Hugh Hartshorne

Early Life and Education

Hugh Hartshorne was born on Nov.13, 1885, in Lawrence, Massachusetts, the son of William Davis Hartshorne and Eliza Jones (Cutler) Hartshorne. He grew up in the neighboring community of Methuen. He graduated from Methuen Grammar School and High School, while his father was the chairman of the school committee and signed his diplomas. His older brother, Isaac, had gone to Amherst College, and Hugh joined him there, graduating with honors in 1907. He was a member of the Chi Psi fraternity, and became a member of the Phi Delta Phi and Phi Beta Kappa.

Hartshorne went on to study at Yale University, receiving the M.A. degree in 1910 and the B.D. degree in 1911. Among his professors at Yale Divinity School were Douglas Clyde Macintosh, Frank Chamberlain Porter and Edward L. Curtis. Most significant for his future career was his introduction to George Albert Coe, who lectured at Yale in 1909-1910. Not only was Coe a pioneer in religious education, but also in the psychology of religion, along with William James, and Edwin Starbuck. Hartshorne chose to pursue graduate study in the joint program of Teachers College, Columbia, and Union Theological Seminary, where Coe was professor and head of the department of religious education, receiving the PhD degree from Columbia in 1913. His dissertation was Worship in the Sunday School: A Study in the Theory and Practice of Worship. Besides Coe, he expressed his indebtedness to John Angus MacVannel and Edward Lee Thorndike, the country's leading pioneer in educational psychology.

On June 28, 1913, he married Margaret Curtis of New Haven, but she died in 1918. He married Evangeline Wickersham of Iowa on June 15, 1920, and the couple had one son, Hugh Wickersham Hartshorne, who died in 1959. Hartshorne had been ordained on Dec. 30, 1913, at his home-town church, the First Congregational Church of Methuen.

Career

Before Hartshorne had finished his graduate study, Coe recruited him to serve as the principal of the Union School of Religion. Coe also added him to the department of religious education at Union Theological Seminary; Hartshorne started as an instructor in 1913 and was promoted to be assistant professor in 1915. His dissertation was published by Teachers College in 1913 with the title, Worship in the Sunday School. He followed up with two manuals for training in worship leadership, a book of stories for worship, and Book of Worship of the Church School. He also wrote a book, Childhood and Character. Charles R. Foster wrote about Hartshorne in the Harper's Encyclopedia of Religious Education: "he applied contemporary insights from psychology and education to the development of religious education."

In 1922 Hartshorne joined the faculty at the University of Southern California as professor of religious education. Coe probably had a hand in this new appointment, since USC was where Coe had begun his career. Indeed, Hartshorne set up a four-day conference at USC in 1924 on The Religious and Social Life of College Students with Coe as the major speaker. The details of the program were spelled out in an issue of the USC Journal of Religious Education, which Hartshorne had founded and edited. It was published in cooperation with the Religious Education Association of Southern California.

In the summer of 1922 Coe had entered into a lively exchange of letters and telegrams with the president of Union Theological Seminary, Arthur Cushman McGiffert, protesting the departure of Hartshorne after Union refused to grant tenure to Coe's younger colleague. Coe resigned as professor and head of the department of religious education and accepted an appointment as professor at Teachers College, where he remained for another five years until retirement in 1927. Coe was so angry about the entire affair that he donated his papers to the library of Yale Divinity School, with the instructions that the file of 1922 correspondence was to be sealed and no one allowed to see it. Hartshorne wanted the file destroyed, but fortunately for future researchers and historians the Divinity School librarian, Raymond Morris, never complied with the request.

Hartshorne did not stay long on the west coast. The Religious Education Association had urged a study of character and moral education, and the Institute of Social and Religious Research decided to sponsor the research. (The Institute had been founded in 1921, primarily with money from John D. Rockefeller, Jr.) Hartshorne and Mark A. May, professor of psychology at Syracuse University were recruited as co-directors of the study. The research went on for five years, from 1924 to 1929, and resulted in three books on the overall subject, studies on the nature of character.

