This post is an essay about the formation of the US common school system, which was responsible for forming the American republic during a period in the early 19th century when its survival was in doubt. The essay is an extended excerpt from the second chapter of my book, Someone Has to Fail.
I’m posting it here for two reasons. First, the common schools saved the republic during a time of dire threat. It’s a great story of how important schools are to the nation state. In the 1820s and 30s, the fragile US polity was shaken by the market revolution that would come to destroy the traditional pattern of social, economic, political, and moral life in the country. Challenges to the survival of a social order don’t get any more serious than this.
The second reason for this post is that it provides a window into one of my all-time favorite books, Paul Johnson’s 1978 classic, A Shopkeeper’s Millennium: Society and Revivals in Rochester, NY, 1815 to 1837. Everyone should read this book, which will teach you more about the historical interaction between economy and society than anything else I have encountered.
The Rochester case is compelling because the market didn’t intrude on the town through a gradual process. Instead the market arrived on a canal boat one day in 1825, when the Erie Canal reached Rochester. Suddenly the town was connected through cheap transportation to New York City and the world. The consequences were traumatic, turning the entire social order upside down. And, since this was the early 19th century, the community experienced this upheaval as a religious crisis. One of the great evangelists in US history, Charles Grandison Finney, came to the rescue, launching an enormous religious revival that became the centerpiece of the Second Great Awakening and turned upstate New York into what people came to call the Burned Over District.
Drawing on Johnson’s analysis, I show how the common school movement was able to take the lead in establishing a model for creating community within the radically individualist setting of a market economy. Take all of the youths in a community and expose them to a shared educational experience that would provide them with the values and norms and skills required for them to be self-regulating members of the new social order, capable of balancing the self-interested economic behavior of a market actor with the civic virtue of a republican citizen.
Check it out.
A Social Crisis for the New Republic
The United States went through some tough times in its early years, and the second decade of the 19th century was particularly trying. First came the War of 1812 with Great Britain. The fighting lasted for three years and ended in a draw, but not before the country had gone through substantial destruction and citizens had watched in humiliation as the president fled the capital to escape from invading troops, who then sat down to eat his dinner before burning down the White House. Coming on the heels of war was the Panic of 1819, which wiped out all of the growth in personal income from the previous 20 years. What followed, however, was one of the strongest periods of economic growth in American history, lasting all the way to the Civil War. There are a number of compelling explanations for the rapid economic growth in the latter part of this period, including the rise of factory production, railroads, and widespread immigration from Germany and Ireland. But none of these factors was in place in the 1820s, when the boom began.
What was going on in the late teens and twenties, however, was an extraordinary growth in the country’s economic infrastructure – in particular a huge government investment in building turnpikes and canals. These internal improvements in the U.S. transportation system sharply reduced the cost of transporting goods, which meant that for the first time farmers and craftsmen in rural areas could sell their produce in major cities on the east coast. By connecting previously isolated segments of the economy, the new trade routes helped create regional markets for goods and even the beginnings of a national market. The result was a boom in trade and also a sharp increase in competition among all of the producers along these routes. Instead of operating within a geographically constricted setting, with a small group of producers catering to a small group of local consumers, producers such as wheat farmers and shoemakers found themselves having to adapt to an economic situation where the numbers of buyers and sellers were effectively unlimited. This in turn led to a dramatic transformation in the mode of production for goods, the relations between owners and workers, and in the structure of communities.
This transformation was a kind of revolution, a market revolution.[1] As I noted earlier, America had a market economy from the earliest colonial days, but large scale trade had been confined to a few port towns. For everyone else markets were local, narrowly restricted by poor transportation and communication. But when goods and information were suddenly able to cross great distances at low cost, this brought a severe challenge to America’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 conclusion that the primary institutional way to resolve this crisis was to develop a broadly inclusive system of public schools.
A useful way to understand both the nature of for this social turbulence in the 1820s and the rationale for seeing education as the solution to the problem is to examine a particular case of social change and social reform close up. Rochester, New York presents an ideal case to consider in the regard, since it served as the site for a natural experiment in radical social change. Starting out as a tiny agricultural village, which had only 15 inhabitants in 1812, it became the fastest growing city in the United States in the 1820s. The reason for this rapid growth is easy to identify: the Erie Canal. And we can even establish the exact starting date for the change process. Construction on the canal began in 1817, and on October 1, 1823 the waterway reached Rochester, connecting the city to Albany 225 miles east and, by way of the Hudson River, all the way to New York City. On that day, the national market came to Rochester, riding on the first canal boat. With this arrival, everything in Rochester changed.
