William Channing Woodbridge (December 8, 1794 – November 9, 1845) was an American geographer, educational reformer, and the author of many geography textbooks.

Woodbridge developed an interest in both the American landscape and in the publication of geographies, and was a member of the Society of Brothers in Unity.

He believed passionately in science, but he was certain that this knowledge of the material world could only lead people closer to God and to a firmer morality.

Eventually, he accepted a position as an instructor with Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet at the Asylum for the Deaf and Dumb in Hartford, Connecticut.

He returned to Hartford in July 1821, where he began writing a new and greatly expanded geography that would incorporate what he had learned in Europe.

Woodbridge spent the summer of 1826 teaching in Hofwil, Switzerland, where Philipp Emanuel von Fellenberg had established an influential experimental school.

He had made the acquaintance of the great German explorer, scholar, and student of physical geography Alexander von Humboldt.

[15] While on his second trip to Europe, Woodbridge observed the teaching of vocal music by Nägeli, Pfeiffer, Kübler and others, and brought home many of their works with him.

[17] During this same time, Woodbridge had gone to Boston and met Lowell Mason, whom he persuaded to go and observe Ives' experiments in Hartford.

[19] His promotion of Mason through lectures in Boston and through his American Annals of Education eventually helped Mason win support to introduce music education into the Boston public schools, a feat which William Alcott would say was "a service which alone would have made him a public benefactor.

He was astonished when Woodbridge responded to the introduction with a question; "what is the great practical error in all of our school education?"

They were particularly concerned with women's education and with incorporating the ideas of Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi and the French reformer Joseph Jocotot into American schools, both of whom had stressed the importance of observation and of geography.

Emma Willard had to publicly assure readers that the "system of modern geography" had been entirely written and arranged by Woodbridge.

[26] Kim Tolley has recently argued that the Woodbridge and Willard geographies, with their strong emphasis on field work and observation, were important in encouraging American women to develop an interest in science[27] and Daniel H. Calhoun has made the case for their importance in the world view of Americans in the Jacksonian era.

In his essay, Woodbridge argued that simple memorization of names was insufficient; each word had to be supported in the student's mind by a clearly defined concept.

He felt that the small amount of knowledge that could be acquired in a classroom was not of much practical use to travelers, explorers, soldiers or missionaries; the real importance of geography was to lead the students outside his own limited experience and to learn to see themselves as part of a larger human family.

Climate, religion, and the nature of governments played some role, but he had no place for the racial slurs that were to disfigure so many American textbooks of the second half of the nineteenth century.

"[31] This is ironic because some modern readers are struck by the relatively few number of maps in some of his works; this is often because many were bound and sold together with a small atlas.

In 1832 Woodbridge married Lucy Ann Reed, who had been Catharine Beecher's associate principal at the Hartford Female Seminary and then an assistant teacher in Marblehead, Massachusetts.

His young wife eventually joined him there, but died in Frankfurt in 1840, leaving Woodbridge with the care of their two small children.

His health continued to deteriorate, and hoping that a more tropical climate would relieve his symptoms, he spent the last three winters of his life in St. Croix, in what was then Danish Territory, but is now part of the United States Virgin Islands.

An illustration the 1847 edition of his Modern School Geography shows Woodbridge working in his study there with a map on the wall and a shelf of books (p. ix).