His method combined teaching in academic subjects like Greek, history and mathematics with practical farming skills and crafts.

[1][2][3] Josiah was privately educated under pastor Amasa Porter of Derby, England,[4] and entered Yale College in 1806 at the age of eighteen.

[6] He graduated from Yale in 1810 when twenty years old and became an itinerant teacher, teaching farm technology and lecturing on geology in the northeastern states.

[10] Modeled after the agronomy ideas of Philipp Emanuel von Fellenberg of Switzerland, it combined academic study with teaching practical skills and crafts.

[15] He wanted a broad social structure that would provide a common education for young adults from a variety of backgrounds to help in their future careers.

[17] As well as scientific techniques, scholarly endeavors, religion, and politics, he saw education as teaching crafts, the mechanics of agricultural methods, geological surveys and a range of other practical subjects.

[14] Between 1829 and 1844 he set up additional factories to make his school teaching aids in Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York City.

[14][27] Holbrook traveled throughout the New England states promoting the lyceum school idea with instruction pamphlets he wrote and lectures he did using these teaching aids.

[30] In later life, he went on geological expeditions and on one such trip at Lynchburg, Virginia, in 1854, he had an accident and drowned at Blackwater Creek on June 20.

His theories were a significant motivator and inspiration behind the growth of industrial training in the United States for young adult men.

[36] He attracted notable speakers to the lyceum schools included Louis Agassiz, Daniel Webster, Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., Nathaniel Hawthorne and Susan B. Anthony, as well as occasional talks by William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips and Frederick Douglass.