The Most Influential People Across History
Find the most influential people in 24 academic disciplines and numerous subdisciplines
Find famous and important people related to your research. This is an excellent tool for research papers, topic papers, and building a bibliography. Using our influence-based algorithm, our rankings synthesize data from Wikipedia, Wikidata, Semantic Scholar, and CrossRef.
Students and researchers now have a fast and reliable way to find influential thinkers from 24 disciplines and 300 sub-disciplines (and growing). If you want to find history’s most influential philsosophers, or the world’s most influential mathematicians currently, now you can.
We also provide custom rankings of people by discipline as well as interviews with influential academics who are currently active.
To use this tool, select the discipline (and optional subdiscipline) relevant to your research, and specify influential academics by history, world, or US. Even results that are counterintuitive are often enlightening (our algorithm always picks up a signal).
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List of the most influential people in Education,
#2551
Horace Mann
1796 - 1859 (63 years)
Horace Mann was an American educational reformer, slavery abolitionist and Whig politician known for his commitment to promoting public education, he is thus also known as The Father of American Education. In 1848, after public service as Secretary of the Massachusetts State Board of Education, Mann was elected to the United States House of Representatives . From September 1852 to his death, he served as President of Antioch College.
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William Tecumseh Sherman
1820 - 1891 (71 years)
William Tecumseh Sherman was an American soldier, businessman, educator, and author. He served as a general in the Union Army during the American Civil War , achieving recognition for his command of military strategy as well as criticism for the harshness of the scorched-earth policies that he implemented against the Confederate States. British military theorist and historian B. H. Liddell Hart declared that Sherman was "the most original genius of the American Civil War" and "the first modern general".
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Joseph Priestley
1733 - 1804 (71 years)
Joseph Priestley was an English chemist, natural philosopher, separatist theologian, grammarian, multi-subject educator, and liberal political theorist. He published over 150 works, and conducted experiments in several areas of science.
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Kuniyoshi Obara
1887 - 1977 (90 years)
Kuniyoshi Obara was an influential Japanese education reformer and publisher. Obara left a strong mark in education philosophy and on the theories of liberal education, art education and vocational education. In addition to creating his own education theory, Zenjin Education, he was among the leaders of the New Education Movement in Japan and disseminated in that country the works of earlier reformers such as Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi. He was the founder of the campus Tamagawa Gakuen and for many years president of its university, Tamagawa University.
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John Amos Comenius
1592 - 1670 (78 years)
John Amos Comenius was a Moravian philosopher, pedagogue and theologian who is considered the father of modern education. He served as the last bishop of the Unity of the Brethren before becoming a religious refugee and one of the earliest champions of universal education, a concept eventually set forth in his book Didactica Magna. As an educator and theologian, he led schools and advised governments across Protestant Europe through the middle of the seventeenth century.
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Kurt Hahn
1886 - 1974 (88 years)
Kurt Matthias Robert Martin Hahn was a German educator. He was decisive in founding Stiftung Louisenlund, Schule Schloss Salem, Gordonstoun, Outward Bound, the Duke of Edinburgh's Award, and the first of the United World Colleges, Atlantic College.
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John Bosco
1815 - 1888 (73 years)
John Melchior Bosco, SDB , popularly known as Don Bosco , was an Italian Catholic priest, educator, writer, and saint of the 19th century. While working in Turin, where the population suffered many of the ill effects of industrialization and urbanization, he dedicated his life to the betterment and education of street children, juvenile delinquents, and other disadvantaged youth. He developed teaching methods based on love rather than punishment, a method that became known as the Salesian Preventive System.
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Alcuin
724 - 804 (80 years)
Alcuin of York – also called Ealhwine, Alhwin, or Alchoin – was a scholar, clergyman, poet, and teacher from York, Northumbria. He was born around 735 and became the student of Archbishop Ecgbert at York. At the invitation of Charlemagne, he became a leading scholar and teacher at the Carolingian court, where he remained a figure in the 780s and 790s. Before that, he was also a court chancellor in Aachen. "The most learned man anywhere to be found", according to Einhard's Life of Charlemagne , he is considered among the most important intellectual architects of the Carolingian Renaissance. A...