The National Market Comes to Town:
The Case of Rochester, New York
Because of its relation with the Erie Canal, Rochester presents a useful way to understand the social crisis of the 1820s and the impetus for social reform during this period, and what allows us to interpret this case is Paul Johnson’s stunning study of the city in the throes of social transformation, A Shopkeeper’s Millennium: Society and Revivals in Rochester, New York, 1815-1837.[2] In this book, he details the social transformation that took place in the city after the arrival of the canal and shows how citizens experienced this transformation as a crisis of the spirit. His analysis allows us to understand both the threats and the opportunities inherent in this transformation, which was happening at the same time across the U.S. This upheaval prompted reformers to invent a series of social institutions that came to shape American society for the next 200 years, and the model for these institutions was the common school.
In 1818, when construction work on the canal began in earnest, Rochester had about 1,000 residents, and from this point on its population grew at a rate of about 25 percent a year into the early 1830s. In the first few years of this expansion, the social structure of the town retained a distinctly traditional character, following longstanding patterns of precapitalist economic and social relations. Surrounding farmers sold their produce in town, and craftsmen made goods to order for customers in the area, with local custom setting the prices for their wares. Farm work was organized by family, with little need for outside labor. Craft work was organized around the family of the master craftsman, who took in apprentices to learn the trade and journeymen to carry out production, all of them living in the master’s house and eating at his table; the goods were sold in the master’s shop. Children on the farm expected either to take over the family farm or to buy their own land and become independent farmers. Apprentices expected to become journeymen and eventually hoped to set up their own shop as master artisans.
Social authority rested with the head of household, who was also the owner of the farm or the shop. Because of property qualifications for the electorate, these owners were also the prime political actors. Demand for goods was modest and steady, restricted by a geography that also limited the options and thus the leverage [1]of consumers. As a result, there was little pressure for farmers or shopkeepers to increase productivity. Workers in the craft shop earned room, board, and a small amount of pay, which they received regularly even though orders came in more episodically; the shopkeeper-craftsman had to maintain a stable workforce to meet average demand and could not easily add or drop employees in response to fluctuations in this demand. When there were no orders to fill, the workers would quit early.[3]
All this suddenly changed with the arrival of the national market. Cheap transportation by canal boat opened up enormous economic opportunity for farmers and craftsmen alike. Instead of having sales restricted to customers within walking distance, they could sell their wares to anyone living along the 365 mile length of the canal, plus anyone living along the rivers that connected with the canal. Beyond this was the world, since at the western end the canal connected with Great Lakes and the entire upper Midwest, at the eastern end it linked up with the Hudson, and at the mouth of the Hudson was New York City, where ships could take their goods up and down the coast and across the ocean. A wide open market meant wide open opportunity for farmers and craftsmen to get rich by expanding production to meet the new demand.
But at the same time that the canal provided great opportunity, it also opened up great economic risk. Every wheat farmer was suddenly competing with every other wheat farmer across New York state and beyond, and every shoemaker was competing with every other shoemaker in Buffalo, Albany, New York City, and all points in between. Because of the huge increase in potential market, producers in Rochester could sell vastly more goods than they had before, but because of the huge increase in competition, they could do so only if they lowered their prices to a competitive level. Otherwise they would easily be driven out of business. The only options were to increase the volume and intensity 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. In order to survive, much less thrive, in this environment, producers had to raise productivity by sharply reducing the cost of producing every bushel of wheat and every pair of shoes. This meant increasing the amount of goods produced for every hour of labor and every acre of land, increasing the volume of output, and reducing the cost of labor, all in order to compensate for the drop in prices.
Johnson carefully traces the social consequences of these market pressures in Rochester with the arrival of the Erie Canal, and in doing so he provides insight into the same series of changes that were going on more gradually across the country during the period from about 1815 to 1860. As in Rochester, the growth of cheap transportation and the connection with wider markets in the U.S. was steadily lowering prices and wages and changing the way people worked and lived. Under these new conditions, master craftsmen could no longer afford the economic inefficiencies that came with the old model of work relations. Since they were now producing goods for consumers far away, they could no longer work to order but had to turn toward volume production of standardized goods. They could only pay workers when there was work to do and had to supervise them closely to get the most productivity during working hours. In order to maintain flexibility in matching work hours to product demand, they could no longer support apprentices and journeymen in their homes, since they had to be able to drop and add workers as needed. So workers increasingly lived in their own housing in a separate section of the city, which freed them from the social authority of the master but at the same time left them wholly dependent on their own declining and irregular wages as the sole support for themselves and their families.
In Rochester and across the country during this period, the shift toward a market economy led to a series of major problems – social, political, religious, and economic – which merged into a single overarching crisis in American society.[4] The social problem was in part a question of authority. In the face of wage labor, the old unquestioned authority of the farm and business owner was disappearing and there was nothing to take its place, a change that liberated workers but also raised fears of anarchy and rebellion. In addition, since the key to survival was now the ability to command wages in the market, this left families poorly equipped to handle the dependents in their midst – the old, the young, and the ill – who were not able to care for themselves much less earn a living wage. The political problem was the potential destruction of republican community in the new economy, with its emphasis on personal autonomy, the pursuit of individual interest, and the growing separation between social classes. Under these conditions, how could the republic instill civic virtue in its citizens without restricting their new won liberties, and how could it reduce social differences sufficiently to allow citizens to continue thinking of themselves as political equals?
