Founding the American School System

Founding the American School System David Labaree

Reformers ask schools to pursue certain ends

Northern schools organized by law; mid-atlantic looser; Southern states less enthusiastic.      -> Was this related to the slave trade? Greater suspicion of popular education? Zinn… 

Protestantism (in Northern colonies) drove near-universal white male literacy (also trade)      -> Illiteracy makes masses dependent on liturgical authorities (interesting contrast to above)      -> Roots of progressive commitment to individual empowerment?

Therefore, at the heart of the push for schooling in colonial Amer- ica was a profoundly conservative vision of education’s mission: to preserve piety and maintain the faith.

Interesting suspicion of “false glosses;” points to age of inventing religions in 1820’s…

The history of American education is in many ways an ex- pression of this ongoing tension between schooling as the pursuit of gradually evolving cultural ideals and schooling as the pursuit of increasingly compelling economic practicalities.

After revolution, third purpose: political stability

TJ: give them knowledge of those facts, which history exhibiteth, that…they may be enabled to know ambition under all its shapes, and prompt to exert their natural powers to defeat its purposes.”

Worth considering today. How much do we encourage our students to be critical citizens? Hidden curriculum. 

NY, Philly establish large public school systems, but they are charity schools; parents must declare themselves paupers to enroll. “tended to reinforce class differences by establishing a distinction between schools for us and schools for them."

1820’s: Turnpikes and canals open markets; spur industrialization

But when goods and information were suddenly able to cross great distances at low cost, this brought a severe challenge to Ameri- ca’s economic, social, political, and religious life. The result was the destruction of one social order without a clear indication of what new social order would arise to take its place, leaving a vacuum of authority that threatened the foundations of the fragile new republic. And the significance of these events for the history of American school reform is that reformers came to the conclu- sion that the primary institutional way to resolve this crisis was to develop a broadly inclusive system of public schools.      -> Should make us hopeful of the present-day changes?

Paul Johnson’s stunning study of the city in the throes of social transformation, A Shopkeeper’s Millen- nium: Society and Revivals in Rochester, New York, 1815–1837.      -> Compare to Katrina New Orleans?      -> Puts “local food” movement and efforts to stoke local economies (like local scrip) in perspective

“The only options were to increase the volume and in- tensity of production in your business or fold up shop and go to work for someone else who was more successful in negotiating the new market situation.”

“Crisis conditions in a society create a powerful demand for possible solutions, which in turn encourages social entrepre- neurs to develop innovative reform measures and test them out in practice. Local innovations that demonstrate the greatest apparent success spread quickly to other locations, winning the reformer public acclaim, social influence, and political power.

Most of the institutions created during the years before the Civil War are still with us in some form or other. These include the penitentiary, the hospital, the insane asylum, the poorhouse (now superseded by welfare and social security), and the com- mon school. At one level, all these institutions were designed to provide a social support system to replace the system that was destroyed by the market.      -> Is the drive toward the basic income (and the total market) a continuation of this process?

Finney, evangelical preacher, offered salvation through acceptance of grace, “a profound decision to replace external control with internal control.”

Initial goal of common schools to inculcate self-control

Primary goal of common schools was not to emphasize education (already emphasized), but to unify school experience

The school sys- tem put in place by the common school movement had the follow- ing emergent characteristics: community-wide enrollment, public control, local control, age grading, teacher training, big govern- ment, and curriculum marginality.

the age-graded school drew on insights from the revival movement and its techniques for promoting conversion.

the common form of the schools was its content. Being there was the most im- portant thing.

in the twentieth century the key issue in the politics of education be- came this new tension between the open access and the special advantage that schooling could provide individual consumers.

-> For the Common Schoolers, there was no status quo to displace (Compare with Education and the Cult of Efficiency)

At the core of this balancing of competing interests was the Whig vision of the need to construct a new citizen for the republic, a new soul for the church, and a new conscience for society.      -> I’m interested in the internalization and externalization of culture. (McLuhann, Papert)

the system placed a priority on the experience of school- ing over the experience of learning