American Experiment (91 page)

Clearly there were sharp limits to American tolerance of religious diversity, and boundaries to the effective reach of the First Amendment. Protestants beset Catholics; Methodists persecuted Mormons; the head of the Mormons assaulted an opposing newspaper; Protestant sects “stole” members from one another. Yet the vast number of Americans who attended church and camp meeting did so without harassment. The various sects seemed indeed to thrive amid competition—a competition, Sidney Mead wrote, “that helped to generate the tremendous energies, heroic sacrifices, great devotion to the cause, and a kind of stubborn, plodding work under great handicaps, that transformed the religious complexion of the nation.” Such competition could thrive only in an environment of liberty.

There was as well a latent but powerful strand of egalitarianism in American Protestantism. By the 1830s and the 1840s this moral tradition was confronting slavery more and more directly. Theodore Weld, a zealous convert of Charles Finney’s, had traveled to Ohio in 1829 as an agent of the Society for Promoting Manual Labor in Literary Institutions, looking for a site to build a western manual labor theological seminary. The place chosen in southern Ohio was Cincinnati, where the society established Lane Seminary and called as its first president Lyman Beecher.

While Beecher was absent on a fund-raising tour in 1834, several Lane students, led by Weld, conducted an antislavery revival meeting to debate immediate abolition or colonization. The decision was for emancipation. When Beecher returned to find the trustees angered over the meetings, he dissolved the antislavery society, and Lane rebels withdrew in 1835 to found Oberlin College. Charles G. Finney was its first professor of theology and later president. Weld’s band of followers also founded the Ohio State Abolition Society and determined to “burn down by backfires the city.” So aroused was the populace by revival meetings against slavery that within one year the Ohio State Abolition Society swelled to 15,000.

If to many church members slavery was a sin and an evil, for others abolitionism was worse. The issue began to divide churches into northern and southern wings, although the Roman Catholic Church stood largely aloof from the controversy. The main plank in the abolitionists’ platform asserted that slaveholding and even allowing slavery to persist were sins. “Faith Without Works Is Dead,” preached Weld, as abolitionists began to
call more and more for action, for immediate repentance and immediate freedom for the slave. The Quaker poet John Greenleaf Whittier spoke for many church members when he wrote: “We do not talk of gradual abolition, because, as Christians, we find no authority for advocating a gradual relinquishment of sin. We say to slaveholders—Repent Now—today—Immediately; just as we say to the intemperate—‘Break off from your vice at once—touch not—taste not—handle not—from henceforth forever…’ Such is our doctrine of immediate emancipation. A doctrine founded on God’s eternal Truth—plain, simple and perfect.”

The cultural change that touched and transformed most Americans in the first half of the nineteenth century was the emergence of a common, uniform, public school system. Two paradoxes marked this transforming change. It was an experiment in pure socialism, if socialism is defined as governmental ownership of certain facilities, and governmental hiring and firing of persons employed in those facilities, in order to carry out purposes of the state. The government was taking over not an impersonal service like a communications or transportation system, but the education of innocent and vulnerable children handed over by their parents to the tender mercies of Leviathan. In an era before socialism became an ideological issue within and among nations, this particular socialist experiment was conducted in other guises and for other purposes.

But what purposes? Herein lies a second paradox. The political, educational, religious, and intellectual leaders who brought about this transformation had diverse goals, so that a conflict of purpose centrally affected the formative period of education and has affected it ever since.

For some, common school education was intended to serve the political needs and purposes of the new republic. In his Farewell Address George Washington had urged the people to promote, “as an object of primary importance, Institutions for the general diffusion of knowledge. In proportion as the structure of a government gives force to public opinion, it is essential that public opinion should be enlightened.” Jefferson made the point more pithily: “If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.” Some leaders stressed the practical need to educate the “jurors, magistrates, legislators, governors” who would run the new republic. It was argued too that as a matter of republican principle, “
the education of the whole becomes the first interest of all.
” Or as Governor Edward Everett said, “…the utmost practicable extension should be given to a system of education, which will
confer on every citizen the capacity of deriving knowledge, with readiness and accuracy, from books and documents.”

