III. Education
The story of education between 1820 and 1865 is dominated by the common school movement. No age in the history of American schools matches it in the list of impressive laws placed upon the statute books or in the quality of argument that this movement inspired. A long roster of names evokes the caliber of its leadership: Horace Mann preeminently, striving ever, as he once movingly advised the young, to win at least one battle for humanity. Henry Barnard, James Carter, Calvin Wiley, Samuel Lewis, and many others scattered throughout the Union publicized, lobbied for, and administered the new and improved school systems. Imaginative and dedicated as these men were, the American common school did not spring fully fashioned from their minds. Popular schools had been ably advocated before. Thomas Jefferson among other thinkers of the first years of independence, grasping the connection between popular education and popular government, had supported education for all. Their recommendations, unhappily, had resulted in few new schools. With the exception of the New England states, free instruction was still confined to those pauper children whose parents were willing to testify to their inability to provide schooling for them.
New social and economic conditions prompted a re-examination of public and private institutions and processes in the middle of the nineteenth century and brought a new urgency to the cause of public education. Generally speaking, the public school movement was an attempt to secure a common core of belief and loyalty in order to maintain a balance between social stability and liberty. Challenges to the uniformity of American character appeared on every side. Immigrants came from abroad in unprecedented numbers. Old communities were uprooted and destroyed as new lands in the West drew off the farmers and youth of established agricultural areas which could not compete with the fertile expanse of the Mississippi valley, while the growing factory towns and cities of the eastern states similarly drained upland farms and villages of their youth and talent. Manchester, Lowell, Buffalo, and, by the 1850's, Chicago, were the emblems of an industrial-urban way of life that was fast encroaching upon the simple agrarian and commercial society of earlier decades. A new America emerged of factories as well as fields, of Irishmen as well as Yankees, Catholics as well as Protestants.
Probably there was more sustained analysis and speculation about the character of institutions in the four decades before the Civil War than in any other comparable period of American history. The social role of the schools was at the center of this reconsideration. On the one hand, schools were expected to mold the young into loyal and useful American citizens, an uncertain procedure at best but clearly one of greater difficulty as the population became more varied. On the other hand, they were supposed to assist the young in developing and fulfilling their capabilities, helping them to unlock the potentials of mind and character that would free them from error and narrowness. The two aims were theoretically brought together in the process of social mobility: by developing his mind and skill each individual would find the place he merited in the social order. If mobility worked efficiently, all would be both happy and useful. Unfortunately, it did not always work that way. The demanding task of the common school reformer was to find and sustain a balance between serving order by shaping young Americans and serving young Americans by helping them find themselves.
It was no accident that the common school movement took hold in precisely those areas where the pluralistic character of society was most evident. Although the New England states and those of the middle-Atlantic area had progressed farther than any others in building schools, they were also the states where the new society and economy made the deepest and most rapid inroads. The population of Massachusetts increased from 523,287 in 1820 to 1,231,066 forty years later. Inevitably this threw a burden upon the schools. They had to accommodate the new immigrants and the shifting school population that resulted from internal population movements. In addition, faith in the very idea of public schools had to be revived. Under the Massachusetts law of 1789 authorizing the "district school," financial support had fallen off, buildings were in disrepair, teachers' salaries had dwindled, and the school year had been shortened. The reputation of free schools declined, while private schools attended by the children of the wealthy nourished and spread. Horace Mann's task, following his appointment as secretary of the Massachusetts Board of Education in 1837, was no less than to restore the support of the public for free schools, which he did with astounding energy and ingenuity.
Even where it took hold, the common school movement fell short of its aims. It was difficult to strike an entirely satisfactory balance between the school as a means of inculcating the value of social stability and the school as a means of personal growth and liberation. Ironically the mobile character of the American population accentuated the need for uniformity of instruction. The separation of students into grades, the standardization of textbooks, and uniform training for teachers were in part attempts to accommodate learning to the desire of so many Americans to be on the move from an old place to a new where they hoped better fortune awaited them. If instruction could be classified, children could move freely with their parents from place to place taking up schoolwork where it had been dropped at their old place of residence. [1a] But such classification inevitably meant that different pupils (and teachers) were steered into niches fashioned for them by someone else.
