3.2) Expansion of the Common School

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From the course by University of Pennsylvania

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.

From the lesson

Postbellum Period

This module considers the post-Civil War expansion of the common school and the reality behind the myth of the “Little Red Schoolhouse”; the educational gains made by blacks during the Reconstruction period and the limits white supremacists put on blacks’ educational progress after Reconstruction; the Hampton/Tuskegee model of industrial education for blacks and the role of northern industrial philanthropists; Plessy v. Ferguson and Jim Crow schooling in the South; the Carlisle Indian School; and the early progress of the American high school.

3.1) Introduction 1:54

3.2) Expansion of the Common School 6:29

3.3) After Emancipation: Education of African Americans in the Reconstruction South7:58

3.4) Industrial Education in the South's Organic Society 7:47

3.5) Jim Crow and the Radical Segregation of African Americans6:38

3.6) Boarding Schools for Native Americans 3:16

3.7) The Rise of the American High School 5:52

Meet the Instructors

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

The nation's westward expansion continued apace in the postbellum era with

the formation of new western states and by 1890 the closing of the American frontier.

The new towns and rural districts of the expanding west and southwest invariably

built primary schools, state supported systems of schools fouled with statehood.

Replacing the covered wagons that had dotted the great plains in

earlier decades, the ever-growing railroads became a dominant force and

locus of power in American society.

By giving impetus to increased settlement,

the railroads indirectly spurred the growth of the common school.

Postbellum America was predominantly a rural society.

The common schoolhouses were typically one room structures taught by

a single teacher.

Until a town or district attained a degree of permanence or,

or reached a certain level of affluence, its school house was likely to

be a log structure, a throwback to the early Republic and National periods.

Nationwide, the central tendency over the course of the post

Civil War decades was a shift from log to wood framed buildings.

The education historian Jonathan Zimmerman dispels the longstanding myth

of the little red schoolhouse,

namely that America's historic one room schoolhouses were typically red.

He writes quote, one rooms schools were typically white or

left unpainted, weathering to sliver or gray.

Some districts did paint their schools in the venetian red,

the inexpensive pigment used in barn paint, which came from iron ore.

After the United States developed its own lead supply, however,

white paint derived from lead oxide became the cheapest option.

Even in the rare instances in which a school was built of brick, the mineral

content of local clay often rendered it yellow or beige, instead of red.

Zimmerman says there's no denying that these schoolhouses were little,

typically with a single door opening onto a single room.

The belfry, sometimes with a bell, seen in images of postbellum schoolhouses,

was a respectful nod to the connection of religion and

education in the early days of common schools.

This symbol would carry forward in some localities well into the 20th century.

>> Who were the teachers in these one room schools?

By the end of the 19th century three quarters of

them says Zimmerman were women, single women,

in the 19th century married women were typically prohibited from teaching.

Single women taught boys and girls of different ages and

abilities simultaneously in one room day in and day out.

Their own educations rarely extended beyond the high school level.

As the 19th century wore on,

school sessions increased from six months terms to nine months.

Teaching remained rote, with pupils memorizing passages of text and

regurgitating them at the teacher's desk.

Standardized text books replaced the earlier jury rigged arrangement of

children bringing books from home to read and to recite in school.

The most popular school book was William McGuffey's Eclectic Reader

with sells of some 50 million copies.

McGuffey's text and others of similar ilk echoed the ideological commitments of

the waspish common school leaders of Horace Mann's generation.

Protestant morality based on the King James Bible,

combined with an ethic of hard work, industriousness, temperance and

patriotism were the stock and trade of these text books.

Spare the rod and spoil the child one of Ben Franklin's aphorisms remained in

vogue, in fact corporal punishment and other forms of humiliation remained

fixtures of public primary schools long after the 19th century had passed.

>> After the 1840's, most one room schools had commercial blackboards.

By the end of the century, most were outfitted with maps, globes, dictionaries.

Zimmerman notes that a photo of Abraham Lincoln was ubiquitous in

Northern schoolhouses.

Not so in the south, where Lincoln was vilified, images of Confederate War

heroes and politicians adorned the walls of that region's schoolhouses.

Finally, we would be remiss not to mention a prominent feature of one-room schools,

the proverbial outhouse or privy.

Before the ascent of outhouses, boys and girls strolled out to the woods, or

prairie, or whatever landscape was available to relieve themselves.

Boys caught spying on the girls were made to feel the business end of

the teachers birch rod.

Zimmerman puts the evolution of the outhouse under his

scholarly microscope, quote.

Later in the century when schools started to provide dual outhouses,

his marked by a sun, hers by a moon.

Concern turned to the privys themselves.

Not surprisingly, most were filthy.

A 1913 study of 131 one room schools in Wisconsin found that school employees or

students in just half clean the outhouses, even once a year.

When a privy hole filled up with human waste and Sears Roebuck catalogs,

America's first toilet paper, many schools simply dug a new hole.

Moved the outhouse over it.

>> [LAUGH] >> One Missouri school found

a mama pig building a nest for her piglets in the outhouse.

Other privies housed snakes, raccoons, skunks, opossums.

Most of all educators worried the outhouses transmitted moral filth

in the form of obscene pen knife drawings.

There the vile creatures go, wrote one school official, to write and

cut and carve what their vile imaginations feed upon.

It's an extravagant understatement to say that

southern blacks confronted hostile social forces that denied them

the same benefits of public schooling that accrued to whites.

In our next several episodes, we'll see how they courageously,

often pragmatically, navigated an entrenched social system that pulled out

all the stops to deny them the benefit of an education that would allow them to

compete on a level playing field with southern whites.

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