For others, however, education as part of the republican experiment raised a more profound question—what were the purposes of the republic? Those who answered with the classic goals of “liberty and equality,” as many did, believed that popular or universal education was vital to these purposes. Schoolhouses were seen as “Temples of Freedom,” as both the source and the guardian of liberty. Even higher hopes were held for education as a product and protector of equality, especially in the light of the educational privileges of the elites. William Manning, the Billerica tavernkeeper, went to the heart of the matter: “Larning is of the greatest importance to the seport of a free government,” he wrote, “& to prevent this the few are always crying up the advantages of costly collages, national aca-dimyes & grammer schooles, in ordir to make places for men to live without work, & so strengthen their party. But are always opposed to cheep schools & woman schooles, the ondly or prinsaple means by which larning is spred amongue the Many.” This view, which was too strong for even the Jeffersonian press to print, anticipated the egalitarian thrust of the 1830s.

Still others looked on schooling as a means of achieving diverse goals or changes: as the way toward moral regeneration, or at least curbing vice; as an agency for inculcating patriotic values; as a training ground for republican leadership; as a practical preparation for earning a better livelihood. Education for leadership had a special appeal to early republicans, in the absence of the kind of aristocratic system that took care of the training of princes in monarchies. In providing for three years of elementary public education for all children, Jefferson’s “Bill for the More General Diffusion of Knowledge” aimed at selecting potential leaders from the mass of the people.

Still other Americans, usually Federalist or Whig, sometimes Republican or Democratic, had a less elevated view of the purpose of schooling. Their aim was to control and discipline the children of an unruly, democratic people. Heirs to the Framers, who feared faction, disorder, and turbulence, these persons saw the public school less as a means of expressing and realizing the aspirations of the people, more as a means of carrying out the purposes of the state. Some radicals of the time understood this basic purpose. Defining the attitudes of certain of the workingmen’s groups of the 1830s, Rush Welter wrote: “Whereas republican educational institutions had been intended to serve the
needs
of the people, democratic institutions were much more likely to respond to their
wants.
”Doubtless too, many parents were happy to let the schools take over the function of discipline, or at least of inculcation of proper values.

The “Common School Awakening” of the 1830s reflected a sharp diversity of purpose. The upper-class leaders of the movement wanted to provide a free elementary education for all white children, to create a trained educational profession adhering to a single standard, and to establish state control over local schools. States could then create uniform criteria for buildings, curricula, and teachers. States could also enforce the attendance of children. While leaders wanted social control, supporters of the movement believed advancement would come with common schooling. In educational opportunity the lot of the worker had declined since colonial times. Colonial authorities had bound out orphans, children of indentured servants, and even four- and five-year-olds as apprentices to learn a trade with a master; but apprenticeship faded with the onset of mechanization in the North and slavery in the South. Finding their wages, businesses, and status undermined by industrialization, skilled workers and small shopkeepers wanted their children to attend better schools, if possible with the scions of the wealthy.

Labor leaders made free, equal, and state-supported schools their cardinal goal. Robert Dale Owen, fresh from the failure of New Harmony, became an inspirational leader in the New York labor struggles of the l830s and an advocate of common schools. In urging the Working Men’s party to place tax-supported schools at the head of the platform, Owen proposed an audacious system of education in which the state would lodge all children in boarding schools, providing them with equal food, clothing, and instruction. Only through boarding schools could the environment of every child be equalized.

“I believe in a National System of Equal, Republican, Protective, Practical Education,” Owen proclaimed, “the sole regenerator of a profligate age, and the only redeemer of our suffering country from the equal curses of chilling poverty and corrupting riches, of gnawing want and destroying debauchery, of blind ignorance and of unprincipled intrigue.” Clearly the schools for Owen would be another Utopia. His six essays on education received wide publicity, although his bold plan for boarding schools was far too visionary for the Working Men’s party.

