Abstract
The study of colonial and antebellum American education received a major impetus almost five decades ago when Bernard Bailyn and Lawrence Cremin challenged scholars to critically re-examine education and schooling in the past (especially employing a broader definition of education than had been used by most previous authors).1 Since the mid-1960s scholars have made major contributions to our understanding of the role of parents, churches, and schools in educating early Americans. Yet there has been relatively little overlap between the historians who investigate education before and after 1800. In addition, the education issues addressed by colonial historians differ from those pursued by antebellum analysts—partly reflecting societal variations in the past as well as the particular concerns of the current scholars studying those two timeperiods.
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Notes
Bernard Bailyn, Education in the Forming of American Society (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1960), passim.
For example, see James Axtell, The School Upon a Hill: Education and Society in Colonial New England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974);
David D. Hall, Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment: Popular Religious Belief in Early New England (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1989);
E. Jennifer Monaghan, Learning to Read and Write in Colonial America (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2005).
In a study of the process by which America became modern, for example, Jon Butler has nothing to say about education, which as traditional theory suggests, was instrumental to the movement of traditional societies into modernity Jon Butler, Becoming America: The Revolution before 1776, new ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001).
For a recent call to study the impact of social change on education as well as the influence of schools on society, see John L. Rury, Education and Social Change: Themes in the History of American Schooling, 2nd ed. (Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 2005).
Joel Perlmann, Silvana R. Siddali, and Keith Whitescarver, “Literacy, Schooling, and Teaching among New England Women, 1730–1820,” History of Education Quarterly 37 (Spring 1997): 118–19.
R. A. Houston, Literacy in Early Modern Europe, 2nd ed. (London: Pearson Education, 2002), 125–39
Kenneth A. Lockridge, Literacy in Colonial New England: An Enquiry into the Social Context of Literacy in the Early Modern West (New York: W. W Norton, 1974).
Linda Auwers, “Reading the Marks of the Past,” Historical Methods 13 (1980): 205. Auwers found that female mark-signature literacy rose from 27 percent, 41 percent, and 48 percent, respectively, for the birth cohorts 1650–69, 1670–89, and 1690–1709 and to 76 percent and 81 percent, respectively, for the birth cohorts 1710–29 and 1730–49.
Perlmann, Siddali, and Whitescarver, “Literacy, Schooling, and Teaching among New England Women, 1730–1820,” 120–21. Gilmore reported that while six out of ten women could sign in 1777–86 (similar to Main’s data on rural Massachusetts in the 1760s), more than eight out of ten could do so in the period 1787–1806; Gloria L. Main, “An Inquiry into When and Why Women Learned to Write in Colonial New England,” Journal of Social History 24 (Spring 1991): 581–86.
Joel Perlman and Dennis Shirley, “When Did New England Women Acquire Literacy?” William and Mary Quarterly 48 (1991): 50–67.
Perlmann, Siddali, and Whitescarver, “Literacy, Schooling, and Teaching among New England Women, 1730–1820,” 139. For a thoughtful discussion of male and female schoolteachers, see Jo Anne Preston, “‘He Lives as a Master’: Seventeenth-Century Masculinity, Gendered Teaching, and Careers of New England School Masters,” History of Education Quarterly 43 (Fall 2004): 350–71.
Kathryn Kish Sklar, “The Schooling of Girls and Changing Community Values in Massachusetts Towns, 1750–1820,” History of Education Quarterly 24 (Winter 1991): 537.
Perlmann and Shirley, “When Did New England Women Acquire Literacy?” 64–65. In a recent essay, Daniel Howe has argued that “the American Enlightenment had made big plans for education in the young republic, but proved unable to carry them out effectively.” Daniel Walker Howe, “Church, State, and Education in the Young American Republic,” Journal of the Early Republic 22 (Spring 2002): 18.
Sheldon S. Cohen, A History of Colonial Education, 1607–1776 (New York: John Wiley, 1974).
