Josiah Holbrook

• Josiah Holbrook
• Born: c. 1788
• Died: June 17, 1854

Educational reformer and founder of the American Lyceum, was born in Derby, Connecticut, the son of Colonel Daniel Holbrook, a prosperous farmer, and Anne (Hitchcock) Holbrook. Holbrook was a member of a large family and was descended from John Holbrook who had emigrated from Derby, England, to America, but little else is known about his early life. In 1806 at the age of eighteen he entered Yale College at New Haven, Connecticut, where he was a good, but not exceptional, student, with a strong interest in science. In the last two years of his college course he worked as a laboratory assistant to Benjamin Silliman, professor of chemistry and mineralogy. Silliman was one of the first popular science lecturers in America. After graduating in 1810, Holbrook turned to farming, but he did not find it satisfying, and decided to open a private school. In his spare time he studied minerals, becoming a well-informed geologist, and, whenever possible in the years between 1813 and 1817, he traveled to New Haven to attend Professor Silliman’s lectures.

Holbrook married Lucy Swift, daughter of the Rev. Zephaniah Swift and a resident of Derby, Connecticut, in May 1815. The couple had two sons. Holbrook’s first school failed, partly because of poor financial management. This did not end his teaching career, and in 1819 he started an industrial school on his father’s farm. Its curriculum combined manual training and farm work with simple scientific book instruction. This was to be the predecessor of the lyceum academy. The word lyceum traces to the Lyceum, the shaded Athenian grove where Aristotle is supposed to have taught. This school was also a financial failure, but Holbrook did not give up, and in 1824 he established an Agricultural Seminary. The following year he was forced to abandon that too. In addition to running the schools, Holbrook became an itinerant lecturer in New England, presenting talks on scientific subjects.

By 1826 Holbrook had devised in his mind a project for adult education, the lyceum. In October of that year he published his ideas in an article entitled “Associations of Adults for Mutual Education” in a new magazine, The American Journal of Education. His plan called for the establishment of individual associations or lyceums for mutual instructions, first in the sciences and then in other useful areas of general knowledge. Each association would have an elected board of officers that would include up to five curators, whose responsibilities would include selection of lectures and caring for the lyceum’s educational property. Each local group would select three delegates to represent them at a county lyceum, and each county lyceum board would appoint one member to a state board of mutual education. Eventually, Holbrook planned to form a general or national board. His prime objective was to provide young men with an economic and practical education. In addition, he felt that by providing new educational avenues for adults, it would in turn lead to stimulating interests in district schools, provide a seminary for teachers and benefit academics, and bring into use neglected libraries and help in the establishment of new ones.

Holbrook established his first lyceum, Mill-bury Branch Number One, in Worcester County, Massachusetts, in November 1826. That same month he issued a long pamphlet, The American Lyceum of Science and Arts, which explained the philosophy of the lyceum and described the curriculum and teaching methodology. Holbrook’s curriculum centered on the sciences, especially chemistry, mineralogy, pneumatics, botany, and mechanics. Domestic and useful arts subjects were also included. Instruction was carried out primarily by lecturing with demonstrations and discussion used as needed. To facilitate learning, classrooms were to be provided with books, scientific equipment, and teaching aids. The lyceum movement took off rapidly, and by January 1827 eight village lyceums had been established in Worcester County. The movement spread throughout eastern Massachusetts, encompassing Boston, and then into the rest of New England. By 1829 lyceums were accepted as a major educational form, and by the mid-1830s there were 3,500 local lyceums organized in the northeastern United States. In addition to being centers of instructions, lyceums helped local areas compile town maps and histories, made regional agricultural and geological surveys, and collected minerals for state specimen collections.

In 1830 Holbrook began publishing a semimonthly series, Scientific Tracts Designed for Instruction and Entertainment and Adapted to Schools, Lyceums, and Families. Two years later he turned this enterprise over to others and began to edit The Family Lyceum, a weekly newspaper that ran until August 1833. In addition, Holbrook helped to found the School Agents Society in 1831, becoming its corresponding secretary. In this capacity he organized town, county, and state lyceums in New England, the mid-Atlantic States, and in parts of the South and West, and the American Lyceum Association. He also supplied local lyceums with scientific equipment and maintained a factory in Boston that manufactured devices such as simplified air-pumps, arithometers, geometrical apparatus, and astronomical equipment.

With the financial backing of several supporters, Holbrook in 1837 tried to establish a Lyceum Village in Berea, Ohio. This enterprise failed after a few years, and Holbrook was not able to get past the planning stage for a similar village he hoped to set up in New York State. Holbrook moved his family to New York City in 1842, and served as executive secretary of the American Lyceum Association. This group arranged lecture courses and provided scientific materials to schools and lyceums.

Throughout his career Holbrook wrote numerous articles, pamphlets, and books on geology, education, and lyceums. By 1837 he was envisioning a universal lyceum system that would provide statistics on all parts of the earth. His ideas appeared in the First Quarterly Report of the Universal Lyceum in September 1837 and in a small magazine called The Self Instructor and Journal of the Universal Lyceum published in 1842.

He moved to Washington, D.C., in 1849, hoping to make the capital the national center of the lyceum movement. This did not materialize, but he continued to plan and work for the movement up until his unexpected death by drowning at the age of about sixty-six in the Blackwater Creek, while on a mineral and plant species collection excursion in Lynchburg, Virginia.

Josiah Holbrook was the originator of the American lyceum and was one of the pioneers in American adult education. A dedicated educator, he helped popularize scientific knowledge and promoted the study of geology by adult groups.

Josiah Holbrook’s works include The American Lyceum; or Society for the Improvement of Schools and Diffusion of Useful Knowledge (1829); Easy Lessons in Geometry (1829); First Lessons in Geology (1833); Familiar Treatise on the Fine Arts, Painting, Sculpture, and Music (1833); First Lessons in Geometry (1833); Penny Tracts for Children (1833); Apparatus for Schools, Academies, and Lyceums (183?); and Agricultural Geology (1851). There is no full-length biography of Holbrook. His life and career must be pieced together from various sources. The best modern sketches are to be found in Biographical Dictionary of American Educators and The Dictionary of American Biography (1932). Also useful are C. B. Hayes, The American Lyceum: Its History and Contribution to Education (1932); H. C. Gratten, American Ideas about Adult Education, 1790-1951 (1959); and C. Bode, The American Lyceum: Town Meeting of the Mind (1965).