The Cyclopedia of Education (Kiddle & Schem, 1877)

Why this matters

This is the first systematic American reference work on education, published twelve years after the Civil War and a decade before the consolidation of the federal Bureau of Education’s authority. Henry Kiddle was Superintendent of Schools for New York City; Alexander Schem was a multilingual scholar of comparative education. Together they assembled what the educational profession of the 1870s considered the mature form of its own discipline: state-system entries, biographical entries on educators living and dead, statistical entries by state and by country, entries on school architecture, on pedagogy, on the trust-fund institutions that funded the systems being described. To read it now is to see the high-water-mark era’s self-portrait, drawn by its own practitioners at the moment they believed common schooling had arrived.

What’s in it

• Alphabetical entries from “Abacus” through “Zürich, Schools of.”
• State-system entries — one per U.S. state and territory, summarizing law, finance, enrollment, and administration as of 1877.
• “Common Schools” — the master entry on the American common-school institution.
• “School Funds, State” — entries on the permanent funds, their origins, and their administration.
• “Trust Funds” — the period treatment of the fiduciary category.
• Biographical entries on Horace Mann, Henry Barnard, Calvin Wiley, John D. Pierce, and the other state-system founders.
• Comparative international entries — Prussia, France, England, Switzerland — establishing the period’s reference frame.
• Entries on school architecture, on the normal-school movement, on the kindergarten (recently arrived from Germany).
• Statistical appendices by state — enrollment, expenditure, teacher counts, fund balances.
• Entries on contested institutional questions — religious instruction, segregation, compulsory attendance, the rate-bill.

Most-quoted passages

The “Common Schools” entry treats the institution as essentially settled — universal, tax-supported, locally administered, state-supervised — and frames the remaining questions as questions of refinement rather than of foundation. The confidence is the period’s, not the editors’ alone.

The state-by-state entries, when read in sequence, are the single most efficient period snapshot of where the school systems stood in 1877. A reader who wants to know what Kansas or Wisconsin or Oregon’s school-fund balance was, what its enrollment was, and what its administrative structure looked like in 1877 can find that here in a single paragraph per state — drawn from state superintendent reports the editors compiled directly.

The “School Funds, State” entry treats the permanent funds as the mature financial substrate of the system — the corpus from which the income supports the schools, the fiduciary architecture inherited from the 1785 land ordinance, the variation among states in how the funds were managed. The entry already names, in 1877, the categories of failure that Swift would document at length in 1911.

The biographical entries on the state-system founders — Mann in Massachusetts, Barnard in Connecticut, Wiley in North Carolina, Pierce in Michigan — frame those men as the architects of an institution the editors believed had now arrived. The biographies are the period’s canonization of its own founders.

How it connects to the Library’s argument

Kiddle and Schem matter to the Library for two reasons. First, as a baseline: the 1877 Cyclopedia is the most-rounded period self-portrait of American common schooling at its post-Civil-War apex. Any claim about what the schools were, what the trust funds were doing, who was running the systems, and what the profession believed about itself in the 1870s can be checked against this single source. It is the period’s own answer to the question “what is American common schooling?” The Library’s drift-of-purpose argument needs that baseline, because drift can only be measured against a reference state.

Second, as an honest mirror: the Cyclopedia documents the system at its moment of maximum confidence — the moment just before the institutional consolidation that followed (state takeovers of local trustees, professionalization of administration, rate-bill abolition, compulsory-attendance enforcement) and before the trust-corpus erosion that the next half-century would deepen. The system Kiddle and Schem described as “essentially settled” in 1877 was not yet on the trajectory it would follow. Reading them now is reading a community of practitioners describing their own work at the high-water mark, before the tide turned. That is a useful place from which to measure what came next.

How to engage

• Full text: Internet Archive — search “Kiddle Schem Cyclopedia of Education” at https://archive.org/search?query=kiddle+schem+cyclopedia+of+education — multiple scanned editions are available (E. Steiger 1877 and Steiger’s reissues); canonical IA identifier confirmation pending.
• Submit a correction or annotation: /contribute/

Curated by

Library editorial team, 2026-05-07.

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