Historical Geography

public space and public pedagogy

While geography has had much to say about public space, it has had relatively little to say about public pedagogy.⁷ The latter has more typically been covered in cultural studies and educational studies, but even there it has been approached either in scattershot fashion or as a concept in need of clarification. Recognizing this problem, Sandlin, O'Malley, and Burdick break public pedagogy scholarship down into five basic categories.⁸ The first includes research on the reformist public education movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the United States; while the time period makes it relevant to this study, the movement had more to do with unmooring all public education from the church and directing it toward democracy and nation-building, as theorized by John Dewey.⁹ The Wagner Institute, on the other hand, attempted to carve a separate space for open-access higher education. The second involves research on popular culture as an educational force, most notably the vast, ongoing scholarship of Henry Giroux.¹⁰ The third involves informal institutions and public spaces as alternative sites of pedagogy, such as museums, parks, and public art. Geography has done [End Page 78] a great deal of work on such sites, if not perhaps explicitly connecting it to pedagogy, and this category is the most relevant to the present research. The fourth concerns how dominant discourses construct the public; geography's vast and deep literature on neoliberalism would fall into this category, if, again, not necessarily put in terms of public pedagogy. The last category of public pedagogy scholarship Sandlin et al. outline is that of public intellectualism; while geography has its share of public intellectuals, the topic itself has received only scant coverage, and is only tangential to this article.¹¹

How might we connect this broad framework to the geographic literature on public space? My approach to this is to think through how critical understandings of the "publicness" of public pedagogy maps onto geographic analyses of public space. Biesta, for instance, stresses the difference between public pedagogy of the public, for the public, and in the interest of recreating publicness. The latter is the most critical as, following Hannah Arendt, he maintains that the public is not a place but an ongoing political practice of freedom.¹² We see this distinction between public space as a material object of contestation and publicness as an always emerging potentiality throughout geography. Mitchell, for instance, uses Henri Lefebvre's concepts of representational space and representations of space to analyze the struggle over People's Park in Berkeley, California.¹³ Domosh, on the other hand, argues that despite its theoretical nuance, Mitchell's analysis still directs our attention to high-profile events in well-known places at the expense of understanding everyday practices. In contrast, she argues that public space is never fully open or closed, but constantly mediated as the norms and practices that govern its use are challenged and negotiated through seemingly discrete acts of resistance.¹⁴ Similarly, pedagogy is not simply the sum of what goes on in schools but what informs our learning through all aspects of our lives, all the time. Like politics, ideology, culture, and so on, pedagogy is not strictly identifiable through obvious events and institutions, but saturates our daily experience.¹⁵ Schools are institutionalized pedagogy, and any mobilization of public pedagogy is an organization of pedagogic experience that is not easily interpreted along traditional notions of public and private. Rather, it is a claim, or a representation, of what the public is, or should be. Thus, what Terzi and Tonnelat recently observed about public space—that it is better understood as an act of [End Page 79] becoming public (publicity) rather than a literal place—can also be applied to pedagogy.¹⁶

In certain ways Dewey's prolific writings on the value of public education for democracy bear witness to this inextricability of pedagogy and the public sphere. At the turn of the century, for instance, Dewey argued that in the social function of the school, "individualism and socialism are at one," meaning that concern for the individual and concern for society at large are commensurable (not socialism in the conventional political sense of the term).¹⁷ He refined these arguments in his more well-known treatise Democracy and Education: "Not only does social life demand teaching and learning for its own permanence, but the very process of living together educates."¹⁸ Dewey argued not only that education matters for social life but that social life impacts education, for learning happens both in and out of schools and never in a vacuum. Dewey's normative vision of public education, however, is more "of the public" and "for the public" than "in the interest of publicness," to use Biesta's terms, and as such reflects the liberal understanding of the public sphere critiqued by Jurgen Habermas and Hannah Arendt.

