Background

Harold Ordway Rugg was born in Fitchburg, Massachussets, son of Edward Francis Rugg, a struggling carpenter, and Merion Abbie Davidson.

Education

Rugg attended the Fitchburg public schools. Then he entered the Dartmouth College. He remained there for five years, receiving his B. S. in 1908 and a degree in civil engineering from Dartmouth's Thayer School in 1909. Rugg went on to study psychology, sociology and education at the University of Illinois where he completed a dissertation titled "The Experimental Determination of Mental Discipline in School Studies" and took his Ph. D.

Career

Rugg worked for two years in a local textile mill before entering the college. After a brief period of employment with the Missouri Pacific Railroad, Rugg taught civil engineering for a little over a year at James Millikin University in Decatur, Ill. In 1911 he went to the University of Illinois to teach engineering. In September 1915 he moved on to research and teaching in educational statistics and administration under Charles H. Judd at the University of Chicago. His work with Judd led, in turn, to an opportunity to serve during World War I with Edward L. Thorndike on the army's Committee on Classification of Personnel, the first group to make widespread use of intelligence and aptitude tests on adults.

Two of Rugg's colleagues on the committee, Arthur Upham Pope and John Coss, were instrumental in shaping his postwar career in education. Pope aroused Rugg's interest in the writings of Van Wyck Brooks, Waldo Frank, Randolph Bourne, and other contributors to the Seven Arts and the New Republic; Coss started Rugg thinking about an integrated social sciences curriculum by describing his own plans for merging the social sciences in an undergraduate course in contemporary civilization at Columbia University.

When the war ended, Rugg returned to Chicago to work for another year under Judd; but his conversations with Coss and Pope had persuaded him that his future lay in the social studies, and in January 1920 he left Chicago to pursue his new interests at Teachers College, Columbia University. He taught at Teachers College for the next thirty-one years. At Columbia, Rugg continued his study of contemporary social criticism, canvassing the works of R. M. Tawney, Graham Wallas, Beatrice and Sidney Webb, Charles A. Beard, Harold Laski, and Thorstein Veblen.

By the late spring of 1920 his transformation from educational technician into curriculum specialist in the social studies was well under way, and he was determined to convey the ideas encountered in his reading to the youth of the nation. The result was a controversial textbook series distributed in pamphlet form in the 1920's and published under the general title "Man and His Changing Society" (14 volumes) between 1929 and 1940. Eight of the books were written with Louise Krueger, his second wife. The series, which was designed to portray American society accurately, including weaknesses as well as strengths, was widely used in the 1930's but by 1940 it had been labeled "subversive" by various conservative spokesmen, an action that precipitated one of the most sensational cases of textbook censorship in American educational history.

In 1938 Rugg's publisher, Ginn and Company, sold 289, 000 copies of the textbooks. By 1940 total sales (including workbooks) had reached 5, 500, 000 copies, and the series was in use in some five thousand school systems. In the long run, however, the opposition of representatives of several patriotic and business organizations led a number of communities to officially ban the series and many others to quietly remove the books from their school libraries. By 1944 sales had dropped to 21, 000, and Rugg had literally seen his efforts to teach critical thinking go up in smoke when his books were actually burned in Bradner, Ohio.

During the 1930's and early 1940's, Rugg was identified with a group of reformist educators, frequently referred to as "social reconstructionists, " who were committed to the idea that the school should be utilized as an agent of social change. Within this group Rugg's own brand of reform was somewhat distinctive (largely because of the influence of Frank, Brooks, and Bourne) in that it encompassed not only the concept of social engineering but also the notion that the good society awaited the appearance of significant numbers of creative, cultured individuals.

Rugg thought that the school, in addition to furnishing an accurate description of society, should provide ample opportunity for individual self-expression, which he assumed was an important element in character formation. In the years after World War II Rugg concentrated on developing sound educational "foundations" by relating educational theory to the humanities and social sciences, on working out an adequate theoretical basis for teacher preparation, and on investigating the nature of the creative process. The last-named was actually a long-standing interest for Rugg, dating back to his early years at Columbia, when he had become acquainted with a number of writers and artists in the New York area.

Following his retirement in 1951, Rugg continued his intensive study of creativity for the nine remaining years of his life. He died in 1960 at his home in Woodstock, N. Y.

Achievements

• Harold Ordway Rugg was prominent as an educational reformer in the early to mid 1900s, associated with the Progressive education movement. One of the traits that set Rugg apart from most of his progressive colleagues was his versatility. At various points in his career he was associated with attempts to forge a science of education, with both the "child-centered" and "society-centered" wings of the progressive education movement, and with the earliest efforts to focus the attention of educators on the affective (as opposed to cognitive) dimensions of learning. Intense, energetic, hard-driving, and somewhat combative (he seemed to thrive on the controversy that swirled around his textbook series), Rugg could generally be found in the forefront of educational developments. He was noted less for the originality of his thought than for his qualities of leadership, his teaching ability, and his skill in synthesizing for educational purposes the latest and most significant findings in a variety of disciplines. His influence was strongest in the field of curriculum design, where he pioneered in unifying the social sciences and developing methods of content selection based on research and experimentation. His textbook series, in which his curricular ideas were implemented, was one of the noteworthy achievements of the progressive era. It also provided Rugg with an opportunity--denied to other social reconstructionists-to have his views presented systematically in the nation's schoolrooms.

Works

More photos

• book

  • The child-centered school;: An appraisal of the new education,

    (Harold Rugg, a longtime professor of education at Teacher...)

  • Statistical methods applied to education; a textbook for students of education in the quantitative study of school problems

    (This book was originally published prior to 1923, and rep...)

  • Fundamentals of High School Mathematics: A Textbook Designed to Follow Arithmetic

    ( This work has been selected by scholars as being cultur...)

  • Educational Psychology Monographs, No. 17. The Experimental Determination of Mental Discipline in School Studies

    ( About the Book Teaching methods comprise the principles...)

  • The content of American history as taught in the seventh and eighth grades; an analysis of typical school textbooks

    (The content of American history as taught in the seventh ...)

  • Changing civilizations in the modern world;: A textbook in world geography with historical backgrounds, (The Rugg social-science course)

    (A social studies text book on the history and geography o...)

  • A History of American Civilization: Economic and Social

    (A History of American Civilization: Economic and Social H...)

  • Nature Peoples (Man and his changing society. The Rugg social science series. V.2 of the elementary school course)

    (Vintage children's book. Elementary-level social studies.)

  • A Primer of Graphics and Statistics for Teachers
  • Imagination

Connections

On September 4, 1912, Rugg married Bertha Miller, the first of his three wives. They had two adopted children. Louise Krueger had become Rugg's second wife on August 25, 1930. They had one child. His first two marriages were to end in divorce. Elizabeth May Howe Page was his third wife since their marriage in 1947. They had no children.

Father:

Edward Francis Rugg

Mother:

Merion Abbie Davidson

Spouse:

Elizabeth May Howe Page

Spouse:

Louise Krueger

Spouse:

Bertha Miller

References

• This Happened in America: Harold Rugg and the Censure of Social Studies (Studies in the History of Education)
• The Rugg course in the classroom;: The junior-high-school program,
• The social and educational thought of Harold Rugg