The General Education Board: A Catalyst for Educational Reform in the United States
Introduction
The General Education Board (GEB) was a philanthropic organization established in the early 20th century with the broad mission of promoting education throughout the United States. Founded by John D. Rockefeller and Frederick T. Gates, the GEB played a significant role in shaping American education, particularly in the South. While the GEB's work has been lauded for its contributions to education, it has also faced scrutiny for its approach to race and its influence on public policy. This article examines the history, activities, and impact of the General Education Board.
Formation and Purpose
The formation of the General Education Board began in early 1902. On January 15, 1902, two months after the Southern Education Board was founded, a small group of men gathered at the home of banker Morris Ketchum Jessup to discuss education. This meeting included John D. Rockefeller Jr., Robert Curtis Ogden, George Foster Peabody, Jabez Lamar Monroe Curry, William Henry Baldwin Jr., and Wallace Buttrick. On February 27, 1902, a second meeting was held at John D. Rockefeller Jr.'s home. This meeting was attended by the guests of the original meeting but also included Daniel Coit Gilman, Albert Shaw, Walter Hines Page, and Edward Morse Shepard. At the climax of the meeting, it was announced that John D. Rockefeller Sr. would give $1,000,000 for the inauguration of an educational program.
The General Education Board was incorporated by an Act of Congress that took place on January 12, 1903. The original members of the General Education Board were: William H. Baldwin Jr., Jabez L.M. Curry, Frederick T. Gates, Daniel C. Gilman, Morris K. Jessup, Robert C.
The General Education Board (GEB) was incorporated in 1903 to foster “the promotion of education within the United States of America, without distinction of race, sex, or creed.” John D. Rockefeller, Sr., (JDR Sr.) made an initial commitment of $1 million to the organization, but his contributions quickly grew to $43 million by 1907. Rockefeller eventually gave it $180 million, which was used primarily to support higher education and medical schools in the United States and to improve farming practices in the South.
Frederick T. Gates, the foundation’s head, envisioned “The Country School of To-Morrow,” wherein “young and old will be taught in practicable ways how to make rural life beautiful, intelligent, fruitful, recreative, healthful, and joyous.”
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Focus on the American South
The GEB's earliest and longest focus was to build up the educational capital of the American South, which two decades after the end of the Civil War was still socially and economically depressed. The board first surveyed needs and then became a leader in promoting primary education for American blacks. Many other successes followed. The GEB insisted that schools at all levels keep clear, open, and honest accounting books. It required colleges to raise their own funds to match GEB grants, seeding today’s powerful campus fundraising operations. It spread knowledge of scientific agriculture in poor farming counties.
Agriculture was one of the earliest concerns of the Rockefeller philanthropies. The General Education Board, established to improve education in the southern United States, quickly realized that better farming practices were the key to better schools.
Promoting Practical Farming
One of the GEB's primary initiatives was the promotion of practical farming in the southern states. Through the Department of Agriculture, the board made accumulative annual appropriations amounting in by 1912-1913 to $673,750 for the purpose of promoting agriculture by the establishment of demonstration farms under the direction of Dr. Seaman A. Knapp. About 236 men were employed in supervising such farms. In 1906 the General Education Board contributed $7,000, and due to the increased success of the programs in reaching the distant southern farming communities, G.E.B. contributions grew each year. In addition to promoting demonstration farms, instructors for the education of farmers were also furnished.
Modernizing the Agrarian South
The GEB’s goals, however, aimed higher than improved farms and schools. The Board sought to modernize the agrarian South. Higher crop yields guaranteed the constant flow of agricultural products that Northern industry demanded. Higher incomes, in turn, meant farm families would buy more goods. A wide range of GEB social and cultural programs remade rural life from top to bottom. Night classes in local school districts used demonstration pamphlets to teach adult literacy and reinforce the benefits of a scientific approach to agriculture. Corn and poultry clubs for young people fostered a future generation of scientifically inclined, business-minded farmers. Their young members then carried the concepts of efficiency and rational management back into family life after attending lessons on household budgeting, modern canning techniques, and domestic science. Summer institutes for farm families at agricultural colleges drew rural people into a regional institutional web.
