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,
#2851
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.
Go to Profile#2858
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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August Hermann Niemeyer
1754 - 1828 (74 years)
August Hermann Niemeyer was a German Protestant theologian, teacher, a librettist, a poet, a travel writer, a Protestant church song poet and a Prussian political educator. He was professor of theology in 1780, then vice-chancellor of the University of Halle-Wittenberg.
Go to Profile#2860
Millicent Mackenzie
1863 - 1942 (79 years)
Millicent Hughes Mackenzie was a British professor of education at University College of South Wales and Monmouthshire, the first female professor in Wales and the first appointed to a fully chartered university in the United Kingdom. She wrote on the philosophy of education, founded the Cardiff Suffragette branch, became the only woman candidate in Wales in the 1918 general election, and was a key initiator of Steiner-Waldorf education in the United Kingdom.
Go to Profile#2861
Charles Eliot Norton
1827 - 1908 (81 years)
Charles Eliot Norton was an American author, social critic, and Harvard professor of art based in New England. He was a progressive social reformer and a liberal activist whom many of his contemporaries considered the most cultivated man in the United States. He was from the same notable Eliot family as the 20th-century poet T. S. Eliot, who made his career in the United Kingdom.
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Graham Wallas
1858 - 1932 (74 years)
Graham Wallas was an English socialist, social psychologist, educationalist, a leader of the Fabian Society and a co-founder of the London School of Economics. Biography Born in Monkwearmouth, Sunderland, Wallas was the older brother of Katharine, later to become a politician. He was educated at Shrewsbury School and Corpus Christi College, Oxford. It was at Oxford that Wallas abandoned his religion. He taught at Highgate School until 1885, when he resigned rather than participate in communion and was President of the Rationalist Press Association.
Go to Profile#2863
Fanny Jackson Coppin
1837 - 1913 (76 years)
Fanny Jackson Coppin was an American educator, missionary and lifelong advocate for female higher education. One of the first Black alumnae of Oberlin College, she served as principal of the Institute for Colored Youth in Philadelphia and became the first African American school superintendent in the United States.
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Kenneth Clark
1903 - 1983 (80 years)
Kenneth Mackenzie Clark, Baron Clark was a British art historian, museum director, and broadcaster. After running two important art galleries in the 1930s and 1940s, he came to wider public notice on television, presenting a succession of programmes on the arts during the 1950s and 1960s, culminating in the Civilisation series in 1969.
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Hans Sedlmayr
1896 - 1984 (88 years)
Hans Sedlmayr was an Austrian art historian. From 1931 to 1932 and from 1938 onwards, he was a member of the Nazi Party. Positions as a University Professor Sedlmayr held a chair in Art History at the University of Vienna from 1936 until 1945, then at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich from 1951 until 1964.
Go to Profile#2866
Alec Peterson
1908 - 1988 (80 years)
Alexander Duncan Campbell Peterson OBE was a British teacher and headmaster, greatly responsible for the birth of the International Baccalaureate educational system. He was instrumental in the formation of the International Baccalaureate Organisation in 1968, and served as the organisation's first director-general until 1977. He was also the first honorary member of the organisation's Council of Foundation from 1983 until his death in 1988.
Go to Profile#2867
Alice Mabel Bacon
1858 - 1918 (60 years)
Alice Mabel Bacon was an American writer, women's educator and a foreign advisor to the Japanese government in Meiji period Japan. Early life Alice Mabel Bacon was the youngest of the three daughters and two sons of Reverend Leonard Bacon, pastor of the Center Church in New Haven, Connecticut, professor at the Yale Divinity School, and his second wife, Catherine Elizabeth Terry. In 1872, when Alice was fourteen, Japanese envoy Mori Arinori selected her father's home as a residence for Japanese women being sent overseas for education by the Meiji government, as part of the Iwakura Mission. Alice received twelve-year-old Yamakawa Sutematsu as her house-guest.
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Ulisse Aldrovandi
1522 - 1605 (83 years)
Ulisse Aldrovandi was an Italian naturalist, the moving force behind Bologna's botanical garden, one of the first in Europe. Carl Linnaeus and the comte de Buffon reckoned him the father of natural history studies. He is usually referred to, especially in older scientific literature in Latin, as Aldrovandus; his name in Italian is equally given as Aldroandi.
