Making substantial use of Marshall Hodgson’s papers at the University of Chicago, this paper contextualizes the historian's pedagogical views in the vociferous debates about American education that took place at the University of Chicago during the course of his career. Hodgson was explicitly the inheritor of hybrid beliefs about education promulgated by the ideological adversaries John Dewey and Robert Maynard Hutchins. Hutchins, the fifth president of the University of Chicago and one of the renowned administrators of his day, was a firm proponent of the classical liberal education. Hutchins piloted a “Great Books” program modeled after John Erskine’s course at Columbia and instituted a structure for the University that is largely in place today. Hutchins was staunchly opposed to the contemporary fad of utilitarian and scientific education popularised by John Dewey and William James, and the terms of debate about American education in the 1930s would come to be characterized by the sparring of Hutchins and Dewey. The acknowledged lion of the progressive educational movement of the early twentieth century, Dewey’s major influence was Charles Darwin, and his beliefs about education were built upon the idea that the scientific method was “the sole authentic mode of revelation.” Dewey was influenced by the collectivism observed during a trip to the Soviet Union in the 1920s, and criticized the classical education as “an ornament and solace; a refuge and an asylum.” It is difficult to overstate the impact of the Hutchins-Dewey debate broadly on the public consciousness of the 1930s and 1940s, and particularly at the University of Chicago, which Hutchins was treating as a large-scale laboratory at the time when Hodgson began his doctorate. Hodgson was subsequently hired as a Chicago faculty member during the so-called “Kimpton counter-revolution” that more or less forced Hutchins’s resignation in 1951. Hodgson’s archive shows that his pronounced and particular views about education were shaped by the debates of the 1940s, and that he himself was involved in enacting the evolving policies of the subsequent decades. This paper will describe the way in which Hodgson’s educational principles were expressed in word and deed as a sort of hybrid inheritance of the debate that had riven the University of Chicago particularly, and American education generally, in the first half of the twentieth century.