Luther Weigle became dean of Yale Divinity School in 1928 and he invited Hartshorne to come up to New Haven to serve as a research associate. This continued until 1951 when the new dean, Liston Pope, made Hartshorne the professor of the psychology of religion. In his first years at Yale he was involved in a new project of the Institute of Social and Religious Research, namely to study the status and trends in Protestant religious education carried on through community and cooperative organizations, local churches and colleges. This culminated in the publication of four volumes in the Yale Studies in Religious Education.

During his years at Yale, Hartshorne taught courses on "Procedures in Character Education," "Growth in Religion," and "Personality and Religious Experience," and wrote what was probably his most important book, Character in Human Relations. He also collaborated with others in books on youth organizations and character-building, the transition from school to college, and the ethical dilemmas of ministers. He was hired in 1944 to conduct a study of theological education in the Northern Baptist Convention, and the final report was published the following year, with Milton C. Froyd as co-author. This was his last major book. When Hartshorne retired from Yale Divinity School in 1954 he delivered the Wright lecture on "Theological Education and the Churches" in which he said: "What is going on is neither theological nor education."

Throughout his career Hartshorne had been a member of the Religious Education Association, which was founded in 1903 by William Rainey Harper and others at a convention in Chicago. Hartshorne served on its trend-setting council on religious education, faithfully attended the annual conventions and presented programs, and wrote extensively for its journal, Religious Education. At the recommendation of Luther Weigle, Hartshorne was elected to its board of directors in 1930 and served as president from 1935 to 1939. Along with a few others, he can be credited with keeping the organization alive during the economically depressed 1930s, when there was little money and no executive staff. In his history of the R.E.A., Stephen Schmidt has given a critical assessment of Hartshorne's leadership, including an unflattering picture of his attitudes toward Roman Catholic participation in the organization.

Hartshorne was also a member of the American Association of University Professors and served on various committees of his denomination, including a subcommittee of the Commission on Ministry, dealing with the issues of ordination and installation.

He was active in a number of other organizations. According to his bio in Who's Who in America, Hartshorne was a director of Friends of Boys, Inc, a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a director of the Association for Personality Training, and an officer of the Service Bureau for Intercultural Education. He also attended a White House Conference on Children.

After retirement the Hartshornes lived in Chapel Hill, North Carolina and briefly in Winter Park, Florida, before settling into a Methodist retirement home in Durham, North Carolina. It was there that he led worship services, contributed to a newsletter, and preached occasionally in neighboring churches. His life came full circle as he returned to his first interest, the theory and practice of worship. Also, he devoted considerable time to the disposal of a large library of books and the organization of his many writings and published articles. He died on Dec. 13, 1967, in Durham.

Four parts of his career will be examined in more detail: the Union School of Religion; his departure from Union Theological Seminary and Coe's resignation; the Character Education Inquiry; and the Yale Studies in Religious Education.

Union School of Religion

For ten years Hartshorne was the principal of the Union School of Religion, an experimental demonstration Sunday School maintained by the Union Theological Seminary and housed in its new campus at Broadway and West 120th street in New York City. The school was unique because it was not a part of any particular church and was free from ecclesiastical control. Under the supervision of Coe, it served neighborhood families who may or may not have had a church affiliation and was a laboratory school for seminary students. Hartshorne reached a wide audience with the story of the school in a series of seven articles in a new magazine of Christian education, The Church School.

The school met on Sunday mornings between 9 and 10:30 and was structured so as not to compete with other churches on Morningside Heights or downtown Manhattan. There were classes for all the elementary grades and high school, and the school year went from September to the end of May. Hartshorne led the 20-minute worship service, which was held in the seminary chapel, and was responsible for teacher training and curriculum development. Coe himself spent Sunday mornings at the school, visiting, observing and preparing evaluations.

In a report on the school's first ten years at Union, Hartshorne described the beginnings of the enterprise and how it had evolved under his leadership. It had actually begun at the turn of the 20th century when a family on the upper West Side of Manhattan was dissatisfied with the quality of instruction being offered in existing churches and hired a tutor and invited other families to join them. The program grew in popularity and had to find larger quarters, ending up at Teachers College, with Professor F. M. McMurry as the first principal. When Union Theological Seminary moved from its location at 700 Park Avenue to new buildings across the street from Teachers College, it was agreed that Union would take over the sponsorship. An executive committee was appointed at the seminary and representatives from Teachers College continued in an advisory capacity. Enrollment in the school varied from 147 to 174 and attendance from 113 to 140.

