The H. W. Wilson Company produced The Debaters Handbook Series between 1910 and about 1950. |
In 1907, a Minneapolis
publishing executive named Halsey W. Wilson was looking for writers and
researchers to work for his growing company.
Spurred by his wife, Justina, he asked a University of Minnesota
professor to recommend several alumnae. A
young woman named Edith Phelps left her teaching job and came on board right
away.
In short
order, Edith would become a supervisor and editor at the H. W. Wilson Company. She wrote dozens of guides to such topics as
the income tax, immigration, and the League of Nations.
These became known as “debaters’ handbooks,”
and were used by high school and college teams who sparred competitively about the
social policies and laws of the rising century.
But really, the handbooks had a larger significance. They were particularly useful to people who
lived in rural areas, with their reach extending well beyond debaters to men’s
and women’s clubs, voting leagues, and adult education programs.
In fact, making this literature widely
available tied into the Progressive ideal of educating as many Americans as
possible.
Halsey W. Wilson (1868-1954) |
In 1913,
when Halsey Wilson decided to move his company to New York City, Edith Phelps
went with him. For the next 40 years,
she worked in the vanguard of what became known as information sciences. In 1922, she became an officer of the
company.
Back to the
other Edith.
Within
several years of Edith Penney’s arrival in New York, she made her mark on one
of the most innovative projects in the history of American education: The Eight-Year Study. This experiment posed a
challenge to the time-honored methods of evaluating college applicants long used
by admissions officials.
The study explored whether
students’ performance in the college preparatory curriculum was the best indicator
of college readiness and future success.
What would happen if students were to pursue an alternative high
school curriculum in the humanities and social sciences?
That
question lay at the heart of The Eight-Year Study, launched in 1930 by the Progressive
Education Association. That year, high school teachers and administrators started to
collaborate with researchers and college professors to revise the traditional
curriculum.
Between 1933 and 1940, 29
public and private high schools and 200 colleges and universities participated
in the experiment.
Along came
more classes in the manual and fine arts, a shift from survey-style courses to
electives that focused on a few texts or a historical era, and the elimination
of material that students had regurgitated since elementary school. There was a concerted effort to embrace unconventional
opinions and interpretations.
The outcomes
were positive. When it came to college
the Eight-Year Study students turned out to be as successful as students who
followed an established curriculum. They
also developed a wider range of interests outside the classroom.
As a high
school principal and member of two committees that directed the study, Edith
Penney became committed to educational reforms that would have been unheard of
during her Minnesota childhood.
Radical
as the work seemed during the 1930s, several of the ideas that emerged from The Eight-Year Study have endured.
The Eight-Year Study was published in 1942 in five volumes. |
Professional
development for teachers, testing methods that would provide more accurate and meaningful
measures of students’ knowledge, and greater variety and student choice of
courses were among the changes.
High schools also began to push back against onerous college entrance
requirements.
Unfortunately,
the results of The Eight-Year Study received little attention when they were
published in 1942. Some critics thought
they were inconclusive while others feared change. Regardless, by
the time the war ended, school administrators were not in the mood to innovate. Every so often, however, the study draws
renewed attention.
Edith May Penney
retired in 1948 and died at the age of 96 in 1974.
Edith May Phelps
retired in 1948 and died at the age of 98 in 1980.
Continued
from post June 5, 2019.
You are definitely the only writer alive who has related these to Edith Mays.
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