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Amos Bronson Alcott
1799 - 1888 (89 years)
Amos Bronson Alcott was an American teacher, writer, philosopher, and reformer. As an educator, Alcott pioneered new ways of interacting with young students, focusing on a conversational style, and avoided traditional punishment. He hoped to perfect the human spirit and, to that end, advocated a plant-based diet. He was also an abolitionist and an advocate for women's rights.
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Thomas Arnold
1795 - 1842 (47 years)
Thomas Arnold was an English educator and historian. He was an early supporter of the Broad Church Anglican movement. As headmaster of Rugby School from 1828 to 1841, he introduced several reforms that were widely copied by other noted public schools. His reforms redefined standards of masculinity and achievement.
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Johann Friedrich Herbart
1776 - 1841 (65 years)
Johann Friedrich Herbart was a German philosopher, psychologist and founder of pedagogy as an academic discipline. Herbart is now remembered amongst the post-Kantian philosophers mostly as making the greatest contrast to Hegel—in particular in relation to aesthetics. His educational philosophy is known as Herbartianism.
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Kanō Jigorō
1860 - 1938 (78 years)
was a Japanese educator, athlete, and the founder of Judo. Along with Ju-Jutsu, Judo was one of the first Japanese martial arts to gain widespread international recognition, and the first to become an official Olympic sport. Pedagogical innovations attributed to Kanō include the use of black and white belts, and the introduction of dan ranking to show the relative ranking among members of a martial art style. Well-known mottoes attributed to Kanō include "good use of energy" and "mutual welfare and benefit".
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Francis Wayland Parker
1837 - 1902 (65 years)
Francis Wayland Parker was a pioneer of the progressive school movement in the United States. He believed that education should include the complete development of an individual — mental, physical, and moral. John Dewey called him the "father of progressive education." He worked to create curriculum that centered on the whole child and a strong language background. He was against standardization, isolated drill and rote learning. He helped to show that education was not just about cramming information into students' minds, but about teaching students to think for themselves and become indepen...
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Adolph Diesterweg
1790 - 1866 (76 years)
Friedrich Adolph Wilhelm Diesterweg was a German educator, thinker, and progressive liberal politician, who campaigned for the secularization of schools. He is said to be precursory to the reform of pedagogy. Diesterweg is considered as "a teacher of teachers".
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Quintilian
35 - 96 (61 years)
Marcus Fabius Quintilianus was a Roman educator and rhetorician born in Hispania, widely referred to in medieval schools of rhetoric and in Renaissance writing. In English translation, he is usually referred to as Quintilian , although the alternate spellings of Quintillian and Quinctilian are occasionally seen, the latter in older texts.
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Marshall McLuhan
1911 - 1980 (69 years)
Herbert Marshall McLuhan was a Canadian philosopher whose work is among the cornerstones of the study of media theory. He studied at the University of Manitoba and the University of Cambridge. He began his teaching career as a professor of English at several universities in the United States and Canada before moving to the University of Toronto in 1946, where he remained for the rest of his life. He is known as the "father of media studies".
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Dorothy L. Sayers
1893 - 1957 (64 years)
Dorothy Leigh Sayers was an English crime novelist, playwright, translator and critic. Born in Oxford, Sayers was brought up in rural East Anglia and educated at Godolphin School in Salisbury and Somerville College, Oxford, graduating with first class honours in medieval French. She worked as an advertising copywriter between 1922 and 1929 before success as an author brought her financial independence. Her first novel Whose Body? was published in 1923. Between then and 1939 she wrote ten more novels featuring the upper-class amateur sleuth Lord Peter Wimsey. In 1930, in Strong Poison, she introduced a leading female character, Harriet Vane, the object of Wimsey's love.