Responding to their leaders’ calls for educational reform, craftsmen and small shopkeepers used their recently acquired suffrage to demand education for their children. In Pennsylvania, they argued the necessity of a free system of education, already established in Philadelphia. In 1834, a milestone bill providing for free education passed on a statewide level, only to meet violent opposition among the wealthy, who produced 32,000 signatures for repeal. When the Senate voted for another bill providing for free education of only the poor, Representative Thaddeus Stevens opposed it
on the grounds that education should be free to all. After a denunciation of class hostility toward free public schools he carried the legislature, and the original act stood.

Although education had changed in colonial days from a dependence on family, church, and apprenticeship to more public, official arrangements, no part of the country before 1815 had a comprehensive school system. In New York and other middle Atlantic states, public funds had gone to benevolent organizations such as the Free School Society of New York City, which sponsored charity schools for the poor. To attend charity schools, children had to take pauper oaths, and the poor objected to charity schools so much that they boycotted them. As late as 1828, more than 24,000 children between the ages of five and fifteen received no education in New York City; in Delaware, New Jersey, and Maryland the number was even greater.

States had left responsibility for schools to local districts. The district schools received meager funds from local taxes, hardly enough to pay a teacher and maintain a schoolhouse. Parents were assessed rates according to the number of their children in school; those unable to pay could still send children as charity pupils. In Massachusetts, one-third of the districts, 1,000 in all, had no schoolhouses. By 1840, it is estimated, one-half of the schoolchildren of New England and the middle Atlantic states were receiving free education, as were one-sixth of those in the old Northwest.

Private schools for children whose parents could pay tuition flourished throughout the Northeast. Children of the wealthy attended private “dame schools,” to avoid associating with the poor. In both district and private schools, instruction was all recitation by rote—students memorized a page from the text and recited to the teacher. In district schools, there was no age grading, since all ages learned in the one-room schoolhouse. Nor did uniform school books exist, at least at first; teachers taught from whatever books were at hand. In the 1830s, however, William McGuffey, a professor of languages, developed the renowned McGuffey’s Readers, a series of six textbooks for the elementary grades. The Readers mingled entertainment with moral and patriotic lessons, and they became the chief introduction to learning for several generations of American schoolchildren.

Teachers usually had no direct training for their work. As one school board member wrote in 1847 of a teacher: “he thinks of turning peddler, or of working at shoemaking. But the one will expose him to storms, the other he fears will injure his chest.…He will nevertheless teach school for a meagre compensation.” Such problems were less prevalent in the better-funded private schools where children of the well-to-do studied
classical languages. In 1837, the Connecticut educational leader Henry Barnard estimated that 10,000 wealthy children attended private schools, at an expense greater than all the funds appropriated for the other 70,000 children of the state.

But members of elite groups often led reform. Leaders of the common school movement in the several states shared similar backgrounds and views on the purpose of education. They were members of the established professions—law, medicine, education, religion—and members of the Whig party. Horace Mann of Massachusetts, Henry Barnard of Connecticut, and Calvin Wiley of North Carolina were Whig legislators before they became state superintendents of education. As Whigs, they supported an active role by government in industrial growth, protective tariffs, internal improvements—and education.

Reformers hoped to bring every child into school through the establishment of the “free school,” supported by taxes and state grants—free so that no child would be identified as pauper and the poor would attend, and free so that the rich would not object to mixed economic classes since they would be paying for the schools anyway through taxation. Raising taxes for schools was unpopular everywhere, and reformers had only limited success, as wealthy people who could educate their children privately often opposed common schools. It took a lawyer-educator-politician with the moral standing and political skill of a Horace Mann to enlist manufacturers in the common school movement in Massachusetts.