Lyceum

Lyceum, a system of adult education in the United States during the 19th century. The name derives from the ancient Lyceum near Athens, a park dedicated to Apollo Lyceus, where in the 4th century B.C., Aristotle lectured while strolling with his pupils, the so-called Peripatetics.

The American lyceum stressed lectures, debates, and readings. It also promoted the improvement of district schools and the establishment of libraries and museums. Inaugurated in 1826 in Millbury, Mass., by Josiah Holbrook, the lyceum system was a forerunner of the chautauqua movement and of university extension. It flourished until shortly after the Civil War.

Origin and Early Years. Holbrook, a graduate of Yale College, had founded an industrial school in 1819 and an agricultural school in 1824both in Derby, Conn. These institutions were modeled after Philipp von Fellenberg's schools for the poor in Hofwyl, Switzerland, in that they offered both traditional education and practical vocational training. The lyceum movement also owed much to the system of mechanics' institutes that had been established in England.

In its original form, as described by Holbrook in an article in the American Journal of Education (1826), the lyceum was a "society for mutual education" [dedicated] "to procure for youths an economical and practical education, and to diffuse rational and useful information through the community generally," [as well as] "to apply the sciences and the various branches of education to the domestic and the useful arts, and to all the common purposes of life." These aims were in tune with the various early 19th century social and intellectual movements that promoted democracy and that brought about the establishment of public school systems and more advanced educational institutions all over the United States.

The Millbury lyceum, opened in November 1826, was Branch Number One of the new movement and became the prototype of other lyceums established in succeeding years in neighboring communities. By 1829 there were lyceums in Connecticut, Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont. Before long, the movement spread to all sections of the country.

With the spread of the movement, Holbrook was encouraged to expand the functions of the lyceum. In a pamphlet early in 1829, he outlined 11 aims for his educational institution. These included some broadly stated general aims, such as raising the level of conversation, directing amusements into socially elevated channels, and reducing the cost of instruction to the individual student. They also included suggestions for specific projects, such as founding libraries in and preparing maps and histories of the towns in which lyceums were located. The sum total of these activities was not only the cultural enlightenment of the citizenry but also the promotion of political discussion and social reform and the opening of libraries and museums in localities which had hitherto lacked them.

The Movement at Its Height. The rapid growth of the American lyceum was evident as early as 1831, when 900 towns and 56 counties reported lyceum organizations.

The basic form of the lyceum was the lecture, at times with various visual aids. The lecturers numbered some of the most prominent persons of the time, both American and foreign, including Daniel Webster, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Charles Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray, William Lloyd Garrison, Horace Greeley, and Susan B. Anthony. Several of Emerson's essays were originally written as lyceum lectures.

Decline of the Lyceum. During the Civil War, the major objective of lyceum lectures, whether in the North or the South, was the promotion of the causes of the combatants. After the war, lectures of the more customary kind were revived, but the lyceum movement was displaced in the closing decades of the century by the commercial lecture bureaus, which more thoroughly exploited the "star" or "name" system and even introduced comic entertainment.

Adult education and cultureincluding music, which had been largely neglected by the lyceumwere later brought to the far reaches of the country by the chautauqua institution, established in 1874. (See Chautauqua Movement.) Although there was little direct connection between chautauqua and its predecessor, the lyceum's earlier success must have contributed somewhat to the rapid spread and great popularity of the chautauquas.

William W. Brickman
University of Pennsylvania