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N. F. S. Grundtvig
1783 - 1872 (89 years)
Nikolaj Frederik Severin Grundtvig , most often referred to as N. F. S. Grundtvig, was a Danish pastor, author, poet, philosopher, historian, teacher and politician. He was one of the most influential people in Danish history, as his philosophy gave rise to a new form of nationalism in the last half of the 19th century. It was steeped in the national literature and supported by deep spirituality.
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William Pinar
1900 - Present (126 years)
William Frederick Pinar is an American pedagogue. Known for his work in the area of curriculum theory, Pinar is strongly associated with the reconceptualist movement in curriculum theory since the early 1970s. In the early 1970s, along with Madeleine Grumet, Pinar introduced the notion of currere, shifting in a radical manner the notion of curriculum as a noun to curriculum as a verb. Apart from his fundamental contributions to theory, Pinar is notable for establishing the Journal of Curriculum Theorizing, founding the Bergamo Conference on Curriculum Theory and Classroom Practice, and foundi...
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John Holt
1923 - 1985 (62 years)
John Caldwell Holt was an American author and educator, a proponent of homeschooling , and a pioneer in youth rights theory. After a six-year stint teaching elementary school in the 1950s, Holt wrote the book How Children Fail , which cataloged the problems he saw with the American school system. He followed it up with How Children Learn . Both books were popular, and they started Holt's career as a consultant to American schools. By the 1970s he decided he would try reforming the school system and began to advocate homeschooling and, later, the form of homeschooling known as unschooling. He ...
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Mary McLeod Bethune
1875 - 1955 (80 years)
Mary Jane McLeod Bethune was an American educator, philanthropist, humanitarian, womanist, and civil rights activist. Bethune founded the National Council of Negro Women in 1935, established the organization's flagship journal Aframerican Women's Journal, and presided as president or leader for a myriad of African American women's organizations including the National Association for Colored Women and the National Youth Administration's Negro Division.
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Nikolaus Pevsner
1902 - 1983 (81 years)
Sir Nikolaus Bernhard Leon Pevsner was a German-British art historian and architectural historian best known for his monumental 46-volume series of county-by-county guides, The Buildings of England .
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Édouard Claparède
1873 - 1940 (67 years)
Édouard Claparède was a Swiss neurologist, child psychologist, and educator. Career Claparède studied science and medicine, receiving in 1897 an MD from the University of Geneva, and working 1897–98 at La Salpêtrière hospital in Paris. In 1901 he founded the Archives de psychologie with his cousin, Théodore Flournoy, which he edited until his death. He was based from 1904 onward at the University of Geneva, where he became director of the experimental psychology lab.
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Joseph Jacotot
1770 - 1840 (70 years)
Joseph Jacotot was a French teacher and educational philosopher, creator of the method of "intellectual emancipation." Life Jacotot was born at Dijon on 4 March 1770. He was educated at the university of Dijon, where in his nineteenth year he was made a professor of Latin, after which he studied law, became a lawyer, and at the same time devoted a large amount of his attention to mathematics.
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Louis Agassiz
1807 - 1873 (66 years)
Jean Louis Rodolphe Agassiz FRS FRSE was a Swiss-born American biologist and geologist who is recognized as a scholar of Earth's natural history. Spending his early life in Switzerland, he received a PhD at Erlangen and a medical degree in Munich. After studying with Georges Cuvier and Alexander von Humboldt in Paris, Agassiz was appointed professor of natural history at the University of Neuchâtel. He emigrated to the United States in 1847 after visiting Harvard University. He went on to become professor of zoology and geology at Harvard, to head its Lawrence Scientific School, and to foun...
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Wilhelm Rein
1847 - 1929 (82 years)
Wilhelm Rein was a German educational theorist. He was a late representative of the Herbartian school. Biography After graduating from the Eisenach gymnasium in 1866, Rein studied theology in Jena, also listening to lectures on pedagogy by Karl Volkmar Stoy who he followed a year later to Heidelberg. He returned to Jena in 1868 and passed his theological candidacy exam in Weimar in 1869. At this point, he turned his studies exclusively to pedagogy, going on to study under Tuiskon Ziller at Leipzig. In 1871 he became a teacher at Friedrich Wilhelm Dörpfeld's school in Barmen, in 1872 a teacher in Weimar, and moved to Eisenach in 1876.