Habermas argued that the public sphere in Europe arose as a buffer between the state and the bourgeois class. It purported to be a free and open space of public discussion, but as Habermas observed, it was in fact structured upon numerous classed, raced, and gendered exclusions. The structural transformation that Habermas outlines is one in which, by roughly the Progressive Era, socially disadvantaged groups gain access to the public sphere and demand state recognition to address their grievances. It is also in this transition that consumer culture develops as a means for people to secure their sense of moral worth and dignity as private citizens (think of the turn-of-the-century work of sociologist Thorstein Veblen in this sense).¹⁹ This was only possible, however, as the interests of various groups are "bracketed," meaning that relations of inequality and dependence are provisionally disregarded in order to give the semblance of equal ground. The pivotal question then becomes whether this provisional, contingent (indeed, imagined) equality serves a positive purpose in advancing the causes of citizens, or prevents those inequalities and dependencies from being fundamentally recognized and challenged. Habermas recognized the latter, but writing in the chaos of postwar Germany, he still advocated the normative potential [End Page 80] of the public sphere.²⁰ Arendt, on the other hand, argued that the public sphere is not simply a conduit through which already free private individuals express their preference but is in fact the space of freedom itself, as citizens become fully human by acting as political beings. The public sphere is only public if its publicness is constantly reproduced. Biesta's description of "publicness" derives from Arendt's normative vision of the public sphere. Dewey's normative vision of public education, even if it understood the spatial fluidness of pedagogy, was intended to create a certain kind of pupil, one that would both resist the rapidly expanding consumer culture of its era and fill his or her civic duty more adequately, toward a more unified democracy. To the extent that this implies that bracketing (while not Dewey's term) yields a healthier public sphere, Dewey's project was in part about nation building. Producing certain types of being or ways of knowing toward a healthier nation exists in tension with the practice of public freedom sought by Arendt.

Thus, not only is the very dichotomy of public and private life structured on systems of domination, particularly but not only gender,²¹ an uncritical notion of public pedagogy potentially obscures the multiple modes of knowing and access to knowledge concurrent with the disparate social realities of the public sphere.²² In other words, invocations of "the" public in the singular tend to work in service of the state. Take, for instance, Kohlsted's characterization of the new museum movement (approximately 1880–1925) as a "potent force for promoting national self-consciousness."²³ The collection of far-flung artifacts for the ostensible purpose of public science education was a material practice complicit in the construction of an imagined national community.²⁴ George Brown Goode, curator of the Smithsonian Museum at the time, advocated the pedagogical value of museums on grounds that they could satisfy the "needs of the mechanic, the factory operator, the day laborer, the salesman and clerk, as much as the professional man and the man of leisure."²⁵ He thus characterized a diverse public sphere in terms of occupation but exclusive of women and Black people, and which can be satisfied by a single way of knowing promoted by the state. The Smithsonian in particular was arguably as much a museum of national empire as it was of natural history.²⁶

Given such a critique, how do we best analyze something as individual and experiential as pedagogy in terms of publicness? We might, aft er all, look at Goode's invitation of professionals from different walks of [End Page 81] life, similar to William Wagner's perspective quoted earlier, as an example of a liberal notion of bracketing, wherein various bracketed publics are said to have equal access to the public sphere. In contrast, Fraser famously argued that while the normative potential of the public sphere should not be abandoned altogether, this notion of bracketing was insufficient, and that a multitude of counter-publics (rather than bracketed publics) should be embraced.²⁷ Fraser's argument about the public sphere pertained to her examination of actually existing, rather than normative, democracies. Hence, rather than thinking about pedagogy and publicness in the abstract, it makes more sense to examine the question in real-world contexts, both geographically and historically. The project herein examines how the Wagner Institute sought to share its love of science with the public in Progressive-Era Philadelphia. More specifically, it focuses on the particular ways in which the Wagner Institute reflected and enacted public sphere politics in the terms outlined above.

philadelphia in historical context

The Wagner Institute was founded on the northern rural outskirts of Philadelphia just prior to the US Civil War. Urban development reached the area during the peak years of Philadelphia's industrial era, between approximately 1880 and 1930. In the time period under study, the neighborhood of Seventeenth and Montgomery Avenues was a rapidly developing, primarily white suburb of a booming industrial city, known locally as "up-town." It was in the era of postindustrial decline that North Philadelphia became the African American heart of the city as it is known today.²⁸

The manner in which the public sphere of Philadelphia evolved in this time period is particularly relevant. Recall that this period was, broadly speaking, congruent with the transition traced by Habermas from the bourgeois public sphere, structured on exclusion, to one in which various bracketed groups vie for public voice. For instance, in her study of nineteenth-century street parades in Philadelphia, Davis suggests that they were less directly state-managed than their European counterparts, and as such reflected the exclusions and bracketing of public space more clearly. To be clear, parades were not demonstrations of the public, as if it could be known in the singular, but examples of how publicness was [End Page 82] produced through contestation. Blacks were always and women were often excluded from nineteenth-century parades, and there was considerable anti-Irish sentiment in them. What Habermas called the bourgeois public sphere was marked by open public discourse about the need to rid street displays of perceived degeneracy among the poor and working class.²⁹

