Henry Barnard

Henry Barnard was born in Hartford, Connecticut, on the twenty-fourth of January, in the year 1811, the son of Chauncey and Elizabeth (Andrews) Barnard. He was educated at Monson Academy and at Yale, admitted to the bar in 1835, and might have followed the placid career of a country jurist. He chose instead a labour more arduous and less remunerative: the construction, in the young American republic, of a universal system of public instruction.

Over sixty-five years of public life he served as Connecticut’s first Secretary of the Board of Commissioners of Common Schools, as State Commissioner of Public Schools in Rhode Island, as Principal of the Connecticut State Normal School, as Chancellor of the University of Wisconsin, as President of St. John’s College in Annapolis, and, in 1867, as the first Commissioner of the United States Department of Education. Between these offices he wrote, compiled, and edited without cease, at his own expense, the thirty-one volumes of the American Journal of Education—the most comprehensive record of educational thought in the English language then in existence.

He died in the same Hartford house in which he was born, on the fifth of July, 1900, having outlived by many years the generation whose schools he had built.

A Life in Public Instruction

1. 1811 Born the twenty-fourth of January in Hartford, Connecticut.
2. 1830 Graduated Yale College, having taken honours in oratory and moral philosophy.
3. 1835 Admitted to the Connecticut bar. Travelled thereafter in Europe, observing the schools of Prussia, Saxony, and Switzerland.
4. 1837 Elected to the Connecticut House of Representatives; drafted the act establishing a state Board of Commissioners of Common Schools.
5. 1838 Appointed the Board’s first Secretary — the office in which Horace Mann was, that same year, appointed in Massachusetts.
6. 1843 Called to Rhode Island as State Commissioner of Public Schools; founded there the first teachers’ institute in the state.
7. 1851 Returned to Connecticut as Principal of the State Normal School and Secretary of the reconstituted Board of Education.
8. 1855 Established, at his own charge, the American Journal of Education, which he was to edit until 1881.
9. 1858 Named Chancellor of the University of Wisconsin.
10. 1866 President of St. John’s College, Annapolis.
11. 1867 Appointed by President Andrew Johnson the first Commissioner of the United States Department of Education.
12. 1870 Retired from federal service; devoted his remaining years to editorial labour and to the assembly of his library.
13. 1900 Died the fifth of July in Hartford, in his ninetieth year.

Four Principles of a School of Thought

What Horace Mann accomplished as an orator, Barnard accomplished as a scholar. Together they founded what may fairly be called the Barnardian school of American public education — a body of doctrine which shaped the common schools of a continent.

A Library in Thirty-One Volumes

From the year 1855 until 1881, at intervals dictated by his health, his private resources, and the exigencies of the several public offices he held during that period, Henry Barnard edited, financed, and in large part himself composed the American Journal of Education. Its thirty-one octavo volumes — more than twenty-two thousand printed pages in the aggregate — constitute the largest single work of educational scholarship produced in the nineteenth century.

Within its pages one finds treatises upon the schools of Prussia and of France; biographies of Pestalozzi, Fellenberg, and Fröbel; documentary histories of the American colleges; specimen curricula of the German gymnasium; papers upon the education of women, upon the deaf, upon the blind, upon the industrial and mechanic arts, upon physical training, upon school hygiene, and upon the architecture of schoolhouses. It was, in Barnard’s own phrase, a cyclopædia of education, arranged not by alphabet but by inquiry.

The complete run survives in the collections of the principal research libraries of the United States and of Europe. It remains today, as it was in its own time, the indispensable point of departure for the historical study of American education.

The Long Reach of a Quiet Reformer

Henry Barnard was not, in his own lifetime, the more celebrated of the two great architects of the common school. Horace Mann had the eloquence; Barnard had the archive. But it was Barnard’s patient scholarship — his monographs, his statistical reports, his translations of the European authorities — that furnished the intellectual foundation upon which two full generations of American educators built.

His name endures across the American educational landscape — in institutions of learning, in scholarship, and in the enduring principle that public education is the foundation of a free republic. The federal office he first held has grown, in the century and a half since, into a department of state. The state boards he helped to establish govern, at this day, the schooling of every child within the union.

He is buried in the Old North Cemetery at Hartford, beneath a stone bearing no title and no epitaph beyond his name and dates. The monument he intended for himself was of another kind.