In other parts of the nation the educational problems of industrial and urban growth were not so acute. Where frontier conditions lingered, sparseness of settlement and a moving rural population worked against effective schools. A legal framework for uniform public education was created in the Midwest, closely following the models of the New England and middle-Atlantic states. Building schools and hiring good teachers, however, lagged behind. As states like Ohio and Michigan attained a settled population accompanied by some industrial growth toward the middle of the century, their school systems became indistinguishable from those in the older states in the East.
In southern states the difficulties in founding free schools were of a different character. A people predominantly rural, living in isolation from each other, and lacking liquid wealth, had to overcome both aristocratic educational and social traditions and the blighting effects of slavery. Despite the obstacles public education had its champions, particularly Calvin Wiley who laid the foundations for a state school system in North Carolina during the decade preceding the Civil War. Actual free schooling in the South, however, remained confined to pauper education at public expense, some city school systems that provided education for all, and a very few districts that chose to avail themselves of the permissive school legislation passed by southern legislatures.
Higher education, although further removed than the common schools from the immediate stress and strain of demographic, social, and economic changes, felt the pressure of similar forces. The colleges, among the most aristocratic institutions of the country, had to face charges that their course of study was irrelevant and their methods of governing the lives of undergraduates undemocratic. Student restlessness and criticism were commonplace in the early part of the nineteenth century, stemming from dissatisfaction with the course of study and the student's unhappiness with the restraints the faculty imposed upon their lives. Although denominational interests and competition continued to be crucial in the founding of private colleges, the harmful effects of sectarian rivalry were frequently recognized and deplored. State universities suffered from the indifference of a public that was preoccupied with numerous denominational colleges. Consequently, with exceptions like the Universities of Virginia and Michigan, they remained subordinate to private colleges. Some experiments were undertaken with the college curriculum, although most institutions preferred to stand by the prescribed classical studies. At Harvard a limited trial of elective study began through the prompting of George Ticknor, a young professor who had studied at a German university and had there glimpsed what a university might be. Ticknor became so discouraged over the lack of faculty interest in expanding the curriculum and giving students a choice of subjects that he resigned. Yale, with its hearty commitment to prescription, the ancient languages, and the theory of mental discipline, pointed to a familiar and appealing way. Only toward the middle of the century when college enrollments began to decline and the volume of criticism increased did serious discussion of sweeping changes in studies and the formation of true universities as centers of research and scholarship as well as of teaching begin to take place. In many ways the most important outcome of this desire for new institutions was the passage of the Morrill Act in 1862 which launched the land-grant colleges. Initiating a democratization of higher education by supplying training in more practical subjects at less cost than the traditional college, the land-grant colleges anticipated an enlargement of the college-attending group and a commitment of federal government support for learning.
The education of blacks came under closer restriction after the Nat Turner revolt of 1831. One southern legislature after another, fearing assemblies of slaves and their communication with each other and with free Negroes, outlawed elementary instruction. Most of these laws remained in force until the Civil War, although some of the harshness was removed from them by allowing instruction for free Negroes when carried out under the auspices of trusted whites acceptable to the legislature or local authorities. Because of the weak administration and enforcement of law, occasional slaveowners acquiesced in the instruction of their slaves and even participated in it themselves. The literate slave was not, then, unknown in the old South, but he was a rarity. Eighty per cent of nonwhites in 1870 were illiterate according to the federal census of that year, the first to attempt such estimates. Two considerations should be remembered in interpreting this figure. First, the 20 per cent who were literate by the census definition were mainly the free blacks of the ante-bellum era and their descendants. Second, by 1870 there had been five years of freedom in which private and public agencies had made an impressive attempt to supply ex-slaves with an education sufficient to assure literacy.