Elsie W. Clews, Educational Legislation and Administration of the Colonial Governments (New York: no publisher, 1899).
Gerald F. Moran and Maris A. Vinovskis, “Schooling, Mass Literacy, and Gender in America, 1630–1870,” manuscript, 2007.
Farley Grubb, “Colonial Immigrant Literacy: An Economic Analysis of Pennsylvania, 1727–1775,” Explorations in Economic History 24 (January 1987): 63–76;
Farley Grubb, “Educational Choice in the Era before Free Public Schooling: Evidence from German Immigrant Children in Pennsylvania, 1771–1817,” Journal of Economic History 52 (June 1992): 363–75.
Robert E. Gallman, “Changes in the Level of Literacy in a New Community of Early America,” Journal of Economic History 48 (September 1988): 567–82.
David W. Galenson, “Literacy and the Social Origins of Some Early Americans,” Historical Journal 22 (March 1979): 75–91. As Galenson has shown, the mark-signature literacy of 2,792 male indentured servants who emigrated from in the period 1718–1719 was “considerably higher than for the English population at large.”
Mechal Sobel, The World They Made Together: Black and White Values in Eighteenth-Century Virginia (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), chap. 14.
Janet D. Cornelius, When I Can Read My Title Clear: Literacy, Slavery, and Religion in the Antebellum South (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1991).
Jill Lepore, The Name of War: King Philips War and the Origins of American Identity (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998).
Gaither, American Educational History Revisited; and Carl F. Kaestle, Pillars of the Republic: Common Schools and American Society, 1780–1860 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1983), xi. Kaestle has provided a useful definition of common schools: “By ‘common school’ I mean an elementary school intended to serve all children in an area. An expensive independent school obviously, would not be a ‘common school,’ but neither would a charity school open only to the poor.”
Ellwood P. Cubberley, Public Education in the United States: A Study and Interpretation of American Educational History (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1919).
Sidney L. Jackson, America’s Struggle for Free Schools: Social Tension and Education in New England and New York, 1827–42 (Washington, DC: American Council on Public Affairs, 1942);
George H. Martin, The Evolution of the Massachusetts Public School System (New York: D. Appleton, 1902).
Ellwood P. Cubberley, Rural Life and Education: A Study of the Rural-School Problem as a Phase of the Rural-Life Problem (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1914);
Thomas Woody, A History of Women’s Education in the United States, 2 vols. (New York: Science Press, 1929).
Raymond B. Culver, Horace Mann and Religion in the Massachusetts Public Schools (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1929);
B. A. Hinsdale, Horace Mann and the Common School Revival in the United States (New York: C. Scribner’s Sons, 1898);
Louise Hall Tharp, Until Victory: Horace Mann and Mary Peabody (Boston: Little Brown, 1953);
and E. I. F. Williams, Horace Mann: Educational Statesman (New York: Macmillan, 1937).
For useful overviews of the history of education in the mid-1970s, see Sol Cohen, “The History of Education in the United States,” in Urban Education in the Nineteenth Century: Proceedings of the 1976 Annual Conference of the History of Education Society of Great Britain, ed. D. A. Reeder (London: Taylor and Francis, 1977), 115–32;
Lawrence A. Cremin, Traditions of American Education (New York: Basic Books, 1977);
Michael B. Katz, “The Origins of Public Education: A Reassessment,” History of Education Quarterly 16 (Winter 1976): 381–407.
Michael B. Katz, The Irony of Early School Reform: Educational Innovation in Mid-Nineteenth Century Massachusetts (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968), 1.
Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, Schooling in Capitalist America: Educational Reform and the Contradictions of Economic Life (New York: Basic Books, 1976), 178–79.
Diane Ravitch, The Revisionists Revised: A Critique of the Radical Attack on the Schools (New York: Basic Books, 1978).
Walter Feinberg, Harvey Kantor, Michael Katz, and Paul Violas, Revisionists Respond to Ravitch (Washington, DC: National Academy of Education, 1980).
