Common School Movement Research Articles

An African American Dilemma: A History of School Integration and Civil Rights in the North

Zoë Burkholder, professor of educational foundations and director of the Holocaust, Genocide, and Human Rights Education Project at Montclair State University, has written an essential account of the complex and often troubling history of America's implementation of meaningful school integration strategies. In particular, the author focuses upon the northern United States and its frequently uncomfortable legacy, as reflected in failed educational integration in its many diverse school districts, both urban and suburban. As Burkholder states, “the North is an imagined landscape as much as a physical one; a place that has long been associated with freedom and opportunity for African Americans. This study focuses specifically on communities north of the Mason Dixon line and east of the Mississippi River where the largest Black communities developed over the course of the first and second Great Migrations” (p. 5). As a social history, An African American Dilemma also explores, as is referenced on several occasions, the same racial divides and challenges that Gunnar Myrdal confronted in his classic An American Dilemma (1944). As Burkholder declares, her book “emphasizes white racism as the cause of the African American dilemma, or the question of whether school integration or separation provides the best route to equality and justice” (p. 8). The analysis follows a chronological format beginning with the common school movement in 1840. Organizationally, the chapters unfold in the following manner: introduction; chapter 1, “Caste Abolished: Integration for Freedom, 1840–1900”; chapter 2, “The Education That Is Their Due: Separation for Racial Uplift, 1900–1940”; chapter 3, “A Powerful Weapon: Integration for Equality, 1940–1965”; chapter 4, “Conflict in the Community: Separation for Black Power, 1966–1974”; chapter 5, “An Armageddon of Righteousness: Integration for Justice, 1975–Present”; and conclusion. The chapter titles reflect a broader intellectual focus than simply defining the integration debate through the prism of Brown v. Board of Education (1954), which falsely suggests that integration is a solved southern educational problem.

Agents of Reform: Child Labor and the Origins of the Welfare State by Elisabeth Anderson

Reviewed by: Agents of Reform: Child Labor and the Origins of the Welfare State by Elisabeth Anderson Jaclyn N. Schultz Agents of Reform: Child Labor and the Origins of the Welfare State. By Elisabeth Anderson. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2021. xviii + 362 pp. Elisabeth Anderson argues in Agents of Reform that the welfare state's origins lie in child labor laws, yet the book's main focus is the eponymous "agents of reform" who pushed for such legislation. Anderson takes a social scientific approach to understanding these middle-class reformers who, with varying degrees of success, tried to convince legislators in nineteenth-century continental Europe and the United States to protect workers (especially children and women) from capitalist exploitation. Anderson concludes that such reformers were required for any real political movement on worker-related issues, particularly in times and places where organized labor was weak. Moreover, Anderson's framework theorizes that middle-class agents of reform were more likely to see their goals realized when they articulated the need for reform [End Page 313] vis-à-vis dominant discourses (which were often paternalistic), formed powerful alliances, and creatively problem-solved when facing barriers to success. Agents of Reform is a transnational comparative history in two parts. Part I focuses on the development of child labor laws during the first half of the nineteenth century, most of which were tied to education and were undesirable to the working class. Part II moves to the second half of the century and factory inspection laws that enforced earlier child labor laws. In these cases, reformers often worked to enact factory inspection with the help of labor movements. Throughout Agents of Reform, Anderson details the social, economic, and political contexts that reformers operated in as well as the backgrounds and political activism of the reformers themselves. Most of these agents of reform will be new to readers, but familiar faces such as Florence Kelley also appear. It is the depth and breadth of child labor law history that make Agents of Reform an impressive must-read not only for historians of child labor, middle-class reform, and the welfare state but also for those studying education, capitalism, and labor. In part I alone, Anderson compares two reformers in laissezfaire Prussia while tracing the eventual passage of child labor laws, in part, to compromises with chambers of commerce; she compares the cases of France and Belgium and argues that France passed child labor laws when Belgium did not because their agent of reform was flexible and effectively articulated and cited his proposal; she likewise relates the common school movement in Massachusetts to uncontroversial child labor laws there. In part II, readers are guided through a chapter each on the passage of toothless factory inspection laws in Germany, what Anderson calls "conciliatory" factory inspection laws in Massachusetts and, finally, robust factory inspection laws in Illinois that gave women enforcement powers. These six chapters collectively reveal the painstaking work that went into reconceptualizing the government as a protector of children and workers at a time when economic liberalism was at its height. This rich synthesis of child labor reform histories may, however, overshadow Anderson's social scientific framework as the highlight of Agents of Reform. As a trained social scientist, Anderson seeks to objectively answer the question of why some "states" passed labor laws protecting children while others did not. Across case studies, Anderson compares reformers, whom she refers to as policy or administrative entrepreneurs (the former push for legislation while the latter work from within bodies that administrate law), using variables including their abilities to effectively frame policy proposals, compromise, and signal expertise. Yet while these are collectively meant to be predictors of a reformer's success, Anderson's definition of success is ambiguous, particularly in part II. Moreover, her variables shift the focus away from other crucial factors in [End Page 314] child labor history. For example, at the times when Massachusetts passed child labor laws and Illinois passed factory inspection laws, both states were run by a single party (Whigs and Democrats, respectively) that supported the legislation. In the case of Belgium, which did not adopt child labor laws during the 1830s, child labor was...