The religious and moral problem was how people could take part in a competitive market economy, with its emphasis on individual self reliance instead of social dependence, and still remain good Christians with a high standard of morality. And the economic problem was how to resolve all of these other problems without constricting individual initiative and the market economy, which were so effective at increasing wealth and improving the standard of living. Going back to a more traditional society did not seem possible or even attractive, either for the workers who had submitted to it or the farmers and masters who had dominated it; but the social, political, and spiritual consequences of the new market economy were truly frightening.
Reform to the Rescue
If necessity is the mother of invention, then crisis is the mother of reform. Crisis conditions in a society create a powerful demand for possible solutions, which in turn encourages social entrepreneurs 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. In the 1820s and 30s, the rise of a national market economy in the U.S. created a strong demand for social reform to deal with the market’s disruptive side effects, and the result was an amazing flowering of reform ideas, which in turn led to the most productive period of institution creation in American history.[5]
The reformers who stepped forward to meet this challenge can be loosely labeled as whigs. This group, however, was not limited to members of the Whig party, which was formally established in 1833 in response to Andrew Jackson’s new Democratic party. The Whig party was a prime mover at the national and state levels in efforts to promote development of the market economy (by supporting construction of canals and turnpikes to spur trade and by supporting the tariff to protect industry) while simultaneously supporting development of new institutions to soften the impact of the market on society. But the urge to establish these new institutions extended well beyond the confines of this party and long preceded its formation, when, during the late teens and 20s, whiggism was lodged in the nationalist wing of the old Democratic-Republican party founded by Jefferson. In states like New York, where the Jacksonian Democrats became the dominant force, the whig impulse played out through Democratic politicians.
Whiggism broadly conceived was a particular stance toward progress that cut across party lines if not across class lines. At its heart was a desire to reconcile the market economy with the republic, to develop an approach that would accommodate the one without destroying the other. Whigs tended to be masters, merchants, and farmers who prospered or hoped to prosper in the new setting (and people aspired to join their ranks). They wanted to enjoy the benefits of the market while also preserving the republic, and their efforts at institution building were closely aimed at accomplishing this kind of delicate balance. This whig effort was part of the larger American compromise, starting in 1789 and continuing to this day, which has continually sought to strike just the right balance between the prime elements in a liberal republic. They sought to preserve economic liberty while also preserving republican politics. The whigs were the group that arose to reestablish this balance when the market economy posed the most severe threat to a liberal republic that Americans have ever faced.[6]
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 common 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. They took care of the various dependent populations that used to be supported through a person’s affiliation with a family farm or family shop. Each institution dealt with a particular dependent group that was left hanging by the wage labor system, a group that was incapable of supporting itself in the labor market and was also too much of a burden for wage earning families to manage on their own. These institutions took care of those who were too criminal (the penitentiary), too sick (the hospital), too crazy (the asylum), too old and poor (the poorhouse), and too young (the school) to earn wages and thus care for themselves. With the rise of a market economy, wage earners were not able to deal with these dependents on their own, since to do so would remove them from the wage labor force and leave their families without support. Whigs argued that the government needed to step in to fill the gap, providing a new kind of safety net for the populace while at the same time freeing up more people in their productive years to enter the workforce and make a contribution to the economy.
But whig reformers in Rochester (and in the U.S. more generally) saw a bigger mission for reform than the need to provide a social safety net for workers in the new market economy. At a deeper level, they wanted to resolve the core problem at the heart of the liberal republican compromise: how to create a moral and politically stable community that was made up of self-interested individuals; how to accommodate the republic with the market. The grandest of issues was at stake here: Could we maintain social order, the accumulation of wealth, individual liberty, and republican community – all in the same society? Rochester, like the rest of the United States, settled on an answer right around 1830. In Rochester’s case, the answer took a singular form. The great evangelical preacher, Charles Grandison Finney, came to town in 1830 and stayed for a year. By the time he was done, he had turned the city upside down and established a stable basis for a new social order.
Prior efforts by civic leaders to establish social stability in Rochester had failed miserably. During the late 1820s, city government, churches, and civic organizations had tried to fill the vacuum left by the decline in the social authority of masters by imposing such authority through law. Leaders sought to close bars, ban drinking, and prohibit activities on the Sabbath, all in the name of restoring social order. But with the disappearance of property qualifications for voting and the introduction of the secret ballot, the city’s broader and freer electorate soundly rejected these initiatives. And this was as much a failure of vision as an electoral defeat for the first wave of reformers. The problem was that imposing order from above was not only unfeasible in the new political environment but it was also economically counterproductive, since it threatened to restrain those individual liberties – free labor and free enterprise – that were so critical to the market economy. So reform took a turn away from imposition and toward education.
