1930s
Events include: Great Depression experienced worldwide;
nylon, jet
engines and photocopier are invented, first atom split,
Pluto is discovered, Amelia Earhart becomes the
first person to fly solo across the Pacific Ocean
First lady
Eleanor Roosevelt gives an award
U.S. presidents:
Herbert Hoover (1929–1933)
Franklin D. Roosevelt (1933–1945)
1938 | B.F. Skinner publishes
The Behavior of Organisms:
An Experimental Analysis which he worked on
while a member of the U of M faculty (1936 to 1945).
1936 | Jean Piaget publishes
La naissance de
l’intelligence chez l’enfant.
Maria Montessori publishes
The Secret of
Childhood.
1934 | The Commissioner of Indian Affairs rescinds the
Bureau of Indian Affairs official policy of
repressing native languages. In practice, however,
the policy continues until the 1940s and 1950s.
 1930
| The
Dick and Jane “Curriculum Foundation Series” is
designed primarily by Dr. William S. Gray and
William H. Elson.
1930 | Eleanor Roosevelt publishes Good Citizenship: The
Purpose of Education.
1930 | An editorial in the April 19, 1930,
Minnesota Alumni
Weekly lamented the fact that “the
problem of learning how to make heaps of money has
become more important than the problem of learning
how to live.... The average student enters the
University for the avowed purpose of increasing his
earning ability.... After graduation there comes
disappointment and discouragement to the majority of
students [who] have found the secret of money making
but are groping blindly for the secret of happy
living.”
Scene inside a campus streetcar
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Timeline
1938
The Laboratory of
Physiological Hygiene is established. Initially
conceived as a place for research on the effects of
physical exercise, it evolves into a home for “the
exact measurement of human function and the factors
affecting human performance and behavior.” Its
projects explore far more than exercise; during
World War II, Professor Ancel Keys studies
starvation and subsistence diets and invents K-rations.
He also develops a cookbook based on his theory of the
healthful effects of a Mediterranean-influenced diet.
When asked just before his death at age 100 in 2004
whether the diet has contributed to his longevity, he
replies, “Very likely, but no proof.”
 Wesley Peik succeeds Melvin
Haggerty as dean of the college. A modest man who
remains loyal to faculty members embroiled in
controversy, he spends 13 years as dean—a time
marked by a return to the college’s focus on
elementary and secondary education, the challenges
of World War II and the Baby Boom, and the emergence
of the College of Education as a strong component of
the University.
1936
With Assistant Dean Harold Benjamin as its
first director, the Center for Continuation Study
opens its doors. Benjamin writes that the college
began the center for “citizens who feel a desire and
need for continuing their education beyond the
formal limits of their secondary, college, or
professional schooling.” It is later renamed the
Nolte Center after Dean Julius Nolte.
Gilbert Wrenn, a Minnesota psychologist who played a
key role in the establishment of the American
Psychological Association (APA) Division of
Counseling Psychology and founding editor of the
Journal of Counseling Psychology, joins the
faculty at the College of Education. He continued
his work as the assistant director of the newly
formed General College before moving full-time into
the College of Education two years later. He begins
offering classes in personality development and
diagnostic counseling, eventually building the
course sequence that would become the core
foundation for the college’s formal counseling
psychology program. Although he insisted that his
students discover their own identities as
counselors, some of Wrenn’s most successful students
attest to the profound impact he had on their
professional development.
1932
In the depths of the Great
Depression, annual public school spending in
Minnesota plummets to $78 per student and the
average teacher’s salary falls to less than $750 per
year. Some faculty members turn their thoughts to
the possibilities education offers as an engine of
social change. Theodore Brameld, a professor of
educational philosophy with Marxist-Leninist
leanings, becomes a leading advocate of introducing
political values into teacher training. One critic
writes that “the College of Education…is composed of
rabid revolutionists. And the worst of them all, the
one who is admired by all other College of Education
instructors, is Professor Brameld.” Brameld’s
Minnesota tenure lasts from 1939 to 1947.
1931
 Edwin Ziegfeld, professor
of art education and a pioneer and leader in the
field of art education, begins directing the
Owatanna Art Project, a study of art and
its impact on everyday life in one community, Owatanna, Minn. This program, funded by the Federal
Works Progress Administration and a grant from the
Carnegie Corporation, involves the local community,
schools, and the University, to promote art in
homes, schools, businesses, and public spaces.
Special instructional units in art in daily life
were introduced in the schools. Ziegfeld will go on
to become professor of art education at Columbia
Teachers College and help found the National Art
Education Association.
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