This essay was originally published in the 1945 OCHS Yearbook. Please note that this essay was published over 80 years ago. While still useful for general education, language may be outdated and at times offensive. The Oswego County Historical Society does not stand by the language used in this essay. All photos were added in 2026 when this article was uploaded to the web. To view the original document, please visit NYHeritage.org
Paper Read Before Regional Meeting of New York State Historical Association at Oswego October 20, 1945 by Dr. Donald Snygg of the Faculty of the Oswego State Teachers’ College.
Edward Austin Sheldon, the founder of the Oswego State Normal School and originator of the famous “Oswego Movement,” came to Oswego in 1847 as a young man of 24. Ill health, possibly coupled with a nervous depression similar to that which he later suffered in 1879-0, had forced him to abandon Hamilton College and his plans for a legal career. When the nursery firm with which he was associated in Oswego failed he became interested in the plight of some 1,500 young people and adults in the city who could neither read nor write. With the missionary zeal that thereafter characterized his activities he began to raise money to provide a free school for poor children. When it became apparent that the money could be raised only if he agreed to remain in charge and teach the school himself he gave up his plans to attend Auburn Theological Seminary and prepare for the ministry and in the early winter of 1848 opened what was called the “Ragged School”. He became a leader of the local movement in Oswego for a city system of free schools and in 1853, after two years as superintendent of schools in Syracuse, he was called back to Oswego to serve as secretary of the board of education, a position which was then equivalent to that of superintendent. In fact, Sheldon has been called the “first professional school superintendent in the country” (11) and by his own account he was both energetic, efficient, and autocratic:
“For the next two years he dismissed most of the old district teachers, employed new ones, educated his board, instituted a ‘straight jacket system of examinations’ and built a systematic machine of which he says… . ‘I venture the assertion that a more perfect piece of educational machinery was never constructed. (8, p. 104)’ ‘By looking at my watch, I could tell exactly what every teacher in the city was doing.’ (8, p. 115)’ ”
Moral Training Plus Discipline
“Dr. Sheldon constantly kept the local community appraised of his plans through the newspapers and the professional people through lectures at teachers’ institutes and state meetings. To publicize further his perfect machine he invited national educators to visit his schools. On these occasions he staged big publicity stunts. He says: ‘In this way I kept up a high pressure in the schools. The rivalry and competition was tremendous. It took me a long time to learn that there was a better way.’ (8, p. 115). Moral training and rigid discipline were his professional tenets during this period. ‘From the very first I emphasized moral training, and had a course of formal lessons arranged in this, as in other subjects.’ (8, p. 115)” (4).
After the “educational machine” was complete and in good running order Sheldon began to realize that his perfectly organized schools lacked interest for the children and he began to cast about for improvements. In the National Museum at Toronto he found an exhibit of “colored balls and cards, bright colored pictures of animals, building blocks, boxes in which were silk worm cocoons, cotton balls, samples of all kinds of grain, specimens of pottery and glass, (9, p. 40)” together with reading charts and instruction books for teachers. All of this material, he found, was used for instructional purposes by the Home and Colonial Institute of London, a training school for teachers conducted on a rather formalized adaptation of the principles of the Swiss educator Pestalozzi. Sheldon had never heard of Pestalozzi but he at once perceived the educational possibilities of the materials and became a Pestalozzian on the spot. He purchased the entire exhibit out of his own pocket, paying an amount equal to about one third his yearly salary, and brought it home with him. There have been three great movements in American education: the Oswego “Object Teaching” movement; the Herbartian movement; and the progressive movement. Sheldon brought the first of these home with him from Toronto in 1859.
Sheldon Adopts Object Teaching
During the next two years Sheldon, with his customary zeal for organization and efficiency, introduced into the Oswego schools a very detailed plan for formal lessons in form, color, size, weight, animals, plants, the human body, moral instruction. This instruction, called “object teaching”, was justified by Pestalozzi’s principle that all knowledge is derived in the first instance from the perceptions of the senses and therefore all instruction should be based upon real objects and occurrences.
It was difficult for teachers indoctrinated in the methods and subject matter previously in use to adapt themselves successfully to the new methods and the shortage of teachers in the local system became acute. Sheldon explains in his autobiography that his methods of training teachers were so effective that the system was constantly raided by other cities who enticed his teachers away with better salaries. There is some possibility that a zealous, enthusiastic, hard driving superintendent of schools who held meetings of the teaching staff from 9 a. m. until 12 m. every Saturday may also have had something to do with the migration of teachers.