In contrast, Warner's conservative reading of Philadelphia's history stresses the role of privatism as a normative, and specifically American, ideal. Warner argues:

For men [privatism] suggested Benjamin Franklin's model for a life course: a youth of self-discipline and hard work devoted to the accumulation of personal wealth, followed by a more leisurely middle age of comfort, public honor, and community service. For women it implied marriage, homemaking, and childrearing for such a husband, with the hoped-for later life of a comfortable home, well-settled children, and a community of family and friends.³⁰

The privatist ethic Warner describes might be better understood as what Staeheli and Mitchell call a republican-virtue model of publicness; it prescribed the normative roles of people inside and outside the space of the home, the perfection of which leads to the good life.³¹ Rather than seeing exclusion or bracketing as an instrumental function of publicness, Warner sees them as impediments to a homogenous public interest. He laments urbanization and immigration for leading to division and parochialism, and hence the decline of the public sphere. He considers the public education movement of the time as factory-style education administered by the state for the sake of efficiency, and instead lauds private schools and universities.³²

Warner places the Wagner Institute in the latter category because it was privately owned, even if open to the public; his definition of public, at least when it comes to education, means state-administered. The public education movement was thus only one strand of a much broader movement toward public pedagogy, not least of which included the new museum movement discussed earlier. Like the museums, the public school movement had elite origins, but (part of) what Warner misses is that it had broad—some might say public—popular support. The bourgeois class liked public schools for the self-improvement they would putatively [End Page 83] offer the poor; the capitalist class liked them for the production of semiskilled labor; and the poor and working class liked them for the scant promise of upward mobility.³³ State-administered is one way to define "public"—it would be pedagogy for the public³⁴—but to suggest that state-administered projects cannot also be of the public is as ideological as saying that they must be. Whether a mode of education is public or not is a function of a number of variables, but ultimately what matters is the nature of the publicness their participants create.

Consider, for instance, the university extension movement of the Progressive Era, in which the Wagner Institute was an eager participant. It originated in two of the most elite universities in Britain, Cambridge and Oxford, with the express purpose of the intellectual self-improvement of the laboring masses. Even with such elite institutional settings there were individuals of a more radical persuasion (such as Michael Earnest Sadler of Oxford) who promoted extension, and at least some histories (if perhaps empirically underdeveloped) show more radical versions of university extension in Scotland and parts of continental Europe.³⁵ The movement's entry into the United States was directly from Cambridge and Oxford, as University of Pennsylvania provost William Pepper communicated with Sadler and his colleagues on developing a university extension system in Philadelphia.³⁶ Pepper established the Philadelphia Society for the Extension of University Teaching in the summer of 1890. It expanded rapidly and by 1891 became the American Society for the Extension of University Teaching, with Philadelphia as its first chapter. At the same time that Edmund James, the president of the American Society, touted university extension as a way to put "new and worthy objects of thought into the lives of people who have been content to live on intellectual sloth and barrenness," he also recognized the potential of university extension to prevent elite universities from falling out of touch with the needs and issues of the general public. He cited Cambridge and Oxford specifically in this regard.³⁷ The first local branch of the Philadelphia chapter was located at Saint Timothy's Workingmen's Club and Institute, about four miles northwest of the Wagner Institute (it is no longer there). The Wagner Institute became the second branch, and at least twenty-one others followed during the society's first year (1890–91). In that year forty total courses were delivered to an audience of nearly sixty thousand, across all twenty-three branches.³⁸ But the origin of any particular movement [End Page 84] or engagement with public pedagogy is only part of the story—what matters perhaps more is how it played out on the ground, and how its participants enacted its publicness. Samuel Wagner embraced the idea of university extension because "the idea of a people's college was one of the fundamental ideas that animated the founder [William Wagner] of this institution. University extension . . . is but another name of the same idea."³⁹ The Wagner Institute also took part in the burgeoning public library system of the era (which also had its origins with Provost Pepper), for similar reasons.

