A sex scandal about which may know what to believe, but they do not want to hear any more newspaper discussion by the principal actors (Godkin, 1895, p. 192). The prospect of trial during which several people, whose truthfulness is already in question, will try to convince jury that others are lying. A once-trusted public figure accused of adultery. Although they sound like sound-bites from the evening news, these points come from Chromo-civilization, an 1874 essay by E. L. Godkin, editor of the Nation, friend of Harvard's Charles Elliot Norton, and 19th century cultural commentator. In his essay Godkin expresses deep concerns over the decline of cultural values demonstrated by the sex scandal surrounding Rev. Henry Ward Beecher, nationally known minister accused of adultery with parishioner (A. Douglas, 1977; McLoughlin, 1970). Godkin believed that culture resulted from mental and moral discipline; character and ideals could only be formed through labor and self-- denial. Thus, he decried the rise of easily accessible popular culture, a smattering of all sorts of knowledge, taste for reading and for 'art'-that is, desire to see and own pictures, symbolized by the chromolithograph, an inexpensive means of reproducing paintings in color (1895, p. 201). Although many of Godkin's ideals resonate with what Ralph Smith (1998) identifies as the humanist tradition, Godkin wrote from position within the genteel tradition. While humanism has had positive connotations in academic circles, references to gentility and the genteel tradition have called forth disclaimers or derision at evocations of poetry-writing in the parlor and middle-class smugness. Philosopher George Santayana (1967) denounced the genteel tradition as hereditary spirit, looking to the past, dominated by women. Van Wyck Brooks (1915) contrasted the highbrow genteel tradition of Transcendentalist and aesthetic ideals with the lowbrow world of materialism and practical business. For intellectuals, like Santayana and Brooks, the genteel tradition was marked by effete refinement, the upward-looking, lily-sniffing aestheticism often caricatured in the persona of Oscar Wilde. We might think of gentility as the Victorian housewife to humanism's scholar in his study. Vestiges of the genteel tradition appear in common sense beliefs about the value of art education. When teachers in the Los Angeles Unified School District say that children from their urban classrooms need to be exposed to fine art and museums to enrich their lives, we can hear echoes of genteel values. When museum educators and docents talk about the capacity of art to influence people to be more moral, happier, and better citizens (Storr, 1994, p. 3), we hear echoes of gentility. When the director of research and evaluation for moderate-sized Southern school district, man who is also minister, talks about seeing those kinds of children bused to an opera performance and his amazement that they appeared to enjoy an art form he considers over his head, we hear the genteel tradition. This essay will suggest that the genteel tradition in American middleclass culture has influenced core assumptions in art education. Within the world of genteel refinement, learning in and about visual art was one means to resolve the predicament of making better life. Simultaneously, 19th century art educators contributed to the spread of chromo-civilization, the making of popular culture. While art education has sometimes functioned as critique of the dominant culture-a position many advocate today-it has more often contributed to the formation and reproduction of middle-class culture in the United States.2 Drawing Toward Gentility Drawing was an important accomplishment for antebellum New Englanders in the emerging middle class. Art education was valued in three distinct social contexts because skills in drawing opened both social and economic opportunities. …