The situation of free Negro children was substantially the same in North and South. In neither section was there equality before the law. Discriminatory legislation in civil rights, access to courts, occupations, property, and schools could be found in every southern state and in nearly all those of the North. Segregated schools were the rule. Only in remote areas and small towns with few Negro inhabitants was it common for black and white children to attend school together. In some towns and states separate schools for Negro children were maintained by law. Financing of schools was often carried out in a discriminatory fashion. Negro property owners were liable for the payment of local taxes for the support of schools which their children could not attend. In some states legislation provided for the division of local school funds in accordance with the payment of taxes by blacks and whites. In no instance were funds divided according to the number of black and white children attending school, nor were other efforts made to assure that the separate schools children went to should be equal in length of the school term, pay of teachers, or expenditures on equipment. Black children in separate public schools in the North almost uniformly received less attention and care than their white counterparts.
Only in Massachusetts was legal action successful in changing this situation. In Boston segregated primary schools for blacks were maintained by the School Committee. A Negro father sued in behalf of his daughter for admittance into a nearby all-white school. Although the state Supreme Court upheld the School Committee's racial discrimination among pupils, the legislature, responsive to opinion outside Boston in the rural and small town portions of the state, reversed the court's decision in 1855. This was the only legislative victory that black parents and children in the North could claim before the war in their struggle for equal rights.
The federal government first assisted in the education of Indian children after the War of 1812. The Treaty of Ghent ended the series of conflicts stretching back to the late seventeenth century in which Indian tribes, in alliance with foreign powers, tried to stem the advance of white Americans. Warfare did not, of course, cease in 1815, but the subjugation of the Indians was a foregone conclusion once the possibility of outside assistance had been eliminated. The American government, therefore, reached a turning point in its relations with the tribes. With less need for a military approach, the government turned to what it called a civilization policy. Having been brought under control, the Indians would now be transformed into white Americans, or at least made into a manageable and partial facsimile.
The task of civilizing the Indian did not lie with government alone. Cooperation with private agencies was an accepted means of carrying on a multitude of tasks of a public character. So it is not surprising that the government should have adopted subsidization of private, missionary religious agencies as the primary means of educating the Indian child. Many religious groups were eager to take the field. They had a long history, without great success, of seeking contact with Indians and trying to bring Indian youth into schools and convert them to Christianity. In 1819 the federal government committed a small portion of its resources through the establishment of an Indian "civilization fund," at first only ten thousand dollars each year, to pay the expenses of missionaries and teachers chosen by denominational associations or ecumenical bodies in schools scattered among the Indian tribes.
The kind of schooling and community that would be effective for Indian children was difficult to determine. Most of the teachers tried to impart the ordinary kinds of elementary instruction combined with lessons in piety. This seldom produced more than a veneer of education which was stripped away as soon as the Indian child returned to the tribe. An exception existed among the Cherokees of the Southeast who established villages, cleared fields, raised domestic animals, learned trades, and went to school and church in large numbers until during Jackson's administration they were forced to surrender their lands and move westward. Thus the only really successful experiment in acculturation before the Civil War failed because of the desire of white men for the lands the Indians occupied.
Once the failure of conventional education was recognized, those concerned began to cast about for alternatives. They hit upon combining a measure of conventional education with instruction in manual trades. Mastery of a trade, it was hoped, would supply the Indian child with a way of making a living while contributing to the progress of all and the assimilation of his fellow Indians. Another possibility was the boarding school in which children were removed from the influence of parents and tribal ways in the hope that they would adopt the outlook of whites. This movement, in its infancy before the Civil War, was to be implemented in the late nineteenth century.
How successful was education for minority children? In general, government only indirectly affected most aspects of their lives. They were mainly influenced by unofficial, less formal institutions of society. In education, government largely maintained legal and social-cultural distinctions between the treatment of the children of these minority groups and the children of the white middle class. Where it was possible for Negro children to go to school at all, laws were passed to keep them in segregated schools. Very few Indian children were given any kind of instruction. The broad impact of institutions under government control or influence on children of minority groups was to enforce an alien way of life and a degrading conception of themselves incompatible with growth and fulfillment.