Oswego Movement

Oswego, located on the shore of Lake Ontario in New York State, was the birthplace of a successful education reform movement during the second half of the 19th century. Its leader, Edward Austin Sheldon (1823–1897), was instrumental in bringing ideas of Swiss educator Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi (1746–1827) into American education through the development of the object method. Sheldon, with the assistance of British and continental educators, contributed significantly to formalizing teacher education. Upon completing their programs, teachers who had come to Oswego obtained administrative and teaching positions around the country and internationally, spreading the noted method. Today the movement associated with Oswego's method retains its historical importance, and the normal school started in 1861 has been transformed over the years into a branch of the state university that continues to be recognized as a progressive teacher education institution.

Sheldon, raised as a farm boy, disliked studying. In his autobiography, edited by daughter Mary Sheldon Barnes, he revealed that country school life was “one continuous holiday.” He detested memorization, and books were valued only for interesting pictures. He enjoyed minding the social classroom scene, indicating that he had observed, besides the use of fool's caps and dunce-blocks as forms of punishment of misbehavior, the commonplace whippings with “the rod and ferrule” and actions that today would be considered mild forms of physical torture.

Sheldon's negative attitude toward education changed only when an enthusiastic teacher, Charles Huntington, inspired him at 17 to read and reflect. Sheldon decided to attend Hamilton College, where he studied classical languages and mathematics. Later, he dropped out and moved to Oswego to pursue a newly found interest in horticulture.

Despite his own lack of success in the new venture, Sheldon became concerned about the lives of the poor and illiterate in Oswego. With the help of supporters, in 1849 he founded a school for orphans, styling himself as a schoolmaster who “had never read any theories of school teaching, and certainly had none of [his] own at the outset.” Sheldon brought this teaching background and later experience as school superintendent in the upstate New York city of Syracuse to the newly formed Oswego free public school system in 1853. To secure good teaching, he held meetings with teachers to provide “the necessary instruction in regard to organization, classification, instruction, and discipline.” He scheduled classroom visits to discuss “principles of education and methods of teaching.” Barnes states that Sheldon perfected the smooth running “machine” (school system) but found it wanting because the instructional methods lacked “vitality.”

The habit of calling on good school systems took Sheldon to Toronto, Canada, where he set his eyes on a collection of educational materials developed at the London's Home and Colonial Training Institution. Paying with his own money, he acquired books for teachers and the desired collection of manipulatives—objects, pictures, charts of colors, reading charts—and made a decision to hire a British educator who could teach how to use them.

A well-paid Margaret E. M. Jones came to Oswego to train the first nine teachers at the newly opened Oswego Primary Teachers Training School in 1861. Impressed with the results, the next year Sheldon invited a group of fellow educators to observe the method of object teaching. Their favorable report helped draw students from other places to Oswego. Eagerly sought out by schools across the country and abroad, these new teachers spread the influential Pestalozzi-inspired Oswego instructional method and school reform movement.

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