Founders: Innovators in Education, 1830-1980

Fran Ashdown was the Head of the Children's Department, Capilano Branch, North Vancouver District Public Library.

Ernest Stabler is a former dean of the faculty of education at the University of Western Ontario, and, in Founders, he explores the lives and work of six innovative educators or groups of educators, each of whom is associated with a significant change in methodology and / or the establishment of an institution. He begins in the nineteenth century with N.F.S. Grundtvig, who founded folk high schools in Denmark to provide a liberal education for young farmers. Mary Lyon opened a seminary for young women in Massachusetts that later became Mount Holyoke College, one of the leading women’s colleges in the United States. In the same state, Horace Mann was responsible for the development of a system of public elementary schools. Through the extension department of St. Francis Xavier University in Antigonish, Nova Scotia, Moses Coady and James Tompkins organized study groups and cooperatives among fishermen and farmers. A German educator, Kurt Hahn, founded a secondary school in Salem, Germany, that placed a strong emphasis on community service, adventure, and physical challenge. Escaping from the Nazis, he arrived in Great Britain and founded Gordonstoun, out of which developed the Outward Bound and Atlantic College schools and the Duke of Edinburgh Awards. Also in Britain, a group that included Prime Minister Harold Wilson and Jennie Lee, the widow of Aneurin Beven, created the Open University, where anyone over the age of 21 can earn a university degree via distance education.

I ran these names by a professor of education at the doctoral level, and he recognized only two of them. It is clear that theirs are by no means household names. Their achievements do deserve to be better known, but given the academic nature of this volume, its audience will probably be limited to a scholarly one.