Date of Award

1-23-2002

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Arts (DA)

First Advisor

Albert I Berger

Abstract

Joseph Kennedy (1858-1937) was an unusually talented educator who played a major role in shaping educational thought and practice in North Dakota. Kennedy came to Dakota territory as a teacher in 1886 and joined the faculty of the University of North Dakota in 1892, and served as dean of the Normal School (later Teacher's College and the School of Education) from 1898 until his retirement in 1928. Possessed of a curious mind and a knack for identifying and communicating practical concepts and methods of education, Kennedy ranked among the finest educators of his generation in the Midwest. Self-consciously a progressive, he exhibited many attitudes and ideas common to that social movement, and yet he was complex enough as a thinker and a personality to transcend many of the stereotypes that were then and later attached to progressivism. This research project follows Kennedy from his boyhood in Minnesota through his college education, early teaching career and long tenure at the University of North Dakota. Special attention is given to his intellectual heritage, especially that which he received from his personal mentor William Watts Folwell, and from his distant mentor William James, both of whom shaped him and helped him shape a generation of educators in the region. This project draws extensively on primary sources, but provides also a background context that helps explain Kennedy’s position within the educational controversies of his time, and also makes understandable his related interests, especially psychical research. As a survey o f one important educator, Education in the Large demonstrates the richness and complexity that existed within educational progressivism, and suggests that while this tradition had serious flaws, it also contained a great deal that was and remains valuable

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