Finney was the most famous evangelist in the Second Great Awakening, the powerful wave of religious revival that swept across the United States in the period before the Civil War. His preaching in Rochester helped to establish that city as the heart of what came to be known as the Burned-Over District, the central and western part of New York State (along the route of the Erie Canal) that was the site of the most intense series of revivals in the country during this period. He succeeded in establishing a new social and moral order in the region, not through the force of law but through the power of persuasion, employing his superb preaching skills in service of a powerful theological message directed at the troubled citizens along the canal. His message was perfectly suited to the problems they faced in this difficult time of social transition. In Finney, the social crisis had found the social reformer with the skills and message that were best adapted to respond to this time of trouble and opportunity.
His theology was based on the principle of salvation by grace. Individuals could only save their souls if they were willing to make the decision to accept the grace of God and then to rededicate themselves to a new life as Christians. And the revival process was enormously effective in encouraging people to make this choice by using social modeling and social pressure. When people arrived at a revival, they found that their social betters – the local masters, merchants, and landowners – had already accepted grace and were welcoming newcomers to join them. And the revival’s combination of public exhortation, public prayer, and social outreach made it hard to resist the offer of the good news – combined with entry into the community of true believers who were also social leaders. But at the heart of this choice was more than social approval and social mobility; it was a profound decision to replace external control with internal control. Coming forward at the revival to accept the gift of grace meant agreeing to accept the precepts of social authority, internalizing these rules for behavior, and them imposing them on yourself. It meant giving up drink, developing sober work habits, observing the Sabbath, and being a productive member of your religious and social community.
Here was a formula for restoring social, political, and religious authority in a market economy; a formula that showed how individuals could be self-interested economic actors and still be orderly townspeople, civic-minded citizens, and upstanding Christians, all the while avoiding the kinds of traditional social controls that would undermine the freedoms needed for free enterprise. For masters, Finney offered a new social order based on sharing self regulation with their workers rather than imposing control on them. For workers, he offered an answer that reinforced their freedom from the master by allowing them to impose regulation on themselves; and since this new pattern of behavior was the same for workers and entrepreneurs, it offered the possibility that the one could become the other.
Grounding their efforts in this revivalist Protestant frame for reconstructing the antebellum social order, the whigs invented a powerful and enduring series of social institutions that were designed to carry it into social practice. Intended to establish a balance between the republic and the new economy and modeled after the structure of the religious revival, these institutions saw their primary function as education. Reformers established the penitentiary, hospital, asylum, poorhouse, and school all as educational institutions. Like Finney’s revivals, these institutions sought to persuade, inculcate, and educate individuals to regulate themselves; and like the revivals, they used mechanisms of social pressure and routines of habit building to accomplish their educational goals.
Although many, maybe most, of these institutions have tended over the years to hover closer to warehousing than educating their clients, that was not the primary intent of their whig founders. As I have noted, taking care of those whom the family could no longer handle was a secondary goal of the institutions, but the primary goal was not custody but conversion. The penitentiary was supposed to be a place for the inmate to become penitent, develop new work habits, and then return to society as a self regulating and productive participant. The hospital and asylum were supposed to rehabilitate patients and prepare them to take on responsibilities as citizens, family members, and workers. The poorhouse took care of the elderly who were unable to take care of themselves, but it also sought to retrain the younger and more able inmates in order to reintroduce them into the labor force. Every correctional officer, nurse, and attendant in these institutions was considered a kind of teacher.
Of all these institutions, the common school was the most comprehensive and the most fundamental. Whereas the others focused on discrete subgroups of the population, the school focused on the entire cohort of the young, and as a result its goals were broader and its potential social impact greater. The idea was provide one place in every community where every child would receive instruction, and the primary focus would be on moral and political education. The notion of education for economic growth was not in the vocabulary of the common school movement. Instead, the explicit aim of the movement was to provide students with an educational experience that would encourage them to become self regulating moral and political actors in society. Without resort to external supervision, they would be obedient to moral standards and committed to civic virtue. In the verbal shorthand of the movement, the school was focused on making citizens. And in line with the republican vision of education that came from Rush and Jefferson, this meant that a critical quality of the common school was its commonness. Citizens could not come together into a republican community unless the social differences among them were kept sufficiently modest that they would be able to find common ground. Under these circumstances, the mix of private, parochial, and pauper schools that was in place in the 1820s was no longer suitable for the task.
The Common School Movement
In the introduction to this book, I argued that Americans over the years have loaded enormous responsibility onto public education by asking it to take the lead in solving one major social problem after another. And as I have been showing in the current chapter, that process of placing massive responsibilities and high expectations on the schools was present at the birth of the U.S. public school system in the years before the Civil War. The social problems in United States in the 1820s and 30s were potentially catastrophic – threatening the dissolution of community, morality, and republic – and the key social response that reformers devised to solve these problems was to create the common school. The stakes don’t get any higher than this. Of course school reformers have always claimed that the stakes are high. But what distinguished the common school movement from all of its successors in the history of American school reform was that this reform movement accomplished its goal. More recent educational reformers have aimed for a lot and accomplished a little, but the common schoolmen established a system of education that not only reflected their goals but for the most part realized them. And the system they established, with only modest addition and alteration, is still with us today.
