Adams Sherman Hill - Reconstruction-Era Education and Culture

Reconstruction-Era Education and Culture

Hill's tenure as Boylston Professor coincided with a widely growing cultural desire for education in Reconstruction-Era America. The number of colleges in America, particularly small, religious colleges, rose rapidly after 1865, and universities across the country saw their student populations increase in turn. As the industrial revolution began to move more and more people to cities, many individuals saw college as an opportunity to make themselves marketable for jobs.

This influx of students, coupled with the expanded number of composition programs across the country, meant that more and more teachers were brought in from secondary schools to teach these newly created composition classes. Overworked, teaching students who frequently needed more help with their compositions, (because they were generally not as classically educated as the “elite” students colleges had traditionally been set up to teach) composition instructors began to seek help in the form of textbooks. This cultural expansion, along with newly improved printing presses, helped give rise to the expanded usage of textbooks in American composition classrooms.

At the same time, the use of newspapers became more widespread. With the mass influx of newspapers meant more journalists, many who lacked college education, and in fact thought it unhelpful to their careers. This highly consumed, but less educated style of writing clashed, however, with that of nineteenth-century intellectuals, who considered criticism vital to defining and upholding the standards of taste. Because persons not considered "elite" had access to a large body of readers, intellectuals' authority, and thus importance, was deteriorating in American culture.

Hill's views on culture sided him with the intellectuals of his time. As early as 1856, Hill vocalized about the dangers of "uneducated" newspaper journalists, bemoaning the lack of control he as an "educated" man, was able to exert over the minds of his readers. By 1876, when Hill assumed the Boylston Professorship, it had already become cliche that the newspaper had replaced the rostrum and the pulpit. During his time at Harvard, Hill saw the university as the place to educate individuals of the moral and linguistic dangers of journalism.