pedagogy of the public

As discussed above, Biesta distinguished public pedagogy that is "of the public," "for the public," and "in the interest of publicness."⁴⁰ To refer to something as "of the public" means that it is a creation of whatever we consider, a priori, to be the public. But through what mechanism would the public create public pedagogy? The most commonplace answer might be the state, but that risks a problematic conflation of "public" with "state-administered." Furthermore, the Wagner Institute had private, moneyed origins and maintained connections to other elite institutions. A letter of solicitation from the Forum, for instance, asked Samuel Wagner if the Wagner Institute might be advertised in a special edition on the best private technical and scientific institutes, and targeted to a readership described as "a well-to-do, intellectual class of people."⁴¹ But the Wagner Institute also relied on public utilities to supply water, and eventually electricity, to not only the institute but also the Philadelphia properties it owned. This section will look in more depth at how the Wagner Institute interacted with public structures that enabled it—and sometimes constrained it.

William Wagner died on January 17, 1885. Shortly thereaft er, the board of trustees, including Samuel Wagner, Richard Westbrook, and Sidney Skidmore, established committees on instruction, museum collections, building, and finance. Aside from setting the schedule for spring lectures (advertised in the Evening Telegraph, the Evening Bulletin, the Evening Star, the Evening Times, and the Evening Press), among their first orders of business was improvement of their building and facilities at Seventeenth and Montgomery, including new display cases, arrangement of the museum, and other needed repairs (fig. 2). In May [End Page 85] 1886 the board spent approximately $2,000 to build sidewalks, which up to that point did not exist around the property. Improvements in the physical plant were of the public in the case of the institute's application for city electric service in 1891.⁴²

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Fig. 2.

Wagner Free Institute of Science, ca. 1900. Wagner Free Institute of Science Archives.

Used with permission.

Furthermore, though the Wagner Institute is the result of a private endowment from William Wagner, it was incorporated by the Pennsylvania state legislature in 1855. This state charter was further amended in 1864 to indicate that the institute could acquire any other properties that it needed to further its mission, and that any property would be free of taxation as long as it was used for the purpose of providing free education.⁴³ The Wagner Institute's primary source of income was from rental properties built during William Wagner's lifetime; by the time of his death, it owned approximately twenty-six houses throughout Philadelphia, renting for anywhere between twenty-five and forty-two dollars per month. The board of trustees was surprised in 1885 when the city of Philadelphia assessed taxes on all of these properties for 1884. Advised by their legal counsel, George W. Biddle, to "test the questions of taxes in the courts," the Wagner Institute [End Page 86] entered into a five-year legal battle over not only their tax liability but also the exact legal definition of their endowment.⁴⁴

The Wagner Free Institute of Science vs. The City of Philadelphia provides one avenue through which to think about how pedagogy in this case is of the public even when initiated by a private actor. The Wagner Institute filed suit in the Philadelphia City Court of Common Pleas in 1885, arguing that the properties should be included in the tax-free endowment. Upon losing that case, they appealed to the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania in 1886, with the same argument. While the case was being considered, and under advisement of Biddle, they paid their 1884 taxes "under protest" so that they could recoup that money if they prevailed in court. They also considered the financial repercussions of a loss; an 1887 budget of roughly of $11,000 would be reduced to $1,460 if they had to pay back taxes. In 1889 the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania confirmed the lower court's finding. William Wagner's deed of trust indeed enabled the board to expand its holdings with other properties, and the state charter indeed declared the endowment to be tax-free but did not define these expanded holdings as part of the original tax-free endowment. The court argued that if the state legislature in 1864 had intended expanded holdings to be part of what was tax-free, it would have used clear language to indicate such, and in any case the properties in question were not being used for free education. Only the grounds, building, and collections at Seventeenth and Montgomery were tax-free.⁴⁵ As early as 1887, the board considered another appeal to the US Supreme Court, but aft er seeking multiple legal opinions on the matter opted to pay the back taxes and let the matter rest. They paid for it largely by borrowing money from the William Wagner estate, as managed by his widow, Louisa Binney Wagner.⁴⁶

The institute nevertheless needed more sources of income to build their external research program (which was expanding into the Florida Everglades), update the physical plant, complete needed repairs on their properties, and continue to pay faculty. In 1897, feeling that it was "about time to bring the needs of the Institute to the people," Samuel Wagner formed a committee to explore options to increase the size of their endowment. The board of trustees decided to "appeal to public-spirited citizens for the increase of the endowment of the Institute" by selling subscriptions to be priced on a sliding scale (basically asking for donations).⁴⁷ In 1902 they sought an appropriation from the [End Page 87] city of Philadelphia, and in 1904 they proposed an appropriation of $8,000 from the state of Pennsylvania. Though they did receive small appropriations from time to time, in 1907 they declined to seek further appropriations.

