To save content items to your account,
please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies.
If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account.
Find out more about saving content to .
To save content items to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org
is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings
on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part
of your Kindle email address below.
Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations.
‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi.
‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
In south mound cemetery at New Castle, Indiana, lie the remains of William Henry Harrison Beard, his wife Mary Payne Beard, and one of their two sons, Clarence Beard. The fourth member of that Hoosier family, whose name elevates a simple fact of life and death to a level of national significance, was historian Charles Austin Beard (1874–1948).
On December 14, 1857, a Vermont Whig rose from his seat in the national House of Representatives and asked leave of his colleagues “to introduce a bill donating public lands to the several states and territories which may provide colleges for the benefit of agriculture and the mechanic arts.” Justin Morrill thus began a legislative debate over federal aid to higher education that has lost little of its heat and few of its basic propositions in subsequent contests. This paper is an effort to examine the nature of the arguments that appeared in one of the earliest phases of the struggle. Some description of Morrill's proposal and the context of the debate seems in order before proceeding.
When one reads the records of nineteenth-century educators as they wrestled with the question, “Is there a discipline of education?” one finds them very often assuming or flatly asserting that there is or can be such a science and then devoting a major part of their attention to the need for the development of it. Throughout the period this need reflected two concerns: the quality of education and professional status.
The Army and Navy Journal was considerably understating the situation when it commented in 1873 that “our Army is not, as a whole, alive to the subject of education….” Although a significant minority of army officers managed to keep themselves intellectually alive on the frontier, most officers were opposed to any elaborate scheme of formal education because it detracted from the enlisted man's regular duties and because they believed the “school of hard knocks” to be the best educational force. They also commonly assumed, with a great deal of justice in many cases, that enlisted men were not favorably disposed toward classroom instruction and were too dense to benefit by it.