Maeser, Karl Gottfried b. January 16, l828;Vorbruecke, Saxony d. February 15, 1901; Salt Lake City, Utah
Eminent German educator in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (Mormons) and educational founder and principal of Brigham Young University in Utah. Maeser’s formal education began at a respected elementary school in Meissen and continued between 1838 and 1846 at the famed Kreuz Gymnasium in Dresden.
Having learned to read—and to love reading—when very young, he became an eager and gifted student. The budding polymath was interested in virtually everything taught at the school. Following graduation, he became a teacher and gained admission to the nearby Friedrichstaedter Paedagogische Hochschule (Friedrich- staedter Teacher’s College) in Dresden, from which he graduated in 1848.As a result of his formal education, Maeser became a devoted disciple of the famed German educational reformers Wilhelm von Humboldt, Friedrich Froebel, Jean Herbart, and especially the Swiss Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi. In these years, he developed more fully his own philosophy of a comprehensive integrated education of the “Head, the Heart and the Hand.” He was convinced that the best education was one that educated all parts of the human being and that would be taught best by example and kindness, but also according to high academic standards. For him, echoing Humboldt, no education was as valuable as one that encompassed the development of the whole human personality, one preparing each student to become a free being and citizen.
Following graduation from the Paeda- gogische Hochschule, he found his first employment as a tutor of children of German families living in the Sudetenland part of the Austrian Empire, just across the border from Saxony. At the time, he also counted himself a “liberal” and participated in the 1849 revolution in Dresden. Throughout Maeser’s teaching life, students soon came to understand how deeply he cherished freedom of all kinds, but especially political liberty.
Soon after 1850 he found his first position as a teacher at the Budich Institute, a school for Evangelical Protestant girls. One result of this experience was a lifelong conviction of the importance of education for young women, a point of view not always shared either in Saxony or Utah. At the same time, he may have also been aware of the work of a contemporary, Henriette Szold, the leader of the nascent women’s rights movement in Saxony and Germany, also a Meissen native five years his senior.As a teacher at the Budich Institute, he became friends with a colleague, Eduard Schoenfeld. These two subsequently married the daughters of the school’s principal, Benjamin Mieth. Their lives would thereafter become inextricably linked together.
Like many German intellectuals of his day, Maeser had become agnostic about Christianity and the doctrines of the Protestant state church. With his lifelong keen sense of integrity, he questioned what he could honestly teach his students as religious truth in that part of their curriculum.
He first learned about Mormonism in the early 1850s from a tract written by a German journalist and later Bismarck biographer, Moritz Julius Busch, who had traveled to St. Louis and had there heard accounts about the Mormon trek west and of their unique settlements and achievements in the Rocky Mountain West. Maeser’s curiosity was piqued; he wanted to learn more about these Mormons. Following letters to European church headquarters in London, he was sent a missionary, William Budge, who taught him, his wife, and the Schoenfelds the doctrines of Mormonism, which they accepted after a series of transforming, life-defining spiritual experiences that would remain with them, and especially Karl, throughout their lives. However, because of religious persecution, following their clandestine baptism in the Elbe River, Maeser and Schoenfeld were forced to give up their teaching careers in their homeland and join the growing number of European Mormon converts who even then were emigrating to their new Zion in the American West.
Because of the lack of funds, it took the Maesers several years to reach Utah. Along the way, Karl served for a time as a missionary in the United Kingdom, where he improved his English and his understanding of Mormonism. In July 1857, having buried a young son at sea, the family finally arrived in the United States and settled temporarily in Philadelphia, then in Virginia, where, on discovery of his pedagogical skills, Maeser was engaged to teach a number of children in Richmond, including those of U.S. president John Tyler.
When the Maesers left for Utah in June 1860, they were not typical Mormon pioneers. Karl had few skills needed by westering frontiersmen and especially found it difficult driving his oxen and wagon. Equally daunting was finding a profitable place for his educational abilities in a society striving to establish itself with the basics of food, shelter, and clothing in the forbidding western desert. Church leaders and members wanted his knowledge, but found it difficult to pay for it. For most of the rest of his life, Maeser struggled as a teacher in pioneer Utah just to provide adequately for his growing family, let alone give them some of the cultural amenities he and his wife treasured from their German upbringing. Still, from the beginning Mormon leaders, especially Brigham Young, promoted education for Mormon youth and found in Maeser a unique and quintessential teacher.
The family lived for its first sixteen years in Salt Lake City, where Maeser taught in a number of local private, Mormon Church—related schools, including one he started in his own neighborhood. Parents usually paid him in produce. For part of the time, he taught languages at the University of Deseret, established in 1850, later the University of Utah, and even became engaged to teach some of Brigham Young’s own numerous children.
As an expression of his devotion to his church and leaving his family behind for two years, in 1869 he answered a call from church leaders to serve a proselytizing mission in Switzerland and Germany, where he subsequently became the mission president.
Here, he founded a journal, Der Stern (The Star), for German-speaking Latter-Day Saints that would continue until 1974. Under his guidance, the journal was a virtual one-man operation. For it, he wrote editorials, composed poetry and hymns, translated doctrinal articles from English, and wrote original articles of his own, all the while supervising the work of the rest of the missionaries working in those countries. Der Stern educated, informed, and inspired new German-speak-ing converts not yet able to emigrate to America. This was also a time of enormous spiritual and intellectual growth for Maeser. While he was gone, his wife and son Reinhard cared for the needs of the family left behind.
Maeser’s major life work began in 1876 when he was called by Mormon Church president Brigham Young to become principal of the Brigham Young Academy, which had been established in Provo the year before. From 1876 until 1891, Maeser became the mind, heart, and soul of this combination grade school, high school, and college. Under his guidance, the academy grew, attracting some of the best and most motivated students in Utah and surrounding states. In this capacity Maeser essentially and personally educated and trained many of those educators who would provide the educational leadership for Latter- Day Saints for generations to come.
Maeser was held in such high esteem by Mormon Church leaders that in 1892 he was called to serve as commissioner of education for the church, a position of responsibility for the educational interests of the whole church, including continuing to have some influence over Brigham Young Academy, soon to become Brigham Young University. During the 1890s he also served as a leader of the growing churchwide Mormon Sunday school organization, which was dedicated to improving the teaching of church doctrines to every member and helping the church develop better teachers and better teaching methods. In 1894, encouraged by Democratic Party friends, he ran on the Democratic Party ticket for state superintendent of public instruction, but was defeated.
One year later, in 1895, he was chosen a member of the committee to write the constitution for the state of Utah that led to its admission to the Union in 1896. Elements of his educational philosophy became part of that document. Encouraged by his students, Maeser also published the only book he ever wrote, the semiautobiographical School and Fireside (1898), wherein he laid out the origins and principles of his educational background and philosophy.Douglas F. Tobler
See also Humboldt, Wilhelm von References and Further Reading Maeser, Reinhard. Karl G. Maeser: A Biography. Provo, UT: Brigham Young University, 1928.
Sutherland, George. A Message to the 1941 Graduating Class of Brigham Young University. Provo, UT: Brigham Young University, 1941.
Tobler, Douglas F “Karl G. Maeser’s German Background: The Making of Zion’s Teacher.” Zeitschrif fuer Religions-und Geistesgeschichte 24 (1977): 325—344.
Wilkinson, Ernest L., et. al., eds. Brigham Young University: The First Hundred Years. Vol. 1. Provo, UT: Brigham Young University, 1975