Harold Rugg

Who is Harold Rugg?

Harold Rugg was an educational reformer in the early to mid 1900s, associated with the Progressive education movement. Originally trained in civil engineering at Dartmouth College, Rugg went on to study psychology, sociology and education at the University of Illinois where he completed a dissertation titled "The Experimental Determination of Mental Discipline in School Studies."

After earning his Ph.D. he went on to teach at the University of Chicago and later became a professor at Teacher's College at Columbia University. He studied the creativity which he believed was vital to the learning process. He created the first textbook series and his social studies books were extremely popular in US schools. By the early forties his books fell out of favor due to a campaign run by big business organizations like the Advertising Federation of America and even the American Legion. The cause for the controversy was that in some of Rugg's junior-high textbooks he had included concepts considered "pro-socialist" by conservative opponents.