In the same bulletin which contained Hartshorne's report there was an introduction by Coe, in which he recounted the accomplishments of the school: (1) success in all phases of Christian education – worship, service, thinking; (2) problem-project methods of teaching; (3) system of careful records, reports and exhibits; (4) influence on other schools; (5) opportunity for training of seminary students in religious education; (6) teachers and former students involved in writing curriculum and other books in the field. Although Coe dismissed the notion that it was a model school, it set high standards that other churches could aspire to for the rest of the century. For example, it had: (a) a separate room for each class; (b) worship in a chapel with an organ or piano and a children's choir; (c) chairs and tables at appropriate height; (d) materials for creative activities; (e) visual aids; (f) reference library; (g) blackboards, wall maps, bulletin boards; (h) careful records for each pupil and class. Much credit goes to Hartshorne for maintaining the high standards.

Coe realized that one of the limitations of the school was the lack of a supportive congregational setting. In December 1920 Hartshorne met with a group of parents and teachers and put together a plan for "The Fellowship of the Christian Life," a kind of alternative church. It was adopted in February 1921, and the organization included even home classes and adult education.

In 1966 Harris H. Parker, Jr., completed a doctoral dissertation at Columbia as a case study of the school from 1910 to 1929. According to Parker, "In this important experiment the progressive educational theory of the early decades of the 20th century was translated from the blueprints of educational design to the vital life of the classroom." Parker concluded that there was an unusually high degree of correlation between educational theory and actual classroom practice. He showed that the school offered positive guidance for religious educators in areas of experimentation, supervision, worship, social responsibility, and coordination between school, home and the public schools. By 1929 this school became a part of the educational program of Riverside Church.

Hartshorne's Departure and Coe's Resignation

With an understanding of the significance of the Union School of Religion and Hartshorne's leadership role, it is easier to appreciate Coe's reactions when his colleague departed in the summer of 1922 to take a position at the University of Southern California. The correspondence in the previously sealed file between Coe and President McGiffert has revealed Coe's anger and frustration, but not his surprise. Hartshorne had been recommended for promotion to an associate professorship at the seminary several years earlier, but it was voted down. For three or four years Coe tried to strengthen the department of religious education, not only with the elevation of Hartshorne, but also with the training of others in the field. The truth of the matter is that Coe wanted to take early retirement so he could devote more time to lecturing, writing and recreation. Coe had become well known for his sailboat which he named "School's Out" and he spent summers on the St. Lawrence River and other waterways.

In his annual report in April 1922 to McGiffert, Coe called attention to the administrative overload in his department and his wish to retire. Hartshorne's resignation created what Coe called a crisis in the department and the seminary. At McGiffert's suggestion, Coe had contacted Harrison Elliott at the International YMCA to see if he would teach at the seminary, but Elliott declined, apparently because it was a temporary assignment and the salary was low.

The problem with communication in the summer of 1922 was that Coe was at his summer camp in Ontario, Canada, and McGiffert went back and forth between New York City and his vacation place on Cape Cod. On August 5, Coe sent to McGiffert a copy of Elliott's letter of refusal. Coe wrote: "Ever since Professor Hartshorne accepted the chair of religious education at the University of Southern California, I have been struggling to discover some way to prevent the collapse that is now upon us, but in vain." Coe reminded the president that a policy had been adopted three years earlier and the refusal to grant tenure to Hartshorne had led to the current emergency. According to Coe, "the duties of Professor Hartshorne are so specialized and technical that probably it would be impossible to replace him." Coe and McGiffert had discussed during the previous year the possibility of Hartshorne leaving and the need to train a replacement. Coe reiterated his feeling that he could not face the task of rebuilding the department and assuming the heavy burdens.

Coe wrote at the same time to Paul Monroe at Teachers College, explaining his desire to retire and clarifying the decision of the seminary, as follows: "For it was perfectly clear to me that the policy of letting a highly competent specialist go before similar specialists in religious education had been developed meant the disintegration of the structure that had taken thirteen years in the building." To another colleague he wrote: "For some years I have taken the position that Professor Hartshorne has done work that justifies his promotion and expectation of permanency in the seminary. The majority of the professors have not agreed with me but have insisted that the term of his service should be limited and that he should be encouraged to seek a position elsewhere."