Should schools be in loco parentis? Cautionary thoughts

ABSTRACT The jurisdiction of schools has long been contested. Initially, under the sway of loco parentis, parents delegated all authority to educators. With ascendency of the common school movement in the 19th century, however, the doctrine confronted reverses. As the student body increased in size and heterogeneity, families no longer spoke with a single voice. The courts granted parental requests for a more determinative role in their children’s education, prohibited schools from giving religious instruction, and guaranteed students some civil rights. This curtailment of school authority has been countered in recent years by the emphasis on educating the “whole child”with schools taking on responsibilities, such as character development and mental health, arguably a home preserve. While acknowledging the large overlap between school and home, I argue they have differing agendas and capacities. Schools stress the collective, cultivating “we-ness” and agreed upon norms, whereas homes cultivate privacy, individualism, and particularistic values; schools stress equality while homes stress equity; schools are constrained in their use of discipline whereas homes take more liberties. In urging schools to circumscribe and differentiate their role, I nonetheless recognize the problems of doing so.

Public vs. Private: The Early History of School Choice in America, by Robert N. Gross

What is the job of a public (state) school? Who are the public it is meant to serve—and what is the public it is meant to create? These questions hum in the background of Robert N. Gross’s short, compelling book. As Gross notes, the (mostly native-born, middle-class, Protestant) reformers behind the nineteenth-century common-school movement sought a system that would knit together the new American republic by cornering the market on schooling. This meant building for the public what advocates called a ‘natural monopoly’ on behalf of an education that taught reading, writing, arithmetic—and a Whiggish ideal of American-ness that rested, as Gross puts it, on the ‘moral teachings of Protestant Christianity’ (p. 27). In the face of ‘convulsive’ processes such as immigration, industrialisation and urbanisation, in other words, common schools could be palliative—if they were common. Consequently, Gross writes, ‘public systems could transform the nation only if they eliminated the...

Ordering the mess: (re-)defining public schooling as a remedy

ABSTRACT From the vantage point of present educational policy, it appears fairly straightforward to seek the solution to felt social and societal crises in education. Hence, on the basis of this statement, education can be considered as the most suitable tool to repair a perceived damage or the most effective medicine to cure a diagnosed sickness. Through the lens of “crisis narrations” and their alleged call for more (or a different) structure, the paper seeks to trace the perception of education as a remedy back to the origins of Western (more precisely Austrian and US) mass public schooling. Hence, two case studies, namely the Silesian reformer Johann Ignaz Felbiger and the leader of the later US common school movement, Horace Mann, are used to undermine the thesis of a common pattern of education as a way to cure the alleged weaknesses and consequently to order the (perceived) mess. It is argued that in both, the eighteenth-century Habsburg Empire and the nineteenth-century US, constitutional mindsets, described as “deeply engrained ways of understanding the relation between the public and its institutions”, (re-)defined public schooling as a remedy aiming to provide a better future for all the members of the society, independent of their social class.

