Charles W. Eliot and the Secondary School

Abstract

Charles W. Eliot brought to the chairmanship of the Committee of Ten a background of more than twenty years' concern about and interest in secondary schools. In April 1892, the president of the Massachusetts Association of Classical and High School Teachers said that Eliot had been "with us" since 1870 as "a most original, stimulating, inspiring, and, I may almost say, provoking force." He added that it was "no small distinction to this body that President Eliot, by all odds the leader in American education today, got some portion of his training in the arena of debate which we provided him." 1 The motives of the Harvard president, however, were not regarded as above suspicion. According to his critics, Eliot was concerned about the so-called lower schools only to dominate them in the interests of the colleges. One speaker in the NEA convention of 1876 had stated flatly that Eliot did not believe in free public high schools at all. 2 Eliot's criticism of grammar schools in Massachusetts before the state teachers association in 1890 had in particular aroused negative and even hostile response. No one took issue with him on the floor of this meeting, but, according to one observer, within five minutes there were fierce attacks in small groups that gathered in the halls, with Eliot being accused of "insincerity, untruthfulness and various other charac teristics not ordinarily possessed by a college president." 3 Such opinions evidently were not shared by the National Council of Education, which in the summer of 1892 named Eliot as chairman of an executive Committee of Ten to coordinate a series of conferences on the secondary school studies. By this time Eliot was well known to the NEA, not only as president of Harvard, but as the man who had appeared three times before the Department of Superintendence since 1888 to present major addresses on elementary and secondary schooling. The movement culminating in the Committee of Ten had been developing in the National Council for several years. James H. Baker, president of the University of Colorado, had provided much of the leadership,