Aristocratic Education and the Making of the American Republic

Abstract

In Aristocratic Education and the Making of the American Republic, Mark Boonshoft traces the history of a distinctive form of secondary school—the academy—from its origins in the First Great Awakening to the democratizing reforms of the early national era. Boonshoft focuses less on the everyday life of academies than on the circumstances of their creation: chartering, funding, mission, and the political, religious, and socioeconomic profiles of their supporters. Academies mattered for reasons symbolic and practical: they were, Boonshoft argues, “central civic institutions, perhaps second only to county courthouses” in many eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century communities (p. 5). “Aristocratic education” is to some extent a misnomer for the book, because the heart of its story line concerns the process by which academies were gradually recast as more innovative, flexible, widely accessible institutions that anticipated the development of the modern high school. Academies were—in a limited, American way—aristocratic at their inception,...