Democracy's Schools: The Rise of Public Education in America by Johann N. Neem

Reviewed by: Democracy's Schools: The Rise of Public Education in America by Johann N. Neem Mark Boonshoft (bio) Democracy's Schools: The Rise of Public Education in America. By Johann N. Neem. ( Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017. Pp. 256. Cloth, $54.95; paper, $22.95.) Historians do not know how to talk about the common school movement. Conservatives spent the last half century deriding "government schools." Meanwhile, from the Left, Michael Katz and the "revisionist" education historians of the 1960s and 1970s cast public schools as institutions bent on controlling the masses. Thanks to Johann Neem's wonderful new book, we are free of this stagnant debate. [End Page 523] In the first two chapters of his thematically organized book, Neem recovers the democratic vision of common school advocates. The push for public education began in the founding era, to be sure. For Neem, though, democratic education really took shape in the late 1830s. The later reformers hoped common schools would not only make citizens, but also enable all boys and girls to develop themselves and live a fulfilling life. The Boston Unitarian minister William Ellery Channing made the most powerful case for this idea in an 1838 lecture called "Self-Culture." Neem borrows Channing's term throughout the book. To Channing, "self-culture was the right and duty of every child" because it was "the essence of being American" (15). It fell to others to bring this liberating experience to the masses, namely Horace Mann, who in 1837 became the first secretary of the Massachusetts Board of Education. Common schools aimed at "nothing less than democratizing access to imagination" (18). Reformers designed a curriculum to realize their lofty goals. They conceived of knowledge—everything from the three Rs to the classics—as the "building blocks." On this base of knowledge, students "deepened their appreciation of Creation, enriched their experience of the world and their own inner lives, and developed the higher faculties of their minds" (53–54). Even the supposed bastions of an older style of education reinforced these new values. Historians usually argue that the McGuffey Readers—the most popular schoolbooks of the day, the first of which were published in 1836—inculcated values of hard work and patriotism in passive students. To Neem, the McGuffey Readers helped students learn to "reason, imagine, and love" (46). All the while, as Neem argues in the book's final three chapters, idealistic advocates of democratic education confronted the realities of "education in a democracy" (76). First of all, localities were already building schools. Mann and others could hardly be reformers if it were otherwise. Drawing on work by Nancy Beadie, Neem argues that reformers regularly relied on this existing social capital. To them, "localism was a tactic for state building" (70). This is precisely why reform proved difficult. People could and did contest the experts. Jacksonian Democracy raised the question: "What role was there for uncommon sense in an era of the common man?" (33). Similarly, Mann and Channing saw education as counterweight to a degrading capitalist economy. Other Americans embraced schooling to help them get ahead in that very economy. Where the rubber really hit the road was where the ruler hit the knuckles. Reformers envisioned classrooms as temples of self-making. Bored students and undertrained and unsupported teachers alike, though, "saw the schoolroom as a battlefield" (101). Reformers criticized teachers for [End Page 524] continuing to rely on rote memorization and threat of the rod. These complaints undermined their own efforts to make teaching a respected profession through the founding of normal schools. Ultimately, enough Americans built public schools that the question became how to make them truly common in an increasingly diverse society. At first, the challenge was religious. Reformers believed religion had a role in schools. They settled on nonsectarian Protestant teaching as the way forward. That seemed reasonable to most Protestants, though not to the large and growing population of Catholics. Catholics found public schools alienating, especially in the heyday of nativism. So they built other schools for their children. African Americans took a different tack. Recognizing that public schooling had become a prerequisite to accessing citizenship, black Americans demanded inclusion. More generally...