Demonstration Farms
They identified each community’s best farmers and persuaded them to dedicate a portion of their land to new types of seed and fertilizer and adopt modern techniques of crop rotation, furrowing, and soil conservation.
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The USDA-GEB Relationship
In 1906 the GEB made an agreement with the USDA to pay the salaries of agents who could conduct farm demonstrations on behalf of the GEB. However, critics of the system abounded. In 1914 the program came under scrutiny from government officials led by Senator William Kenyon of Iowa. Kenyon accused the GEB and JDR Sr. of using their wealth to influence politics. Certainly, the USDA-GEB relationship involved a private philanthropic organization helping to shape public policy. Supporters of the GEB’s work argued that the GEB simply provided much-needed financial support to a region and for a cause the government was unwilling or unable to fund. These supporters denied that the GEB manipulated local politics. The controversy ended with the passing of the Smith-Lever Bill in 1914.
Establishing Public High Schools
The establishment of public high schools in the southern states was another key objective of the General Education Board.
Improving Rural Education
Founded in 1902, the General Education Board (GEB) promoted various educational improvements throughout the rural South, ranging from school supervision to infrastructure improvement, teacher training, and curriculum reforms. Because rural areas in North Carolina, as in other southern states, were generally without schools, the GEB designated much of its initial support to developing rural schools.
Circuit Riders
To persuade local populations that public schools were necessary, the GEB relied on a number of methods, including what came to be known as “circuit riders.” Circuit riders were professors hired as Chairs of Education by state universities but paid for by the GEB.
Financial Responsibility
Financial responsibility was another tenet of the GEB. At JDR Sr.’s insistence, all institutions wishing to receive GEB funding had to maintain transparent and balanced budgets. Colleges had to raise matching funds. To aid colleges in this requirement, the GEB hired Trevor Arnett to assess the state of university accounting practices and to write a manual to standardize methods of accounting.
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Support for African American Education
The early years of the General Education Board are usually studied in reference to its efforts to shape the education of African-Americans. Yet, in an era where support for the education of African-Americans was politically and physically dangerous, the Rockefeller philanthropies were unusually progressive and, through the GEB, contributed millions of dollars of funding for black schools and colleges. What is often forgotten is that the education of blacks was not a priority of the early years of the GEB. Instead, as W.E.B. Du Bois confirmed, 'it put stress on and gave precedence to the education of whites'.
The GEB did not directly attack Black poverty, segregation, and political powerlessness-the root causes of the problems that plagued the southern Black community.
Industrial Education vs. Liberal Arts
The board took a racist paternalist stance which encouraged the industrial education of blacks, such as through its support and funding for the Tuskegee Institute of Booker T. Washington. And it discouraged or, at least, did not encourage, the higher education of African-American education in areas such as the liberal arts.
Funding Black Schools and Colleges
By 1914, the board had made contributions, amounting to $620,105, to schools for Negroes, mainly those for the training of teachers. Anna T. Jeanes had contributed $1,000,000 for that purpose.
W.T.B. Williams's Reports
The first project undertaken by the GEB sent agents across the South to survey and report on conditions in all schools, for both Black and White students. Agent W.T.B. Williams wrote exceedingly honest narratives of the conditions he encountered. Williams reported on overcrowded and dilapidated schoolhouses and underpaid teachers and commented extensively on the racial divide. Williams wrote from North Carolina, “There is in fact but little interest in negro education among the whites, I am led to believe, save in the cases of the very best elements, who are sadly in the minority.” In 1907 Williams lobbied for increased support of Black Colleges, noting that they had received “…little or no assistance from the General Education Board for advancing their college work.”
Jeanes Teachers
Although social and cultural forces had rendered Black Appalachians invisible, they viewed schools as centers of community and racial uplift, and they invested heavily-financially and culturally-in better schools. This report especially chronicles the work of "Jeanes teachers," Black supervisors whose salaries were partially funded by the GEB.