pedagogy for the public

Biesta also describes understandings of public pedagogy as a pedagogy "for the public," in the sense of making access to it more available.⁴⁸ This was a commonplace understanding of public pedagogy at the time, insomuch as free primary education, unmoored from the church and financed by the state, was a significant component of Progressive-Era educational reforms. The university extension movement was also primarily intended to move the privileges of higher education outside the walls of the university and into public space. This is how the Wagner Institute was commonly understood; per a local newspaper called the Mirror, "the chief aim of the institute is to give to students who are unable to pay for an academic course the means of acquiring a higher education than that afforded by the public schools."⁴⁹ This notion of pedagogy being for the public, understood as in service to the public, is perhaps not so straightforward, however. To suggest that a particular form of pedagogy would properly serve the public as a whole would problematically figure the public in the singular, thus, as discussed previously, obscuring the struggle between diverse epistemes that partially constitute the public sphere in the first place. This is also why it is problematic to conceive of public pedagogy as having particular roots in this or that political tradition.⁵⁰ If we are to understand the public in terms of the contestation of multiple counter-publics, per Fraser, it makes more sense to look at the tension within and among the trustees and faculty about which methods of pedagogy would serve the public interest, and why.⁵¹ While Wagner officials may have themselves seen the public in the singular, their disagreements in some ways mirror the reality that pedagogies for some publics are not necessarily pedagogies for other publics.

Disagreements among the faculty and trustees about whether the Wagner Institute should give final examinations, grades, and certificates is perhaps the most useful example. In July 1885 the board of trustees decided that Wagner Institute lectures would be divided into two [End Page 88] types: the first, and most common, would be "popular instruction in the practiced and natural sciences by means of lectures in the lecture room free to the public at large without class restriction," while the second would be "methods, to qualified individuals, wherever possible."⁵² This was based in principle on William Wagner's original deed of trust, which explicitly stated that priority was to be given to popular instruction, and if funds remained they could be devoted to "the establishment and maintenance of a thorough Polytechnic School, the requirement to admission to which shall be left to the discretion of the said Board of trustees."⁵³ Understanding their mission first and foremost to be "popular" education, and only specialized, occupation-specific instruction if funds warranted (which in 1885 they did not), the board decided against granting degrees, or even grades for courses completed.⁵⁴

In October 1885 Sidney Skidmore, the secretary of the board of trustees, entered a minority report into the minutes of the board arguing vehemently that the board was not adequately following the founder's vision of popular education. First, he argued that the hours of the Wagner Institute's courses should be scheduled around workers' schedules so they could both work and study. Second, he argued that the deed of trust allowed for the funding of faculty research only if the educational needs of the institute (including free education, a library and reading space, and polytechnic school) were met first. This was in reference to discussions of a research trip to Florida to be led by Wagner Institute trustee Joseph Willcox, which was approved in the amount of $300 in November 1885.⁵⁵ Third, and most importantly, Skidmore felt that providing grades and certificates of completion would serve the public interest more, not less, presumably because it would enable the upward mobility of the institute's students. The other members of the board, however, saw things differently and continued to eschew grades and certificates.⁵⁶ In 1888 they declined a request from nearby Temple College (now Temple University) to give students grades so that Temple students might attend the Wagner Institute for transferrable credit.⁵⁷

Debates about formal exams, grades, and certificates turned on the question of what constitutes popular education in the first place—the accessibility of learning and an inquisitive, freely roaming mind, or the servicing of skills and marketable credentials for upward mobility. Debates about trade-offs between vocational and liberal forms of education were pervasive at the time, and remain so today. The board of trustees' [End Page 89] calculations about the functionality of grades and certificates shift ed mostly as it aligned its purposes with the university extension movement beginning in 1890. Originating from elite universities (Cambridge, Oxford, and the University of Pennsylvania), university extension advocates embraced the use of grades and certificates; a statement authored by Samuel Wagner, University of Pennsylvania provost William Pepper, and others lauded the movement's work on grounds that "to render a community more generally and highly educated is to increase not only its happiness and its welfare, but its effective industrial state."⁵⁸ Indeed, access to college and its benefits was one of the chief draws of university extension, and the Wagner Institute received more than a few inquiries related to certifications from the public. For instance, a blacksmith by the name of Stephen Raybold wrote to the Wagner Institute: "I wish to study science and elevate myself, to become a teacher if possible."⁵⁹ A more noteworthy example is provided by a letter from one Benjamin DeCasseres:

