May 2, 2005

Education Prof's Book Looks at the Influence of Phrenology on American Education

Dr. Stephen Tomlinson and screenshot of Head Masters book cover by Suzanne Dowling

A new book by a UA education professor defends the unlikely thesis that phrenology, remembered today as the debunked theory that the contours of the skull reveal a person's abilities and character, played an important role in the development of American education.

The book, Head Masters: Phrenology, Secular Education, and Nineteenth-Century Social Thought, was written by Dr. Stephen Tomlinson, associate professor in foundation of education and chair of educational leadership, policy, and technology studies at UA, and has been released by The University of Alabama Press.

"Probably the most important thing I'm trying to do is to reveal what phrenology meant to Horace Mann, the so-called 'father of the common school,' and his co-worker, Samuel Gridley Howe," Tomlinson explained. "Together Mann and Howe were instrumental in shaping the institutions that shaped America. The common school, the Normal School, schools for the deaf, the blind, and the mentally retarded — even systems of public welfare and relief for the poor — were influenced by their physiologically based arguments about the improvement of mind and morals," he said.

According to Tomlinson, phrenology started out as a study of the brain at the end of the 18th century when Franz Joseph Gall and Johan Gasper Spurzheim tried to locate different mental organs by comparing distinctive behaviors (observed in animals, geniuses, criminals, and the insane) with features of the head.

"What gave phrenology its sensational aspect was the belief that the skull molds itself around the contours of the brain. That is, the skull served as a kind of a map of the brain," Tomlinson explained. "The shape of the cranium was thought to be an index of the size of the organs below, an indication of their power."

He said that the theory quickly evolved into a progressive moral philosophy. "Phrenologists believed they had the behavioral technology to improve human character. Certain activities strengthened mental organs, other activities weakened them. Heredity also shaped human nature, for good or ill — an assumption evident in phrenological ideas about race, class, gender, criminality, and illness that today's reader will find extremely disturbing," he said.

The phrenologists' chief interest, however, was public schooling. Led by the Scottish popularist George Combe, they pushed child-centered teaching methods, a scientific curriculum, and moral education as the solution to the social problems facing Victorian society.

"Horace Mann's work," Tomlinson claims, "is a series of footnotes to the teachings of Combe," whom he befriended during the latter's 1839-1841 tour of America. As Head Masters demonstrates through an analysis of published and private writings, the phrenological view of mind Combe outlined provided a powerful justification for almost every argument in Mann's 12-year crusade to modernize America's schools.

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