Hartshorne himself wrote to Coe on August 11, expressing support for the very difficult and forthright stand that Coe had taken. Hartshorne added: "I want you to be sure to know how proud I am to have been so long associated with you and that I feel very deeply my indebtedness to your leadership." Further correspondence between Coe and McGiffert revealed Coe's increased anger and hurt about being charged with "desertion" and McGiffert's continued pleas for Coe to reconsider his plan to resign.

By August 27, it was announced that Elliott would accept a position and salary comparable to Hartshorne's. Coe informed Hartshorne of this turn of events on August 31 and also indicated that he (Coe) might accept a teaching position at Teachers College. However, in a September 4 letter to McGiffert there seemed to be a change or modification in Coe's feelings. He wrote: "I do not believe that the department has been irreparably injured by Dr. Hartshorne's departure," and further that he had never insisted on retaining Hartshorne. By September 19, McGiffert reported that Coe's resignation would be accepted and would be presented to the board in November. Coe received a number of letters of support and friendship and a parting citation from the faculty.

One might speculate about the reasons that Hartshorne was not given tenure at Union Theological Seminary. First, it was still difficult for some of professors in the traditional disciplines to accept the relatively new field of religious education. In the file of correspondence there is a letter from one colleague to Coe questioning how the Bible was used in religious education. Secondly, it was even more difficult to accept one who was trained in the scientific and psychological approaches to religious education, as Hartshorne was. Thirdly, there was some opposition to the Union School of Religion and Hartshorne's leadership, especially since the classes were held in seminary rooms with inevitable conflict and inconvenience. Finally there was something about Hartshorne's personality which rubbed some people the wrong way. Hartshorne described himself as being "obstinate" or stubborn. He was undoubtedly outspoken and of strong convictions. However, the reasons for his departure do not diminish in any way his dedication to the field of religious education and his major contributions to it.

Character Education Inquiry

The names of Hartshorne and Mark A. May will be forever linked as the directors of one of the most important studies of the 20th century. Hartshorne was an excellent administrator and writer; May a top-notch investigator in the field and a skilled technician. What they accomplished together has been called a "benchmark" by William Chapman in his 1969 dissertation at Princeton. Chapman wrote: "The three volumes published as a result of this project are still cited as a reference in contemporary treatments of character. &;The data gathered, and the conclusions reached, have continued to have a major impact on discussions of character to the present." Martin L. Hoffman, University of Michigan, called them the "best known and most elaborate study" on the subject. Urie Bronfenbrenner of Cornell University termed the study "monumental," but he differentiated its theoretical basis of "behaviorism" from two other traditions, psychoanalysis and the cognitive theory of Piaget.

James E. Dittes, who was a student of Hartshorne and succeeded him as professor of the psychology of religion at Yale Divinity School wrote: "The data were collected with such ingenuity and care and interpreted with such insight that the Hartshorne and May study persists in importance, especially its still standing conclusion that moral qualities must be regarded less as static traits than as dynamic responses to specific environmental conditions or 'situations' as we have come to say today." Another former student, John Peatling of the Character Research Project of Union College, called the collaboration a "wedding" of research and religious education, two disciplines that did not always get along.

The genesis of this landmark study was in the early 1920s when the Religious Education Association called for research on how religion was taught to young people and with what effect. The curriculum committee of the International Lessons Committee and the new International Council of Religious Education joined the R.E.A. in a conference called by the Institute of Social and Religious Research, because all three organizations had requested funds from the Institute. Teachers College of Columbia University agreed to serve as the home base, and Edward L. Thorndike became the supervisor. The Institute appointed an executive committee which included George Albert Coe, Luther Weigle, Mary Ely Lyman, Edward Thorndike, among others. The project was to continue for three years, beginning in 1924, but it was then extended another two years, ending in 1929.

According to an interview with Mark May in 1968, Chapman learned that Thorndike and Coe were each asked to nominate a person to direct the study. Coe named Hartshorne, who was then on the faculty at USC, and Thorndike named May at Syracuse University, who had been a student of both Coe and Hartshorne at Union Theological Seminary and had even been a teacher in the Union School of Religion. May had completed his PhD in psychology at Teachers College, Columbia, under Thorndike, had then gone into the U.S. Army, and had studied the IQ tests of American soldiers after the First World War. Both Hartshorne and May were added to the faculty of Teachers College for the duration of the study.