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Raja Ram Mohan Roy
1772 - 1833 (61 years)
Raja Ram Mohan Roy was an Indian reformer who was one of the founders of the Brahmo Sabha in 1828, the precursor of the Brahmo Samaj, a social-religious reform movement in the Indian subcontinent. He was given the title of Raja by Akbar II, the Mughal emperor. His influence was apparent in the fields of politics, public administration, education and religion. He was known for his efforts to abolish the practices of sati and child marriage. Roy is considered to be the "Father of Indian Renaissance" by many historians.
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Ma Xiangbo
1840 - 1939 (99 years)
Ma Xiangbo was a Chinese Jesuit priest, scholar and educator in late-Qing and early-Republican China. He was one of the founders of Aurora University, Fu Jen Catholic University and Fudan University.
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Mary Lyon
1797 - 1849 (52 years)
Mary Mason Lyon was an American pioneer in women's education. She established the Wheaton Female Seminary in Norton, Massachusetts, in 1834. She then established Mount Holyoke Female Seminary in South Hadley, Massachusetts, in 1837 and served as its first president for 12 years. Lyon's vision fused intellectual challenge and moral purpose. She valued socioeconomic diversity and endeavored to make the seminary affordable for students of modest means.
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Mary Church Terrell
1863 - 1954 (91 years)
Mary Church Terrell was an American civil rights activist, journalist, teacher and one of the first African-American women to earn a college degree. She taught in the Latin Department at the M Street School —the first African American public high school in the nation—in Washington, DC. In 1895, she was the first African-American woman in the United States to be appointed to the school board of a major city, serving in the District of Columbia until 1906. Terrell was a charter member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the Colored Women's League of Washington .
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Roger Fry
1866 - 1934 (68 years)
Roger Eliot Fry was an English painter and critic, and a member of the Bloomsbury Group. Establishing his reputation as a scholar of the Old Masters, he became an advocate of more recent developments in French painting, to which he gave the name Post-Impressionism. He was the first figure to raise public awareness of modern art in Britain, and emphasised the formal properties of paintings over the "associated ideas" conjured in the viewer by their representational content. He was described by the art historian Kenneth Clark as "incomparably the greatest influence on taste since Ruskin ... In so far as taste can be changed by one man, it was changed by Roger Fry".
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Caleb Gattegno
1911 - 1988 (77 years)
Caleb Gattegno was an Egyptian educator, psychologist, and mathematician. He is considered one of the most influential and prolific mathematics educatorss of the twentieth century. He is best known for introducing new approaches to teaching and learning mathematics , foreign languages and reading . Gattegno also developed pedagogical materials for each of these approaches, and was the author of more than 120 books and hundreds of articles largely on the topics of education and human development.
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Amédée Jacques
1813 - 1865 (52 years)
Amédée Jacques , often known as Amadeo, was a French-Argentine pedagogue and philosopher and one of the most prestigious educators of his time. Biography Jacques was the son of Marie Gérard and Nicolas Jacques, a Parisian painter of miniatures. He studied at the Lycée Condorcet and the École Normale Supérieure. He received his doctorate in letters from the Sorbonne at the age of twenty-four, and soon afterwards received a degree in natural sciences. He worked as a docent at the École Normale Supérieure and the Lycée Louis-le-Grand.
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Anna J. Cooper
1858 - 1964 (106 years)
Anna Julia Haywood Cooper was an American author, educator, sociologist, speaker, Black liberation activist, and one of the most prominent African-American scholars in United States history. Born into slavery in 1858, Cooper went on to receive a world-class education and claim power and prestige in academic and social circles. In 1924, she received her PhD from the Sorbonne, University of Paris. Cooper became the fourth African-American woman to earn a doctoral degree. She was also a prominent member of Washington, D.C.'s African-American community and a member of Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority.
