2.5) The Common School Idea as a Social Movement

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American Education Reform: History, Policy, Practice

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University of Pennsylvania

American Education Reform: History, Policy, Practice

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Discover what shapes how we talk about schools today by exploring the history of U.S. education reform. Engage with the main actors, key decisions, and major turning points in this history. See how social forces drive reform. Learn about how the critical tensions embedded in U.S. education policy and practice apply to schools nationally, globally— and where you live.

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The National Period

This module takes up the accelerating market economy between 1815 and 1850; the Second Great Awakening and its spur to social innovations; Horace Mann’s paean for “common” schools; Whigs and the common school movement; Catholic opposition to common schools; the suppression of black literacy in the antebellum South; and nineteenth-century academies.

2.1) Introduction 1:56

2.2) The National Market Economy 7:54

2.3) "What God Hath Wrought": Dramatic Social Innovations 5:58

2.4) Horace Mann: Avatar of Common Schools7:37

2.5) The Common School Idea as a Social Movement 5:25

2.6) Protestants and Catholics in the Arena7:40

2.7) Education of African Americans and Native Americans 6:04

2.8) Secondary Schooling in the Common School Era: The Academy4:12

Познакомьтесь с преподавателями

Dr. John L. Puckett
Professor of Education
Graduate School of Education
Dr. Michael Charles Johanek
Senior Fellow
Graduate School of Education

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.

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