In the December 1924 issue of Religious Education Hartshorne had outlined the objectives of the study: (a) collect a complete bibliography of materials on measuring character, with an evaluation of them; (b) take the most promising of existing measurements and test them by statistical procedures; (c) devise and perfect a set of tests to serve as tools for future research and experimentation. Subjects to be tested included social functioning, self-organization or self-control, and experience of God. The initial study included a sample of 8,150 public school pupils and 2,715 private school pupils between the ages of 8 and 16 in a variety of communities.

The results of the study were reported in three large volumes, all published by the Macmillan Co. The first was Studies in Deceit (1928), which had two parts, General Methods and Results, and Statistical Methods and Results. The second was Studies in Service and Self-control (1929), again with two parts, one on Service and one on Self-Control. Hartshorne and May were joined by Julius B. Maller in this volume. The third volume was Studies in the Organization of Character (1930), with Frank K. Shuttleworth as a co-author. In brief, the first volume focused on deceitful and honest behaviors, the second on cooperative and charitable behaviors, and the third on the organization or integration of these behaviors.

It would be impossible to summarize the results and recommendations of the entire study in a few words, except to say that the investigators found that there was no such thing as character traits, that behavior is a function of relations to one's peers, home and environment, and that the traditional methods of trying to teach character were not working. The study came up with many recommendations, not the least of which was: "The normal unit for character education is the group or small community which provides through cooperative discussion and effort the moral support required for the adventurous discovery and effective use of ideals in the conduct of affairs." Another conclusion was that "the main attention of educators should be placed not so much on devices for teaching honesty or any other 'trait' as on the reconstruction of school practices in such a way as to provide not occasional but consistent and regular opportunities for the successful use by both teachers and pupils of such forms of conduct as make for the common good."

One of the original hopes of the study was that the results would be made available in both technical and popular forms. This hope was satisfied by a number of articles that Hartshorne and May wrote in scholarly journals such as the Journal of Educational Psychology and The Psychological Bulletin, and in more popular publications such as The International Journal of Religious Education and the New York Herald Tribune. Progress reports were published in six articles for the journal, Religious Education, and an entire monograph was prepared for the Religious Education Association in 1927 with the title Testing the Knowledge of Right and Wrong. This led to a series of research conferences sponsored by the R.E.A. at the Chicago Theological Seminary. The R.E.A. even started a new more popular magazine, Character, in 1934 but when it was discovered that it could not support both its journal and the magazine, the rights to the latter were turned over to the editor, Joseph Artman, and his new organization. The magazine was a prime example of how the term, character, was changed over the years to "citizenship," and during the Second World War to "American citizenship."

Walter H. Clark of Hartford Seminary has pointed out two virtues of the Hartshorne-May study: it stimulated further research and highlighted the importance of empirical evidence, but he also called attention to the efforts of Gordon Allport and others to challenge their findings. For Clark, another outstanding program was the Character Research Project of Union College, Schenectady, New York, founded by Ernest Ligon, and funded by Eli Lilly and the Lilly Endowment. Out of this project came many books, a magazine, and curriculum materials seeking to combine Christian personality with good mental health. In Minneapolis, Minnesota, the Youth Research Center was formed by Merton Strommen, and it is still going strong as the Search Institute. Various church bodies and national denominations added research departments, and much of this research found its way into the new curriculum materials which appeared in the 1950s and 1960s.

In his introduction to the comprehensive handbook, Merton Strommen described the genesis of the five-stage project of the Religious Education Association, funded by the Lilly Endowment, which culminated in 1971 with the publication of the book, Research on Religious Development. At the same time there were many researchers on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean, who were working on the subject of the moral growth and development of children and adolescents. One was Jean Piaget of Geneva, Switzerland, with his book, The Moral Judgment of Children, another was Ronald Goldman of Great Britain, and another was Lawrence Kohlberg of Harvard. Kohlberg emerged head and shoulders over the others in the U.S. with the publication of The Child as Moral Philosopher in a 1968 issue of Psychology Today. Kohlberg, calling the studies "classic," referred to the findings of Hartshorne and May in this article, and his cognitive-developmental theory has led to the "faith development" of James Fowler and the R.E.A.-sponsored "faith development in the adult life cycle" of Kenneth Stokes. In his book, Models of Religious Education, Harold Burgess was right about the importance of the studies, i.e. "very little correlation between knowledge of religious ideals and actual moral behavior," but he was wrong about the Character Education Inquiry being "also known as" the Yale Studies.

