Bagley, William Chandler, 1874–1946, American educator and editor, b. Detroit, grad. Michigan State College (now Michigan State Univ.), 1895, M.S. Univ. of Wisconsin, 1898, Ph.D. Cornell, 1900. He taught in elementary schools before becoming (1908) professor of education at the Univ. of Illinois. He was professor of education at Teachers College, Columbia, from 1917 to 1940. An opponent of pragmatism and progressive education, Bagley insisted on the value of knowledge for its own sake, not merely as an instrument, and he criticized his colleagues for their failure to emphasize systematic study of academic subjects. Of his many works, Education and Emergent Man (1934) contains the clearest exposition of his educational philosophy. His other writings include The Educative Process (1905), Educational Values (1911), and Determinism in Education (1925). Bagley was editor in chief of the Journal of the National Education Association (1920–25) and School and Society (1939–46), which he founded in 1915.
See biographies by F. B. Stratemeyer (1939) and I. L. Kandel (1961).
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