Education in Indiana covers public and private schools, and higher education, from the territorial period to the present.
History According to William J. Reese, Indiana followed the pattern of reform movements that originated in New England, and was brought to Indiana by Yankee Presbyterians in the northern half of the state. South of Indianapolis the arrivals from the Southern states considered education a private affair, with wealthy families supporting tutors. Before 1860 nearly all schooling was private.William J. Reese, ed., Hoosier Schools: past and present (Indiana University press 1998) Across the state Presbyterian and other Protestant churches set up Sunday Schools that provided basic training in reading, writing, arithmetic and piety.Grover L. Hartman, "The Hoosier Sunday School: A Potent Religious/Cultural Force" Indiana Magazine of History 78#3 (1982), pp. 215–241 online
Reform efforts included building support for common schools funded by local taxes, the development of city schools, and curricula designed by professional educators. Reforms during the 1880s to 1920s included high schools, manual training and vocational education in the high schools, and controversies regarding control of rural schools between the farmer parents and the centralizers in the county seat. By the late 20th century, new efforts to reform public education agitated the state.
Early attempts The Jefferson Academy was founded in 1801 as a public university for the Indiana Territory, and was reincorporated as Vincennes University in 1806, the first in the state.See About VU
The 1816 Indiana Constitution in Article 8, Section 1 states:For text see onlineKnowledge and learning, generally diffused throughout a community, being essential to the preservation of a free government; it shall be the duty of the General Assembly to encourage, by all suitable means, moral, intellectual, scientific, and agricultural improvement; and to provide, by law, for a general and uniform system of Common Schools, wherein tuition shall be without charge, and equally open to all." It took decades for the legislature to begin to fulfill its promise.
The 1820s saw the start in a few places of free public township schools, locally funded by taxes. During the administration of William Hendricks, a plot of ground was set aside in each township for the construction of a schoolhouse.Dunn, pp. 315–317 Indiana lagged the rest of the Midwest with the lowest literacy and education rates into the early 20th century.Patrick J. Furlong, "Indiana" in Gale Farmington, ed.), Encyclopedia of the United States in the Nineteenth Century (2000) 2:101–103.
Caleb Mills Caleb Mills (1806–1879) was a Presbyterian Yankee who served as the Superintendent of Public Instruction in Indiana and was the first faculty member at Wabash College. He played a central role in promoting the public education system of Indiana.Anne T. Fraker, "Caleb Mills: Schools, Christianity, and Civilization in the West." American Presbyterians 70.3 (1992): 151–162.
Mills arrived in Crawfordsville in 1833 after graduating from Dartmouth College in New Hampshire and Andover Theological Seminary in Massachusetts. He became the first professor and the principal of the Crawfordsville Classical High School, which opened in December 1833 with 12 students. As soon as a charter could be obtained from the state legislature it became the Wabash Teachers Seminary and Manual Labor College, finally acquiring the name Wabash College in 1851.Osborne (1932), p. 31. Mills was recruited to the job by his old college roommate Edmund Otis Hovey, one of the nine founders of the school, who later joined him on the faculty as one of the professors. At first Mills taught all the classes in every subject.
The state held a referendum on public schools in May 1848.Boone (1892) pp 87–128. Northern Indiana voted 64% in favor, while Southern Indiana voted 51% against. The most enthusiastic support came from the Whig strongholds, led by St. Joseph County (South Bend) on the Michigan border, with 94% voting in favor. See Boone (1892) p. 107. Mills played a major role in preparing materials that pro-school editors included in their newspapers. The legislature passed a law in 1849 enabling but not requiring the establishment of public schools. The loophole was closed in the new state constitution of 1851, and the new school law of 1852 finally required all counties to create free public schools.Boone, (1892) pp. 143–151.
Starting in 1846, for six years, Mills wrote an annual address to the Indiana legislature on the subject of public education.See the 1847 address online These very long letters argued for a statewide system of taxpayer funded free public schools. He made the case that the benefits of a "good and efficient system of free schools" would pay for themselves, and described the parts that would be needed for such a system, including township school committees, district superintendents, school libraries, and normal schools to train teachers. These addresses were printed in the Indiana State Journal under the byline "One of the People", and were the main influence on the new school law, embracing most of Mills' proposals, which was drafted and adopted by the state constitutional convention in 1852.
In 1854 Mills was elected Indiana Superintendent of Public Instruction, defeating the incumbent Democrat, William C. Larrabee, 99,857 to 85,835. Mills, a Whig, ran on a fusion ticket called the People's Party which brought together modernizers from the Whigs, Free Soilers, Know-Nothings and temperance advocates to support a common slate. Traditionalists supported the Democrats but they lost. Mills, after serving one term, did not stand for re-election in 1856 and Larrabee regained the office. Larrabee was a Yankee and a professor of mathematics at Asbury College; he agreed with Mills on the need to modernize the schools. They were followed by a series of state superintendents of public instruction who aggressively promoted public schools. However, in the 1850s their work was repeatedly frustrated by the state supreme court, which nullified key parts of the school laws. After 1865 the progress of building public schools resumed.Emma Lou Thornbrough, Indiana in the Civil War Era, 1850–1880 (1965) pp. 461–475.
