About Henry Barnard

Henry Barnard was born in Hartford on January 24, 1811, becoming a lawyer after graduating from Yale in 1836. In 1837 he was elected to the General Assembly where he introduced legislation to help the blind and the deaf. He also participated in debates over the funding of public education, and henceforth became focused on improving Connecticut’s school system. For Barnard, public education was the means of ensuring that the American people remained capable of self-government, and he subsequently spent much of his personal fortune to publish journals advocating educational reform.

In 1838 he became secretary of the Board of Commissioners of the Common Schools and began to issue a series of reports detailing the problems he hoped to solve. At that time, elementary education was the responsibility of school districts in which the primary concern was cutting costs. Above all, the school districts were loath to spend money on teachers or on educational material. Barnard’s solution was to invoke the authority of the state government to force each district to meet certain standards for buildings, teachers, attendance and textbooks.

Barnard’s program was resisted, and he even lost his position for a time as a result of politics. Gradually, however, his concept of what a school should be became the accepted norm. In 1850 Barnard became the state’s superintendent of schools and principal of the New Britain Normal School (now Central Connecticut State University). In 1867 he was named the first United States commissioner of education. These appointments indicate the acceptance of his ideas on the state and national levels.

Barnard died in Hartford on July 5, 1900, at the age of eighty-nine.

Source: James P. Walsh, The Connecticut Humanities Council, 2007