William Torrey Harris

Born in North Killingly, Connecticut, he attended Phillips Andover Academy, Andover, Massachusetts. He completed two years at Yale, then moved west and taught school in St. Louis, Missouri, from 1857 to 1880, There he was superintendent of schools from 1868 to 1880, and established, with Susan E. Blow, America's first permanent public kindergarten in 1873.

He founded and edited the first philosophical periodical in America, the Journal of Speculative Philosophy (1867), editing it until 1893. He was a key member of a philosophical society that, during the beginning of the American Civil War, met in St. Louis; it promoted the view that the entire unfolding was part of a universal plan, a working out of an eternal historical dialectic, as theorized by Hegel.

Harris was associated with Bronson Alcott's Concord School of Philosopy from 1880 to 1889, when he became U.S. Commissioner of Education, serving until 1906. He did his best to organize all phases of education on the principles of philosophical pedagogy as espoused by Hegel, Kant, Fichte, Froebel, Pestalozzi and many others of idealist philosophies.

In His book The Philosophy of Education (1889) he writes:

"Ninety-nine [students] out of a hundred are automata, careful to walk in prescribed paths, careful to follow the prescribed custom. This is not an accident but the result of substantial education, which, scientifically defined, is the subsumption of the individual."

And in that same book:

"The great purpose of school can be realized better in dark, airless, ugly places.... It is to master the physical self, to transcend the beauty of nature. School should develop the power to withdraw from the external world."

He was also assistant editor of Johnson’s New Universal Cyclopaedia and editor of Appleton’s International Education Series. He expanded the Bureau of Education and started graphic exhibits of the United States in international expositions.

He was responsible for introducing reindeer into Alaska so that the native whalers and trappers would have another livelihood, before they brought other species to extinction.

As editor-in-chief of Webster's New International Dictionary (1909), he originated the divided page.

His books include:

• An Introuction to the Study of Philosophy (1889)
• The Spiritual Sense of Dante’s Divina Commedia (1889)
• Hegels Logic: A Book on the Genesis of the Categories of the Mind (1890)
• A. Bronson Alcott: His Life and Philosophy (with Franklin Benjamin Sanborn) (1893)
• Psychologic Foundations of Education (1898)