The Birth of an Ed School

Harvard has long turned out educators. As Samuel Eliot Morison writes in his 1930 book, The Development of Harvard University Since the Inauguration of President Eliot, 1869–1929, “For two centuries the schools and colleges of New England were very largely manned by her bachelors and masters; and her graduates, with those of Yale, Brown, and Dartmouth, carried Puritan ideals of education into the West.”

Despite this, in those early days, the university didn’t see the need for a separate education school. As Morison notes, “Harvard’s influence upon education during this long period was exerted under a conception obviously limited. Teachers were equipped with knowledge of their subjects, but the university had no department for the study of education as a whole.”

Things started to slowly change when Harvard President Charles Eliot appointed Paul Henry Hanus, at a salary of $2,000, to the first faculty position in education in 1891. For Hanus, this meant running a summer school for teachers in Cambridge and teaching one course, the History and Art of Teaching, which was listed under philosophy and didn’t count toward a degree. Many of his colleagues weren’t thrilled with the new position. 

“I did not learn until after the college year began in September that many members of the faculty were doubtful about the value of the new department and that some of them looked on such a department with little more than contempt,” Hanus wrote in his 1937 book, Adventuring in Education. “Quite in harmony with this attitude of a considerable minority of the faculty, and doubtless as a concession to that minority, the faculty, while voting in favor of establishing the new department, also voted that the courses in the history and art of teaching should not be allowed to count toward any degree without special permission of the faculty; so that any students who might elect those courses would run the risk of receiving no academic recognition for the work done.”

Hanus wasn’t content and wanted more for Harvard and the field of education than just one course. By 1903, he began pushing for a separate graduate school devoted to education. As he wrote in Adventuring, he hoped that Harvard would develop a graduate school of education “parallel to the other professional schools of law, medicine, etc. of the university, and on occasion I had expressed that hope in conversation, and also to some extent in print. But the realization of that hope was deferred for many years.” In a letter dated August 3, 1903, President Eliot told him, “If I were you, I should neither talk nor think about a ‘School of Education’ at Harvard.

The Corporation and Overseers are unquestionably opposed to the establishment of more ‘schools’ within the University. Their hope and expectation is to reduce the number of separate schools rather than to increase it.” 

By 1906, Harvard was still wavering about starting a new school for education, but the university did agree to make education a formal division within the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. Hanus chaired the division until 1912, when he turned leadership over to his former student, Henry Wyman Holmes, who was, at the time, a local principal.

Morison writes that this continual push by Hanus for Harvard to embrace education as a professional school was critical for the field. “Until Professor Hanus began his labors, no student could obtain at Harvard an historical perspective of educational institutions, an understanding of the social functions of the schools, a command of teaching in light of the facts of individual growth and learning, or an insight into educational policy. The appointment of Hanus implied, therefore, a permanent change of attitude. The university assumed a new responsibility, which it has not since relinquished or denied.”

And then in 1916, just a little more than a decade after Hanus began his bid for a separate graduate school, his pushing paid off when three groups, including the Harvard Corporation, began a united and serious effort to find the money to get started. In May 1919, John D. Rockefeller, founder of the Standard Oil Company, made the first major donation: $500,000 toward the $2 million that was ultimately raised. Nine months later, on February 17, 1920, at the Harvard Union, 200 guests gathered for a dinner to celebrate the impending conversion from division to school. This included Harvard President A. Lawrence Lowell, Hanus, and Holmes, who would become the school’s first dean. “On a frigid winter night, elaborate pains had been taken to ensure a warm environment of good fellowship and good taste,” writes Arthur Powell in The Uncertain Profession. A few weeks later, on April 12, 1920, the Harvard Graduate School of Education was officially established by a vote of the corporation. As Powell notes, “The educational press reported triumphantly that Harvard at long last was firmly committed to the graduate study of education.” 

This graduate level, Hanus notes in Adventuring, was key to elevating the field. “It is a distinctive feature of this new enterprise at Harvard that it is established on a strictly graduate basis. This, too, was in accordance with the plan of the school I had urged for many years, based on the hope that the school would emphasize the training of leaders in the field of education, while not neglecting the best training that could be devised for the usual practitioner.” 

Starting that September in 1920, the Ed School (housed not on Appian Way, but in Lawrence Hall, near what is now the Science Center) offered two degrees for both men and women: the master of education (Ed.M.) and the nation’s first doctor of education (Ed.D.). As Hanus writes in Adventuring, this is just what the field needed for “students who were planning to make education their lifework.” 

The new graduate school couldn’t have come at a more needed time, said Holmes in an interview with the Harvard Crimson in 1919. 

“The task of training teachers is difficult and cannot be conducted without the development of something much nearer an adequate science and philosophy of education than we now have,” he said. “Trained teachers are already infinitely superior to untrained teachers, but much remains to be done before teacher-training institutions can hope to be reasonably successful in their own effort.” 

Holmes added, “It is therefore especially important to develop university schools in which the study of educational problems may be carried on by those who are to become the educational leaders of the country. In view of all these facts, the establishment of a Graduate School of Education at Harvard may be considered a great step in advance.”