Nathan C. Schaeffer

Thinking and Learning to Think came out in 1900 in Lippincott's Educational Series, edited by Martin G. Brumbaugh, arguing that schooling should train reasoning rather than fill memory. Its author, Nathan Christ Schaeffer, was a clergyman and educator born at Maxatawny in Berks County, Pennsylvania, on 3 February 1849. He graduated from Franklin and Marshall College in 1867, studied divinity at the Theological Seminary of the Reformed Church, and continued at the universities of Berlin, Tübingen and Leipzig. He taught at Franklin and Marshall from 1875, ran the Keystone State Normal School at Kutztown from 1877, and in 1893 became Pennsylvania's superintendent of public instruction, holding that office until he died at Lancaster on 15 March 1919. He edited the Pennsylvania School Journal, chaired the state board of education, sat on the Simplified Spelling Board, and served a term as president of the National Education Association.