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“More Important Than a Rabble of Common Kings”: Dr. Howe's Education of Laura Bridgman

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 February 2017

Ernest Freeberg
Ernest Freeberg*
Affiliation:
Emory University and is completing his dissertation with the help of a Spencer Foundation Fellowship
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Extract

In 1851, a “Great Exhibition” was held in London. There, under the dome of the Crystal Palace, each nation was invited to display its highest contributions to nineteenth-century civilization. Many Americans were mortified to learn, however, that their own offerings to this pageant were received as a dismal failure. The American exhibit, which included a model of Niagara Falls, some false teeth, and a large collection of pasteboard eagles, had even “fallen so far short of expectation as to excite ridicule.” Citizens of the young republic were stung by this blow to the nation's self-esteem.

Type
Articles
Information
History of Education Quarterly , Volume 34 , Issue 3 , Fall 1994 , pp. 305 - 327
Copyright
Copyright © 1994 by the History of Education Society 

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References

1 “Our Country and the London Fair,” Evening Transcript, 14 June 1851; Allwood, John The Great Exhibitions (London, 1977), 22.Google Scholar

2 “Our Country and the London Fair,” Evening Transcript, 14 June 1851; Elliott, Maude Howe and Hall, Florence Howe Laura Bridgman: Dr. Howe's Famous Pupil and What He Taught Her (Boston, 1903); Lamson, Mary Swift Life and Education of Laura Dewey Bridgman, the Deaf Dumb, and Blind Girl (Boston, 1881; New York, 1975); Schwartz, Harold Samuel Gridley Howe: Social Reformer, 1801–1876 (Cambridge, Mass., 1956), ch. 6.Google Scholar

3 “Our Country and the London Fair,” Evening Transcript, 14 June 1851.Google Scholar

4 Kaestle, Carl Pillars of the Republic: Common Schools and American Society, 1780–1860 (New York, 1983), chs. 6–7; Katz, Michael The Irony of Early School Reform: Educational Innovation in Mid-Nineteenth Century Massachusetts (Cambridge, Mass., 1968), part 1.Google Scholar

5 Culver, Raymond B. Horace Mann and Religion in the Massachusetts Public Schools (New Haven, Conn., 1929). In nineteenth-century debates over school reform, the controversy over the religious content of the curriculum was integrally connected to the controversy over pedagogical reform. Both were expressions of a more fundamental and irreconcilable debate over human nature itself. However, in this essay I am concentrating on the issue of pedagogical reform, setting aside some of the theological controversies sparked by Dr. Howe's education of Laura Bridgman. For a discussion of these, see Ernest Freeberg, “‘An Object of Peculiar Interest’: The Education of Laura Bridgman,” Church History 61 (June 1992): 191–205.Google Scholar

6 Howe, Samuel Gridley Sixth Annual Report of the Trustees of the New England Institution for the Education of the Blind (Boston, 1838), 10–11. Howe's annual reports are hereafter cited with shortened titles.Google Scholar

7 Mann, Horace “Laura Bridgman,“ Common School Journal, 15 May 1843, 146; ibid., 16 May 1842, 145.Google Scholar

8 “Julia Brace,” Religions Magazine and Family Miscellany (Aug. 1847); Elliott, and Hall, Dr. Howe's Famous Pupil, 38.Google Scholar

9 Schwartz, Samuel Gridley Howe, 68–69; Howe, Samuel Gridley Ninth Annual Report (Boston, 1841), 23–25; Howe, Samuel Gridley “Laura Bridgman,” Barnard's American Journal of Education (Dec. 1857), 383–400.Google Scholar

10 Howe, Samuel Gridley Eighth Annual Report (Boston, 1840) 17–18.Google Scholar

11 Howe, Sixth Annual Report, 6; Sears, John F. Sacred Places: American Tourist Attractions in the Nineteenth Century (New York, 1989). Sears discusses the Perkins Institution as an antebellum tourist attraction.Google Scholar

12 Howe, Eighth Annual Report, 14.Google Scholar

13 Ibid., 6; Howe, Ninth Annual Report, 34; Lamson, Life and Education, 135–38.Google Scholar

14 Teachers’ Journals, 16 and 9 June, 20 Aug., 27 July 1841, Laura Bridgman Papers, Perkins School for the Blind, Watertown, Mass. Published excerpts of these journals are included in Lamson, Life and Education. Google Scholar

15 Katz, Irony, 131–38, discusses the reformers’ interest in “object learning.”Google Scholar

16 Swift, Mary Teachers’ Journals, 26 July 1843, Bridgman Papers.Google Scholar

17 Howe, Jeanette to Howe, Samuel Gridley 14 Oct. 1843, Samuel Gridley Howe Papers, Perkins School for the Blind; Teachers’ Journals, 12 Apr. 1842, 20 Aug. and 28 June 1841, Bridgman Papers.Google Scholar

18 Howe, Eighth Annual Report, 15.Google Scholar

19 Teachers’ Journals, 31 Dec. and 15 June 1841, Bridgman Papers.Google Scholar

20 Howe, Samuel Gridley Seventh Annual Report (Boston, 1839), 9.Google Scholar

21 Howe, Samuel Gridley Tenth Annual Report (Boston, 1842), 19; Howe, Ninth Annual Report, 39.Google Scholar

22 Teachers’ Journals, 5 Oct. 1841, Bridgman Papers.Google Scholar

23 Swift, Teachers’ Journals, 11 Apr. 1844, Bridgman Papers. In spite of Swift's misgivings about exposing Laura to historical examples of human cruelty, by July the child was reading a story about a battle between two African tribes, which described “the Tuaricks killing the Tibbors.” As Swift predicted, Laura, “was horror-struck & did not seem to know what to say. She never before has heard that there is such a thing as man's killing man—in this world.” Swift, Teachers’ Journals, 8 July 1844, Bridgman Papers.Google Scholar