Carl F. Kaestle, The Evolution of an Urban System: New York City, 1750–1850 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973).
Also see Stanley K Schultz, The Culture Factory: Bostom Public Schools, 1789–1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973);
and Selwyn K Troen, The Public and the Schools: Shaping the St. Louis System, 1838–1920 (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 1975).
Albert Fishlow, “The American Common School Revival: Fact or Fancy?” in Industrialization in Two Systems: Essays in Honor of Alexander Gershenkron, ed. Henry Rosovsky (New York: Wiley, 1966), 40–67.
For a re-analysis of Fishlow’s Massachusetts school data, see Maris A. Vinovskis, “Trends in Massachusetts Education, 1826–1860,” History of Education Quarterly 12 (Winter 1976): 501–29.
Carl F. Kaestle and Maris A. Vinovskis, Education and Social Change in Nineteenth-Century Massachusetts (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1980);
Lee Soltow and Edward W. Stevens, Jr., The Rise of Literacy and the Common School in the United States: A Socio-Economic Analysis to 1870 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981).
Kaestle, Pillars of the Republic, 13–74; Maris A. Vinovskis, Education, Society, and Economic Opportunity: A Historical Perspective on Persistent Issues (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 73–91. Although Bowles and Gintis at times acknowledged the differences in antebellum common schools, in general they focused heavily on Massachusetts. They justified this by pointing out that “the experience of Massachusetts was not perfectly replicated elsewhere, but we believe (and present some evidence) that the course of educational change in this state is not atypical of the rest of the country” Bowles and Gintis, Schooling in Capitalist America, 155.
On southern antebellum education, see Kaestle, Pillars of the Republic, 192–217; Bruce W. Eelman, “An Educated and Intelligent People Cannot be Enslaved: The Struggle for Common Schools in Antebellum Spartanburg, South Carolina,” History of Education Quarterly 44 (Summer 2004): 250–70;
Joseph W. Newman, “Antebellum School Reform in the Port Cities of the Deep South,” in Southern Cities, Southern Schools: Public Education in the Urban South, ed. David N. Plank and Rick Ginsberg (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1990), 17–36;
Kathyrn Walbert, “‘Endeavor to Improve Yourself’: The Education of White Women in the Antebellum South,” in Chartered Schools: Two Hundred Years of Independent Academies in the United States, 1727–1925, ed. Nancy Beadie and Kim Tolley (New York: Routledge Falmer, 2002), 116–36;
Jonathan Daniel Wells, “The Origins of the Southern Middle Class: Literature, Politics, and Economy, 1820–1880,” PhD diss., University of Michigan, 1998, chap. 3.
Mary McDougall Gordon, “Patriots and Christians: A Reassessment of Nineteenth-Century School Reformers,” Journal of Social History 11 (1978): 554–73; Kaestle, Pillars of the Republic;
Ira Katznelson and Margaret Weir, Schooling for All: Class, Race, and the Decline of the Democratic Ideal (New York: Basic Books, 1985);
David Tyack and Elisabeth Hansot, Managers of Virtue: Public School Leadership in America, 1820–1980 (New York: Basic Books, 1982);
Maris A. Vinovskis, The Origins of Public High Schools: A Reexamination of the Beverly High School Controversy (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985);
Julie M. Walsh, The Intellectual Origins of Mass Parties and Mass Schools in the Jacksonian Period: Creating a Conformed Citizenry (New York: Garland, 1998).
Kaestle, Pillars of the Republic; William J. Reese, America’s Public Schools: From the Common School to “No Child Left Behind” (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 2005), 10–44; John Rury, Education and Social Change, 57–93;
Maris A. Vinovskis, “Education and the Economic Transformation of Nineteenth-Century America,” in Age and Structural Lag, ed. Matilda White Riley, Robert L. Kahn, and Anne Foner (New York: John Wiley, 1994), 171–96.
