Jesse Homer Newlon

Background

Jesse Homer Newlon was born on July 16, 1882 in Salem, Indiana, United States. He was the oldest of eight children of Richard Rosecrans Newlon, a farmer of Irish Quaker descent, and Arra Belle (Cauble) Newlon.

Education

After earlier schooling, Newlon entered Indiana University, where he majored in history, but lack of money forced him to interrupt his education for two years, during one of which (1905 - 06) he was principal of the Charlestown (Indiana) high school. He completed the Bachelor of Arts in 1907. He obtained an Master of Arts degree from Teachers College, Columbia University, in 1914.

Career

After a year as teacher of history and mathematics at the New Albany (Indiana) high school, Newlon moved in 1908 to the high school in Decatur, Illinois, where he taught history and civics and then was principal (1912 - 16).

Moving to Lincoln, Nebraska, as high school principal in 1916, he accepted the next year the position of superintendent of schools.

Newlon had little chance to develop his ideas until he became superintendent of schools in Denver, Colorado in 1920. Three years later, with the support of the Denver school board, he appointed committees of teachers from the city's elementary and secondary schools to study their particular fields and propose revised curricula that would be relevant to the needs of their pupils and to the changing times-one of the first such programs in the United States. The committees, working under the guidance of nationally known educators, produced revised courses of study and research monographs that had a wide sale and exercised a strong influence on school curricula throughout the country.

In the fall of 1927 Newlon moved to Teachers College at Columbia as professor of education and director of the Lincoln School, an experimental progressive school founded in 1917 to assist in improving the education of pupils in elementary and secondary schools throughout the United States. To promote unity in the Lincoln School, which was then beset with conflicts, Newlon held regular staff meetings, encouraged pupil participation in the selection and organization of school activities, and arranged seminars and discussion groups for parents. He also served as chairman of the division of instruction at Teachers College (1934 - 38) and, after the retirement of William H. Kilpatrick, became director of the division of foundations in education (1938 - 41).

Newlon served as president of the National Education Association in 1924-25. He was a member of the American Historical Association's Commission on Social Studies (1929 - 33) and of the Progressive Education Association's Commission on the Relation of Schools and Colleges (1932 - 41), and he took an active part in the committee for academic freedom of the American Civil Liberties Union.

Discouraged by the war and by the rising opposition to the progressive movement in education, Newlon died of a coronary thrombosis at his summer home in New Hope, Pennsylvania in 1941, at the age of fifty-nine. He was buried in Crown Hill Cemetery in his hometown of Salem, Indiana.

Achievements

• Newlon served as director of the Lincoln Experimental School of Teachers College, Columbia University, and president of the National Education Association.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Junior-senior High School Administration

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

  • Education For Democracy In Our Time

    (This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923. T...)

  • Harness and Pack (Early Reader)

    (children)

  • Educational Administration As Social Policy

Views

Sympathetic with the progressive education movement of the period, Newlon agreed with other influential educators that the traditional "classical" course taught in the average high school was an inadequate preparation for life in the modern industrial age. School curricula, he believed, should be determined not by school boards, whose members usually belonged to a privileged economic class, but by the teaching profession itself, which should be responsive to the needs of students in a democracy that included diverse social classes and racial groups.

Newlon was a strong leader in promoting the concept that education should not be directed to the teaching of facts in separate areas such as history, sociology, languages, and the sciences, but should be a single process leading the individual child to maturity within a particular social environment. The methods of the classroom teacher, he believed, were a key factor in this process. A Deweyan in philosophy and a humanist in psychology, Newlon was deeply concerned by the ideological conflicts of his day, both in this country and in Europe.

A visit to Russia in 1937 convinced him that the outlook for democracy there was a gloomy one, and he feared the dangers of fascism.

At home, he regarded the loyalty oaths that some states were requiring of teachers as an attempt to control thought. He firmly believed in the values of democracy even in an increasingly complex society. He regarded sound education as essential to the preservation of freedom, and believed that the educator should not promulgate doctrines but should teach the student to think for himself. In his writings he stressed his conviction that "a school whose procedures are authoritarian will only condition youth, and teachers, too, to acceptance of authority. "

Connections

On December 29, 1909, Newlon married Letha Hiestand of Martinsburg, Indiana; they had no children.

Father:

Richard Rosecrans Newlon

farmer

Mother:

Arra Belle (Cauble) Newlon

Spouse:

Letha Hiestand