The common school movement spanned the years from 1830 to 1860. Its most prominent national leader was Horace Mann, a Whig politician who in 1837 became the first Secretary of the State Board of Education of Massachusetts and then used this position to promote the cause of the common schools. His speeches and widely republished annual reports reached a broad audience across the country. Massachusetts was a natural base for the movement, since it had the earliest start in developing public education with the “old deluder Satan” act of 1647. But, provoked by a common set of social problems, school reform efforts emerged spontaneously in a number of locations around the country, carried by dozens of local leaders who freely borrowed from each other until their efforts converged into a national movement. And the leaders of the common school movement were also frequently involved in efforts to establish other parallel whig institutions at the same time. For example, Roberts Vaux led the Philadelphia campaign for a common school system in the 1820s, but he was best known as the founder of Eastern State Penitentiary, the widely copied model for the new prison as reformatory. Along the way he also played a leading role in establishing Philadelphia asylums for the deaf, the blind, and the insane. For whig reformers like Vaux (a Quaker and a Jacksonian Democrat), all of these institutions were closely related answers to the same problem.
To understand the nature of the common school movement, we need to establish first what it was not trying to do. It was not an effort to persuade Americans to see education as important. As we have seen, education was already playing a prominent role in American life. It was not an effort to increase school enrollment, since such enrollments were already quite high. A study by Carl Kaestle and Maris Vinovskis shows that educational enrollments in Massachusetts were at a high level at the start of the 19th century and remained flat during the common school period through the middle of the century.[7] It was also not an effort to raise the literacy rate, which was already nearly universal in New England and elevated in the rest of the country. Instead, its central aim was to channel the existing school enrollments in every community into a single publicly-governed community school.
The problem for the movement was how to bring about this end. Different religious and ethnic groups were accustomed to having their own schools, and the middle and upper classes were comfortable in paying tuition for their children. Add to this the problem that public schools bore the stigma of charity. If only the poor and the unaffiliated continued to attend the public schools, they would fail to accomplish their grand republican aims. But removing the pauper test and opening the doors of the public school to everyone would succeed only if the whole community would be willing to accept the invitation.
One approach reformers took to selling the common schools was political, to emphasize the need for universal education in order to shore up the republic. As one leader of the movement in Philadelphia put it grandiloquently: “Ignorance in the masses is the aliment of usurpation and the safe-guard of tyranny. Education, confined to the favoured few, makes but a janizary guard for the tyrant. The only pedestal on which Liberty can stand erect, forever firmly poised, is UNIVERSAL EDUCATION.”[8] Another approach to selling the reform was religious, to build on the evangelical Protestant vision of sharing the faith, with masters inviting workers to join them in reforming themselves in response to the gift of grace. So reformers portrayed the common school as an ideal institution for instilling the new morality of self regulation.
A third marketing approach was social, to stir up fears of the social disorder that would run rampant without an effective institution for socializing the public. And if all these rhetorical approaches didn’t work, there was also the option of luring the well-to-do with special inducements. For example, the 1836 law that established the common school system in Philadelphia also established a high school. The leaders of the new school system deliberately made the high school more attractive than the best private academies in the city – with a marble edifice, the latest scientific equipment, and a faculty of distinguished professors – and then announced that students could only be admitted to the high school if they had first attended the common elementary schools.
The arguments worked, and in one community after another emerged a structure of schooling in the new mold. By the outbreak of the Civil War, all of the elements of the new educational system were firmly in place.
The Common School System, Then and Now
It is worth pausing at this point to analyze the components of the common school system. At one level, the structure of the system poses promise for reformers, showing how a school reform movement can be truly effective by creating a system whose form and function align closely with the movement’s guiding ideas. But at another level, it also poses caution for reformers, showing how the organizational machinery of a school system created for one purpose can make it ill suited for other purposes. The school system put in place by the common school movement had the following emergent characteristics: community-wide enrollment, public control, local control, age grading, teacher training, big government, and curriculum marginality. Let’s consider the nature of each of these elements and also the implications of each for later school reform efforts.
Community-Wide Enrollment: The most important principle defining the common school was that it drew its students from the entire surrounding community. The whig-republican mission made this central. By including students from all walks of life and putting them through the same educational experience, schools could help alleviate the growing class divisions in the new market society. Students would emerge from this experience with a lot in common, which would help offset substantial differences in other parts of their lives, and which would help prepare them to interact as members of the same republican community. In addition, the school experience would focus on instilling in all students a degree of self regulation, which would allow them to function as independent citizens, workers, and community members while still maintaining a common commitment to civic virtue, work ethics, and public morality.