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Maria Grzegorzewska
1888 - 1967 (79 years)
Maria Grzegorzewska was a Polish educator who brought the special education movement to Poland. Born to a family from the Żmudź region, she was strongly influenced by her parents' beliefs in humanitarianism. After attending clandestine schools to earn her basic education from Polish rather than Russian educators, she obtained her teaching credentials in Lithuania. She continued her education at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków and in 1913 joined her countrywoman, Józefa Joteyko in Brussels to study at the International Paedological Faculty. When her studies in Belgium were interrupted by...
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Janusz Korczak
1878 - 1942 (64 years)
Janusz Korczak, the pen name of Henryk Goldszmit , was a Polish Jewish pediatrician, educator, children's author and pedagogue known as Pan Doktor or Stary Doktor . He was an early children's rights advocate, in 1919 drafting a childrens constitution.
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Joseph Banks
1743 - 1820 (77 years)
Joseph Banks, 1st Baronet, was an English naturalist, botanist, and patron of the natural sciences. Banks made his name on the 1766 natural-history expedition to Newfoundland and Labrador. He took part in Captain James Cook's first great voyage , visiting Brazil, Tahiti, and after 6 months in New Zealand, Australia, returning to immediate fame. He held the position of president of the Royal Society for over 41 years. He advised King George III on the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, and by sending botanists around the world to collect plants, he made Kew the world's leading botanical garden. He i...
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Manuel Bartolomé Cossío
1857 - 1935 (78 years)
Manuel Bartolomé Cossío was a Spanish art historian and Krausist teacher. Born in Haro, La Rioja, he entered the Institución Libre de Enseñanza, where he was the godson and favourite pupil of Francisco Giner de los Ríos as well as his inseparable companion and successor. He also wrote a monumental study of El Greco. He was director of the Museo Pedagógico Nacional and president of the Misiones Pedagógicas, becoming "the most eminent figure in Spanish pedagogy in the period 1882 to 1935", two years after his death. He died at Collado Mediano in Madrid.
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Marion McCarrell Scott
1843 - 1922 (79 years)
Marion McCarrell Scott was an American educator and government advisor in Meiji period Japan. Biography Scott was born in Barren County, Kentucky, and graduated from the University of Virginia during the American Civil War. After the war, he moved to California, where he worked as a teacher, and where he met Mori Arinori, an envoy from the Meiji government of Japan, who offered him a post in Japan as a foreign advisor. Scott arrived in Tokyo in 1871, and taught English language at the Daigaku Nankō, the predecessor to Tokyo Imperial University, and later at Tokyo University of Education, wher...
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Édouard Séguin
1812 - 1880 (68 years)
Édouard Séguin was a French physician and educationist born in Clamecy, Nièvre. He is remembered for his work with children having cognitive impairments in France and the United States. Background and career in France He studied at the Collège d’Auxerre and the Lycée Saint-Louis in Paris, and from 1837 studied and worked under Jean Marc Gaspard Itard, who was an educator of deaf-mute individuals, that included the celebrated case of Victor of Aveyron, also known as "The Wild Child". It was Itard who persuaded Séguin to dedicate himself to study the causes, as well as the training of individuals with intellectual disabilities.
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John Celivergos Zachos
1820 - 1898 (78 years)
John Celivergos Zachos was a Greek-American physician, literary scholar, elocutionist, author, lecturer, inventor, and educational pioneer. He was an early proponent of equal education rights for African Americans and women. During the American Civil War, he was the superintendent at Port Royal and a main figure in the Port Royal Experiment. In his book, Phonic Primer and Reader he developed a special system to educate freed slaves. He advocated and expanded the oratory systems of François Delsarte and James Rush.