I am but 17 years of age and circumstances will not permit me to attend a college. I am very anxious to learn and if I am not mistaken this new movement [university extension] is for the benefit of those who are in the same position I am.⁶⁰

This is in fact the same Benjamin DeCasseres who would later become a well-known journalist, poet, and critic of socialism in the early years of the twentieth century. At the time of the letter he was a young employee of the Philadelphia Press, and there is no record of whether he actually attended the Wagner Institute.

The board of trustees, as it decided to let the Philadelphia Society for the Extension of University Teaching use its facilities, resolved to give exams and grades in order to harmonize with their practices.⁶¹ This was received differently by different faculty. Paleontologist Edward Cope began giving grades by the end of the spring term of 1891.⁶² On the other hand, Cope's colleague, geologist Angelo Heilprin, was so adamantly opposed to the scheme that he refused to lecture at the Wagner Institute over the matter. Heilprin found the new teaching methods "preposterous," stating in his resignation letter that "I cannot lend my name to a scheme of education which should belittle me in the esteem of every true student."⁶³ The Committee on Instruction (composed of faculty) in 1891 penned a sharply worded letter to the board of trustees decrying [End Page 90] the new methods. They argued that the system of exams and grades was anathema to William Wagner's wishes "that the lectures are to have special adaptation to the recreation and instruction of the masses of the people, rather than the formal teaching of a classified and graded school."⁶⁴ They argued that since Wagner had deliberately allowed for a polytechnic school if funds allowed, he clearly did not consider the free lectures a school per se, with traditional school techniques (nor did the Wagner Institute have the funds, in the committee's estimation). They continued:

There are scores of schools were [sic] graded instruction is given, but there is but one Wagner Free Institute of Science in Philadelphia, whose first, and at present, main mission, in connection with its Library and Museum, is the free education of the masses of the people, of all ages and classes. The change in methods of instruction during the last year was deeply deplored by many of the old friends of this Institution who formerly attended the lectures, and a return to the old system was earnestly requested.⁶⁵

They continued by arguing that graded instruction be allowed for those who want it, but not required for those who do not.

The board of trustees did not return to the old system. Writing to the superintendent of grounds (John Rothermal) in 1895, Samuel Tobias Wagner (engineering professor and nephew of the president of the board of trustees, Samuel Wagner) explained:

When the present Faculty, as now constituted, was formed in 1892 the President outlined a course of graded work in each department in place of disjointed work, and the value of such a policy is beginning to tell when we come into competition with institutions as the Drexel or Temple College.⁶⁶

In addition to competition with Drexel and Temple, the local labor market appeared to influence the provision of certificates of completion; as actuary Thomas L. Montgomery reported, the certificates were "thoroughly appreciated by business concerns requiring mechanical help as an evidence of work accomplished" (hence Samuel Tobias Wagner argued for a standardization of their form).⁶⁷ Throughout the 1890s there continued to be lengthy discussions among the faculty on how "the popular [End Page 91] side of the lecture work" would be maintained in the spirit of the founder's wishes.⁶⁸ As late as 1899, for instance, then chairman of the faculty Richard Westbrook (Leidy died in 1891) proposed to the board of trustees a plan to keep a certain segment of their courses free of syllabi and graded exams, such that they remain "thoroughly popular and adapted to the masses of the people who have not had the advantages of a liberal education."⁶⁹ Much of this appears to be concern over sagging attendance at their lectures.⁷⁰ The provision of exams, grades, and certificates continued nevertheless.