Yale Studies in Religious Education

Under the direction of Luther Weigle, Yale Divinity School had launched an ambitious program to publish the very best of doctoral dissertations with the original title Yale Studies in the History and Theory of Religious Education, twenty-one volumes under the general editorship of Weigle. Robert Wood Lynn, professor at Union Theological Seminary and later a vice president at Lilly Endowment, has called the Yale studies "the most important single set of writings about the history of Protestant education. Much of the credit is due to Luther A. Weigle, the architect of the Yale studies."

Hartshorne had joined Weigle at Yale Divinity School in 1929, and at the same time the Institute of Social and Religious Research, which had sponsored the Character Education Inquiry, asked Hartshorne to make a study of the status and trends in Protestant religious education in the country. The study was to emphasize first-hand field investigations and case studies of actual situations. Of major interest was the impact of the progressive educational theories on local churches, cooperative organizations and colleges. The study eventually resulted in five separate investigations, the results of which were published in four volumes by Yale University Press as a part of the Yale Studies, namely volumes V, VI, VII, and IX. Hartshorne served as the editor and coauthor of all four volumes.

First came Community Organizations in Religious Education (1932) by Hartshorne and J. Quinter Miller, general secretary of the Connecticut Council of Religious Education, with the assistance of Willard E. Uphaus, who had completed a doctorate at Yale earlier, and Charles G. Chakerian, a graduate student. It was based on the doctoral dissertation by Miller, A Functional Study of Community Cooperation in Religious Education, analyzing the work of councils of churches and religious education agencies. Thirteen such organizations were studied in eleven communities, with the addition of an in-depth case study of the city of New Haven.

The second volume was Case Studies of Present-day Religious Teaching (1932) by Hartshorne and Elsa Lotz, who was the executive secretary of the Religious Education Committee, Religious Society of Friends, Philadelphia. This was based on her doctoral dissertation at Hartford Seminary, A Critique of Present-day Religious Teaching. The thesis grew out of her personal observations in 150 teaching situations in Sunday Schools, weekday schools, young peoples' societies, religious clubs, summer camps, and vacation church schools, located in 40 communities in twelve states, the District of Columbia, and Ontario, Canada. Nine different Protestant denominations were represented.

The third volume was Church Schools of Today (1933) by Hartshorne and Earle V. Ehrhart, staff member of the sponsoring Institute. Ten churches east of the Mississippi were selected for the study from nine cities and one rural community in six different states. Ehrhart set up committees in each church, supervised their work, assembled the data and prepared the original reports.

The fourth volume was Standards and Trends in Religious Education (1933) by Hartshorne, Helen R. Stearns and Willard Uphaus. The first part was a study of teaching in 746 churches and was based on Miss Stearns' doctoral dissertation, An Empirical Study of Standardization in Church Schools. It focused on the work of churches with children and youth while they were still at home, whereas, the second part, done by Uphaus, reported data collected from 500 colleges and sought to appraise what churches were doing for youth when they left home.

In all of the studies Hartshorne was the co-author as well as the director, consultant and coordinator, and helped to formulate the research designs. However, these volumes represented something of a departure from the tradition of the Yale Studies. In the first place, they were sponsored and financed by an outside agency, the Institute of Social and Religious Research. Secondly, the volumes were no longer on "theory and history," but on practical applications and present-day situations. Thirdly, Hartshorne served not only as a co-author but as editor, in place of Weigle. Finally and most important, the projects were set up to test only one viewpoint in Protestant education, namely the liberal progressive wing of Protestant thinking. This school of thought was expressed best in Coe's 1917 book, A Social Theory of Religious Education, in which he criticized the church bodies that were dogmatic and ritualistic. On a continuum of theological views – fundamentalist, conservative evangelical, liberal evangelical, progressive – Coe and Hartshorne represented the progressive wing, while Weigle's position has been identified as liberal evangelical by Robert Lynn.

