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About
In 1891, Harvard President Charles W. Eliot appointed Paul Henry Hanus to the first faculty position in education, establishing the formal study of education as a discipline at Harvard. Although Hanus is considered the founder of HGSE, the school would not become official until 1920.
In 1859, Hanus and his family emigrated to Wisconsin from Prussia. After earning his undergraduate degree at the University of Michigan, he taught mathematics and soon discovered he was “much more interested in studying schools than in studying mathematics.”
President Eliot’s goal was to ensure that students would be properly prepared for college by improving secondary education in the U.S. public school system. While Eliot felt that colleges and universities would be better suited to train teachers, Hanus possessed a broader view of education. He “viewed education as [a] social process, looking at it in national terms and thinking of schools as an agency and instrument of social progress.”
When Hanus was appointed as a full professor with tenure in 1901 he realized the department needed to grow to keep pace with other education schools in the U.S. He lobbied to create a separate faculty. Education became a formal division within the Faculty of Arts and Sciences in 1906, with Hanus as chair until 1912, when he turned leadership over to his former student, Henry Wyman Holmes. Hanus continued to teach and became professor emeritus in 1921. Holmes later said HGSE stood as a “monument to [Hanus’] vision and zeal."
On Hanus’ 75th birthday, friends and former students raised funds to establish a permanent memorial to recognize his contributions to HGSE. Hanus selected Sergei Timofeyevich Konenkov to sculpt and cast a bas-relief portrait.
Konenkov was born to a peasant family in Russia. From 1892 to 1896, he studied at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture and continued his education from 1899 to 1902 at the Higher Arts School of the Academy of Arts in St. Petersburg. During the Russian Revolution of 1905, Konenkov stood with the workers at the barricades and afterward created portraits of the heroes of this rebellion. After the 1917 revolution, he taught at several state studios and was politically active, participating in Lenin’s Plan for Monumental Propaganda. From 1924 to 1945, he resided in New York City with his wife. At the invitation of Stalin, the couple returned to the Soviet Union in 1945, where Konenkov became an acclaimed Soviet artist. He received the Order of Lenin in 1956, the Golden Star of the Hero of Socialist Labor in 1964, and the title of People’s Artist of the Soviet Union in 1958. After he died in 1971, the Sergei T. Konenkov studio museum opened in 1974 on the site of the artist’s studio in Moscow.