Suffering Girls: The Work of Anti-Catholicism in Martha Finley’s Novels

In this essay I argue for the centrality of anti-Catholic discourse to Martha Finley’s literary project. I first examine her overlooked anti-Catholic novel Casella: or the Children of the Valleys (1868) in the context of popular convent tales. I then investigate the striking similarities between Casella and Elsie Dinsmore (1867) and Holidays at Roselands (1868), reading these novels in the context of the rhetoric that emerged from the Protestant and Catholic tensions during the rise of the Common School movement. I argue that such a move clarifies Finley’s contribution to the consolidation of a Protestant identity that constructs itself oppositionally to Catholicism.

AMERICAN POLITICAL ECONOMY AND THE COMMON SCHOOL MOVEMENT: 1820–1850

Classical political economy in Great Britain was broadly supportive of education, but limited government’s role to modest assistance for charitable schools. The early classical economists in the United States, men like Thomas Cooper and Francis Wayland, in addition to supporting free trade, took this classical position with respect to education. But a more aggressive democratic claim was being advanced by the American common school movement and its supporters among Whig protectionists. The early economic tracts of William Jennison, Willard Phillips, Calvin Colton, and Henry Carey envisioned a larger role for government and advocated support for publicly financed common schools. Most notably, the leader of the common school movement, Horace Mann, built a defense for public financing based on a radical theory of property, derived from distinctly Puritan economic doctrine. If his radical positions received little support from post-Civil War mainstream economists, Mann’s practical advocacy of public taxation for public schools very much carried the day.

Toward a new common school movement

Toward a new common school movement

Toiling together for social cohesion: International influences on the development of teacher education in the United States

This article examines the ways in which the very idea of teacher education in the United States was transplanted from foreign lands. Teacher education, particularly normal school training, was based on a model imported from despotic Prussia, a model that was popularised by French and American visitors to the northeastern German land. Although normal schooling naturally was altered in the American context, the subsequent forms of teacher training, particularly in the emerging universities, owed a great debt to international models as well. This article also explores the ideology of the common school movement, which sought social cohesion, because that ideology helps explain why the Prussian model of teacher training became so attractive to conservative educational reformers in a democratic society.

Dangerous Conversations: Persistent Tensions in Teacher Education

There is a long history of teacher education negotiating the tension between intellectual rigor and meeting the needs of filing classrooms with teachers who will meet the demands of their employers. Up to the 1830s. teaching was mostly a profession of apprenticeships, much like medicine and law. But the creation of the Common School or publicly sponsored education, required large numbers of people to be teachers, and the apprenticeship model couldn't meet the demand. Leaders of the Common School movement became advocates of teacher education And the Normal School was born. Normal Schools provided access to advanced education ?that-many people wanted, and soon-the schools started offering more than teaching courses. Regional and state colleges crew out of this demand for more accessible higher education and they continued to prepare many teachers. Elite universities began to develop schools of education and perceived their function to be different-from nonresearch institutions. These research institutions produced theory and scholarship about-pedagogy educational access. differential outcomes, diversity equity democracy and more. The preparation of teachers within these institutions was viewed as cultivating intellectuals who would use theory and research in their work as educators. The-tensions persist Should schools o-F education Vain' people who will enact the latest poky mandates in schools without questioning the status quo? Or should they educate people who understand theories of teaching learning, childhood and growth so they can make pedagogical decisions that-inspire creativity and innovation in the next-generation The answer is not-inconsequential. I conducted a three-year study of teacher education students' experiences in my classes in a research institution-one of those places sometimes accused of being disconnected from the Real Word What counts as the Real World however, is still under debate. It-was the Red World that provided the subject matter for my students' education. They studied the bed community from the perspective of a critical ethnographer. They analyzed the ways race, class, gender, and sexuality affect individuals' and groups' experiences with schooling. And they developed project-based plans to incorporate families and communities ft education to make learning more relevant and class-sensitive for working-class and poor children from diverse backgrounds. My students had spent many years in the Red World of test-based schooling and believed this had eclipsed the Red World for which their education had claimed to prepare them So which world is real? And how does our answer to that question reveal what we believe about children and youth? This is yet another tension that-often exist between research universities that prepare teachers and some schools where teachers may be employed. Agenda Morning greetings Classism in society and schools Making things Criticai literacies Paulo Freire bell hooks Body image issues Feminism n elementary schools I have exciting news, everyone! What? What? What is it? We have been invited to help design and implement-an after-school program at-a local elementary school. The school served mostly African-American and Latino children, most of whom qualified for free or reduced-price lunch. My students were thrilled and designed an after-school program-that also gave children some choice over how they would use their time. They kept in mind the power of making things aria designed a Construction Center with lots of recyclable materials and supplies to manipulate. Making maps was a popular activity too: 3-D and 2-D maps of classrooms, playgrounds, neighborhoods, homes, bus routes, or even maps of fictional places were dl exciting. …

