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Josiah Holbrook (1788–1854)



American educator and founder of the AMERICAN LYCEUM, the first organization ever to provide adult education in the United States. Born in Derby, Connecticut, Holbrook graduated from Yale in 1810 and returned home to found a school—twice. The first effort failed as an agricultural school in 1819 and the second as an industrial school in 1824. Holbrook turned to the lecture circuit, then a primary provider of education and entertainment for the mass of unschooled American adults. He was so enthused by the eagerness with which his adult listeners sought knowledge that he decided to form “associations for mutual instruction in the sciences and in useful knowledge generally.”
“It seems to me,” he wrote in an article in the AMERICAN JOURNAL OF EDUCATION in 1826, “that if associations . . . could be started in our villages . . . they would increase with great rapidity, and do more for the general diffusion of knowledge, and for raising the morals and intellectual taste of our countrymen, than any other expedient which can possibly be devised.”
After delivering a series of lectures on the natural sciences in Millbury, Massachusetts, he convinced a group of his listeners, all local farmers and mechanics, to organize themselves into Millbury Lyceum No. 1, Branch of the American Lyceum. Within a few months, he organized lycea in a dozen other villages and became a fervent, tireless missionary for the movement. By 1834, he had organized some 3,000 lycea across the United States, all loosely tied to a central American Lyceum Association, from which he supplied each chapter with books, lecturers and the weekly Family Lyceum, which he published. The Lyceum became one of the great educative institutions of the 19th century, when most American went to work in fields, mines and factories at the age of five or six and had little or no access to formal education.
Holbrook’s organization provided untold thousands of unschooled Americans with correspondence courses with which to better themselves. Until the Civil War, it also gave Americans the opportunity to hear lectures by some of their nation’s greatest thinkers and public figures, including Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry David Thoreau and Daniel Webster. Holbrook continued promoting the Lyceum movement until his death at the end of the Civil War.
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