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Edward C. Elliott
1874 - 1960 (86 years)
Edward Charles Elliott was an American educational researcher and administrator. He was the chancellor of the public university system of Montana from 1916 to 1922 and the president of Purdue University from 1922 to 1945.
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Laurence J. Peter
1919 - 1990 (71 years)
Laurence Johnston Peter was a Canadian educator and "hierarchiologist" who is best known to the general public for the formulation of the Peter principle. Biography Peter was born in Vancouver, British Columbia, the grandson of William Herbert Steves, the founder of Steveston, British Columbia. Peter began his career as a teacher in Vancouver in 1941. He received the degree of Doctor of Education from Washington State University in 1963.
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Miguel Covarrubias
1904 - 1957 (53 years)
Miguel Covarrubias, also known as José Miguel Covarrubias Duclaud was a Mexican painter, caricaturist, illustrator, ethnologist and art historian. Along with his American colleague Matthew W. Stirling, he was the co-discoverer of the Olmec civilization.
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Matthew the Apostle
10 - 74 (64 years)
Matthew the Apostle is named in the New Testament as one of the twelve apostles of Jesus. According to Christian traditions, he was also one of the four Evangelists as author of the Gospel of Matthew, and thus is also known as Matthew the Evangelist.
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Johann Joachim Winckelmann
1717 - 1768 (51 years)
Johann Joachim Winckelmann was a German art historian and archaeologist. He was a pioneering Hellenist who first articulated the differences between Greek, Greco-Roman and Roman art. "The prophet and founding hero of modern archaeology", Winckelmann was one of the founders of scientific archaeology and first applied the categories of style on a large, systematic basis to the history of art. Many consider him the father of the discipline of art history. He was one of the first to separate Greek Art into periods, and time classifications.
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Alice Freeman Palmer
1855 - 1902 (47 years)
Alice Freeman Palmer was an American educator. As Alice Freeman, she was president of Wellesley College from 1881 to 1887, when she left to marry the Harvard professor George Herbert Palmer. From 1892 to 1895 she was dean of women at the newly founded University of Chicago.
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Franz Xaver Schmid
1819 - 1883 (64 years)
Franz Xaver Schmid; name sometimes given as Franz Xaver Schmid-Schwarzenberg was an Austrian-German educator and philosopher born in Schwarzenberg am Böhmerwald. From 1840 to 1844 he studied Catholic theology in Salzburg, receiving his doctorate of philosophy several years later in Freiburg im Breisgau. Afterwards he taught classes in history and philosophy at the Lyceum in Rastatt. In 1856 he became a lecturer at the University of Erlangen, where he subsequently became an associate professor of philosophy and pedagogy. During the 1850s, Schmid left the Catholic faith and embraced Protestantism.
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Bernard Berenson
1865 - 1959 (94 years)
Bernard Berenson was a Lithuanian Jew origin an American art historian specializing in the Renaissance. His book The Drawings of the Florentine Painters was an international success. His wife Mary is thought to have had a large hand in some of the writings.
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George Trumbull Ladd
1842 - 1921 (79 years)
George Trumbull Ladd was an American philosopher, educator and psychologist. Biography Early life and ancestors Ladd was born in Painesville, Ohio, on January 19, 1842, the son of Silas Trumbull Ladd and Elizabeth Williams.
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Everett Franklin Lindquist
1901 - 1978 (77 years)
Everett Franklin Lindquist was a professor of education at the University of Iowa College of Education. He is best known as the creator of the ACT and other standardized tests. His contributions to the field of educational testing are significant and still evident today.
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Aloys Fischer
1880 - 1937 (57 years)
Aloys Fischer was a German educationalist and worked on the foundations of a modern theory of education. Life Fischer was born in Furth im Wald, Bavaria on 10 April 1880. He attended the local elementary school. In 1891 he was awarded a scholarship to the grammar school based at the Benedictine Metten Abbey. He finished there 1899 and then attended the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich studying Classical Philology, German and history. After passing the First State Exam in 1902 he studied for a doctorate under Theodor Lipps. From 1903 to 1906 Fischer tutored the children of Adolf von Hildebrand.