At any rate, in an effort to get the new system off to a good start and build up a local supply of trained teachers, Sheldon determined to start a training school under the direction of a teacher from the Home and Colonial Institute of London itself. He was unable to persuade the Oswego Board of Education to pay anything toward her salary but he had better fortune with his teachers and persuaded a number of them to give up half their salaries (which ranged from $300 to $500 a year) and thus raised the required amount*.
The board approved the use of the school building for the instruction when its members were assured that outside teachers attending the class would not only pay tuition but would serve as free teachers during their periods of practice, thus saving money for the city.
*This account of how some teachers gave up half their pay to bring Miss Jones to Oswego was first published by Mary Sheldon Barnes, daughter of Dr. Sheldon. It has been often repeated with various morals attached. However, since this paper was delivered, I have been informed by Dr. R. K. Piez that the story was categorically denied, in his presence, by Dr. Poucher, second principal of the school and a member of the class in question. It is Dr. Piez’s impression that the necessary money was contributed by a small group of private citizens.
Training Class Established
The training class began in May 1861 with 39 students, one of whom was Sheldon. At the end of the year the first teacher and principal, Miss Margaret Jones, returned to London. Mr. Sheldon became principal of the Oswego Normal school, then a municipal and not yet a state institution, and Heimann Krusi, the son of one of Pestalozzi’s assistants, was employed as a teacher. The principles of Pestalozzi were definitely adopted as the principles of the new school.
Knowledge Should Precede Words
Dearborn (2) has summarized these ideas and principles as follows: 1. The end of education is fitness for life. 2. The nature of the child is the fundamental basis of all teaching. 3. Education to be complete requires the ‘harmonious development of all the faculties of man, physical, mental, and moral, into a well ordered organic whole.
4. Education is essentially moral and religious. 5. Education must recognize individual differences. 6. Education must be gradual and progressive and should in such a process embody the principles of unity. 7. The material world, its relation to human affairs, and the inter relationships of human beings must be reduced to their simplest terms if education is to progress effectively and efficiently. 8. Education is based upon habits of accurate perception. 9. Activity is inherent in childhood and must be accompanied by liberty, restrained only when social rights are endangered. 10. Education should proceed in an atmosphere of domesticity and maternalism. As summarized by Dear born, these Pestalozzian principles, with minor changes in terminology, would win the approval of the most advanced educators of the present day. We recognize in order such present day concepts as education for life, child development, personality development, citizenship, character education, recognition of individual differences, pacing, readiness, training in scientific method, learning by doing, and the need for emotional security.
Pestalozzi himself had written “The ultimate aim of education is not perfection in the accomplishments of the school, but a fitness for life; not the acquirement of habits of blind obedience and of prescribed diligence but a preparation for independent action.”
The thing that made the most impression on the Oswego group was Pestalozzi’s teaching credo that (1) the knowledge of things should precede that of words; (2) in Sheldon’s words “All knowledge is derived in the first instance from the perceptions of the senses, and therefore all instruction should be based on real objects and occurrences”; (3) the first objects to be studied by the child are those immediately surrounding it and instruction should therefore begin with familiar objects. With his customary genius for organization Sheldon seized upon these principles and, taking his cue from the Home and Colonial Institute methods, devised a formal technique for teaching with and about objects and experiences which could be rapidly learned by teachers in training and which were, by comparison with the verbal rote memory methods then in vogue, of considerable interest to children.
This mechanization and formalization came at a very opportune time from the standpoint of the Oswego group. Educators throughout the country had for some years been familiar with and favourably impressed with the teaching of Pestalozzi but for lack of trained teachers had been unable to put them into effect in the schools. The poorly paid teachers who made up the great majority of elementary school staffs had so little knowledge of either subject matter or pedagogy that they were unable to teach except by the old textbook recitation method. Sheldon’s formal and therefore easily learned method of object teaching made it possible for these teachers, after one or two years of intensive training, to teach from objects instead of books and apparently brought the Pestalozzian objectives within reach. Perfect teachers, it was hoped, could now be produced by mass production and were ready to invade the low price market.
Oswego Wins National Interest
When a committee of Normal School principals from other states visited Oswego in February 1862 and approved the new methods, with a warning against their use by untrained teachers, the Oswego school became a center of national interest. The second year’s class contained students from Massachusetts, Connecticut, Vermont, and Michigan. So widely did Oswego become known that of the 23 members of this second class 17 accepted positions outside New York State. When the National Educational Association sent a committee to investigate the Oswego methods in 1864 and the committee reported favorably the stage was set for a radical change in public school methods. An indication of the extent to which object teaching and the Oswego Movement swept the country between 1862 and 1881 may be seen in the lists of positions held by Oswego graduates during that period.
