The Origins of Public High Schools: A Reexamination of the Beverly High School Controversy

Abstract

There has been considerable debate about the process of and the underlying motivation for the expansion of public education in nineteenth-century America. Interpretations which focused on the role of reformer like Horace Mann, or on the demands by workers for more public education, have been criticized by revisionists who see education being imposed upon an uninterested and unwilling populace by capitalists seeking to maintain a docile labor force during industrialization. Here, Maris. A. Vinovskis challenges that revisionist view, employing sophisticated social science methodology in a work sure to be welcomed by all historians of American education. The revisionist view of the nature of educational changes rests heavily upon the now classical study by Michael Katz of the abolition of the public high school in Beverly, Massachusetts, in the mid-nineteenth An especially detailed analysis of education in Beverly is made possible by the unique availability of a list of the voters who supported or opposed the public high school in 1860. Katz used this information to demonstrate that the workers strongly opposed the public high school which he claimed has been established by a small group of the leading capitalists not only to provided educational opportunities for their own children, but also to help restore community harmony which was being eroded by the economic transformation of the town. Vinovskis s study of the origins of the Massachusetts antebellum public high school reanalyzes the establishment of the Beverly Public High School within the broader perspective of the other educational developments occurring in that community as well as in the Commonwealth as a whole. The results raise serious questions about Katz s depiction of the timing of and the reasons for the creation of that institution in Beverly. This reanalysis of the vote to abolish the high school also suggests a very different interpretation of events in Beverly than the one presented by Katz. By expanding the number of factors used in this study as well as employing recently developed techniques of statistical analysis, the importance of the opposition of the workers to the public high school is minimized, while the differences in the needs and resources among the school districts in that community become more important factors. Vinovskis s reexamination does not find that the struggle over the Beverly Public High School is primarily a class conflict as suggested by Katz and other revisionists; instead it reveals the complex process by which towns expanded their public school offerings and allocated scarce educational funds to elementary and high schools. His work offers an important contribution to our understanding of the development of American public school education in the nineteenth century.