Differing views on how to best serve the public interest among faculty and trustees were reflected in other debates as well. For instance, the board of trustees debated whether the grounds outside the Wagner Institute should be manicured to be aesthetically pleasing or whether they should be arranged to provide educational value, at greater expense. Samuel Wagner eventually talked other trustees into the latter, and by April 1895 the board of trustees resolved to install a botanical garden and arboretum.⁷¹ Samuel Tobias Wagner (an engineer) debated with actuary Thomas Lynch Montgomery whether English literature classes were in line with the founder's wishes.⁷² What they commonly agreed served the public interest, however, was the use of Wagner Institute space as a branch of the burgeoning free (public) library system of Philadelphia beginning in 1892. As Sydney Skidmore put it:

Since the Wagner Free Institute and the Free Libraries have a common purpose, viz, the furnishing of free educational facilities to the public, and each at present has what the other has not, they should be made to work conjointly and sustain each other in effect until such time as either or both can work with greater efficiency alone.⁷³

With the Free Library of Philadelphia wildly popular, and demand exceeding capacity in branches all over the city, the board of trustees agreed in 1901 to build a 2,700 ft ² extension on the west side of the institute, in order to enlarge the Wagner Institute's branch of the library.⁷⁴ That the Wagner Institute embraced the expansion of the free library system and served as the first branch of the Free Library speaks not only to what Wagner officials saw as serving the public interest but how its activities operated in the construction of publicness. As such, we turn to the idea of publicness next. [End Page 92]

pedagogy in the interest of publicness

To recall, Biesta's connection of pedagogy to the political was through an understanding of public pedagogy that serves the interest of "publicness," wherein the realization of the public is always an open and contingent process. "Enacting a concern for publicness," Biesta suggests, "is not about teaching individuals what they should be, nor about demanding from them what they learn, but is about forms of interruption that keep the opportunities for 'becoming public' open."⁷⁵ This contrasts with the liberal notion of the public oft en associated with Dewey, the one in which museum displays of nationhood and empire helped draw a thread through various bracketed publics, thus obscuring the material and class differences underpinning them.⁷⁶ What sort of public pedagogy Wagner officials espoused would be a flawed question, as the answer would inevitably be both, in different ways. My objective, rather, is to look at what sorts of activities enacted or constrained publicness.

Along these lines, we might consider how various bracketed publics interacted in the space of the Wagner Institute. The institute was certainly open to attendees of any social class or gender (and race is never mentioned in the institute's documents), but, perhaps unsurprisingly for the era, few women were employed by it. The topic of employing women was openly discussed by Wagner officials; in an 1891 letter to Thomas Lynch Montgomery, Joseph Willcox writes:

I was pleased to receive your letter a few days ago. The question of the employment of a female assistant in the W. Institute I supposed had been disposed of, as it had been referred to the Board of the Museum and the Library, who concluded that it was not desirable to make such an appointment. Efficiency is what we require there—not somebody . . . whose qualification is a willingness to serve for a very moderate salary.⁷⁷

This was for an assistant, not a faculty member. One of the first women to lecture at the Wagner Institute was Dr. Emily Hunt, who applied in April 1895 to teach any of physiology, hygiene, botany, and zoology.⁷⁸ The board approved her to give a lecture called What the Trees Teach Us on a contingent basis, and at a reduced salary. In May 1896 the board decided to add Hunt to the faculty permanently, at the same salary as men.⁷⁹ [End Page 93]

Hunt's employment was apparently not without controversy among the faculty. An 1899 entry in the faculty minutes indicates that they "respectfully decline to express an opinion as to the appointment of Dr. Hunt as professor of botany at this institution."⁸⁰ A corresponding entry in the minutes of the board of trustees states "that in as much as the faculty have acquiesced in the appointment of Dr. Hunt as professor of botany the said appointment is largely confirmed."⁸¹ The use of the term "acquiesced" implies some dispute on the matter, the precise nature of which is not captured in the records. Other women were employed as lecturers at the Wagner Institute following Hunt, but none with the public profile of the male faculty.

In addition to the important question of gendered inclusions and exclusions in the practices of public pedagogy, the aforementioned debates about grades and certificates intersect with the question of publicness, in that they reflected different assumptions about why the poor are poor. William Wagner's original mission was clear—"to improve and elevate the working classes in the city of Philadelphia."⁸² Likewise, in 1901 Wagner Institute physics professor George Stradling characterized the value of the institute's public pedagogy as

productive of a great amount of good in lift ing one here and there above the level of his intellectual surroundings. A young weaver, who comes to my lectures, is growing steadily by reason of what he gets at the Wagner Institute and the other popular educational places.⁸³

