louis, and there he met and married Florence MacLean Winger. They had four children, two sons and two daughters.

Bagley's first faculty appointment was in 1902 at the Montana State Normal College at Dillon as professor of psychology and pedagogy and director of teacher training. He also served as superintendent of the local Dillon public schools, where he promoted such innovations as the use of college student teachers in the schools.

After several years there and in a similar faculty appointment at the State Normal School in Oswego, New York, in 1909 Bagley was appointed professor and director of the School of Education at the University of Illinois. During this period of expansion of American schools and of teacher education institutions, Bagley worked to create a strong faculty and to build an influential program in education at the University of Illinois. In 1917 he left Illinois to accept a professorship at Teachers College, Columbia University, in New York City. There he organized a department for the study of normal schools and teacher education. He continued in this position at Teachers College until his retirement in 1939.

Bagley's central professional goal was to determine the scientific theoretical basis for the professionalization of teacher education. His writings, books, and journal articles were widely influential at a formative time in American education. Most notable was his textbook Classroom Management (1907), which was a guide for beginning teachers to help them master the necessary skills and techniques for effectively controlling the classroom. Over 100,000 copies of the book were sold, and it remained in print until 1946. Management of the classroom was perceived as a strict "chain of command" model. The building principal, he wrote, was like the captain of the ship who issued orders (i.e., the course of study) to the teachers, who in turn saw that each student executed the assigned tasks (skills and knowledge). An efficient school system in Bagley's view required the "unquestioned obedience" of teachers and of students to the authority of principal and superintendent, though, he wrote, there might be some latitude, some choice and initiative on the part of individuals in the actual day-to-day execution of the orders. The ultimate aim of education in Bagley's view was indeed efficiency - that is, social efficiency, or the "development of the socially efficient individual."

Other books by Bagley that were used extensively in teacher education classes were The Educative Process (1905) and Educational Values (1911), works that explored the limitations of the then current "transfer of training" theories and outlined his ideas on the need for a scientific basis for educational practice. For effective teaching, he stated, it is necessary that "an adequate conception of principles based on the best data that science can offer … be added to a mastery of technique." Science, he concluded, rather than narrow psychological studies, must be the foundation of good teaching.

Bagley was also active in other publications' efforts to advance the professionalization of teaching. As early as 1905 he organized the Inter-Mountain Educator, the first journal of education studies in the northern Rocky Mountain region. He joined with several colleagues to found and edit the Journal of Educational Psychology (1910). He was editor of School and Home Education (1912 to 1914) and of the Journal of the National Education Association (1920 to 1925), and he worked with the Carnegie Foundation to create the Society for the Advancement of Education and to edit its journal, School and Society, in his retirement years. He collaborated on several grade school textbook projects, the most notable of which was the History of the American People which was written in cooperation with historian Charles A. Beard.

As an educational theorist Bagley was best known for his statement of an "essentialist" position in education, a view that emphasized the firm facts of the physical and social sciences as the "essential" basis of subject matter that all students must acquire. The view stressed the conservative function of education: schools must pass on the accepted values of the society as well as the realities of scientific fact and should not concern themselves with the satisfaction of individual interests and desires. In a widely influential address in 1938, "An Essentialist's Platform for the Advancement of American Education," Bagley stated his socially conservative position in contrast with the "soft" pedagogy of the then current progressive education theory, which in his view overemphasized individual interests and freedom. It was time, he declared, to reassert the values of discipline, authority, tradition, and scientific truth. Language and mathematics skills were the essentials upon which any curriculum must be built, and these basics must underlie the socially useful curriculum and effective education for citizenship. The term "essentialist" passed from fashion by the 1950s, but the ideas contained in it remained a persistent force in American educational thinking over the years.

William Bagley remained active through continuing work with Teachers College students and colleagues in his retirement years. He died in 1946, at age 72, in New York City.

Further Reading

The following publications contain information on Bagley and his work: Erwin V. Johanningmeier, "William Chandler Bagley's Changing Views on the Relationship Between Psychology and Education," History of Education Quarterly (Spring 1969); Henry C. Johnson, Jr., and Erwin V. Johanningmeier, Teachers for the Prairie: The University of Illinois and the Schools, 1868-1945 (1972); and I. L. Kandel, William Chandler Bagley: Stalwart Educator (1961).

