By Thomas Ultican 5/21/2024
In 1867, Henry Barnard was appointed the first Commissioner of the new US Department of Education. Today that position is called Secretary of Education. The Department came into being with President Johnson’s signature on March 2nd and was followed by Barnard’s being sworn in as Commissioner on March 11th. Powerful forces opposed to a federal takeover of schools abolished the department on July 20, 1868. It officially became the Bureau of Education, attached to the Department of Interior, where it remained until 1979. Barnard continued as Commissioner of the Bureau until March 15, 1870. (BARNARD Pages 106-108)
Henry Barnard’s contribution to establishing the common school system and the ideals of pedagogy in America and Europe were remarkable. Boone, an early 2oth century writer, stated that “in magnitude and detail, in permanency of result and general cooperation, Barnard’s work in Rhode Island was scarcely second to that of Horace Mann in Massachusetts.” (Barnard Page 61)
Barnard’s Early Life
On January 24, 1811, Henry was born at home in Hartford, Connecticut and was named after his is father, a well-to-do Puritan farmer. His mother, the former Elizabeth Andrus, unfortunately died when Henry was just four. Still he wrote, “It was my blessed inheritance to be born in a family in which chore-doing and mutual help was the rule and habit and happiness.” There were siblings, at least one brother and one sister. (Barnard Page 7)
Hartford Connecticut Home Where Henry Barnard was Born and Died
In the late 1600s, Connecticut’s Governor Hopkins founded the Hartford Grammar School that Henry attended. He detested that school but would later change his mind, realizing it was “a school of equal rights, where merit, and not social position, was the acknowledged basis of distinction and therefore the fittest seminary to give the schooling essential to the American citizen.” At 13 years old, he transferred to Monson Academy in Hampton County, Massachusetts. (Barnard Page 8)
Fifteen year old Henry entered Yale in 1826 and graduated with a bachelors of arts in 1830. He would return to Yale in 1833 to study law and was admitted to the Bar in 1835.
Barnard was sent home from Yale for his part in the 1828 “bread and butter rebellion”, over poor food in the mandatory dining hall. During this short stay at home, his sister became ill. It was then that Henry first learned of the Pestalozzi from her attending physician, Dr. Eli Todd. The doctor was acquainted with American Pestalozzian, William McClure, and both shared a high opinion of the Swiss educator. (Barnard Page 11)
Upon his graduation, Yale President, Jeremiah Day, advised Henry to teach school for a year. He took a teaching position in Tioga County, Pennsylvania. This would be his only classroom teaching experience but it gave him a deeper perspective of pedagogy than other school reformers of his day. (Barnard Page 14)
After leaving Tioga County and before returning home to Hartford, he made a tour of Auburn, Ithaca, Niagara, and Rochester. It was the first of many important trips he would take.
Political and Professional Life
Barnard became an ardent Whig. The Whig party appeared around 1830 in opposition to the Democratic President, Andrew Jackson. Henry’s strong anti-Jackson feelings were expressed in speeches and by his attendance at the 1831 Whig convention as a delegate. (Barnard Page 14) Illinois Congressman, Abraham Lincoln, was also a Whig.
In 1837, without running for office, he was elected as one of two Hartford delegates to the Connecticut general assembly. Horace Mann of Massachusetts described him as having “fine powers of oratory, wielding a ready and able pen, animated by a generous and indomitable spirit, willing to spend and be spent in the cause of benevolence and humanity.” (Barnard Page 24)
Barnard introduced a bill “to provide for the better supervision of the common schools.” This law created a state committee to supervise schools and Barnard was appointed the new Secretary of the Connecticut Education Committee. (Barnard Page 26)
Washington DC Normal School
He was convinced the quality of educator in America’s common schools must be improved, writing, “No one sends a shoe to be mended, or a horse to be shod, or a plow to be repaired, except to an experienced workman, and yet parents will employ teachers who are to educate their children for two worlds,” without their careful training. (Barnard Page 44)
Henry’s two main focuses became the development of normal schools for teacher training and graded schools for children. He outlined the graded schools: 1) primary schools, with the “teachers all females and the children below 8 years of age”, 2) secondary schools, comprising children from 8 to 12 years of age and 3) high schools for boys and girls. To achieve these goals he attended hundreds of meetings with community members where he gave eloquent and inspiring speeches. (Barnard Page 29)
Barnard also spoke to these issues in other states. He had made such a convincing two-hour speech supporting graded schools in Barre, Massachusetts, that Horace Mann offered, “If you will deliver that in 10 places, I’ll give you $1,000.” (Barnard Page 48)
In 1842, Barnard and the common-school education system suffered a setback. A new Democratic administration swept the Whigs out of power in Connecticut and neither he nor the system was popular with the Democrats. (Barnard Page 49)
Horace Mann reported:
“Four years ago a new System was established in Connecticut which was most efficiently and beneficently administered under the auspices of one of the ablest best of men: but it is with unspeakable regret that I am compelled to add that within the last month all his measures for improvement have been suffered to fall.” (Barnard Page 48)
Rhode Island quickly took advantage of Connecticut’s firing Barnard. In 1843, Rhode Island Governor, James Fenner, invited him to “test the practicability of his own plans of educational reform.” Over the next four years he organized a “revolution in the public opinion and the educational system of the State; a revolution which is without a parallel …” (Barnard Page 54)
Following Barnard’s death on July 5, 1900, the Hartford Courant shared:
- Yale 1826-1830
- Admitted to the Connecticut Bar 1835
- Nominated without his knowledge to serve in the Connecticut legislature and was elected 1837
- Ushered through with unanimous support laws to provide better supervision by establishing the Board of Commissioners of Common Schools. After originally declining to lead the commission he took the post 1838
- Visited Europe 7 times to study education. Corresponded with Marshall, Clay and Webster. He met with Wordsworth, Lockhart, De Quincey, Carlyle and others.
- Secretary of Connecticut State Board of Education 1838-42
- Superintendent of schools in Rhode Island 1843-49
- Superintendent Connecticut State Normal School and secretary of the board of education 1850-54
- President of the state university of Wisconsin 1857-63
- President of St. John’s College, Annapolis 1865-66
- US commissioner of education 1867-70
The Courant’s memorial stated,
“The work of Dr. Barnard, which is monumental, and with which his name will be associated in all coming time, is his work in educational literature, as a writer, editor and publisher. He has done more than any man before or since to give to the English speaking world the best thoughts of the world on education. His collected writings include 52 volumes, averaging 500 pages, comprising 800 individual treatises. The article on school architecture alone had a circulation of more than 10,000 copies.”
There was one disagreement between Mann and Barnard. In spring of 1943, Mann and his new bride, Mary Peabody, took a European honeymoon. He was captivated by the schools he saw in Prussia (Democracy’s Schools Page 104). On the contrary, Barnard found that Prussian students were, “subjected to the depressing and repressing influences of a despotic government and of a state of society in which everything is fixed both by law and the iron rule of custom.” (Barnard Page 48)
The author of Henry Barnard’s Interior Department biography, Barnard C. Steiner, wrote this tribute:
“The greatest contribution yet made by the United States to the uplifting-genius of the world’s progress was the establishment of the free public school supported by general taxation and directed by the State, and Horace Mann and Henry Barnard were ‘the men to whom America owes the organization of the public-school system.’” (Barnard Page 32)
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