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May 02, 2021

eBook details

Title: Struggle for the Soul: William Heard Kilpatrick (Chapter 1) (Biography)
Author : American Education History Journal
Release Date : January 01, 2007
Genre: Education,Books,Professional & Technical,
Pages : * pages
Size : 206 KB

Description

In his book, Ministers of Reform, historian Robert Crunden described progressivism as a secularized version of fundamentally religious impulses. Crunden wrote that many reformers "found that settlement work, higher education, law, and journalism all offered possibilities for preaching without pulpits" (1982, 15). He might have added progressive reforms in the lower schools to his list of causes because attempts to reconcile the religious experience of their youth with their increasingly secular worldviews influenced the work of many progressive educators. Progressive educators applied these early religious experiences to their professional lives in four ways. Some, like schoolmaster Jerry Voorhis, consciously integrated their religious beliefs into their educational theories and practices. Others, like Paul Hanna, lived divided lives, one religious and one professional. John Dewey represents a different approach. After a thirty-year struggle with religious belief, he reinterpreted his religious experience in purely secular terms. This paper focuses on William Heard Kilpatrick who represents a fourth group who did not seek to harmonize their youthful religion with their adult lives, but seemingly left religion behind as they pursued their careers. That is, Kilpatrick rejected personal religious devotion, but not the bedrock religious ethic of his childhood. Despite his encounters with Charles Darwin's Descent of Man and the ideas of Biblical higher criticism, his embrace of science as the sole arbiter of truth, and even a 'heresy trial' before the Board of Trustees of Southern Baptist Mercer College, Kilpatrick incorporated significant elements of Christian faith and practice in his manners, writings, and work. In each case, the ways in which progressive educators approached their personal religious beliefs influenced their contributions to education.