Nancy Beadie, “Female Students and Denominational Affiliation: Sources of Success and Variation among Nineteenth-Century Academics,” American Journal of Education 107 (1999): 75–115;
Nancy Beadie and Kim Tolley, eds., Chartered Schools: Two Hundred Years of Independent Academics in the United States, 1727–1925 (New York: Routledge Falmer, 2002);
Mary Kelley, Learning to Stand and Speak: Women, Education, and Public Life in America’s Republic (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006);
Margaret A. Nash, Women’s Education in the United States, 1780–1840 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005).
Richard M. Bernard and Maris A. Vinovskis, “The Female School Teacher in Antebellum America,” Journal of Social History 10 (Spring 1977): 332–45;
Mary Carroll Johansen, “‘Female Instruction and Improvement’: Education for Women in Maryland, Virginia, and the District of Columbia, 1785–1835,” PhD diss., College of William and Mary, 1996;
Donald H. Parkerson and Jo Ann Parkerson, Transitions in American Education: A Social History of Teaching (New York: Routledge Falmer, 2001);
Joel Perlmann and Robert A. Margo, Women’s Work? American School Teachers, 1650–1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001);
John L. Rury, “Who Became Teachers? The Social Characteristics of Teachers in American History,” in American Teachers: Histories of a Profession at Work, ed. Donald Warren (New York: Macmillan, 1989), 9–48;
Maris A. Vinovskis and Richard M. Bernard, “Beyond Catherine Beecher: Female Education in the Antebellum Period,” Signs 3 (Summer 1978): 856–69.
Cornelius, When I Can Read My Title Clear; Robert L. McCaul, The Black Struggle for Public Schooling in Nineteenth-Century Illinois (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1987);
William S. McFeely, Frederick Douglas (New York: Norton, 1991);
John L. Rury, “The New York African Free School, 1825–1835: Conflict Over Community Control,” Phylon 45 (1983): 187–98;
Thomas L. Webber, Deep Like the Rivers: Education in the Slave Quarter Community, 1831–1865 (New York: Norton, 1978).
Nina Silber, “A Compound of Wonderful Potency: Women Teachers of the North in the Civil War South,” in The War Was You and Me: Civilians in the American Civil War, ed. Joan E. Cashin (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), 35–59.
George H. Callcott, History in the United States, 1800–1860: Its Practice and Purpose (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1970);
Douglas Alan Jones, “The Tradition of Didacticism in America’s Early Reading Textbooks, 1780–1830,” PhD diss., Michigan State University, 1990; Kelley, Learning to Stand and Speak;
Cynthia Marie Koch, “The Virtuous Curriculum: Schoolbooks and American Culture, 1785–1830,” PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1991; Gerald F. Moran and Maris A. Vinovskis, “Schooling, Literacy, and Textbooks in the Early Republic,” in A History of the Book in America, vol. 2 (forthcoming); Lisa Roberge Pichnarcik, “The Role of Books in Connecticut Women’s Education in the New Republic: As Examined in Sarah Pierce’s Litchfield Female Academy and James Morris’ Coeducational Academy,” master’s thesis, Southern Connecticut State University, 1996;
Edward W. Stevens, Jr., The Grammar of the Machine: Technical Literacy and Early Industrial Expansion in the United States (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995);
Curtis Brent Wilken, “An Examination of American Reading Textbooks, 1785–1819, as an Expression of Eighteenth-Century Rhetorical Theory, and as a Precursor to Nineteenth-Century Writing Instruction,” PhD diss., Ball State University, 2003.
Jurgen Herbst, The Once and Future School: Three Hundred and Fifty Years of American Secondary Education (New York: Routledge, 1996), 11–39.
Robert Middlekauff, Ancients and Axioms: Secondary Education in Eighteenth Century New England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963).
Nancy Beadie, “Internal Improvement: The Structure and Culture of Academy Expansion in New York State in the Antebellum Era, 1820–1860,” in Chartered Schools: Two Hundred Years of Independent Academies in the United States, 1727–1925, ed. Nancy Beadie and Kim Tolley (New York: Routledge Falmer, 2002), 89–115.