The tradition of the community school has remained important throughout the history of American education. In the 19th century, the community was inclusive by social class and gender but not when it came to race, since blacks, Indians, Chinese, and Hispanics were all consigned to separate institutions if they were educated at all. The mid 20th century saw efforts to broaden access to racial minority groups through the desegregation movement, which then expanded the community even more widely by seeking to include students with disabilities into the regular classroom and to end tracking by gender. More recently, the school standards movement has drawn on this tradition to argue for imposing a common academic standard on all students in order to make sure that no child is left behind.
But sometimes the community school has been a bone of contention for reformers. Administrative progressives in the early 20th century sought to track students by ability and future job, which introduced de facto segregation by social class and immigrant status and later by race. And the contemporary school choice movement has argued for breaking up the public school monopoly, which compels everyone in a given geographical area to attend the local public school, in order to allow consumers to select alternative private schools and public charter schools that are tailored to their values and wishes.
Public Funding: The common schools could not enroll everybody in the community without drawing on public funds to overcome differences in ability to pay. The earliest common schools often supplemented public appropriations with fees charged to students, but these were generally waived for students who couldn’t pay and gradually disappeared over the years. This shift toward public subsidy of education from a mixed public-private model meant that education quickly became a dominant issue in state and local politics, since schools devoured such a large portion of the public purse. No longer a matter only for private concern, schooling took center stage, where it was exposed to withering critiques as well as public acclaim and was subjected to a variety of public pressures. After all, the thinking went, since we’re already paying for schools, shouldn’t they be doing something about the latest looming social problem? So the intensely public character of the common school system made it the target of recurring efforts at social reform.
Local Control: From the very beginning, control of the common schools was radically localized. Decisions about funding, hiring, and curriculum rested in the hands of the elected (or sometimes politically appointed) board of a local school district, and the districts for a long time were quite small. One-school districts were the norm in rural areas and smaller towns. No one knows the actual numbers of districts in the 19th century; but when the federal government starting counting districts in 1938, after 40 years of aggressive efforts at consolidation, there were still 120,000. Now they number about 14,000.
One consequence of this structure of local control is that it created a legacy of weak school administration. For most of the 19th century, school administration was so decentralized and districts were so small that administration was a part time job. In most districts, with only one school, the principal and superintendent were the same person. In larger districts, the grammar school master or high school principal was superintendent; there was no administrative staff. True professional administration didn’t start to emerge until the latter part of the century and then only in the larger cities.
For reformers over the years, this decentralized structure has posed both a problem and an opportunity. The problem is this: How can you disseminate reforms when governance is so widely dispersed and implement the reforms at the local level? One answer has been for reformers to push for an increased role by the state and federal governments, and another has been to push for mechanisms, like curriculum standards and testing requirements, which restrict district autonomy and bring local practice in line with reform policies. But so far neither approach has managed to make more than a dent in local resistance to outside reform initiatives.
The opportunity posed by decentralization is that there are many ways to try initiating reforms within the system. You don’t have to rely on a process of dispersion from the center to the periphery; instead, you can try something new in a remote district without the support of a national reform movement or state educational policymakers. As a result, the system encourages a process of reform that is diverse, dispersed, and chronic. Every school becomes potentially an independent site of reform experimentation. This makes it easy for us to use school reform repeatedly to address social problems, which is a key element of the American school syndrome.[9]
Age Grading: In rural areas and small towns, one room schools remained the norm long after the establishment of the common school system. (Fewer than 400 persist today, but as recently as 1919 there were 190,000.)[10] But in most towns and cities, a more complex structure of the school emerged quickly with the arrival of universal education. In response to the growing size of the school, educators started dividing students into manageable groups, and age was a natural basis for this since it correlated with cognitive development. But age grading also arose from ideology. The common school mission called for a form of education that was powerful enough to instill within students a deep sense of citizenship, self regulation, and moral conscience. By organizing students by developmental stage, educators created the possibility that the whole class could be taught the same subject at the same level and that forces of peer pressure and emulation could help reinforce the learning process. In this sense, the age-graded school drew on insights from the revival movement and its techniques for promoting conversion.
Age grading, however, came to pose particular challenges for future educational reformers. When over time a gap emerged between the age of students and their level of academic achievement, educators faced the dilemma of which criterion to use in promoting students to the next grade. This tension between social promotion (by age) and merit promotion (by achievement) has been a chronic concern for reform movements over the years. Opting for social promotion, progressive reformers chose to group students in each grade by their differing abilities and curriculum levels. Opting for merit promotion, reformers in the standards movement have pushed to establish common achievement and curriculum standards for students in each grade.
Teacher Training: For common school reformers, schooling was too important for political and social life to be left to private option and private funding; and it followed that teaching in the common schools was also too important for leaders to leave the preparation and recruitment of teachers to chance. So common school reformers worked hard to develop public normal schools that could provide teacher preparation. But normal schools remained relatively scarce until the latter part of the 19th century, and even by 1900 they were not preparing a majority of teachers. Most elementary teachers came to the classroom with little more than the experience of having completed the course of study that they were now trying to teach. Under these circumstances, the normal schools often played a role that was less practical (preparing teachers) than symbolic (providing a model of what teaching should be). (The term “normal school” came from the French école normale, and it carried the meaning of setting the norm for schooling.) Accompanying the move toward normal schools was a parallel effort to establish state certification of teachers, with both intended to insure that the common schools were able to carry out their mission.