As long as social and economic class is understood as a function of "intellectual surroundings," which can be transcended through intellectual stimulation, such formalities as grades and certificates seem less vital. On the other hand, if it is seen as dependent upon the demonstration of skills and accomplishments (as Skidmore evidently saw it), then grades and certificates would be imperative. At the crux of debates about liberal and vocational education, then, are imaginations of social mobility. Stradling's statement above is what might be called, in today's terms, a culture of poverty argument, in which poverty is understood as having cultural roots rather than being a function of political economy. The value of public pedagogy as he describes it, as with Dewey, is about producing a certain type of pupil, rather than a statement about the conditions in which he or she accesses education. [End Page 94]

This also brings us to the point that science is a particular way of knowing, or episteme, through which the Wagner Institute sought to enact publicness. The dominant, popular understanding of political economy at the time was one predicated on a naturalist epistemology, in which social questions have answers rooted in nature. This is reflected in the Wagner Institute's brief employment of Walter S. Tower, one of the early twentieth-century geographers known for advocating geography as a systematic regional science.⁸⁴ Moreover, it explains their embrace of monetary theorist and greenback advocate Arthur Kitson's request to lecture at the Wagner Institute on the topic of monetary policy in 1894. In his initial contact with the institute, Kitson remarked, "As far as I know, the ideas advanced by me are new and original and whilst I do not expect the public will immediately embrace them, I certainly claim for them a scientific basis and do not hesitate to challenge criticism."⁸⁵ The board of trustees approved his request for two lectures, based on his recent book A Scientific Solution to the Money Question, in April 1895.⁸⁶ Kitson prefaces his work by questioning the neglect by classical economists (such as William Stanley Jevons) of a purely scientific approach to economics. He wanted to separate economics from politics, but not necessarily from ethics; in place of politics, he substituted a "science of ethics" deriving from social Darwinist Herbert Spencer.⁸⁷ Despite his claim to originality, such a tactic was not at all uncommon in his day, and in fact faith in naturalist epistemology was a driving force behind the disaggregation of political economy into putatively separate categories of politics and economics. Imaginations of the economic as distinct from the political, save perhaps a notion of ethics deriving from Darwinian nature, were typical of arguments that class mobility is a function of intellectual stimulus and initiative.

The Wagner Institute was also involved in other important issues of the day, too many in fact to discuss in any detail here. For example, Samuel Tobias Wagner played a key role as an engineer in efforts to improve the Philadelphia water system at the time, for the purpose of public health.⁸⁸ The institute also agreed to direct original research into the emerging issue of food preservatives, and in 1904 agreed to sponsor a guest lecturer from the Pennsylvania Society for the Prevention of Tuberculosis. In 1907, given the rapid proliferation of electrification, they moved to add electrical engineering to what had been approved in the [End Page 95] deed of trust as "civil and mining engineering" (concluding that electrical engineering would have been in line with the founder's wishes, but for the fact that William Wagner could not have known how prevalent electricity would become). The institute also devoted considerable efforts to the creation of a marine zoology lab to be located in Florida, though the lab itself never materialized. By about 1910, the Wagner Institute began to embrace the emergent Progressive-Era conservation movement as well. Entries in the minutes of the board of trustees indicate that throughout these developments, Wagner officials maintained due vigilance on whether the institute was accessible to, and serving the interests of, the public.⁸⁹

conclusion

In 1913 Temple College proposed a merger with the Wagner Institute. The board of trustees appears to have genuinely considered the possibility, but such a merger never occurred (likely as it would have conflicted with the legal requirements of the deed of trust and state charter).⁹⁰ While the period between 1885 and World War I represented the high point of the Wagner Institute's activity and global reach, it maintained regular free science courses throughout its history and continues to do so today (save for the interruption of the COVID-19 pandemic). As the nature of publicness changes (as it must), the nature of public pedagogy—as indeed a historically contingent epistemology—must change with it. Hence, to understand public pedagogy is to understand it in its historically and geographically specific manifestations. This paper has explored how public pedagogy was enacted by the Wagner Free Institute of Science in Progressive-Era Philadelphia. In doing so it considered how the Wagner Institute can be understood as both of and for the public, but more importantly how its activities can be understood as part of the constant reconstitution of publicness. The relationship between pedagogy and publicness is vital to understand insomuch as the processes of teaching and learning are integral to social and political life. That is, if the constitution of public space is constantly mediated through everyday practice, pedagogy in all its various forms, whether institutional or informal, needs to be understood as part of that mediation. [End Page 96]