How the Foundation of Today's Public School System Was Laid: Nineteenth-Century
American Education Reform
By John Crouch, Attorney at Law,
Crouch & Crouch, Arlington, Virginia; (703)
528-6700;
Other Crouch Articles
Nineteenth-century American education reformers used, and worked within,
an ideology of republicanism which they shared with everyone in American
politics. They also belonged to a (less universal) tradition of promoting
specific projects for social improvement. They saw these as necessary extensions
of American republicanism, which would prevent mob rule and despotism and
perpetuate national economic progress. Various other groups, though equally
patriotic, did not see it that way.
Like reformers of other areas of life, educators moved around 1830 from
overtly patriarchal schemes, in which patricians tried to make the lowest
class more comfortable in their positions, to a universalistic, crusading,
middle-class assimilationist model of reform. Throughout the century, reformers
fought for their plans in every political forum, while continuously creating
and re-shaping new political institutions to administer schooling.
From the moment of independence, political leaders decided that the republic's
survival depended on the civic and moral education of ordinary people. The
first thing Thomas Jefferson did after the Declaration of Independence passed
was to propose a constitution for his state, providing free, secular public
primary education for all free males, and a meritocratic system of public
higher education. Though this sweeping plan failed politically, it represents
a concern which was shared by Jefferson's peers and has remained predominant
in public life. As far back as 1785, Congress set aside a fraction of all
land-grants for the support of local schools. (Tyack &c. p. 31) People
of all parties have kept Franklin's words in mind - "You now have a
republic, if you can keep it."
In the founding generation, everyone from Hamilton and Washington to Jefferson
and even Patrick Henry encouraged state investment in public-spirited projects
to cultivate and improve society, to keep the new nation from languishing
or fragmenting. These included roads, bridges, navigation improvements,
and, in the early nineteenth century, manufactures, societies for manumission,
colonization, and charity schooling, and even a few universities. Private
benefactors, states, and Congress invested liberally, certain that these
ventures would repay society tenfold as the nation expanded commercially
and geographically, as foretold by manifest natural laws.
As political participation broadened in the decade following the War of
1812, this far-sighted tradition remained confined to the well-born, who
increasingly declined to run for local office and concentrated their energies
on various benevolent societies. The Jacksonians who came into power saw
such concerns as the Charles River Bridge, the Second Bank of the United
States, and the New York Public School Society as exclusive monopolies.
They resented institutions which merged public funding and privileges with
private, high-handed management. Some of these they privatized and opened
to competition, but others seemed so essential to the state's survival that
they made them totally public, democratically owned, watched and controlled
- e.g., the United States Treasury and urban public schools.
Even as agents of government, the predominantly Whig common school reformers
retained the tradition of self-directing movements for the moral uplift
of Americans. They now emphasized the need to transform and harmonize the
entire school-age population. Noting rapid democratization, they saw a need
to make the people into wise rulers, as well as dutiful subjects. Innovators
such as Horace Mann sought to redefine democratic control as a consensus
- which they themselves would build - that would assign them a broad mission
and let them accomplish it scientifically. They hoped to create structures
in which they could plan and direct the professionalization and spread of
their vocation.
Mann's projection of an ideal common-school was like the kingdom of God
in its universal embrace, its commitment to shower its blessings alike upon
the just and the unjust. In more secular terms, he asserted a universal
right to a socially useful education, as basic as the right to life. (Cremin,
The Republic and the School, p. 112) This was consistent with the religious
and moral movements of the time, and so was his emphasis on voluntary individual
transformation. He observed people's need to actively learn, rather than
being force-fed. Instead of being treated as part of a lower class to be
ground down, each child was to develop his own moral and mental faculties.
While he advertised the social advantages of a respect for law and property,
he insisted on training children in freedom and responsibility, not in submission
to force. It was a subtle and laborious process, but vital, to "make
republicans." (p. 92)
Concerned to save the republic from the "extremes of overgrown wealth
and desperate poverty" which ruined ancient civilizations, Mann hoped
schools would be a non-revolutionary social "equalizer," arming
everyone with an "equal chance" for success, and fostering the
social cohesion which many Whigs longed for. (pp. 8, 32, 84, 86.)
Mann argued that there was a non-partisan, universally-confessed "creed
of republicanism" which schools could and must teach. He likewise thought
that everyone should be exposed to the Bible, uncontaminated by the interpretations
of any denomination. He even claimed that hardly anyone had objected to
the Bible in public schools. (pp.97, 101, 105) He simply wished away the
fact that many Catholics, like those in New York led by Bishop John Hughes,
did object to reading any version of the Bible without commentary, even
if, within his philosophy, they should not have objected. This may demonstrate
how social and institutional barriers can keep decision-makers ignorant
of matters they presume to know best about.
