The educator William Torrey Harris was graduated from Yale in 1855 and began teaching in Saint Louis in 1857. As a teacher, principal, superintendent, and eventually U.S. commissioner of education, Harris recognized that all children must be educated. "Education must relate first to citizenship," he wrote in 1898. He claimed that especially in the industrial age, citizens had to "maintain mobility, for with the great inventions of our age, we find ourselves all living in a borderland." Education, he argued, was the only way to "give people the power to climb up to better paid and more useful industries out of lives of drudgery." Despite his advocacy of lifelong education, he counted the school as only one of several important educational institutions, the others being the church and family.

Economy in Education.

Harris was the reformer of the schools in Saint Louis, establishing the first free...