The failure of corporate school reform

Corporate school reforms, especially privatization, union busting, and high-stakes testing have been hailed as the last best hope for public education. Yet, as Kenneth Saltman powerfully argues in this new book, corporate school reforms have decisively failed to deliver on what their proponents have promised for two decades: higher test scores and lower costs. As Saltman illustrates, the failures of corporate school reform are far greater and more destructive than they seem. Left unchecked, corporate school reform fails to challenge and in fact worsens the most pressing problems facing public schooling, including radical funding inequalities, racial segregation, and anti-intellectualism. But it is not too late for change. Against both corporate school reformers and its liberal critics, this book argues for the expansion of democratic pedagogies and a new common school movement that will lead to broader social renewal.

Someone Has to Fail: The Zero-Sum Game of Public Schooling

What do we really want from schools? Only everything, in all its contradictions. Most of all, we want access and opportunity for all children - but all possible advantages for our own. So argues historian David Labaree in provocative look at the way this archetype of dysfunction works so well at what we want it to do even as it evades what we explicitly ask it to do. Ever since the common school movement of the nineteenth century, mass schooling has been seen as an essential solution to great social problems. Yet as wave after wave of reform movements have shown, schools are extremely difficult to change. Labaree shows how the very organization of the locally controlled, administratively limited school system makes reform difficult. At the same time, he argues, the choices of educational consumers have always overwhelmed top-down efforts at school reform. Individual families seek to use schools for their own purposes - to pursue social opportunity, if they need it, and to preserve social advantage, if they have it. In principle, we want the best for all children. In practice, we want the best for our own. Provocative, unflinching, wry, Someone Has to Fail looks at the way that unintended consequences of consumer choices have created an extraordinarily resilient educational system, perpetually expanding, perpetually unequal, constantly being reformed, and never changing much.

Horace Mann's troubling legacy: the education of democratic citizens

A righteous reformer committed to the power of education, Horace Mann became a national figure by championing the common school movement. Mann's message, which he preached at every opportunity, was that universal public education was the only means to transform America's disorderly masses into a disciplined, judicious republican citizenry, thereby removing the dangers of anarchy and class warfare. In his new look at Mann's work and thought, Bob Pepperman Taylor shows that Mann's ideas on civic education have had a lasting impact on the way that we still think today about education and its relation to our civic life. Written from the perspective of democratic theory and practice, Taylor's work reassesses Mann's philosophy of civic education and deeply resonates with today's pervasive and highly political debates about the role of education. By conceiving of public schooling as serving primarily political ends, this nineteenth-century reformer fostered an enduring tension between educational values and political purposes. Taylor contends that Mann's approach to civic education marginalized the role of schools in training the intellect, and that this anti-intellectual component has been retained in the current model of schooling in the United States. He contends that Mann's schooling model promotes moral certainty and political consensus over intellectual doubt and political disagreement an imbalance that erodes and weakens both educational and democratic ends. By considering Mann's unique influence as a theorist of civic education, Taylor argues, we find both his greatest strengths and most significant weaknesses. And when we take Mann seriously as a contributor to American political thought, we find that the challenge he presents is more significant than concerns about the lack of originality or the unscientific nature of some of his ideas. Ultimately, Mann can tell us a great deal about the very best in our educational tradition, as well as help us see some of its significant flaws and show us how both strengths and weaknesses have played out in our current public and higher systems of education. By examining how Mann was the first to articulate a cohesive vision of the relationship between civic education and democratic practice, Taylor demonstrates that Mann belongs among the key founders of the American political tradition.