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Francis Landey Patton
1843 - 1932 (89 years)
Francis Landey Patton was a Bermudan-American educator, Presbyterian minister, academic administrator, and theologian, and served as the twelfth president of Princeton University. Background, 1843–1871 Patton was born in Warwick Parish, Bermuda, to a family of Scottish descent. He attended Warwick Academy. As a child, the family relocated to Canada. Patton received collegiate education at the University of Toronto, followed by a theological education at Knox College, Toronto. He graduated from Princeton Theological Seminary in 1865; was ordained to the Presbyterian ministry in June 1865; was ...
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Margaret Haley
1861 - 1939 (78 years)
Margaret A. Haley was a teacher, unionist, and Georgist land value tax activist, who was dubbed the "lady labor slugger". Haley was the first business representative of the Chicago Teachers Federation and a pioneer leader in organizing schoolteachers. During her long career with the CTF, Haley fought to correct tax inequalities, increase the salaries of teachers, and expose unfair land leasing by the Chicago Board of Education.
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Calvin M. Woodward
1837 - 1915 (78 years)
Calvin Milton Woodward was a United States educator and professor. As dean of the school of engineering at Washington University in St. Louis, he developed a manual training programme . He opened the St. Louis Manual Training School.
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Roland Penrose
1900 - 1984 (84 years)
Sir Roland Algernon Penrose was an English artist, historian and poet. He was a major promoter and collector of modern art and an associate of the surrealists in the United Kingdom. During the Second World War he put his artistic skills to practical use as a teacher of camouflage.
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Swami Vipulananda
1892 - 1947 (55 years)
Swami Vipulananda , also known as Vipulananda Adigal, was a Sri Lankan Tamil Hindu social reformer, literary critic, author, poet, teacher and ascetic from the Eastern Province of Sri Lanka. Vipulananda was an early pioneer associated with the Indian-based Ramakrishna Mission in Sri Lanka. Along with other reformers, Vipulananda was instrumental in the revival of the Hindu religion and native traditions in Sri Lanka after a long period of dormancy and decline during the previous 500 years of colonial rule by various European powers.
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Erwin Panofsky
1892 - 1968 (76 years)
Erwin Panofsky was a German-Jewish art historian, whose academic career was pursued mostly in the U.S. after the rise of the Nazi regime. His work represents a high point in the modern academic study of iconography, including his hugely influential Renaissance and Renascences in Western Art and his masterpiece Early Netherlandish Painting. Many of his books are still in print, including Studies in Iconology: Humanist Themes in the Art of the Renaissance , Meaning in the Visual Arts , and his 1943 study The Life and Art of Albrecht Dürer.
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Carl Strehl
1886 - 1971 (85 years)
Carl Strehl was a German educator born in Berlin who was influential in the teaching of the blind. History In December 1907, Strehl lost his eyesight while working in a chemical factory in New York. Later, after returning to Europe, he commenced with studies in Hamburg. In 1915, he was hired by University of Marburg ophthalmologist Alfred Bielschowsky to assist with World War I soldiers who had been blinded by shell fragments and poison gas.
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John Calvin Ferguson
1866 - 1945 (79 years)
John Calvin Ferguson was an American scholar of Chinese art, collector and procurer for American art museums, and a Chinese governmental adviser. Ferguson was the son of John Ferguson and Catherine Matilda Pomeroy . His father was a Methodist minister and his mother a schoolteacher. Ferguson attended Albert College in Ontario, Canada and then Boston University, where he graduated in 1886. He was ordained in the Methodist Episcopal Church and, in 1887, married Mary Elizabeth Wilson.
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Robert Jameson
1774 - 1854 (80 years)
Robert Jameson FRS FRSE was a Scottish naturalist and mineralogist. As Regius Professor of Natural History at the University of Edinburgh for fifty years, developing his predecessor John Walker's concepts based on mineralogy into geological theories of Neptunism which held sway into the 1830s. Jameson is notable for his advanced scholarship, and his museum collection. The minerals and fossils collection of the Museum of Edinburgh University became one of the largest in Europe during Jameson's long tenure at the university.
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Catherine Isabella Dodd
1860 - 1932 (72 years)
Catherine Isabella or Isabel Dodd was an English academic, novelist and education writer. In 1892 she became the first woman on the academic staff of Victoria University of Manchester, as a lecturer in education.
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Maria Sanford
1836 - 1920 (84 years)
Maria Louise Sanford was an American educator. She was a professor of history at Swarthmore College from 1871 to 1880 and a professor of rhetoric and elocution at the University of Minnesota from 1880 to 1909.
