G. Stanley Hall,Child Study,and the Teaching of Geography

Abstract

G. Stanley Hall (1844-1924), founding president of Clark University, was a leader in the child study movement and a significant figure in psychology and education in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Hall had pronounced opinions on many educational subjects, including the teaching of geography. His criticisms and program for the reform of school geography were based on a mix of European ideas of heimatkunde or “home geography,” developmental or “genetic” psychology, and his work in the child study and nature study movements. This article traces Hall's involvement with geographic pedagogy from the 1880s through World War I, including his sponsorship of the first American Ph.D. dissertation in the teaching of geography, completed at Clark in 1906.