Higher education For a list of institutions, see :Category:Universities and colleges in Indiana.
The state government chartered Indiana University in Bloomington in 1820 as the State Seminary. Construction began in 1822, the first professor was hired in 1823, and classes began in 1824.Donald F. Carmony, Indiana, 1816 to 1850: The Pioneer Era (1998) pp. 396–398. Enrollment in 1890 was only 400, but it grew to 3200 in 1919. Its national reputation was weak until the late 1930s, when president Herman B Wells (1937–2000) started to build a national reputation for research.Clifton J. Phillips, Indiana in Transition, 1880 to 1920 (1968) pp. 414–419.James H. Capshew, Herman B Wells: The Promise of the American University (Indiana UP, 2012) see online book reviewThomas D. Clark, Indiana University: Midwestern Pioneer, Years of Fulfillment (1977). Purdue University was founded in 1869 in West Lafayette as the state's land-grant university, a school of science, engineering and agriculture. Enrollment grew from 849 in 1900 to 2605 in 1919. Purdue for the first half of the 20th century boasted the largest enrollment of any engineering school in the country. It battled IU for years over who would run a medical school, and finally its rival won control of the medical school in Indianapolis.Phillips, Indiana in Transition, 1880 to 1920 (1968) pp. 414–419.Robert W. Topping, A Century and Beyond: The History of Purdue University (Purdue UP, 1988).
Other state colleges were established for specialized needs. They included Indiana State University, established in Terre Haute in 1865 as the state normal school for training teachers.Dan Clark, A History of Indiana State University: From Normal School to Teachers College, 1865–1933 (Indiana University Press, 2022) online Ball State University was founded as a normal school in the early 20th century and given to the state in 1918.Anthony O. Edmonds, & E. Bruce Geelhoed, Ball State University: An Interpretive History (Indiana UP, 2001).
Public colleges lagged behind the private religious colleges in both size and educational standards until the 1890s.Furlong, "Indiana" 2:101–103.Donald F. Carmony, Indiana, 1816 to 1850: The Pioneer Era (1998) pp. 398–402. In 1855, North Western Christian University [now Butler University] was chartered by Ovid Butler after a split with the Christian Church Disciples of Christ over slavery. Significantly the university was founded on the basis of anti-slavery and co-education. It was one of the first to admit African Americans and one of the first to have a named chair for female professors, the Demia Butler Chair in English. Asbury College (now Depauw University) was Methodist. Wabash College was Presbyterian. The Northern Indiana Vocational School became Valparaiso University in 1907. Its cheap tuition attracted 5000 students as the largest school in Indiana. It fell apart in the 1920s and the campus was sold to the Lutherans who still operate it. The University of Notre Dame, founded by Rev Edward Sorin in 1842, emerged as the most prominent Catholic school in the country, thanks in large part to football under Knute Rockne.Robert E. Burns Being Catholic, Being American, Volume 1: The Notre Dame Story, 1842–1934 (1999) pp.172–173.
Basketball Indiana did not invent basketball but it pioneered in adding it to the high school curriculum, using it to build rural support for hundreds of small new rural high schools. Hundreds and even thousands of supporters packed the bleachers to cheer the local team.David G. Martin, "Gymnasium or Coliseum? Basketball, Education, and Community. Impulse in Indiana in the Early Twentieth Century." in Reese, ed., Hoosier Schools Past and Present (1998) pp. 121–144.Alexander M. Moore, "Elementary and Secondary Education" in Donald F. Carmony, ed. Indiana: A Self-Appraisal (Indiana UP, 1966), pp. 166–185.Phillip M. Hoose, Hoosiers: The fabulous basketball life of Indiana (Indiana UP, 2016), ch. 1.
Black students largely attended racially segregated schools, especially in Indianapolis and Gary. Although official segregation ended in the 1940s, in practice the great majority of blacks attended schools that were overwhelmingly black. Starting in 1941 all-black high schools were allowed in the basketball tournaments. One unexpected result was that whites in Indianapolis cheered Oscar Robertson and the all-black Crispus Attucks High School in winning the state basketball championship in 1955 and 1956 under coach Ray Crowe.Arum Goudsouzian, "'Ba-ad, Ba-a-ad Tigers': Crispus Attucks Basketball and Black Indianapolis in the 1950s," Indiana Magazine of History 96#1 (2000), pp.4–43.Richard B. Pierce, "More than a game: The political meaning of high school basketball in Indianapolis." in Sport and the Color Line (Routledge, 2004) pp.223–246 abstract
Current
Public schools Indiana's 1816 constitution was the first in the country to implement a state-funded public school system. It also allotted one township for a public university. However, the plan turned out to be far too idealistic for a pioneer society, as tax money was not accessible for its organization. In the 1840s, Caleb Mills pressed the need for tax-supported schools, and in 1851 his advice was included in the new state constitution. In 1843 the Legislature ruled that African Americans could not attend the public schools, leading to the foundation of Union Literary Institute and other schools for them, funded by donations or the students themselves. The Indiana General Assembly authorized separate but equal schools for Black students in 1869, and in 1877 language in the law changed to allow for integrated schools.