Preserving the “Public” in Public Education for the Sake of Democracy

At the dawn of the 21st century, education in the United States is undergoing intense, fundamental change, a revolution possibly as remarkable as the common school movement that gave rise to publicly supported schools. The past few decades has brought a host of neo-conservative education reforms. We have witnessed the emergence and rapid expansion of charter schools (Bulkley & Fisler, 2002; Center for Education Reform, 2005), the proliferation of private voucher plans in metropolitan areas including New York City, Dayton, Ohio, San Antonio, Texas, and Washington, D.C. (Godwin & Kemerer 2002; Howell & Peterson, 2002), and the implementation of publicly-funded voucher programs in selected urban districts and statewide in Arizona, Florida, Maine, Ohio, Utah, Vermont, Wisconsin, and the District of Columbia (National Conference of State Legislatures, 2007; Shaul, 2002). Moreover, these reforms have been gaining momentum from federal regulation and court rulings, most notably the charter school option in No Child Left Behind (NCLB), the Supreme Court's decision upholding the constitutionality of tuition vouchers in Zelman v. Simmons-Harris (2002), and, more recently, the Obama administration's choice to keep vouchers in the D.C. school system and provide stimulus package incentives (e.g., Race to the Top funds) for states to permit or expand charter schools. Teacher unions are under constant attack as well. New York City Schools Chancellor Joseph Klein, for instance, called for an end to the three pillars of non-meritocracy--teachers' seniority rights, tenure, and pay scales (Gootman, 2003), and D.C.'s former Education Chancellor Michelle Rhee adopted an evaluation system that dismisses teachers who fail to improve students' standardized test scores despite fervent resistance from the teacher union (Edsall, 2009; Turque, 2009). Merit pay schemes have also reemerged in districts throughout the nation with political support from both the Bush and Obama administrations, and performance-based accountability (with dramatic implications for teachers and school administrators) has become the modus operandi of education (Hannaway & Hamilton, 2008). While primarily the province of neo-conservative policymakers, these reforms have also attracted (and in a few cases, such as Milwaukee's Democratic Mayor John Norquist, been led by) some liberals who have become disenchanted, indeed impatient, with the inability of traditional education reforms to improve educational opportunities for children most at risk of academic failure. In this article, we argue that while the influence of these reforms on classroom instruction and student achievement are still contested, these reforms may help schools achieve other goals that are part of their mission and promote outcomes for the common good--certain general conditions that are in an appropriate sense equally to everyone's (Rawls, 1971, p. 246). The first section of the manuscript provides an overview of the private and benefits of educational attainment. Arguments in the second section suggest that the current state of schools precludes schools from accomplishing these goals, in particular supporting a stable, democratic society. In the last section, we consider current reforms in light of goals and suggest that these reforms, coupled with accountability measures, may change how we think about public education and rekindle optimism in the ability of schools to meet their goals to the advantage of both the individuals receiving an education and society. Education as a Quasi-Public Good Because education not only produces benefits for the individual, but also yields benefits to the public, education is often considered a good. The term good is misleading, and at least partially erroneous. In the strict economic sense of the term a good: (a) is non-excludable--others cannot be prevented from using the good or service, (b) is non-rivalrous--use of the good or service does not prevent others from using the good or service at the same time, and (c) has externalities--provides benefits that extend beyond the person consuming the good or service. …

Oregon Voices: Oregon's First State-Mandated Uniform School Readers: Politics and Education

