Education and the Creation of Capital in the Early American Republic (review)

Abstract

Education and Creation of Capital in Early American Republic. By Nancy Beadie. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Pp. xiv, 353. Cloth, $95.00.)Reviewed by William W. Cutler, IIILike many scholarly books, this one began as a dissertation, although it took longer to be published than might be expected. As a graduate student at Syracuse University in 1980s, Nancy Beadie ventured into university's archives where she discovered collection that would become basis for her book. Established in 1870, Syracuse traces its origins to Genesee Wesleyan Seminary (GWS), an academy that was founded in Lima, New York in 1832. Institutional histories occupy an established albeit undistinguished place in historiography of American education, but this book is not an institutional history. Far from it! Rather, it is a nuanced analysis of role that church and school played in economic, social, and political development of western New York in first half of nineteenth century. The breadth of its research and depth of its scholarship justifies many years its author devoted to it.The book's argument revolves around concept of social capital, an idea most often associated with work of social scientists like Theda Skocpol, Robert Putnam, Claudia Goldin, and Lawrence Katz. They have argued that a community's wealth derives not just from its economic assets but also from its social relationships. To make most of their property, knowledge, and skills, a community's members must trust one another. They must associate closely to leverage their assets. Applying this concept to her topic, Beadie argues that the economic significance of schooling in rural North during early republican era lay not in production of human or intellectual capital but in creation and mobilization of social capital and its conversion into political capital for die modern liberal state (320).Comprising eighteen chapters and a conclusion, book is divided into three parts. The first examines history of churches and schools in and around Lima, a farming town and trading center on Genesee Road about halfway between Buffalo and Syracuse. Beadie ascribes a significant role to area's Methodists - both lay and clerical - who facilitated development of friendships and trust upon which social capital rests. For example, Methodist women, who were well connected but legally indigent, drew upon their husbands' wealth to build potent social networks. They marshaled their households' surplus labor and capital on behalf of collective activities like schools, which themselves provided an alternative mode of association, building bonds among churched and unchurched.In part two Beadie devotes much of her attention to relationship between political and social capital, arguing that without latter there would not have been enough of former to bring about expansion of schooling in rural New York. At beginning of nineteenth century, school attendance there was occasional and intermittent. Some children almost never attended. The educational marketplace was diversified; those wanting a formal education could choose among private teachers, local academies, and town schools. …