At the National League for Nursing (NLN) Education Summit 2018, nurse educators celebrated 125 years of the remarkable history of the NLN and the promotion of excellence in nursing education through faculty development, testing and assessment, nursing research grants, public policy initiatives, and more. The Summit, held in Chicago, highlighted the NLN's inaugural days in that city at the 1893 World's Fair, then the early days and maturity in New York City, and the present, with our move to Washington, DC, in 2013. The program emphasized the power of nursing education through the years as well as the role of leader pathfinders.
Nurses training began in America in 1873 when three Nightingale-influenced schools opened at Bellevue Training School for Nurses in New York, the Connecticut Training School for Nurses at New Haven, and the Boston Training School of Nurses at Massachusetts General Hospital. For the next two decades, there was tremendous growth in nursing education. But training schools, opened without consideration for standards and curricula, lacked rigor and criteria. The stage was set for the development of organized nursing. At the 1893 World's Fair, Isabel Hampton, superintendent at the Johns Hopkins Training School in Baltimore, chaired a group of superintendents who set about laying the foundation for the first association of nurses in the United States, the American Society of Superintendents of Training Schools of Nursing. It would become the National League of Nursing Education in 1912 and the National League for Nursing in 1952.
From its beginning in 1893 and through its early days, the organization advocated for reform in basic pupil training. Members worked toward standardizing nursing education, building curricula based on theory, and advancing teacher preparation. A quest for quality laid the foundation to reform nursing education and make significant contributions to American public health and well-being. This was the beginning of the League's long and respected history of providing accreditation as a reliable indication of the value and quality of nursing education programs.
During the early years, leaders of the Society and the National League of Nursing Education fully recognized the need to champion differences of ideas, values, and perspectives in the pursuit of reform. A culture of inclusiveness across disciplines and among training schools, from a variety of locations and cultures, was celebrated. These ideas challenged long-held beliefs and required openness to diverse thinking in the context of maintaining and building an inclusive approach to a transformative future. This belief is consistent with the NLN's current core value of diversity, which affirms that, by acknowledging the legitimacy of us all, we move beyond tolerance to celebrating the richness that differences bring forth.
Throughout the long history of the NLN, the influence of nurse leaders in accomplishing reform cannot be minimized. These leaders developed a shared future vision for the profession and clearly articulated strategies for advancing nursing's priorities. In the spirit of the early NLN leaders, the opening session of the Summit began with a presentation by the NLN Board of Governors of the NLN's powerful history. The NLN presented all attendees at the Summit with a book to commemorate the NLN's legacy of leadership: Inspiring Words: Selected NLN Addresses, 1893 to 2018. The speeches presented in the book speak to the creativity, far-sightedness, and extraordinary vision of the leaders who shaped the NLN and cocreated the League's current standing as one of the most respected nursing organizations in the world. (A video of the opening session with text and a pdf of the commemorative book, Inspiring Words, are online at http://www.nln.org/about/history-of-nln).
The history of the NLN, as presented at Summit 2018, is augmented by an archival repository for scholarly historical research at the Barbara Bates Center for the Study of the History of Nursing at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia. Through generous funding from the Independence Foundation and NLN members through the NLN Foundation for Nursing Education (http://www.nln.org/foundation/overview/foundation-programs), digitalized annual reports and videos from the NLN's archives will preserve the NLN's rich history for scholars and students investigating the history of nursing, nursing education, and nursing accreditation. The NLN collection at the Bates Center will continue to evolve and grow. Visit the NLN website and the Bates Center website as the NLN shares its formidable legacy for future generations of leaders to achieve reform and excellence in nursing education.