William Henry Burnham

William H. Burnham (1855–1941) was an American educational psychologist, who was a major advocate for promoting good mental hygiene in the education system. He defined this as taking measures to prevent mental problems or disorders to help students learn more effectively.

Biography

William H. Burnham was born in Dunbarton, New Hampshire in 1855. He received his bachelor's degree from Harvard in 1882, and his doctorate from Johns Hopkins in 1888. He was then recruited by G. Stanley Hall to teach at Clark University, where he stayed until he retired in 1926. Burnham and Hall worked closely with each other at both Johns Hopkins and Clark studying the education system and development of children.

America was recovering from the Civil War and was in the core of the second industrial revolution while Burnham was in school. During this time there was an increased demand for better education. People were upset and dissatisfied with how secondary schools and colleges were only focusing on producing diplomas and not ‘capable men’. As a result, there was a shift in education to focus on the individual development of the student and not just the information they were learning. Since this was Burnham's area of expertise, he was inspired to study and observe this situation to help improve the education system. He wrote numerous books about how to improve the education system, and how the student as a whole should be the primary concern of teachers and the school.

Contributions

William H. Burnham observed how secondary schools and colleges were primarily concerned about the scholarship product of an individual, and not on how the individual was personally growing. He created guidelines and principles to create a new path of education. He wrote his notes, results, and conclusions into published books and articles. Some of these books are: The History of Education as a Professional Subject, Bibliographies on Educational Psychology, The Normal Mind, and The Group as a Stimulus of Mental Activity. Throughout these books, it is easy to understand that Burnham saw hygiene as a basic and necessary component of education. In these books explained how mental hygiene could be improved and how to achieve it so that all students are successful.