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Khan Bahadur Ahsanullah
1874 - 1965 (91 years)
Khan Bahadur Ahsanullah was an educator, litterateur, Islamic theologist and social reformer of pre-partition India. He was instrumental in the formation of the University of Dhaka and is the namesake of Ahsanullah University of Science and Technology.
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Richard Allen
1760 - 1831 (71 years)
Richard Allen was a minister, educator, writer, and one of the United States' most active and influential black leaders. In 1794, he founded the African Methodist Episcopal Church , the first independent Black denomination in the United States. He opened his first AME church in 1794 in Philadelphia.
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Mehmed Tahir Münif Pasha
1830 - 1910 (80 years)
Mehmed Tahir Münif Pasha was an Ottoman writer and statesman. A veteran official, he served thrice as Minister of Education and twice as ambassador to Qajar Iran . During his first ambassadorship to Iran, he was awarded the Order of the Lion and the Sun medal. He also served as a trusted advisor to Sultan Abdul Hamid II, until he fell out of grace.
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Arthur Upham Pope
1881 - 1969 (88 years)
Arthur Upham Pope was an American scholar, art historian, and architecture historian. He was an expert on historical Persian art, and he was the editor of the Survey of Persian Art . Pope was also a university professor of philosophy and aesthetics, an archaeologist, photographer, museum director, interior designer, and the co-founder of an international scholarly organization.
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Margaret Scolari Barr
1901 - 1987 (86 years)
Margaret Scolari Barr was an art historian, art critic, educator, translator, and curator. Life Margaret Scolari Barr was born in 1901 in Rome to the Italian antiquities dealer, Virgilio Scolari and his Irish wife Mary Fitzmaurice Scolari. She attended the University of Rome from 1919 to 1922 before moving to the United States in 1925. She taught Italian at Vassar College until 1929, where she also started her MA in art history in 1927. There she was introduced to the young art historian Alfred H. Barr, Jr. by her colleague Henry-Russell Hitchcock. At this time, she was offered a position at the Smith College Art Museum, but turned it down to move closer to Barr.
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David Hosack
1769 - 1835 (66 years)
David Hosack was an American physician, botanist, and educator. He remains widely known as the doctor who tended to the fatal injuries of Alexander Hamilton after his duel with Aaron Burr in July 1804, and who had similarly tended to Hamilton's son Philip after his fatal 1801 duel with George Eacker. He established several institutions including Elgin Botanic Garden and a medical school at Rutgers University.
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Ernest Fenollosa
1853 - 1908 (55 years)
Ernest Francisco Fenollosa was an American art historian of Japanese art, professor of philosophy and political economy at Tokyo Imperial University. An important educator during the modernization of Japan during the Meiji Era, Fenollosa was an enthusiastic Orientalist who did much to preserve traditional Japanese art.
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Gustav Friedrich Hartlaub
1884 - 1963 (79 years)
Gustav Friedrich Hartlaub was a German art historian, critic, and curator. He was born in Bremen into a merchant family. He studied with Franz Wickhoff in Vienna and Heinrich Wölfflin in Berlin, among others, until 1910 and then initially worked as assistant to Gustav Pauli at the Kunsthalle Bremen. Hartlaub became the director of the Kunsthalle Mannheim in 1923. He was particularly committed to the promotion of contemporary art.
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Stanislav Shatsky
1878 - 1934 (56 years)
Stanislav Teofilovich Shatsky was an important humanistic educator, writer, and educational administrator in the late Russian Empire and the early Soviet Union. Shatskii established a number of experimental and progressive educational institutions between 1905 and 1934. A member of the Russian intelligentsia, Shatskii imported many of the values of late tsarist educational experimentation into early Soviet approaches to creating a communist school and constructing 'a new Soviet person'.
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Andrew D. Holt
1904 - 1987 (83 years)
Andrew David Holt was an American educator who was the 16th president of the University of Tennessee, filling that position from 1959 to 1970. Holt was born in Milan, Tennessee in 1904, the son of two schoolteachers. He graduated from Milan High School and Emory University. After his college graduation in 1927, he became a teacher in West Tennessee, first in Milan, where he taught grades five through eight, and then in Humboldt, where he taught high school. He also worked as a coach, a school principal, and a school superintendent. After less than 10 years of teaching, he joined the faculty ...
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