Josiah Holbrook - Inventor American education...
...adult education, science labs with equipment, natural history collections/museums, local free libraries for commers, library systemization, professionalization of teacher training, the reduction and elimination of corporal punishment, kindergarten type tools/toys and boxes, learning "by doing" (later credited to John Dewey), learning by experimentation, lecture series (to Chautauquas to TED Talks), free common schools with trained teachers, national teacher associations and conferences and standardized by-laws, experiential learning, differentiation, teacher and student collaboration, higher teacher pay, gender equality in schools... ... ...
He basically created what Horace Mann (one of his Lyceum members), Frederick Froebel (kindergarten), and Dr. Maria Montessori were later given credit for ...and Daniel Webster worked with him...
"A mere glance at this list (activities approved by the American Lyceum) is enough to show that we have in this movement a forerunner and parent of many of our most valuable institutions to-day. The United States Weather Bureau, library extension, the museum of natural history, the scientific laboratory, free textbooks, the village improvement society all are there foreshadowed; and there can be little doubt that the National Education Association and the American Association for the Advancement of Science were both more or less directly the outgrowth of the lyceum movement."
"The fact that these historians and others made such enthusiastic statements, and the disturbing fact that little was said to justify their declarations, aroused a desire to determine whether the American Lyceum deserved unlimited praise. A hasty survey of the source material indicated that the praise was justified; that the American Lyceum had been a potent force in the development of common-school education and the general diffusion of useful information."
This is the US government giving him full credit for --https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED542227.pdf
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His son Albert Holbook (and others of the family) kept the processes of advancing American education moving ahead at a faster rate. He greatly influenced Indiana's second teaching institution, the Central Normal School in Danville. Indiana where Milton Paddock of Center Grove schools went for training.
The Lyceum movement launched Abraham Lincoln: https://www.abrahamlincolnonline.org/lincoln/speeches/lyceum.htm
The Lyceum was the walking school and gymnasium on the east side of Athens where Aristotle taught his students while walking on the covered pathways in a 'temple' dedicated to Apollo the sun god and the wolf. Lyceum's deepest root meaning is wolf.
If you don't know who Thales is ...he is the most important person in all human history.
ThⱯles was a natural philosopher, scientist, moral philosopher, traveling academic, mathematician, and school designer who is the “Father of the Western World” and the first person to state the Golden Rule. For the sake of argument, ThⱯles is both the most important individual to know in order to understand the emergence of the Western World and its mindset(s) and the most neglected person just the same. ThⱯles contributed to every academic field – high and low – predicting a solar eclipse (astronomy); diverting rivers so armies could cross (engineering); discovering magnetism in lightening-struck lodestones (physics/chemistry); creating schools and mentorship (education); starting the thinking of monism/ultimate essences/first-origins, and word meanings (logos/etymology); writing the first golden rule (moral philosophy); and theorizing the in a purely scientific way (natural philosophy/science). Thales was the first of many strings of Greece's greatest thinkers, mathematicians, and scientists that laid the foundations of the Western world, the Roman Empire, Europe, and later the ‘New’ World.