The Formative Years of Schools of Education in America: A Five-Institution Analysis

The prototype of the American graduate school of education emerged between 1900 and 1940. Five institutions--Chicago, Columbia's Teachers College, Harvard, Stanford, and the University of California (Berkeley)--were pacesetters. Their experiences in trying to mediate between the academic pressures of their ambitious universities and demands for professional training and for services to public school practitioners were repeated elsewhere in a changing America. The generic problems of professional schools were compounded for schools of education by the tenuous state of professional knowledge, the low status accorded teaching, and the predominance of women among practitioners. The education professoriate dealt with these issues by emphasizing graduate instruction and research training, distancing themselves from teacher education, and assisting male educators to make careers as school administrators and faculty for the nation's other schools and departments of education.