Miss Lotz was explicit about this orientation when she referred in her dissertation to the many volumes of theory generated by the progressive religious education movement. She listed nine authors, with Coe first, followed immediately by Hartshorne. Weigle was not on her list in spite of his influential, best-selling 1911 book, The Pupil and the Teacher. Her avowed purpose was to appraise the extent to which the progressive theories had permeated Protestant churches. What she found was "the progressive principles discussed in the college classroom were only rarely to be seen in operation in the leadership of boys and girls." Since theory had been so generally divorced from practice, she asked whether "artist teachers" could be found who will allow practice to be informed by progressive theory. Two years after she received the Ph.D. Miss Lotz died, at the age of 47, and Hartshorne compiled and edited a collection of her letters and writings in a book published by the Religious Society of Friends in 1937 with the title Friendship Triumphant: Glimpses of the Life of Elsa Lotz.

There was a fifth volume in the Yale Studies which was not a part of the investigations by the Institute on the status and trends of Protestant education. This was entitled From School to College: A Study of the Transition Experience and was edited by Hartshorne and published by Yale University Press in 1939, but was based on research conducted by Lincoln B. Hale of Carleton College in collaboration with others. Hartshorne was the chairman of the Connecticut Survey Committee on Transition from School to College. One hundred and three secondary schools and forty colleges were involved in the study, and the final volume was based on four Ph.D. dissertations at Yale.

During his years at Yale, Hartshorne also wrote many articles, including one on forty years' progress in Protestant education, which was reprinted in Religious Digest. Excerpts of his Wright lecture on theological education were printed in the Yale Divinity School News, but the entire text appeared in the journal, Religious Education. This lecture was also reported in the Religion section of TIME magazine, May 3, 1954, in which it said that he recommended a broad "philosophy of education," and closer ties between seminaries and churches.

Final Years and Memorials

In the year after his retirement, Hartshorne addressed a faculty conference at Meredith College on the subject "The Christian function of the liberal arts college." In the last years of his life he and his wife took up residence in a Methodist retirement home in Durham, North Carolina, where he prepared meditations and led worship in the chapel and preached on his favorite subjects, "faith," "hope" and "love." In 1964 he began a sermon on the 8th century prophets by saying: "Had I been a preacher for forty-odd years instead of a mere teacher, I would have accumulated a barrel of sermons on which I could draw in the days of my retirement."

Hartshorne was memorialized after his death in 1967. Randolph Crump Miller, the editor of the journal, Religious Education, reprinted his article on Growth in Religion from a 1939 issue, and Raymond P. Morris, Yale Divinity School librarian, contributed a brief biographical sketch. For Morris, it was "the passing of one who left an indelible imprint on character and moral education of the past generation."

James E. Dittes, Yale Divinity School professor of the psychology of religion, prepared a "memorial minute" in June 1968, in which he said:

His own teaching was consistent with his theories of education, He knew that lectures and other formal educational procedures supply only one characteristic of the environment with which students were profitably in interaction – not usually the most educational characteristic. He was a superb tutor in personal guidance of individual students, intellectually unremitting, personally gentle and standing aside for the student to make his own mistakes and his own progress. Professor Hartshorne was a wise and humble counselor in the conduct of the school's affairs. His last major research was a study of theological education in the Northern Baptist Convention, completed with characteristic care and insight. In a Wright lecture in the year of his retirement, he made recommendations for theological education, applying to this educational task the same principles he had examined for other tasks of personal growth (even using a formula others since may have supposed they invented: experience plus reflection on experience). In the year of his death, his school has probably come closer to recognizing such principles than at any point during his tenure on the faculty.

In the first decades of the 20th century, when Hartshorne was actively engaged in the work, religious education was almost synonymous with Christian education, or at least Protestant education. Protestant religious and educational leaders founded the Religious Education Association in 1903, and Protestant denominations created the International Council of Religious Education in 1922. The term, Christian education, gradually came into use, so that at least by mid-century religious education was a more inclusive or inter-faith concept, which included Christian, Jewish and other religious traditions.

Hartshorne's major contribution to the field was in character and moral education. His work with Mark May in the Character Education Inquiry forever changed how people would look at the subject. Their studies have been called a "benchmark," a "landmark," "classic," "monumental," and were cited for decades after they were completed.