Medical Education for Black Students
The General Education Board also provided funds to fund existing medical schools for Black students, such as Meharry Medical College and Howard University Medical School. However, the General Education Board encouraged graduates to stay working in the rural South. Schools with graduates that established private medical practices in the North received less funding. Additionally, fellowships awarded to Black medical programs discouraged medical scientific research projects and encouraged more remedial education.
Limitations and Criticisms
The schools for Black Americans were often designed to teach rural agricultural skills that would keep them tied to the South and discourage migration to Northern cities.
From the mid-1920s until the Supreme Court's decision in Brown v. Board of Education (1954) outlawing segregation, the GEB was increasingly concerned about the weakness of Black educational institutions and disenchanted with industrial education as the major tool for Black development. This led to an increase in its grants to southern institutions of higher education, its efforts to make southern governments less discriminatory toward Black citizens in their distribution of public funds, and its support of interracial conferences.
Promotion of Higher Learning
The promotion of institutions of higher learning was another significant area of focus for the General Education Board. By 1914 the board had made conditional appropriations to the amount of $8,817,500, gifts towards an approximate total of $41,020,500. This money was expended throughout the United States.
Many GEB grants were given to Duke University, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, North Carolina State University, and Wake Forest University, among others. For instance, the libraries of UNC, Duke, and N.C. State participated in an unusual cooperative enterprise directed by Nathan Carter Newbold, longtime director of the Department of Public Instruction's Division of Negro Education in North Carolina. In 1935 the libraries began, with a GEB grant, to build collections of books by and about African Americans to support study in that field.
Reform of Medical Education
One of the GEB’s most impactful accomplishments was the reform of medical education in the United States. The charge was led by Abraham Flexner, Secretary of the GEB, who had completed a comprehensive evaluation of existing medical programs in 1910. medical education (see 1910 entry on Medical list).
Other Activities
The work of the General Education Board had a social side as well. “Corn” and educative clubs to study house management, poultry, preservation of fruit and other subjects directly related with agricultural life were encouraged in various ways, more especially in connection with the girl's clubs.
The investigations which preceded the gifts of the Board were perhaps of as great importance to the development of education in the United States as the gifts themselves.
The General Education Board emphasized the need for real world applicational skills. Two areas which the General Education Board highlighted was Demonstrative Farming as well as Industrial Education. Wallace Buttrick an influential member in the development of the General Education Board highlighted that, "the fundamental problem of the South is the recovery of the fertility of the soil". For this reason as well, the lack of literacy and overall knowledge on modern farming techniques the General Education Board implemented interactive learning techniques rather than "how-to manuals". Because these demonstrations were so effective at informing white and black farmers at the time, the General Education Board invested in committees which were more willing to build/sponsor programs which provided vocational and nonvocational information. Education in a time of racial discrimination became vehicles for African American empowerment. Because of the discriminatory philosophy of the time, African Americans were granted limited knowledge in the realm of industrial training. In most cases information ranged from basic skills to learning strong working habits, which in most cases was nowhere close to the information needed to obtain higher learning.
Promoting Institutions of Higher Learning
By 1914 the board had made conditional appropriations to the amount of $8,817,500, gifts towards an approximate total of $41,020,500. This money was expended throughout the United States.
Winding Down and Legacy
By 1934 the Board was making grants of $5.5 million a year. In the 1940s the GEB began to struggle with decisions about its future and its legacy.
The General Education Board began to wind down its program in 1953, committing the last of its principal funds to such groups as the Council of Southern Universities and the Council for Financial Aid to Education, which it had created with the collaboration of three other foundations to encourage the business community to support colleges and universities. The GEB finally closed its doors in 1964, having expended a total of $324.6 million since 1902. Its final grant, like one of its very first, went to Berea College in Kentucky.
From rural elementary schools to elite graduate and professional programs, the reach of the GEB had been wide. The work done by the General Education Board paved the way for philanthropic foundations which provided financial grants throughout the American south. More generally, the General Education Board helped usher in a new businesslike form of philanthropy.
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