Labor leaders made free, equal, and state-supported schools their cardinal goal. Robert Dale Owen, fresh from the failure of New Harmony, became an inspirational leader in the New York labor struggles of the l830s and an advocate of common schools. In urging the Working Men’s party to place tax-supported schools at the head of the platform, Owen proposed an audacious system of education in which the state would lodge all children in boarding schools, providing them with equal food, clothing, and instruction. Only through boarding schools could the environment of every child be equalized.
“I believe in a National System of Equal, Republican, Protective, Practical Education,” Owen proclaimed, “the sole regenerator of a profligate age, and the only redeemer of our suffering country from the equal curses of chilling poverty and corrupting riches, of gnawing want and destroying debauchery, of blind ignorance and of unprincipled intrigue.” Clearly the schools for Owen would be another Utopia. His six essays on education received wide publicity, although his bold plan for boarding schools was far too visionary for the Working Men’s party.
Responding to their leaders’ calls for educational reform, craftsmen and small shopkeepers used their recently acquired suffrage to demand education for their children. In Pennsylvania, they argued the necessity of a free system of education, already established in Philadelphia. In 1834, a milestone bill providing for free education passed on a statewide level, only to meet violent opposition among the wealthy, who produced 32,000 signatures for repeal. When the Senate voted for another bill providing for free education of only the poor, Representative Thaddeus Stevens opposed it on the grounds that education should be free to all. After a denunciation of class hostility toward free public schools he carried the legislature, and the original act stood.
Although education had changed in colonial days from a dependence on family, church, and apprenticeship to more public, official arrangements, no part of the country before 1815 had a comprehensive school system. In New York and other middle Atlantic states, public funds had gone to benevolent organizations such as the Free School Society of New York City, which sponsored charity schools for the poor. To attend charity schools, children had to take pauper oaths, and the poor objected to charity schools so much that they boycotted them. As late as 1828, more than 24,000 children between the ages of five and fifteen received no education in New York City; in Delaware, New Jersey, and Maryland the number was even greater.
States had left responsibility for schools to local districts. The district schools received meager funds from local taxes, hardly enough to pay a teacher and maintain a schoolhouse. Parents were assessed rates according to the number of their children in school; those unable to pay could still send children as charity pupils. In Massachusetts, one-third of the districts, 1,000 in all, had no schoolhouses. By 1840, it is estimated, one-half of the schoolchildren of New England and the middle Atlantic states were receiving free education, as were one-sixth of those in the old Northwest.
Private schools for children whose parents could pay tuition flourished throughout the Northeast. Children of the wealthy attended private “dame schools,” to avoid associating with the poor. In both district and private schools, instruction was all recitation by rote—students memorized a page from the text and recited to the teacher. In district schools, there was no age grading, since all ages learned in the one-room schoolhouse. Nor did uniform school books exist, at least at first; teachers taught from whatever books were at hand. In the 1830s, however, William McGuffey, a professor of languages, developed the renowned McGuffey’s Readers, a series of six textbooks for the elementary grades. The Readers mingled entertainment with moral and patriotic lessons, and they became the chief introduction to learning for several generations of American schoolchildren.
Teachers usually had no direct training for their work. As one school board member wrote in 1847 of a teacher: “he thinks of turning peddler, or of working at shoemaking. But the one will expose him to storms, the other he fears will injure his chest.…He will nevertheless teach school for a meagre compensation.” Such problems were less prevalent in the better-funded private schools where children of the well-to-do studied classical languages. In 1837, the Connecticut educational leader Henry Barnard estimated that 10,000 wealthy children attended private schools, at an expense greater than all the funds appropriated for the other 70,000 children of the state.
But members of elite groups often led reform. Leaders of the common school movement in the several states shared similar backgrounds and views on the purpose of education. They were members of the established professions—law, medicine, education, religion—and members of the Whig party. Horace Mann of Massachusetts, Henry Barnard of Connecticut, and Calvin Wiley of North Carolina were Whig legislators before they became state superintendents of education. As Whigs, they supported an active role by government in industrial growth, protective tariffs, internal improvements—and education.
Reformers hoped to bring every child into school through the establishment of the “free school,” supported by taxes and state grants—free so that no child would be identified as pauper and the poor would attend, and free so that the rich would not object to mixed economic classes since they would be paying for the schools anyway through taxation. Raising taxes for schools was unpopular everywhere, and reformers had only limited success, as wealthy people who could educate their children privately often opposed common schools. It took a lawyer-educator-politician with the moral standing and political skill of a Horace Mann to enlist manufacturers in the common school movement in Massachusetts.
Mann contended that education would create better workers. “Education has a market value…it may be turned to a pecuniary account: it may be minted, and will yield a larger amount of statutable coin than common bullion.” Mann’s influence on educational thought and practice was immense through his use of publicity to popularize his beliefs. In 1837, at a financial sacrifice, he relinquished his seat in the Massachusetts legislature to become secretary of the Massachusetts Board of Education. Two years later he secured the first state-supported American normal school at Lexington, Massachusetts, and by 1845 he had formed a state association of teachers in Massachusetts, as well as founding and editing the Common School Journal.
Mann’s accomplishments in Massachusetts were formidable. When he became secretary of the board of education, one-sixth of the children of the state were being taught in private academies, about one-third had no significant schooling at all, and in many districts the school term was only two or three months. Under Mann’s leadership, a minimum school year of six months was established by statute; schoolhouses and equipment were improved; teachers’ salaries raised by over a half; and the ratio of private school spending to public halved. The professional training of teachers was improved and educating by rote reduced.