It was initially called the Boston English Classical High School, but it was renamed three years later as the Boston English High School. On the origins of the Boston English High School and the difficulties of establishing a comparable school for girls, see William J. Reese, The Origins of the American High School (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), 1–15.
Emit Duncan Grizzell, Origin and Development of the High School in New England before 1865 (New York: Macmillan, 1923);
Alexander Inglis, The Rise of the High School in Massachusetts (New York: Teachers College Press, 1911).
Vinovskis, The Origins of Public High Schools. Katz and Stevens were asked to write review essays of The Origins of Public High Schools, and Vinovskis agreed to respond. The three interesting and useful essays were published in History of Education Quarterly, 27 (Summer 1987): 241–58, and reprinted in Vinovskis, Education, Society, and Economic Opportunity, 126–41. Readers may also want to consult the 2001 introduction to the re-issue of Katz’s book, Michael B. Katz, The Irony of Early School Reform: Educational Innovation in Mid-Nineteenth Century Massachusetts (New York: Teachers College Press, 2001), xiii–xxxix.
Reese, The Origins of the American High School, 59–79. On the debates over mid-western high schools, see David L. Angus, “Conflict, Class, and the Nineteenth-Century Public High School in the Cities of the Midwest, 1845–1900,” Curriculum Inquiry 18 (1988): 7–31.
While Labaree does not try to calculate directly what percentage of children attended high school, the figure provided certainly suggests that the percentage would have been small. David F. Labaree, The Making of an American High School: The Credentials Market and the Central High School of Philadelphia, 1838–1939 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), 26–27.
Stephan Thernstrom, Poverty and Progress: Social Mobility in a Nineteenth Century City (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965), 23. For a sophisticated, statistical refutation of Thernstrom’s assertions about the Irish, home ownership, and the school attendance of their children,
see Steven Herscovici, “Ethnic Differences in School Attendance in Antebellum Massachusetts: Evidence from Newburyport, 1850–1860,” Social Science History 18 (Winter 1994): 471–96.
Vinovskis, Education, Society, and Economic Opportunity, 142–56. Also see David L. Angus, “A Note on the Occupational Backgrounds of Public High School Students Prior to 1940,” Journal of Midwest History of Education Society 9 (1981): 158–84.
Katz, “The Origins of Public Education,” 403. In a subsequent study of social mobility in Hamilton, Ontario in 1861, Katz and his colleagues downplayed the importance of education for social mobility even further: “School attendance itself, it is important to stress, did virtually nothing to promote occupational mobility. With other factors held constant, school attendance exerted no influence on the occupation of young men traced from one decade to another.” Michael B. Katz, Michael J. Doucet, and Mark J. Stern, The Social Organization of Early Industrial Capitalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), 275.
Reed Ueda, Avenues to Adulthood: The Origins of the High School and Social Mobility in an American Suburb (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 179.
Joel Perlmann, Ethnic Differences: Schooling and Social Structure among the Irish, Italians, Jews, and Blacks in the American City, 1880–1935 (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 38.
Beadie and Tolley, Chartered Schools; Jurgen Herbst, And Sadly Teach: Teacher Education and Professionalization in American Culture (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), 12–31, 57–86; Nash, Women’s Education in the United States, 1780–1840;
Christine A. Ogren, The American State Normal School: “An Instrument of Great Good” (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005); Reese, The Origins of American High School.
Reese, The Origins of the American High School, 208–35; Kim Tolley, “Science for Ladies, Classics for Gentlemen: A Comparative Analysis of Scientific Subjects in the Curricula of Boys and Girls Secondary Schools in the United States, 1794–1850,” History of Education Quarterly 36 (Spring 1996): 129–53.
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Moran, G.F., Vinovskis, M.A. (2008). Literacy, Common Schools, and High Schools in Colonial and Antebellum America. In: Reese, W.J., Rury, J.L. (eds) Rethinking the History of American Education. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230610460_2
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