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G. Stanley Hall And An American Social Darwinist Pedagogy: His Progressive Educational Ideas On Gender And Race, Lester Goodchild

Lester F. Goodchild

President G. Stanley Hall hung only a portrait of Ralph Waldo Emerson in his office at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts. The philosopher embodied Hall's most cherished mid-nineteenth century ideas that comprised part of his intellectual worldview. In the 1840s, Emerson reflected on his transcendental concepts of the common mind and instinct, which held all innate human knowledge and behavioral patterns, in his Essays. Later, Hall would believe that the human metaphysical psyche, driven by primordial instinct, offered an evolutionary font from which educational activities enabled individuals to discern their destinies and to discover their abilities. His intellectual journey began …