Haviland Hall, the new home for the School of Education, was to serve as a center for the training of high school teachers, administrators, and related school personnel, but its design envisioned broader purposes as well. College bulletins described the new building as offering “facilities for historical, theoretical and experimental research.” It included seminar rooms, not just for instruction in academic pedagogy, but for vocational education and agricultural education as well; the largest seminar room in the building was able to seat 170. The second floor held the library and administrative offices for the school, as well as the faculty room, while the third floor featured an exhibition room and lounges.
The school’s informal motto was, "Our laboratory is the school," and Oakland's University High School and University Elementary School served as practical research laboratories for students. However, according to the university bulletins, “useful as the conception may be that the School of Education should find its laboratory in the schools, certain phases of investigation demand a laboratory in the narrower sense. . . . Such a laboratory accentuates the movement toward exact quantitative thinking in education. Education courses can no longer be given in an abstract, theoretical way by the lecture method.”
To that end, the new building boasted more than half a dozen labs stocked with the latest in research and clinical equipment. Reporting on the opening of Haviland Hall, the May 1924 issue of the Western Journal of Education described the new facilities:
The laboratories of Haviland Hall would puzzle, would perhaps even antagonize, a visiting ghost from the teachers’ training school of a generation ago. One of those is a statistical room 27 feet square with cases and deep drawers around three sides for storing data relative to psychology, administration, educational tests, etc. Eight calculating machines, one electrically operated, make up its mechanical equipment, all at the service of students. Another laboratory is that for child study, two connected rooms each fourteen by fourteen feet. Here are scales, spirometers, grip and strength test apparatus, puzzle and form block tests, besides considerable equipment present thus far only in contemplation. Adjacent to this laboratory are two similar rooms for special research work.
Another large room of the ground floor has been set aside for general laboratory purposes and equipped with work tables, gas and electricity outlets, running water, fume hoods, etc. Connecting with this room and with the specially equipped lecture room is an apparatus storage room. The lecture room, apparatus room, and general laboratory form a compact inter-communicating unit for investigations in experimental psychology. (Western Journal of Education, May 1924, v.30:5, p.5.)
The lab for child study was a special room “made as attractive as possible, with pictures and furniture designed for children, with the idea of making the surroundings as little like the ordinary doctor’s office as possible,” according to the Daily Cal. Tests performed here included weight, height, nutrition tests, quickness of reactions, and intelligence. Apparatus for the various labs was designed and built in-house “in a special room furnished with wood-working and machine shop equipment. A mechanic working under the direction of the department of educational psychology will design and make apparatus which will be available for the schools of the state. Eye pacing apparatus for increasing the speed of reading, and exposure equipment for the flashing of drill cards in mathematics and other memory subjects will be designed and built in this shop.” (Daily Californian, July 3, 1923. p.3.)
“Included in the laboratory equipment,” as the university bulletins stated, “there are representative supplies of all tests, both of mentality and of subject matter, devised to date and kept up to date. Some of these will constitute museum material, as illustrative of educational history.” Further pamphlets, reports, and testing literature were to be housed in the Lange Library.
“It may be doubted if any professional school building yields more service for its size,” wrote the Western Journal, “than should come from Haviland Hall. Every square foot is accounted for and is in daily, almost hourly, use.” (Western Journal of Education, May 1924, v.30:5, p.5.)
Written by Craig Alderson