Henry Barnard

Born: Hartford; January 24, 1811
Died: Hartford; July 5, 1900

Entry by James P. Walsh

One has only to look around a classroom to see Henry Barnard's monument. If there are blackboards or students grouped by age in a building especially designed to serve as a school, one is seeing Barnard's enduring monuments to American education.

Barnard was born to a wealthy family and never lacked a comfortable income. He became a lawyer after graduating from Yale in 1836 but found little interest in the practice of law. In 1837 he was elected to the General Assembly where he introduced legislation to help the blind, the deaf and the insane. He also participated in debates over the funding of public education, and henceforth became almost obsessed with improving Connecticut's school system. For Barnard, public education was the means of ensuring that the American people remained capable of self-government, and he subsequently spent much of his personal fortune to publish journals advocating educational reform.

In 1838 he became secretary of the Board of Commissioners of the Common Schools and began to issue a series of reports detailing the problems he hoped to solve. At that time, elementary education was the responsibility of school districts in which the primary concern was cutting costs. Above all, the school districts were loath to spend money on teachers' salaries or on educational material. Barnard's solution was to invoke the authority of the state government to force each district to meet certain standards for buildings, teachers, attendance, and textbooks.

Barnard's program was, of course, resisted, and he even lost his position for a time as a result of politics. Gradually, however, his concept of what a school should be became the accepted norm. In 1850 Barnard became the state's superintendent of schools and principal of the New Britain Normal School (now Central Connecticut State University). In 1867 he was named the first United States commissioner of education. These appointments indicate the acceptance of his ideas on the state and national levels.

When Barnard died at the age of eighty-nine, he could reflect upon a full life of service in the interest of public education in Connecticut and in the nation.

For Further Reading

There is a good biography-Robert B. Downs, Henry Barnard (Boston, 1977). Merle Curti devotes a critical chapter to Barnard in The Social Ideas of American Educators (Paterson, New Jersey, 1965).

* Entry under revision.