Recapitulation Theory and the Racial Roots of the New Education, 1880-1910

• In Event: Theory and Practice: Expanding Historical Models of Education

Abstract

In this essay I demonstrate how the leading social scientists and educators of the pre-progressive generation held the basic assumptions of the theory of recapitulation, the belief that the development of the individual retraced the development of the human race. Using the theory of recapitulation as a lens to examine the racial views of leading scholars of the Gilded Age and progressive era, I document the constancy in views on racial hierarchy in the disciplines of anthropology, sociology, psychology, and history. Many of these scholars authored textbooks specifically aimed at teachers and high school students. Collectively they formed the intellectual context that engendered the new education.

Author

• Thomas Fallace, William Paterson University