Closely related to this was Hartshorne's contribution to research in the field and the dazzling set of tests and measurements that were developed for studying character. Along with Goodwin Watson and a few others, he showed that it was possible to apply scientific tools to the areas of religion and morality, as well as the study of religious education. Hartshorne became well known for the open-ended stories and other methodologies which he perfected.

Through his teaching and writing, Hartshorne contributed much to the understanding of how children and youth grow in religious understanding and moral behavior. It was fitting that the journal, Religious Education, should reprint his 1939 article on Growth in Religion as a part of the tribute to him after he died.

His first interest and major contribution was in the field of worship. His published dissertation on the theory and practice of worship in the Sunday School was followed by other resources and a book of worship which Hartshorne edited. In the Union School of Religion he transformed the traditional "opening exercises" into authentic worship. Hartshorne had written: "Christian worship is fundamental to Christian character."

Hartshorne's leadership of the Union School of Religion was so successful that it attracted the attention of many people throughout the country and other parts of the world. Its influence extended far beyond the neighborhood of Morningside Heights and the school represented the best of Christian education.

Hartshorne made a major contribution to leadership training, especially through his manuals on worship and his textbook, Childhood and Character. His contributions included also his work on research methods and programs of character-building, and extended to his four decades of teaching, where he was involved in the preparation of clergy, directors of religious education and other professionals in the field.

He also contributed to theological education through his study of the seminaries of the Northern Baptist Convention. In his final year at Yale Divinity School he delivered the Wright lecture on "theological education and the churches," in which he called for greater attention to the process by which learning takes place. James Dittes has commented in more detail on his educational methods in the "Memorial Minute" prepared in June 1968.

He turned his attention to the issues confronted by college students as they made the not so smooth transition from home to the campus. Among the questions raised was how the churches were carrying on their ministry in colleges and universities, where the YMCA and YWCA "Christian Associations" were established. This concern was confronted at USC in the 1920s, in Connecticut in the 1930s, and at Meredith College in the 1950s.

Another contribution was made in the study of the status and trends in Protestant education, whether in local churches, community organizations and agencies, or in colleges. The fact that the Institute of Social and Religious Research recruited him for the study was a testimony to his outstanding reputation and expertise in the field.

Finally, and often overlooked, because he was in the shadow of George Albert Coe, was his contribution to the theory or philosophy of religious education. It could be argued that Hartshorne was one of the most important disciples of Coe and sought to apply theory to the practical problems of teaching, but he offered insights of his own along the way. In a little known article, Religious Education – A Point of View in a 1927 issue of Child Study, he listed the elements for a program of religious education: (a) background in natural and social science; (b) knowledge of poetry, music and art; (c) extension of the boundaries of knowledge, the joy of discovery; (d) contact and cooperation with others; (e) the improvement of human relations; (f) development of a philosophy of life; (g) application to social problems and their amelioration; (h) exposure to great characters in history and fiction; (i) frequent opportunity for worship; (j) daily companionship with understanding friends, whereby "the whole is lifted from the level of mere method to that of the gentle partnership of those who put their trust in God, who seek the adventure of faith and who believe in the unfailing power of love."

On a personal note, the author did not take a course with Hartshorne at Yale Divinity School before he retired, but he remembered his Wright lecture. He recalled that Dean Liston Pope wanted to bring someone onto the faculty in place of Hartshorne who would relate more to the growing field of pastoral psychology and counseling. Jim Dittes was identified as that person and he started teaching at Yale Divinity School in 1955, and the author took one of his first courses on "Psychological Foundations of Personality." Hartshorne's writings were an important part of the bibliography for a course on "Growth and Religion" that the author took with Randy Miller. The author is grateful to Ray Morris, the Yale Divinity School librarian, who preserved the papers of Hartshorne and Coe, and to Martha Smalley and Joan Duffy who maintain the special collections and have been very helpful to the author. It is important that future generations do not forget the legacy of Hartshorne and all the contributions that he made as one of the outstanding Christian educators of the 20th century.

Works Cited

Unless otherwise noted here, all information has been taken from the writings of Hugh Hartshorne or from the papers of Hartshorne and Coe in the special collection of Yale Divinity School Library. This includes the unpublished "Memorial Minute" written by James E. Dittes on June 3, 1968.

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