Common Schools and the Industrial Order

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Common Schools and the Industrial Order

Rapid Change. The triumph of the common-schools movement in America, and of the idea of public-supported education in general, occurred against a backdrop of dramatic social transformation and growing uncertainty about the future. Well into the nineteenth century, most Americans conceived of their society as a relatively homogenous nation of small producers and independent farmers, a self-image that seemed to harmonize with the ideals fought for in the Revolution. By midcentury, however, the first stirrings of industrialization had begun to render that image obsolete. There were still, to be sure, tremendous opportunities for many Americans who wanted to set out on their own in farming or the various skilled crafts. For some, moreover, the rise of industry seemed to portend a future of unbounded national wealth and greatness. But for others, the fruits of the advancing industrial revolution seemed elusive; more and more, independent craftsmen in the cities and towns saw their livelihoods undermined by the availability of cheap manufactured goods, and many found themselves as wage laborers in the factories sprouting up around the Northeast. Many began to look upon the changes under way as a threat to the way of life they had known in an earlier era and worried that the social stratification prevalent in Europe was gaining a foothold on this side of the Atlantic, where it would undermine the equality that many Americans had come to consider their birthright. In the years leading up to 1850, these fears had translated into a new volatility in popular politics; the advent of universal white male suffrage in the 1820s and 1830s had led to the formation of parties committed to redressing the grievances of laborers and the poor, and many at the top of American society began to express their own concerns that the new cleavages in society might lead to social unrest.

TEACHER TRAINING

Normal Schools beget an esprit du corps, and kindle a glowing enthusiasm among their pupils. They tend to exalt the business of teaching. They show it up in its nobler instead of its meaner colors. By infusing an element of philosophy into the very work of instruction, they dignify every step of it. Under this influence the work of primary instruction becomes the worthiest of the whole task, because, considered with respect to the child’s wants, it is the most important. It takes profounder insight into the child’s nature to lay aright the foundations of his culture in the primary school, than to help him at any other stage of his progress, because the primary teacher must see the end from the very beginning. His plans for the future must embrace the child’s entire career. No partial view of the field is sufficient. This the Normal School brings into view and insists upon. Admit this truth and you at once exalt the work of elementary instruction into a dignified science, into something worth the study of any mind. Make the excellence of teaching to depend upon what you teach. . . .”

Source: Richard Edwards, “Normal Schools in the United States,” National Teachers’ Association, Lectures and Proceedings (1865): 277–282.

The Great Equalizer. It was in this atmosphere of growing unease at all levels of American society that educational reformers such as Horace Mann and Henry Barnard solicited support for their vision of educational reform, and it was perhaps inevitable that their appeal would tailor itself to the looming concerns of the age. In his Twelfth Annual Report to the Massachusetts Board of Education, written in 1848, Mann explicitly referred to common-school education as a balm for the growing division between rich and poor. He warned of the “danger of… those hideous evils which are always engendered between Capital and Labor, when all the Capital is in the hands of one class and all the Labor is thrown upon another…. Now surely,” he wrote, “nothing but Universal Education can counter-work this tendency toward the domination of capital and servility of labor.” The spread of education through all classes, Mann argued, “would do more than all things else to obliterate factitious distinctions in society,” by “disarm[ing] the poor of their hostility towards the rich.” Mann’s prescription of the common school as a solution for social conflict relied on two important elements. First, he was convinced that by mixing children from every level of society in “common schools,” the tendency toward social strife would be undermined by mutual exposure and “would provide society with a common set of political and moral values.” Wrote another reformer, “The Common School is common, not as inferior, not as the school for poor men’s children, but as the light and air are common.” Mann also believed that public education would act as a bulwark of equality in a changing America by providing the tools with which even the children of the poor might rise to the top. “Education,” he wrote in a now-famous passage of his Twelfth Annual Report, “is the great equalizer of the conditions of men—the balance-wheel of the social machinery.”

Popular Appeal. Mann’s formula of public education seems, in retrospect, to have been a perfect example of the right idea arriving at precisely the right time. The “chief contribution” of the reformers, one observer has written, was to make their appeal “relevant to the aspirations and anxieties of the age.” Events in Rhode Island during the years leading up to 1850 illustrated how the common-school program succeeded in building a diverse constituency of supporters. Protests against property qualifications on the right to vote in that state had led, in 1842, to a civil uprising known as Dorr’s War. Eventually, conservatives were able to quash the rebellion, but fears of a repetition led them to enact a series of reforms, including the establishment of a system of state-supported common schools. In 1843 Rhode Island legislators appointed moderate reformer Henry Barnard to oversee the work. Within seven years the state had constructed “one of the best systems of public instruction in the world,” as described by Horace Mann. This talent for straddling popular demand for free education and the conservatives’ requirement for social stability was essential to the success of educational reform during this period. Although reformers shared the conventional attitudes of many conservatives—that poverty was a result of moral weakness and individual failing rather than injustice or a flawed social order—they genuinely believed universal education would provide a solution to the social ills that beset American society. Barnard had appealed to Rhode Island legislators in terms designed to allay their fears and at the same time rouse their sense of public obligation. It was “the responsibility of civilized men,” he told them, “to decide for the urban poor how best to raise them from barbarism.”

Harmony and Efficiency. The degree to which the common-schools crusade was adapted to fit the changing needs of an industrializing America is evident not only in the manner in which Mann and others solicited support for their ideas, but in day-to-day classroom instruction as well. The common-school classroom presented educators with an ideal opportunity for training young people in the habits required in an increasingly complex industrial society. Punctuality, obedience to authority, personal thrift, moral restraint—the inculcation of these qualities became the common objective of moral instruction. “The first requirement of the school is Order,” Saint -Louis superintendent William T. Harris wrote in 1871. In modern industrial society, he pointed out, “conformity to the time of the train, to the starting of work in the manufactory,” and to other “activities of the city” required strict precision and regularity. “The pupil must have his lessons ready at the appointed time, must rise at the tap of the bell, move to the line, return; in short, go through all the evolutions with equal precision.” By preparing students for participation in modern society, reformers pointed out, public education would result in increased productivity and economic growth, benefiting all of society. Access to a well-rounded education, George Emerson and Alonzo Potter wrote in their School and Schoolmaster (1873), “multiplies the ways in which [workers] can be employed with profit to themselves, and with advantage to the community.” The triumph of common schooling in the years after 1850 was a product, therefore, of major forces in American life as the nation moved away from a simpler, agrarian past and toward greater complexity and stratification. Though education reformers conceived their project neither as a counterweight to growing inequality, as labor reformers had, nor merely as the guarantor of social stability desired by industry, their ability to offer something of value to diverse constituencies was key to their success.