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Charles De Garmo
1849 - 1934 (85 years)
Charles De Garmo was an American educator, education theorist and college president. Biography DeGarmo was born in Mukwonago, Wisconsin on January 7, 1849. His parents moved to Sterling, Illinois in 1852 and later to Lebanon, Illinois. In 1865, at the age of sixteen, DeGarmo enlisted in the Union Army. Upon his return from service, DeGarmo enrolled at Illinois State Normal University in 1870, where he would graduate in 1873. Following his graduation in 1873, DeGarmo moved to Naples, Illinois, where he was principal of an Illinois graded school. In 1876, DeGarmo returned to Normal, Illinois, ...
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Christa McAuliffe
1948 - 1986 (38 years)
Sharon Christa McAuliffe was an American teacher and astronaut from Concord, New Hampshire who was killed on the Space Shuttle Challenger on mission STS-51-L, where she was serving as a payload specialist.
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Nadezhda Krupskaya
1869 - 1939 (70 years)
Nadezhda Konstantinovna Krupskaya was a Russian revolutionary and the wife of Vladimir Lenin. Krupskaya was born in Saint Petersburg to an aristocratic family that had descended into poverty, and she developed strong views about improving the lives of the poor. She embraced Marxism and met Lenin at a Marxist discussion group in 1894. Both were arrested in 1896 for revolutionary activities and after Lenin was exiled to Siberia, Krupskaya was allowed to join him in 1898 on the condition that they marry. The two settled in Munich and then London after their exile, before briefly returning to Rus...
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Anna Leonowens
1831 - 1915 (84 years)
Anna Harriette Leonowens was an Anglo-Indian or Indian-born British travel writer, educator, and social activist. She became well known with the publication of her memoirs, beginning with The English Governess at the Siamese Court , which chronicled her experiences in Siam , as teacher to the children of the Siamese King Mongkut. Leonowens's own account was fictionalised in Margaret Landon's best-selling novel Anna and the King of Siam , as well as adaptations for other media such as Rodgers and Hammerstein's 1951 musical The King and I.
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Harold R. W. Benjamin
1893 - 1969 (76 years)
Harold Raymond Wayne Benjamin was an American educator and writer; known for his publications The Saber-Tooth Curriculum and Higher Education in the American Republics . Biography Early life and education Harold Raymond Wayne Benjamin was born March 27, 1893, in Gilmanton, Wisconsin, to Harold and Harriet Benjamin. He moved to Oregon with his family in 1904, and graduated from Tualatin Academy in 1910. Benjamin earned degrees from both the Oregon Normal School and the University of Oregon. He later received a Ph.D. from the Stanford Graduate School of Education in 1927 .
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Tao Xingzhi
1891 - 1946 (55 years)
Tao Xingzhi , was a renowned Chinese educator and reformer in the Republic of China mainland era. He studied at Teachers College, Columbia University, and returned to China to champion progressive education. His career in China as a liberal educator was not derivative of John Dewey, as some have alleged, but creative and adaptive. He returned to China at a time when the American influence was zesty and self-confident, and his very name at that time meant "knowledge-action," reflecting the catch-phrase of the Neo-Confucian philosopher Wang Yangming which implied that once knowledge had been o...
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Egerton Ryerson
1803 - 1882 (79 years)
Adolphus Egerton Ryerson was a Canadian educator, author, editor, and Methodist minister who was a prominent contributor to the design of the Canadian public school system. Ryerson is considered to be the founder of the Ontario public school system.
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William Holmes McGuffey
1800 - 1873 (73 years)
William Holmes McGuffey was an American college professor and president who is best known for writing the McGuffey Readers, the first widely used series of elementary school-level textbooks. More than 120 million copies of McGuffey Readers were sold between 1836 and 1960, placing its sales in a category with the Bible and Webster's Dictionary.
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Fatima Sheikh
1831 - 1900 (69 years)
Fatima Sheikh was an Indian educator and social reformer, who was a colleague of the social reformers Jyotirao Phule and Savitribai Phule She is widely considered to be India’s first Muslim woman teacher.
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