Graduates Taught in 44 States
According to records compiled in 1886 (9) there were 948 graduates of the Oswego Normal during its first twenty years; 485 of these, or more than half, taught outside New York state. By 1886 Oswego graduates of the first twenty years had taught in 44 states, the District of Columbia, and six foreign countries.
Speaking at the 25th anniversary of the school in 1886 A. D. Mayor said, “Every normal school, as far as I know, State or city, between Pittsburgh and San Francisco, has been organized on the Oswego plan and hundreds of her graduates have been at work in them since 1865.” (9) By 1886, according to Dearborn (2) Oswego graduates had held 892 positions outside New York state. And these were in most cases influential positions. A study made in 1877 showed that the male graduates of Oswego were receiving more than two and one half times the average salaries of men teachers in the same states and women graduates were earning more than twice the average pay of women teachers in the same states. (2) Since many of these graduates were teaching in normal schools and were training their own students in Oswego attitudes and methods the cumulative effect of the movement on American education was tremendous and from one generation to another it still exists. There is still no reason to revise the statement of Hinsdale in Nicholas Murray Butler’s “Education in the United States” in speaking of the leading teacher training schools that “Perhaps no school on this list has exerted a greater influence than the Oswego school.” (1)
In a sudden burst dozens of normal schools, founded on “the Oswego plan”, mushroomed all over America. The results were not always happy. Since the formal methods, which at their best involved more activity by the teacher than by the children, were more easily learned than was the progressive philosophy on which they were based it was only natural that many teachers should adopt object teaching as merely a new method for acquiring knowledge and reduce it to the same verbal level as the textbook methods that had preceded it.
Object Teaching Wanes
In the long run object teaching failed to live up to early expectations for reasons prophetically stated by the committee of leading educators who had approved the method in the investigation of February 1862: “Resolved, that this system of primary education, which substitutes in great measure the teachers for the book, demands in its instructors varied knowledge and thorough culture; and that attempts to introduce it by those who do not clearly comprehend its principles and who have not been trained in its methods, can only result in failure”. (8, pp 151-2) Too few of the young and quickly trained teachers of the time had the varied knowledge, thorough culture, and clear comprehension demanded and ‘Object Teaching”, after holding the center of the stage through the sixties, seventies, and early eighties, fell more and more into disuse.
Results Of Oswego Methods
The actual effects of this period have been, from the point view of the present, both good and bad. On the credit side the Oswego movement greatly reduced the dependence of teachers and children upon textbooks and advanced the revolt against the mere memorization of verbal symbols. The movement was, at least theoretically, seeking the enlargement of the child’s field by personal experiences suited to his stage of knowledge. The natural and inevitable consequence of this idea was a focussing of attention upon individual differences, the introduction into the curriculum of such concrete and active subjects as industrial arts and nature study, the advent of the kindergarten, special classes for the mentally deficient, and the development of new methods in geography and history. In all of these developments Oswego played a leading role. (6)
The following paragraphs from pages 113 and 114 of Sheldon’s autobiography are indicative of the extremely modern character of Sheldon’s thinking:
“I realize now that I have grown away from many things that I now condemn. In only one direction is this so evident to me as in the matter of discipline. My tendency was to restrain the activities and impulses of children, while now I would encourage and cultivate them by giving them proper direction. My influence then (in the ’50’s) was toward repression, but now I would give the greatest liberty possible. Repression tends to stultify and deaden the activities of the soul; freedom tends to give growth and vigor. That work is of most value to the pupil which is voluntary, which is done without restraint or compulsion. That teacher who has to resort to forceful methods to secure order or study is of very little value. The best work is done where there is a warm, sympathetic relation between teacher and pupils. The children are drawn into right doing, not driven. There is a vast difference in the value of the two processes.”
In going on to discuss the value of compulsory attendance laws he says ‘If you cannot draw a pupil to school by the interest he feels in the work, it is very questionable whether you will benefit him very much by driving him. The whole tendency of such a process is to disgust him by the driving.”
“From the very first I emphasized moral training, and had a course of formal lesson arranged in this, the same as in other subjects. The teacher was not to depend on these formal lessons alone, but to seize every occurrence on the school grounds and in the school and treat it as an object lesson. Much must also be done in an indirect way in the life, manner, and work of the teacher. For the formal work we used pictures, books, and everyday incidents. As time went on, the formal work dropped off, and the indirect influences were more and more emphasized.”
