1900s
Events include: Mass
production of automobile, Panama Canal is built, nine million
immigrants pass through Ellis Island, Sigmund Freud publishes
The Interpretation of Dreams
Two children at Ellis Island
U.S. presidents:
Theodore Roosevelt (1901–1909)
William McKinley (1897–1901)
1909 | First middle school
established (Indianola Junior High School in Columbus,
Ohio).
1907 | John Dewey publishes
The School and Society.
1904 | Mary McLeod Bethune
founds the Daytona Normal and Industrial Institute for Negro
Girls (now Bethune-Cookman College).
1902 | The American Association
of Agricultural Colleges recommends that agriculture be
taught in high schools. Many states begin to include agriculture
in their curricula.
1900 | Formation of the
College Entrance Examination Board. This organization,
set up by presidents of 12 leading universities administers
admissions tests.
In 1900, only 50 percent of America’s
children were in school, and they received an average of
only five years of schooling.
“Hear the wail of the children, who never have a
chance to go to school, but work ten to eleven hours
a day in the textile mills.”—Mary Harris Jones,
during the march of mill children, July 28, 1903
Child worker in textile mill |
Timeline
1909
The college appoints Professor
Edward G. Quigley to direct an ambitious program of
extension education for schoolteachers. He spends three
days a week in schools, giving pedagogical lectures, and
coordinates correspondence courses in the teaching of science,
mathematics, history, and foreign languages.
1908
University High School, a
six-year secondary school offering teaching experience to
the college’s aspiring educators, opens. It represents one
of the first efforts anywhere to establish a model secondary
school in coordination with a university teaching program.
Some of its student teachers progress directly to positions
in Minneapolis public schools, working as teaching assistants
at a salary of $300 a year.
1907
Under the strong objections of a
segment of the University’s Board of Regents, the
college
opens the Model Laboratory School located on Beacon
Street, a hands-on workplace for teachers in training, with
Alice Moll as its first principal. (The opposing regents
believe that such a training laboratory is more befitting
a “normal” school.) Within a year, Dean James’s plans for
separate and exclusive facilities for the College of Education
include expanded space for the model school.
1905
At the directive of the Minnesota
legislature and by an act of the University’s Board of Regents,
the College of Education is created on December 12
with the mandate of guiding the training of teachers, principals,
and school superintendents. Upon its birth, the college
has just three faculty members who teach thirteen courses.
Many of their colleagues elsewhere at the University doubt
that professional training for educators is necessary or
even possible. In school districts around Minnesota, few
administrators feel confident that the college can grow
into leading influence in state education. George James
begins his ten-year tenure as the first dean with a tiny
budget, a modest office in Folwell Hall, and a future of
disagreements aplenty with soon-to-arrive University president
George Vincent over the direction of teacher training.
 1902
George James (pictured), who had earlier
served as secretary of the American Society for the Extension
of University Teaching, succeeds David Kiehle as
chair of the Department of Pedagogy. At about the same time,
the University offers its first graduate-level courses in
education.
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