Oregon Voices Lee Lau Oregon's First State-Mandated Uniform School Readers PoliticsandEducation A storm of controversy arose among politicians, educators, newspaper editors, and citizens in 1873when Oregon endeav ored to adopt itsfirst uniform readers for the public schools, ?. The Pacific Coast Series, published byA.L. Bancroft & Co. in San Francisco, elicited immediate protests. Hostility toward the series in creased until eventually Oregon newspapers were referring to the situation as the School Book Fraud and angry letters to the editor carried inflamma toryheadlines such as "Burn the Books."1 Six years after their adoption, the use of the serieswas discontinued by a legislative amendment to the School Law of 1872 in response to statewide and nearly universal dissatisfaction with theBancroft books. Unhappiness with these readers reflected amixture of resentment over the high-handed way the readers were adopted and discontent with the content of the books themselves. The Bancroft series differed significantly from traditional school readers by avoiding doctrinaire moralizing and including thework ofWest Coast writers. Belief that the work of West Coast writers was inferior to that ofmore well-known authors from theEast and concern about the lack of religious content contributed to the removal of the Pacific Coast Series in 1879. In adopting uniform school readers, Oregon's newly created Board of Education was following the theories of what came to be known as the 604 OHQ vol. 105, no. 4 ? 2004 Oregon Historical Society Courtesy of Lee Lau PACIFIC COAST SERIES. ? BOYE the pines themoon was slowly drifting, -?-*- The river sang below ; The dim Sierras, far beyond, uplifting Their minarets of snow. ^ 2. The roaring camp-fire, with rude humor, painted The ruddy tints of health1 On haggard face and form that drooped fainted In the fierce race forwealth; 151 "Dickens inCamp',' a poem by Bret Harte, was illustrated in the Pacific Coast Fifth Reader. In 1868,Harte founded and edited San Francisco's literary magazine theOverland Monthly. At the time the Fifth Reader was being prepared, Harte was writing for theAtlantic Monthly. Lau, Oregon s First State-Mandated Uniform School Readers The Pacific Coast Readers Illustration from the Fourth Reader, page 233 Although the Pacific Coast Series created a furor for including pieces written byWest Coast writers, such au thors did not represent themajority of the selections in the books. Also included were pieces by British authors such as Samuel Tay lor Coleridge, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and Shakespeare and East Coast authors such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Nathaniel Hawthorne. Meant to train students to read passages aloud, the readers included lessons on expression, oratory, inflection, and "orthoepy" (pronunciation) in addition to the literary selections. Engravings illustrated various selections. Sam Simpson took the opportunity to express his opinions at various points in the read ers he prepared, as in this note that accompanied a selection from Charles Dickens's Nicholas Nickleby in the Fourth Reader: NOTE.?In the above lesson, and in all succeeding lessons where provincial isms,colloquialisms, or dialect, occur, the teacher should call theattention of theclass to all errors ingrammar, spelling and pronunciation and have them corrected.This coursewill obviate all danger of false impressions on those subjects and render the exercise of real value to the student. While literatureof this kind should not be too fully represented in a School Reader, we are inclined to think that the insipidprimness affectedby some authors is founded on a mistaken idea. 606 OHQ vol. 105, no. 4 Common School Movement, which began inNew England and spread westward.2 The term "common" referred to the movement's focus on public schools as well as its goal of achieving uniformity in education. Between 1830 and 1870, Americans involved with the Common School Movement worked energetically to improve public elementary schooling. The movement had three goals: the establishment of state control over local schools, the provision of free elementary education for every white child in the United States, and the development of trained educational professionals. The first stepwas "to establish some form of state control over local schools."3 Two mechanisms helped spread the Common School concept to the West Coast. One was educational periodicals such as theMassachusetts Common School Journal, edited by the educator Horace Mann, the Con...

Bridging Liberalism and Multiculturalism in American Education. By Rob Reich. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002. 272p. $60.00 cloth, $21.00 paper

The nineteenth-century, Protestant-led common school movement against Catholic schools, the campaign against foreign language instruction in public schools, and other xenophobic efforts to “Americanize” public education in the early twentieth century provide the historical background for Rob Reich's discussion of contemporary multicultural education in the United States. His goal is to construct a liberal theory of multicultural education that hangs together philosophically and makes practical sense in a pluralistic society whose professed liberal democratic principles are belied by this history of nativism and discrimination.