One result of these efforts to develop systematic preparation of teachers was that every subsequent school reform movement needed to launch a parallel movement to reform teacher education if it was going to have teachers who would teach in line with the reform. Another was that if reformers came to feel that teacher education institutions were part of the problem rather than part of the solution, they could always look to establish alternative routes into teaching that would bypass education schools to supply reform-minded instructors into the classroom. The current movements for academic standards and school choice have pursued both of these options.
Big Government: Like the rest of the common school enterprise, the establishment of normal schools bore the imprint of the whig vision for early America. In an interesting parallel with New Deal reformers a century later, whig reformers felt that they could save capitalism from its own dangerous side effects only by sharply enhancing the role of government. In the 1930s this meant expanding government to provide social security, increased welfare, bank regulation, public insurance, and public employment. In the antebellum period, this meant expanding government to provide canals, turnpikes, and railroads; penitentiaries, hospitals, asylums, and poorhouses; common schools and normal schools. This amounted to a huge increase in the state, enlisting it in the effort to protect both the market economy and the political and social structure of the country. As we have seen, whig reformers asked the state to assume two major functions that had not been part of its purview before that point. Reformers asked it to take on the care of the dependent members of society, who were unable to earn their way in a wage labor economy and who could no longer be supported by their families. And they also asked the state to take on the education of the populace in order to create a new kind of self regulating citizen, soul, and conscience. The common school system was the largest institution for pursuing the first goal, and it was the model for all other institutions in carrying out the second.
Ever since the common school movement, school reformers have debated how best to use the powers of government to render schools more effective in solving social problems. As schools kept taking on new roles, they also needed to add new staff, specialists, curriculum units, and administrators, which amounted to a large increase in the size and social intrusiveness of government. The progressive movement was a particularly extensive development of schooling in this direction. But recently we have seen a growing reaction to the school as the extension of big government. In particular, the school choice movement has launched a frontal assault on the legitimacy of government schools, arguing that schooling works best if government cedes control to empowered consumers, who select the schooling for their children in a competitive educational market.
Curriculum Marginality: The aspect of the common school system that had perhaps the greatest long-term impact was its emphasis on commonality over content. Recall that Americans were already highly literate before the invention of the common school, so the massive public investment in constructing the school system in the mid 19th century did little to increase rates of literacy. The system did not even increase the likelihood that a young person would receive an education, since that was already taking place in some form or other for most Americans in the early part of the century. What the system did do was increase the likelihood that young people, in company with a cross section of the local community, would acquire their education in the setting of a formally constituted school, which was publicly controlled, age graded, and run by a trained teacher. The system’s primary accomplishment was to provide a shared experience of schooling for the populace. This helped to create a new form of community for a liberal republic; and it also helped to socialize students in new norms of self control and internalized social values that prepared them to play the role of self-regulating actor in a market economy.
One thing the system never emphasized, however, was learning the school curriculum. Not that these schools lacked formal study in school subjects. Far from it. They had students read textbooks, listen to lectures, practice their lessons, do homework, and take tests to determine how much they had learned. After all, that’s what schools do. But aside from the basics of literacy and numeracy training, the specific content of this curriculum was less important than the process of learning it in the company of peers and in the setting of a classroom. Community came from being socialized in the values of a liberal republic and from having the shared experience of schooling. What students learned about math, science, literature, and history – the four core school subjects then and now – was beside the point. Horace Mann wrote a lot about the political aims of schooling and his fellow common school reformer Henry Barnard wrote a book about school architecture, but neither showed much interest in talking about importance of learning school subjects. In many ways, for them and for the common school movement in general, the common form of the schools was its content. Being there was the most important thing.
At the elementary level, which was the primary focus of the common school movement, schooling was all about open access and shared experience. But this started to change at the end of the 19th century, when elementary schools were filling up and a sharply increasing number of students began to attend high school. High school at that point was a markedly uncommon experience, shared by fewer than 10 percent of students, and the relative scarcity of a high school education granted its recipients a form of invidious distinction. This is not to say that the subjects learned in high school were any more socially salient than the subjects learned at the lower levels of the system. Social advantage didn’t arise because the high school content was useful but because access to these subjects was limited. Thus in the 20th century the key issue in the politics of education became this new tension between the open access and the special advantage that schooling could provide individual consumers. The central fights that emerged were over who would get access to high school (and later college) and how families with educational advantage could retain their edge in the face of growing enrollments at one level of the system and then another.
So one legacy of the marginality of curriculum in the common school system is that it helped spur the ongoing struggle over access to schooling. Another is that it provided the central issue for a new reform movement that – finally, after 150 years of public schooling in the U.S. – sought to make learning the curriculum the system’s central aim. The standards movement in the late 20th century was the first major American reform effort that focused on trying to improve the quality of student achievement in school subjects. We have yet to see how successful that effort will be.