Professor of education at Teachers College, Columbia University (1917 - 1940), William C. Bagley is commonly referred to as the founder of essentialist educational theory. Bagley was born in Detroit, Michigan, and after his family relocated to the east coast, he attended elementary school in Weymouth, Massachusetts. When his family moved back to Detroit in 1887, Bagley attended high school there and graduated from Detroit's Capitol High School in 1891 at the age of seventeen. Bagley entered Michigan Agricultural College (now Michigan State University), with the intention of preparing himself to become a farmer. Upon graduation in the spring of 1895, Bagley had no land and no money to begin farming. After a fruitless search for employment, he soon decided to teach, a decision that influenced the rest of his life. He accepted a teaching position in a rural one-room schoolhouse near Garth and Rapid River, Michigan.

Early Career

Bagley taught in Michigan for two years, during which time he dedicated his professional life to the improvement of teaching. He attended the University of Chicago in the summer of 1896, and then transferred to the University of Wisconsin in Madison. Working under Joseph Jastrow, he earned his master's degree in psychology, in the spring of 1898. Upon completion of this degree, he accepted a Sage Fellowship at Cornell University to study with well-known psychologist Edward Bradford Titchener. For four years, Bagley worked under Titchener and learned the structuralist psychology of his mentor. Bagley completed his Ph.D. in 1900 and spent the following academic year as an assistant in Titchener's laboratory. Still committed to the improvement of good teaching, Bagley accepted a position, beginning in the fall of 1901, as principal of Meramec Elementary School in St. Louis, Missouri. He worked in St. Louis for only one year, after which he accepted his first professorship as director of the Teacher Practice School and professor of psychology and pedagogy at the Montana State Normal School in Dillon, Montana. While in Montana, Bagley became active throughout the state by speaking at teachers institutes, by delivering commencement speeches, and by creating the first journal in the Rocky Mountain region dedicated specifically to education,The Intermountain Educator.

While working in Montana Bagley wrote his first major book, the Educative Process (1905). As a comprehensive portrayal of an early "science of education," the work became a popular textbook throughout the United States for courses on the introduction to educational psychology. The Educative Process was well received by professors as well as by the general public. With this book, Bagley's name received national, and even international, prominence.

Bagley received an offer to return to New York State to work at Oswego State Normal School in Oswego, New York. In the fall of 1906 he began his appointment there as superintendent of the Teacher Training Department. He also served as principal of the practice school and taught courses on educational methods. After only two short years he left Oswego to accept his first position at a state university, the University of Illinois.

At Illinois, Bagley helped to develop the Department of Education to the point that it became one of the most well known in the nation. In the nine years he was on the Illinois faculty, Bagley attracted to Illinois such prominent educational scholars as Guy M. Whipple, Lewis Flint Anderson, Lotus D. Coffman, and Charles H. Johnston. He also worked with several of his colleagues in 1910 to create the Journal of Educational Psychology, a scholarly publication that has remained significant for almost 100 years. Moreover, during this time, he helped to found Kappa Delta Pi, an honor society in education that has since opened chapters internationally.

As a professor at the University of Illinois, Bagley worked diligently to create a School of Education that was to differ remarkably from the Department of Education that he inherited. This transition ultimately required three main ingredients: an additional number of education faculty members, the construction of a building to house the school, and the creation of a program that permitted the School of Education to enroll its own students. Bagley had to prevail against the view, held by many professors of liberal arts, that future teachers needed no special preparation beyond a sound liberal arts education. Bagley certainly agreed that a sound liberal arts education was essential for future teachers. He also, however, believed that for people who planned to be teachers, a liberal arts curriculum should be accompanied by an equally sound sequence of professional education courses. Bagley eventually founded the University of Illinois' School of Education, although the construction of the building was not completed until 1918, one year after he left Illinois.

