E. A. Cross

From Philosopedia

E. A. Cross (20th Century)

Little has been written about E. Allen Cross, whose anthologies favored not only literature but also the humanities, music, art, the liberal arts. They became textbooks for humanities classes.

One of the early teachers known as progressives, Warren Allen Smith, has written about being a high school teacher in 1950:

Literature textbooks sold to American schools were often aimed at 11th Grade American Literature and 12th Grade English Literature classes. Juniors in high schools then read snippets of works by American authors, starting with John Smith and the Virginia Colony; poems by Anne Bradstreet; religious essays by Jonathan Edwards and Cotton Mather; Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Paine and the revolutionary period; on to Washington Irving, William Cullen Bryant, James Fennimore Cooper, and Edgar Allan Poe; on to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.; the transcendentalists such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau; abolitionists such as John Greenleaf Whittier; Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Samuel Clemens, Henry James, Henry Adams, Stephen Crane; and up to the 20th century's authors such as Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, J. D. Salinger, and as many other authors as could fit into the several hundred pages. Tests insured that students had a cursory knowledge of American literature, and rote learning helped make it all possible.

Seniors in high schools had more extensive periods to study, starting with snippets of Beowulf and on to Chaucer, Shakespeare and the Elizabethans, Jacobeans, Cromwellians, Restoration literature, Augustan, Romanticism, Victorianism, and on to the contemporaries.

During the late 19th century and up to the mid-1950s, "progressive education" was a movement that took form in Europe and North America and was a reaction against the allegedly rigid formalism of traditional education. As a result, textbooks changed in their focus but tried to increase their readability by adding color and pictures.

E. A. Cross and his son, Neal, were among the first to make textbooks that focused not just on American and English but also on the literature of other countries.

Progressive teachers of high school English aimed to avoid rote learning and, instead, tried to teach individual students, often in personalized small groups, rather than focusing on teaching an entire class and expecting all to cover the same material. Writing was emphasized as much as if not slightly more than reading. "Learning by doing" included taking field trips. Paperback books were favored over anthologies. Audio-visual devices became integral parts of classwork.

Critics of progressive education are numerous, and one of the best to write on the subject is William M. Evers, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution.

Contents 1 World Literature and Other Books by E. A. Cross 2 Books by Neal M. Cross 3 A Teacher Writes to the Crosses 4 Further Correspondence

World Literature and Other Books by E. A. Cross

World Literature American Book Co., 1935

Literature: A Series of Anthologies (with Neal M. Cross and George M. Richards, Heritage of World Literature). Macmillan, 1946

Literature: A Series of Anthologies Types of Literature (with Neal M. Cross), Macmillan, 1954.

Books by Neal M. Cross

Search for Personal Freedom, by Neal M. Cross, Robert C. Lamm, and Rudy H. Turk. McGraw Hill, 1984

Humanities in Western Culture, by Neal M. Cross, Robert C. Lamm, and Dale Davis. William C. Brown, 1989

Humanities in Western Culture, by Neal M. Cross and Robert C. Lamm. 1995

A Teacher Writes to the Crosses

Warren Allen Smith, at Bentley School, a private progressive school, 48 West 86th Street, New York City, from 1950 to 1954, taught humanities in 10th grade, using the Crosses' textbook, American literature in 11th grade, and English literature in 12th grade.

9 May 1954

Dear Messieurs Cross:

For three years I have used your world literature text for my 10th graders at he Bentley School, one of the earliest of the progressive schools. And for three years I have had such wonderful results that I feel impelled to write to you to let you know.

In many ways I should prefer teaching world literature in the 12th grade rather than the 10th. However, there is some argument for starting in the 10th grade with the Greeks and Romans and then working onward. At any rate, although my field of specialty is American literature, I find that my favorite class is the one in world literature. And this year's seniors tell me often that they felt the "high point" in English was 10th grade world literature. To you, I hasten to add, goes much of the credit, for the textbook is ideal for teaching about the basis of our Western Civilization.

I'm not exaggerating when I say that one of the students' complaints is that their parents "hog" the book for themselves. In at least one instance, a parent has bought his own copy.

There are really two reasons for my writing. One is to commend you on the text. The other is not related to this at all. My main pastime is being Book Review Editor of The Humanist, a bi-monthly magazine devoted to the study of the philosophy of naturalistic humanism. Perhaps you are acquainted with the movement. It has been described by Corliss Lamont in his Humanism as a Philosophy. Philosophic forerunners include Protagoras, Lucretius, Aristotle, Spinoza, and on down to John Dewey, William Heard Kilpatrick, Morris Cohen, Edman, Randall, Schneider, etc. Literary men who today are a part of the movement include Van Wyck Brooks, Witter Bynner, LeGarde S. Doughty, Dorothy Canfield Fisher, James T. Farrell, Henry Hazlitt, Llewellyn Jones, Joseph Wood Krutch, Thomas Mann, Gilbert Murray, and Jules Romains. Others are Julian Huxley, Max Otto, Sinclair Lewis, and many Unitarian and Universalist ministers.

The second reason for writing, then, is to obtain your reaction to philosophic naturalism (or to naturalistic humanism, if you are acquainted with the movement). In 1951 I sent out 100 similar letters to the "big names" names in American literature to obtain their reaction. Conrad Aiken and Henry Seidel Canby replied that they considered themselves naturalistic humanists, as did Santayana and Schweitzer. Obviously Norman Foerster, Reinhold Niebuhr, and a great many others replied in the negative.

But because of the wording in The Heritage of World Literature's introduction, you apparently know something of the movement when you mention Somerset Maugham (a member of the British equivalent of the American Humanist Association - the Rationalists) and the three big questions Philip Carey tries to answer in order to understand the world about him. A.H.A. member Harry Overstreet has been doing a good job, I feel, in answering the third question. A.H.A. member Julian Huxley has tried to answer the second; and Dewey has given the relativist's answer to the first.

Would you take a moment off and let me know, for I am curious, what your own view is as to "What is man's relation to God (or to the Universe?" Who's Who lists you as being a Congregationalist, but are you a trinitarian lIke most in the East or are you a unitarian in your outlook? If a unitarian, are you a theist or a naturalistic humanist . . . or a deist like my ancestor Ethan Allen, from whom I got my middle name also. /s/ Warren Allen Smith

Smith later found he is not related to Ethan Allen

Further Correspondence