The education of Laura Bridgman: first deaf and blind person to learn language

The Education of Laura Bridgman: First Deaf and Blind Person to Learn Language. By Ernest Freeberg. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001. Pp. 264. Illustrations. $27.95.) Millions of Americans are familiar with the story of Helen Keller and her teacher Annie Sullivan. Whether contact with them came via radio and newsreels prior to Keller's death in 1968 or through theater or film versions of The Miracle Worker, undoubtedly many, even most, have thought of Keller as the first deaf and blind person to learn to communicate through language. Yet, thanks to this work by Ernest Freeberg, we learn that this was not the case. That distinction belongs to Laura Bridgman, who, though hardly a familiar figure today, along with her mentor Samuel Gridley Howe gained a huge measure of fame both here and abroad during the 1830s and 1840s. For Charles Dickens, Laura Bridgman and Niagara Falls were the two highlights of his 1842 American tour. At the completion of her formal education in 1850, Howe would boast that only Queen Victoria was a more famous woman than Laura Bridgman. Despite similarities in their physical disabilities and their success in learning language, the story of Laura Bridgman as related by Freeberg is different in many respects from that of Helen Keller. The setting of Keller's education was her family's home, and Annie Sullivan was employed by Helen's parents. In Laura Bridgman's case, it was the teacher who initiated the relationship. Samuel Gridley Howe, noted supporter of reform causes and first director of the Perkins Institute for the Blind in Boston, had read of Bridgman in a newspaper article. Impressed by the story of the New Hampshire farm girl who had been stricken deaf and blind at the age of two as a result of scarlet fever and yet had mastered several household tasks, Howe gained permission from the Bridgmans to educate their seven-yearold daughter at his school. Except for a few brief intervals back in Hanover, Perkins was Bridgman's home for the remainder of her life. Helen Keller came to world attention after she left home and pursued an active career as author and lecturer. The years during which Laura Bridgman was the center of interest were limited to those of her formal education, between 1837 and 1850. That the public became aware of her was the result of a deliberate public relations policy of her teacher, who really is the central character of Freeberg's study. It is the author's vivid description and analysis of Howe's many social, philosophical, and scientific ideas and interests and their relationship to the educational program he designed for Bridgman that make for fascinating reading, Furthermore, as one proceeds through the book, it becomes apparent that the story of Bridgman and Howe reflects many of the significant social and intellectual currents of the era. Howe's commitment to reform went beyond the education of the blind to embrace the common school movement, care for the insane, prison reform, and abolition. His Unitarianism and attraction to phrenology and his hostility toward the pessimistic views of human nature espoused by orthodox Calvinists were important ingredients in shaping his goals and methods for the education of Laura Bridgman. Freeberg illustrates the multiplicity of Howe's interests and concerns that came to play in his relationship with Laura Bridgman. …

The evolution of educational theory in the United States

Preface Introduction Origins of Theory of Western Education Theory During the Colonial Period Theory During the Revolutionary Period Theory During Common School Movement Theory of Secondary, Higher, and Teacher Education The Courts and Theory of Education for African Americans Theory to Address National Problems: From Warren Harding to Bill Clinton The Evolution of Educational Theory: Summary, Conclusions, and Implications Selected Bibliography Index

Textbook Wars: Governor-General James Francis Smith and the Protestant-Catholic Conflict in Public Education in the Philippines, 1904-1907

American imperialism opened new battlefields for the conflict between Protestants and Catholics over religion in public schools. The nineteenth-century textbook wars followed the flag to the Philippines. American Catholics had fought to protect their children from anti-Catholic school books and Protestant Biblical readings since the beginning of the common school movement. These issues provided much of the rationale behind the 1884 decision to establish a separate Catholic school system. Nevertheless, many Catholic children continued to attend public schools. With the end of the Spanish-American War, Catholic frustration with secular Protestantism took on fresh urgency. Now they feared that Catholic children in the Philippines, and in other new territories, would have their minds and souls contaminated by false interpretations of their church, interpretations that seeped in through American textbooks. The textbook battles that erupted in the Philippines rekindled old animosities and became part of a longer struggle waged by Catholic leadership in the United States to exercise more authority over colonial education. Its repercussions found their way to the White House and Theodore Roosevelt.