In the mid 19th century, education reformers of Whiggish sensibilities led common school crusades through New England, New York, the states of the upper Midwest, North Carolina, and California. The common school leaders were affluent, white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant males, WASPs. Their ideology was properly described as pan Protestant and Republican. All agreed with Horace Mann that the common school should have a religious though non-denominational and non-partisan focus. They assume correctly that Methodists, Baptists, Presbyterians, and other Protestant sects would agree to the King James Bible as a foundational textbook to be read without comment by the teacher. At the cost of having to build their own school systems from church funds, Catholic leaders refused to endorse any education program that wasn't grounded in the Catholic Douay bible and church doctrine. >> As planned by the Whiggish, WASPish reformers, moral education was to be conveyed in the common school classroom through daily reading selected rom the king James Bible. And didactic textbooks replete with exemplars of virtuous and heroic individuals with a Franklinian emphasis on service to god, family, community and country. Character traits, such as honesty, industry, frugality, sincerity, punctuality, benevolence, and dispositions for service. The elements of civic virtue were to be cultivated fastidiously. The common school leaders emphasis of on civic virtue and preservation of the republic echoed arguments that were made earlier by Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, Benjamin Rush. This is not to say that the reform leaders didn't have a vested social class interest in advocating for common schools, nor is it to deny that social control may have been part of their motivation, as some historians have argued. After all, affluent Americans of their sort had much to lose if the social inequities spawned by the national market economy were to unleash class warfare and the destruction of private property. Our own reading of this history is more benign. We see the Whig reformers as religiously grounded, non-partisan idealists who cared deeply about their country, believed in its promise as the beacon of liberty. Their ambivalence about blacks and immigrants notwithstanding and believe that a common basic education was the surest guarantee of the American Republic's survival. >> At all events, the common school idea was enormously successful in terms of its widespread adoption in most regions of the US by 1850, when the census counted about 81,000 public schools in operation. The vast majority were rural one-room schoolhouses with one teacher. The educationally laggard south was the striking exception to the public school rule. Elite whites favored single-sex private schools for their children, leaving yeoman farm families and free blacks to their own devices. In the 1840s and 1850s, the hallmarks of this savvy social movement were myriad state and national periodicals. Most famously, the Journal of American Education, founded in 1855. Statewide common school conventions and coalitions for common school legislation. The most explicit purpose of the US common school throughout the 19th century was citizenship development, making Republicans, in Horace Mann's words. The school's academic program was subordinated to this overarching aim. Spelling, reading, writing, grammar, arithmetic, geography, and history. The core subjects in most of the settled areas were regarded as means to an end, not as ends in themselves. There were no ifs and buts about the purpose of the common school. It's purpose was to cultivate literate, responsible citizens as the nation's safeguard. >> From the outside, America's rural one-room schoolhouses were coeducational. Replicating, as the historians David Hayek and Elizabeth Hanson have noted, the gender relationships of family and church, the republic's bedrock institutions. Increasingly, women took positions as rural school leaders. Local school trustees paid them less than men, not that any rural school teachers were ever well-paid. Teaching had a low occupational status in rural environments, equivalent to farm labor or household servants. We'll return to the common school in our module on the postbellum period where we look at the great expansion of this institution after the Civil War. In our next episode, we'll look at religiously-based forms of primary school that preceded, supplemented, or challenged the common school movement. [MUSIC]
