Who Stayed in School? Social Structure and Academic Achievement in the Determination of Enrollment Patterns, Providence, Rhode Island, 1880-1925

Abstract

Class, race and ethnicity, gender, urban or rural life, religion-these aspects of social structure have been crucial to the work of American social historians. Much of that work explores the relationships between them and patterns of family life, residence, political involvement, schooling, social mobility, crime, and leisure. Clearly, however, there are also differences among individuals-in characteristics of intellect, personality, and values, for example-that are unrelated to position in the social structure and that also influence behavior. Since one cannot usually identify and generalize about the role of such personal chracteristics in the past with much confidence, social history focuses overwhelmingly on the positions of individuals in the social structure. Nevertheless, how much free play the personal qualities had and to what extent they were constrained by social structure are questions that can be asked about many aspects of social life. Here the concern is with schooling. And in connection with schooling the questions have been raised regularly, in one form or another, for at least a century and a half. They represent one way of asking how democratic American education has been. In recent work on the history of education, the effort to understand schools in terms of their relationship to the social structure has been especially strong in the work of historians loosely grouped together as revisionists. A range of perspectives exists within that loose grouping; the most influential and intellectually challenging historical work has been that of Michael B. Katz. The revisionism that characterizes those perspectives insists that an earlier view of educational institutions as evolving toward egalitarian and socially benevolent arrangements must be discarded as myth. Instead, American education is, and was, universal, tax-supported, free, compulsory, bureaucratic, racist, and class-biased, in Katz's pithy summary of 1971. In order to explain how this situation came into being, most revisionists' work