24 Teachers’ Journals, 22 Mar. 1842, Bridgman Papers.Google Scholar

25 Swift, Teachers’ Journals, 23 and 27 Aug. 1843, 27 Apr. 1842, Bridgman Papers.Google Scholar

26 Swift, Teachers’ Journals, 9 June 1843, Bridgman Papers.Google Scholar

27 Howe, Samuel Gridley “Education of the Blind,“ North American Review 37 (July 1833): 20–55.Google Scholar

28 Howe, Sixth Annual Report, 8; Howe, Tenth Annual Report, 16.Google Scholar

29 Combe, George Constitution of Man: Considered in Relation to External Objects (Boston, 1834; Delmar, N.Y., 1974), 51–52; Schwartz, Harold “Samuel Gridley Howe as Phrenologist,” American Historical Review 57 (Apr. 1952): 644–51. Howe despaired of ever reaching Laura's faculties of “Tune” and “Colouring,” but he devised exercises to test her organ of “Time.” He reported that the child could correctly maintain time when striking the keys of a piano, thus proving that “the capacity of perceiving and measuring the lapse of time is an innate and distinct faculty of the mind.” Howe, Eighth Annual Report, 18.Google Scholar

30 Whorton, James C. Crusaders for Fitness: The History of American Health Reformers (Princeton, N.J., 1982), discusses antebellum ideas about physical and mental exercise. See also Wishy, Bernard The Child and the Republic: The Dawn of Modern American Child Nurture (Philadelphia, 1968), ch. 4. Greven, Philip The Protestant Temperament: Patterns of Child-Rearing, Religious Experience, and the Self in Early America (Chicago, 1977), part 3, discusses the ideal of physical, mental and spiritual balance among those Greven calls “moderates.”Google Scholar

31 Combe, Constitution of Man, 54; Howe, Seventh Annual Report, 3.Google Scholar

32 Howe, Sixth Annual Report, 8; Lamson, Life and Education, 157.Google Scholar

33 Howe, Ninth Annual Report, 7.Google Scholar

34 Howe, Eighth Annual Report, 20; Lamson, Life and Education, 69.Google Scholar

35 Howe, Ninth Annual Report, 35.Google Scholar

36 Mann, Horace “Means and Objects of Common School Education,“ Lectures on Education (Boston, 1855; New York, 1969), 20.Google Scholar

37 Ibid., 22.Google Scholar

38 Mann, Horace “Laura Bridgman,“ Common School Journal, 1 Feb. 1841.Google Scholar

39 Mann, Horace “Laura Bridgman,“ Common School Journal, 16 May 1842, 146.Google Scholar

40 Mann, Horace “Laura Bridgman,“ Common School Journal, 15 May 1843, 146–47.Google Scholar

41 Schwartz, Samuel Gridley Howe, 120–36; Glenn, Myra C. Campaigns against Corporal Punishment: Prisoners, Sailors, Women, and Children in Antebellum America (Albany, N.Y., 1984), 103–11; Rev. McClure, George “Laura Bridgman,” Christian Observatory, Mar. 1847, 12.Google Scholar

42 Howe, Samuel Gridley “Laura Bridgman,“ Common School Journal, 15 Oct. 1846, 316; Humphrey, Heman New England Puritan, 29 Oct. 1846. Wishy, Child and Republic, Part I, explains Humphrey's theory of pedagogical reform. As a supporter of Mann's reforms and a member of the State Board, Humphrey may have found it politically convenient to criticize Mann's sectarian excesses indirectly, by attacking Howe's sentiments rather than Mann's. Humphrey may have had an additional incentive for taking aim at Howe. In 1837, Howe publicly criticized “the President of Amherst College” for promoting evangelical revivals on his campus. In an address to the Boston Phrenological Society, Howe scolded Humphrey for “the fanatical excitement, the terror, the agony, the intense cerebral action which he was exciting in youths committed to his care.” Howe, Samuel Gridley Discourse on the Social Relations of Man: Delivered before the Boston Phrenological Society (Boston, 1837), 34.Google Scholar

43 Mann, Horace “Note by the Editor,“ Common School Journal, 1 Feb. 1847, 48.Google Scholar

44 Humphrey, Heman New England Puritan, 29 Oct. 1846.Google Scholar

45 Howe, Samuel Gridley Eighteenth Annual Report (Cambridge, Mass., 1850), 47; Teachers’ Journals, 29 June 1842, Bridgman Papers.Google Scholar

46 Swift, Teachers’ Journals, 7 June 1843, Bridgman Papers.Google Scholar

47 Teachers’ Journals, 19 Aug. 1841, 16 Aug. 1843, Bridgman Papers.Google Scholar

48 Teachers’ Journals, 6 Oct. 1841, Bridgman Papers.Google Scholar

49 Glenn, Corporal Punishment, 145–46; Kaestle, Pillars, 87–88, 180; Katz, Irony 152–53; Wishy, Child and Republic, 22–23.Google Scholar