Carl Kæstle, in Pillars of the Republic, identifies the "cosmopolitanism"
of reformers throughout the North and Midwest. They emphasized the advantages
of equity, "commonality," consolidation and central control, not
only for egalitarian reasons, but so as to "make Republicans"
more efficiently in areas where people often moved from one district to
another. Kæstle's reformers echo many of Mann's ideas, in plainer
language. Henry Barnard went so far as to speak of a "national education"
which would mold "national character," and a public implanted
with the seeds of cosmopolitanism subsequently looked to schools to provide
"fairness and cohesion" as well as education. (p. 103).
Kæstle also points out the socio-economically conservative tendencies
of the school reformers. They shared with other powerful groups an overly
"rosy" view of a distinctly American capitalist system, even as
our labor conditions grew more like those in the Old World. In some cases,
they hung on to the idea that people should be educated for their "station."
(p. 92) Their systems used women in subordinate roles, and the "common"
schools which Mann compared to Christ's kingdom seldom welcomed non-whites.
(In fairness to Mann, it should be noted that Massachusetts was mostly an
exception to this.)
The tremendous role reformers assigned to education in the basic function
and justification of government is revealed by the mid-nineteenth-century
state constitutions which David Tyack, Thomas James and Aaron Benavot studied
in Law and the Shaping of Public Education, 1785-1954. As they recount the
legal tug-of-war between professionals, parents, and a host of other interested
parties, it appears that the bureaucratizing trend has not been constant
or inexorable. Especially in the non-Eastern states they study, the balance
of power between fiscal liberals and conservatives, locals and centralizers
shifted with national political and economic trends. Apostles of Mann's
crusade were well-received in the provinces, then stopped short by the 1837
depression. Judicial records are used to show the struggles between schools
and individual parents and students, which usually upheld common schooling's
authority but treated people leniently.
In Reconstructing American Education, Michael Katz emphasizes the "incipient
bureaucracy" that accompanied common schools. Educators sought to be
led by veteran teachers, not politicians. Their centralizing was economical
and workable in cities - the alternative being a patchwork of tiny wards
with more politicians than teachers. As Diane Ravitch noted, the ward system
allowed a degree of corruption which even Tammany leaders found embarrassing.
Educators, meanwhile, felt they had scientific evidence of the benefits
of age-grading and other standardizations. (Katz, p. 45) While their cause
weathered political setbacks, they built up collegiality and solidarity
in the profession and refined their doctrines in normal schools and professional
journals.
The bureaucratic program, says Katz, was directed at individuals, but otherwise
it assumed the worst about students' lower-class backgrounds. Education
was still an ethnocentric prescription for "social change ... from
the top down," "something the better part of the community did
to the others." The "definition of its clients as inferior"
and dysfunctional became "integral to bureaucracy." Katz calls
this a direct inheritance from paternalistic benevolent societies, as was
the schools' monopoly on public funds.
Common school reformers promoted an institution which was both Democratic
and Whiggish. Especially when first introduced, it would be under democratic
control, but administered by professionals. Whigs could envision social
cohesion as something quite removed from economic equality, while Democrats
were attracted to the ideas of equal opportunity, and suspicious of any
private gathering of the rich. It brought together many of the values which
all parties shared - the perpetuation of the republic, economic progress,
and the idea of consensus itself, regardless of whether people actually
agreed on how to achieve these. It may also be that nearly all the parties,
movements and revivals of the 1830s and 40s welcomed assimilationist institutions
because they hoped they would soon be in a position to convince everyone
else to assimilate to _them_. It promised to assimilate immigrants, yet
a large percentage of immigrants found it useful or convenient to send their
children to public schools. Others found refuge in parochial schools. As
Kæstle notes, common schools' opponents were split, and many groups
with little power were satisfied when they found they could make the new
systems bend a little. (p. 181)
Reformers smoothed their way by fixing the common school in the public mind,
especially among opinion leaders, long before they could actually bureaucratize
the most resistant localities, rural areas which already had small-scale
common schools. The ideas of such civic leaders as editors, legislators
and even county- or township-level school boards, were already somewhat
"cosmopolitan." Except for ethnic leaders, they had reason to
feel in control, and would be reassured, not threatened, by assimilation.
Meanwhile, many Americans faced bureaucratization only in a simmering "guerilla
war."(ibid.) As Wayne Fuller discovered, one-room school boards freely
ignored the pronouncements of reformers on matters of pedagogy, architecture
and ventilation.
Nineteenth-century common-school advocates formed a coherent movement for
a standard system of education delivery that would, in theory, be humane,
versatile, well-funded and professional, providing social cohesion, individual
fulfillment, and national renewal. They appealed to most groups, especially
those with a fair proportion of political power, though they were frequently
disappointed by the stinginess of lawmakers. Just as importantly, they appealed
to basic values of democracy, individualism and community that all Americans
claimed to share. Resistance from minorities and localists, though fierce
at times, was dulled by the reforms' halting, diluted spread through America's
political systems. This, combined with common schooling's wide appeal, ensured
the public school monpoly's fundamental legitimacy, though people continued
to disagree about the specifics of its content and management.
Copyright John Crouch 1991
- John Crouch
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