Essentially, Sheldon’s views of the purposes and basic principles of education have won general acceptance among educators if not with the general public. The inadequacies which beset the practice of the Oswego principles lie not in Sheldon’s views on education but in his necessary dependence upon the now disproved faculty psychology that was in vogue at his time. By the assumptions of this now discarded theory the mind is made up of a number of independent faculties such as attention, memory, judgment, reasoning, and a host of other. The task of education, it follows, is the development, through practice, of these faculties. This theory of psychology, which still persists in popular thinking, has had a pernicious effect upon education by making plausible the idea that subject matter is important chiefly as a means of exercising and developing these hypothetical faculties of the mind and that it is therefore more important for subject matter to be difficult than for it to be useful. This particular doctrine, however, had little effect upon the development of the Oswego movement as it is in direct conflict with the Pestalozzian philosophy.
The serious defect in faculty psychology, as employed by the Oswego group, was that it provided them with no adequate explanation of motivation or of individual differences among children. No one at the time had any idea of the importance of the role played by emotional factors in learning and as a result the methods of teaching were designed in the belief that sufficient repetition would insure learning, an erroneous theory that still plagues the schools today, although not necessarily as an inheritance from Oswego.
Oswego Movement Appraised
Sheldon himself realized the inadequacies of the psychological knowledge of his time and by 1886 had come to feel that the need for a better knowledge of child psychology was his greatest problem. (8) It does not appear that all his pupils and followers shared his concern. The movement from the beginning had been plagued by a basic defect that gradually became apparent. In an effort to secure teachers competent to secure the Pestalozzian objectives the Normal schools, led by Oswego, had subjected their students to an early specialization in the methods of instruction which led many of them to become preoccupied with method to the exclusion of all else. This was for long the unfortunate legacy of the Oswego movement, but it is difficult to see how this result could have been avoided. The general recognition of the importance of Pestalozzi’s educational ideas made it inevitable that they be put into practice. The Oswego movement was a revolutionary attempt to do this within the economic, educational, and scientific limitations of its time. The time for training teachers had to be short because the salaries paid them were low. This necessitated a narrow technical rather than a broad professional course of study. Within these limits the Oswego movement was a brilliant success. Sheldon, as the leader of the first great American education movement based his work upon principles which still, after almost a century seem to be, more than ever, fundamental truths. The students of the Oswego State Normal school who learned only the techniques taught there were good teachers by the standards of their day; but the many students and faculty members who acquired from Sheldon and his colleagues an understanding of and allegiance to the principles upon which the object teaching techniques were based were a source of intellectual fertility to thousands of students in normal schools and training classes all over America.
Herbartian Movement
In the late eighties interest in Oswego, as all over America, shifted to the Herbartian movement which attacked the problem of motivation and of method construction with a more adequate psychology than had previously been available. This movement in many ways represented a return to the basic ideas of Pestalozzi. In the sense, however, that the Herbartian movement was more concerned with the nature of learning than the nature of the child, it was a backward step. The did not remain submerged for Pestalozzian principles, however, long. Coupled with a more adequate body of psychological knowledge they shortly emerged as part of the Progressive movement to determine the direction of progress throughout the twentieth, the thirties, and so far in the forties. Along with the methods teaching at Oswego and in the daughter normal schools throughout the country there was also taught in some degree the philosophy of Sheldon and of Pestalozzi. In the sixties, the seventies, and the eighties it was planted too firmly in American educational thinking to be uprooted and when the formal methods were abandoned the philosophy remained. For modern education, in 1945, that remains the solid, enduring contribution of the Oswego Movement and the Oswego State Normal School. For that philosophy of democracy, citizenship, and individual worth has become one of the enduring traditions of American education, as it is the proudest tradition of this school.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: 1. Butler. Nicholas Murray, Education in the United States, American Book Co., 1910; 2. Dearborn, Ned H., The Oswego Movement in American Education, Teacher’s College Contributions to Education, Columbia University, No. i.83, 1925; 3. Hollis, Andrew P.. The Oswego Movement, Heath and Co., Boston, 1898; 4. Odell, Marietta, An Evaluation of the Oswego Movement in Education, unpublished manuscript; 5. Radosavljevich, Paul S.. The Oswego Movement and the New Education. The Educational Forum, 2: 90 100. Nov., 1937; 6. Piez, Rich ard K., The Oswego State Normal and Training School, An Interpretation. Oswego Historical Society, 1943 Yearbook, pp. 1 10; 8. Sheldon, Ed ward Austin, Autobiography, N. Y., 1911; 9. Historical Sketches relating to the First Quarter Century of the State Normal and Training School at Oswego, N. Y.; 10. History of the First Half Century of the Oswego State Normal and Training School, 1901; 11. Winship, A. D., Great American Educators, Werner School Book Co., 1900.