Teachers College

In the fall of 1917 Bagley began his final academic appointment at Teachers College, Columbia University, where he joined a stellar education faculty that included such prominent scholars as John Dewey, Edward L. Thorndike, William Heard Kilpatrick, and George D. Strayer. Bagley's official position was professor of normal school administration. This role allowed him to use his many years as a normal school professor, to work toward the improvement of normal school education across the nation - in effect becoming for more than twenty years the nation's dean of normal schools, or dean of teacher education.

While at Teachers College, Bagley entered into some of the most heated educational discussions of his career. Sometimes with, and often against, his colleague Kilpatrick, Bagley engaged in debates about the relative weight that should be given in educational theory to academic subject matter, on the one hand, and to the interests and needs of students on the other. Bagley never denied the importance of designing a curriculum that met the interests and needs of students. He often argued, however, that the emphasis that theorists such as Kilpatrick placed on the individual needs of students often eclipsed the necessity for academic subject matter in the curriculum. Importantly, Bagley sought a reasonable view of professional education that balanced the needs of students with a rigorous academic curriculum.

While at Teachers College in the 1920s, Bagley also entered into educational discussions about the role of intelligence testing in the schools. In Determinism in Education: A Series of Papers on the Relative Influence of Inherited and Acquired Traits, Bagley argued against the determinist viewpoint, held by people such as Thorndike, that education played little or no role in the improvement of a person's intelligence. Instead, Bagley asserted that the recently created intelligence tests actually measured the educational opportunity experienced by students rather than their innate ability.

In 1934 Bagley published what he believed to be his most significant contribution to educational theory. In Education and Emergent Man: A Theory of Education With Particular Application to Public Education in the United States, Bagley applied Gestalt psychology to teaching, arguing against what he called mechanistic psychology, represented most prominently by Thorndike and what might be termed extreme pragmatism, advocated by Kilpatrick. This final book of Bagley's, however, received little attention from his colleagues. This lack of recognition likely played into the final major event of Bagley's career, the founding of essentialism in 1938.

In that year, Bagley joined with some of his colleagues to create an organization that would counteract some of the extreme tendencies of Progressive education. In the Essentialist's Platform, which Bagley published in April 1938, the essentialists offered several basic educational principles. First, they recognized the right of an immature student to the guidance of a well-educated, caring, and cultured teacher. Second, they proposed that an effective democracy demanded a democratic culture in which teachers impart the ideals of community to each succeeding generation of children. Third, they called for a specific program of studies that required thoroughness, accuracy, persistence, and good workmanship on the part of pupils. Bagley's basic point with his role in the founding of essentialism was that the currently dominant theories of education were feeble and insufficient. He wanted these dominant theories complemented, and perhaps replaced, with a philosophy that was strong, virile, and positive. He did not, however, want to destroy completely the dominant theories that he was critiquing. Throughout his life, he supported both the academic disciplines and certain basic tenets of Progressive education.

Soon after the founding of essentialism, Bagley retired from Teachers College. During retirement and until his death on July 1, 1946, in New York City, he served as editor of School and Society. He died while completing editorial work for this journal. Bagley can be remembered as an untiring fighter for professional education, a supporter of the academic disciplines, and both a critic and a supporter of different aspects of the complex movement known as Progressive education.

Bibliography

Bagley, William C. 1905. The Educative Process. New York: Macmillan.

Bagley, William C. 1925. Determinism in Education: A Series of Papers on the Relative Influence of Inherited and Acquired Traits. Baltimore: Warwick and York.

Bagley, William C. 1934. Education and Emergent Man: A Theory of Education With Particular Application to Public Education in the United States. New York: Nelson.

Bagley, William C. 1938. "An Essentialist's Platform for the Advancement of American Education," Educational Administration and Super-vision 24 (April):241 - 256.

Johanningmeier, Erwin V. 1967. "A Study of William Chandler Bagley's Educational Doctrines and His Program For Teacher Preparation." Ph.D. diss., University of Illinois.

Kandel, I. L. 1961. William Chandler Bagley: Stalwart Educator. New York: Kappa Delta Pi and Teachers College, Columbia University.

Null, James Wesley. 2001. "A Disciplined Progressive Educator: The Life and Career of William Chandler Bagley, 1874 - 1946." Ph.D. diss., The University of Texas at Austin.

— J. WESLEY NULL