A School Reform That Worked
In this book about the social role of schools and the limits of school reform, the common school movement is the one big success story. It was a school reform that worked, and none of the later reform movements came close to realizing their goals the way it did. The common school movement demonstrated its power in two ways. It had a huge impact on the educational system, effectively creating a structure of schooling in its own image. And it played a critical role in resolving the social crisis that provoked reform in the first place. Let’s look at each of these in turn.
I think I’ve already established the first point in the preceding analysis, where I showed how the central organizational characteristics of the of the common school system expressed the core vision of the common school movement. The reformers had some distinct advantages in creating a system that realized their vision, all deriving from newness. The U.S. was a brand new country, which in revolution had shrugged off much of its British inheritance and thus was free to invent new traditions instead of following old ones. It had educational practices that preceded the development of the common school, but it had no preexisting school system, whose precedents, habits, and organizational momentum might have acted as a drag on radical reform. In the 1820s, the country was undergoing a social transformation that was so threatening to its existence that modest incremental change seemed inadequate to the task and dramatic forms of social innovation seemed prudent and even conservative. In response to this challenge, school reformers found themselves part of a broad movement to invent new social institutions, each part of which reinforced the others. And operating at a time only 30 years after the founding of the U.S., the whig reformers could pursue social reinvention free of the kind of social undertow that would have restricted the scope of innovation in a more established society.
Common school reformers successfully built on these advantages to construct a school system whose core organizational characteristics faithfully expressed the whig agenda. Community-wide enrollment, public funding, and local control produced an inclusive and self regulating community in the school, which in turn promoted the possibility of creating and reinforcing republican community. Age grading and teacher training promoted the kind of modeling, social pressure, peer competition, and professional instruction that would push students to learn and take to heart their new roles as citizens. And the invention of the common school system exemplified the whig view that education in the broadest sense – inducting the populace into the new social order – was the responsibility of an expansive state.
Making the case that the common school movement had a powerful impact on the school system is relatively easy, but establishing that this action was effective in solving the social problems that first provoked the reform is potentially more difficult. After all, the movement had extraordinarily ambitious goals: establish a new social order by educating the new citizen. It’s hard to measure the outcomes of such an effort and even harder to attribute these outcomes to a particular institutional invention. But I think there is compelling evidence that this is a reform that was able to accomplish much of what it set out for itself.
A new social order did indeed replace the old one in the years before the Civil War, and this new order resolved the crisis of the 1820s by filling the void left by the sudden collapse of the previous organization of social and economic life. This is exactly what the common school reformers were aiming to do. Of course, it could simply have been a coincidence, which had nothing to do with the construction of a common school system. But this new social order was organized precisely along the lines sought by the whigs who were behind the common school and the other related efforts to establish new institutions in the antebellum years. It effected a grand compromise between the market and the republic, saving republican community while preserving the rapidly expanding market economy.
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. As realized in the new social order, this vision would allow individuals to participate as self interested entrepreneurs and workers in the market economy by ensuring that they internalized the political, religious, and moral controls that were needed in order to maintain the U.S. as a Protestant republican nation. The common schools could not take all the credit for this stunning reconstruction of society, since there many other institutional innovations that moved this agenda forward. But all of these new institutions shared a common form and function, and all of them were constructed around the educational model set by the common schools. Under the circumstances, it’s hard to see how the common school movement could be denied major credit for bringing about the resolution of the great social crisis of the early republic.
If this is what the common school movement accomplished, what kind of legacy did that leave to the American educational system and its social role in American life? First, the common school system had a structure that was perfectly attuned to the demands of the early 19th century but not necessarily well adapted to the American society that evolved over the next 200 years. Future reform movements would struggle with the problem of trying to accommodate this old system to new social missions.
Second, the common school movement set a dangerous, even impossible, precedent by presenting the public schools as the most effective way to fix social problems, including the most deep-seated and difficult. As a result, it prompted later reform movements to try to use the schools to repair society and perfect its members, extrapolating from the whig experience in the antebellum U.S. to other situations. In the later period, however, the advantages of newness had long since evaporated, and the entrenched organization of the school system resisted redeployment against problems that were markedly different from those it was designed to solve.
Third, the system established schooling as a central focus of the American experience. The school became the central institution in every community, the largest expenditure for every local government, and the primary locus of growing up for every citizen. As such, it became the natural technology for dealing with social problems, large and small, and the natural scapegoat for any failures in these efforts at social improvement
Fourth, the system placed a priority on the experience of schooling over the experience of learning. Gaining access to school was the key for individual consumers, and educational success came to be measured in time served rather than subjects mastered. In these terms, then, the crucial question for parents in the 20th century became: how many years of schooling do my children have compared to yours?
David Labaree on Schooling, History, and Writing 