Mann took on all comers. A Unitarian, he asserted that the Bible should be read in school, but without comment. A Puritan humanitarian with genuine sympathy for the poor and underprivileged, he believed that education would right the wrongs of society. The poor were miserable because of ignorance and lack of education, he felt, not because of injustice in the social system, and so the poor must work to better themselves. Democracy could succeed only if there was a free and universal school system teaching the work ethic; all should attend the public schools, and all would if the public schools surpassed the private schools in excellence. Inevitably Mann provoked fierce opposition not only from private schools but from many churchmen, who accused his board of education of creating a godless system of education.
Mann’s leadership was matched in southern New England by Henry Barnard, who centralized and improved common schooling in two states. Barnard had received an excellent private school education, followed by study at Yale and a year abroad. Elected to the Connecticut legislature, he introduced a bill in 1838 to centralize the school system with a state board of commissioners to oversee it. As secretary of the board, he carried out the law and w
orked to change public sentiment in its favor. Through public schools, Barnard maintained, rich and poor might achieve mutual understanding, and thereby reduce conflict. In 1842, he accepted the post of Commissioner of Public Schools in Rhode Island, where again he secured the passage of a school act. He wanted above all the “complete education of every human being without regard to the accidents of birth or fortune.” With an inheritance that permitted, him to spend $40,000 a year on educational publications, Barnard founded and edited the Connecticut Common School Journal. He went on to further leadership: chancellor of the University of Wisconsin, president of St. John’s College, and the first United States Commissioner of Education.
Leaders of the Common School Awakening in the South were moderate businessmen, former yeomen farmers, who supported internal improvements and greater economic growth for the region. Reformers wanted the South to build home industries and businesses with cheaper money and free itself from New York factors and shippers who were “strangling the South” by controlling the cotton shipment to England and the shipment back of manufactured goods. A better business environment could not grow in the South, they feared, as long as the planter class controlled the state legislatures, for planters disdained commerce and internal improvements. Education of the masses would help all to see through the planters’ values and allow the South to grow. Poor whites, if educated, would be less likely to follow demagogic leaders calling for war, and war was bad for business and economic growth.
“Let the sun of universal education shine upon it [North Carolina], and the matchless resources of the state, by works of improvement, be made to minister nutriment to its wants, and soon its bright blossoms will imparadise the soil from which its sturdy trunk has sprung, and its green, unfading foliage furnish umbrageous retreats for the weary of the earth,” wrote Calvin Wiley, superintendent of North Carolina schools in the North Carolina Reader. Wiley believed education would develop resources and found a new prosperity in North Carolina. A lawyer and newspaper editor, he was a member of the North Carolina state legislature in the early 1850s when he was elected superintendent of schools. He established the North Carolina Journal of Education and the first teacher-training institution in North Carolina.
Only state or local schools for paupers existed in most districts in the South. Children of planters received elementary education from private tutors; others had no education at all. The southern rate of illiteracy for whites was double that of the North in the period before the Civil War. In the 1840s the South made an effort to apply greater resources to education, but it fell behind other regions because it was the poorest section of the country. In 1860 a white child received approximately eleven days of schooling per year in the South, as compared to fifty in the North.
In the West, evangelical ministers advanced common schooling as part of a crusade against ignorance. Young Congregationalist ministers of the American Home Missionary Society who traveled to the Northwest frontier to convert the settlers were amazed at the illiteracy they found, and dispatched letters home to urge the society to send schoolteachers to the West. New England, priding itself on its educational heritage, sent forth numerous apostles of intellectual training.
For the first time, women began to serve as missionary teachers. Catharine Beecher, daughter of the eminent Congregationalist minister Lyman Beecher, began to send circulars in 1835 to county newspapers and clergymen throughout the East asking for names of women who would serve as teachers. In the West she asked for the names of towns and villages where a teacher would be welcome. She organized local groups of church women to raise a one-hundred-dollar donation to train and place one teacher in the West. Carrying the endorsements of Horace Mann and Henry Barnard, Catharine Beecher would present her case to a town’s most eminent official, and after gaining his endorsement she would build a local committee. In Boston, the Ladies’ Society for Promoting Education at the West donated several thousand dollars to the cause. The Organization for Promoting National Education, Catharine Beecher’s committee, received funds from local committees, arranged a brief training period for the teachers, and eventually sent 450 teachers to the West.
Missionaries, schoolmasters, college presidents, and lecturers “swarmed out generally flying over the mountains and alighting beyond wherever there was a job, often trusting to the future to develop a salary.” Horace Mann spent the last four years of his life administering Antioch College in Ohio. The “Father of the Indiana School System,” Caleb Mills, was a minister who answered a call to save the West; he knelt in the snow one winter day in 1833 with the founders of Wabash College in Crawfordsville, Indiana, to dedicate their lives to the cause of education and “the service of the Master whose followers they were.”
Born in Dunbarton, New Hampshire, in 1806, the son of a wealthy farmer, Caleb Mills, after studying at Dartmouth and Andover Theological Seminary, answered an advertisement in the Home Missionary Journal for a minister who could preach on Sundays and teach in a new college being organized in Crawfordsville, Indiana. In 1833 he went there with his wife and three young women whose purpose was to “go west to teach.” His preparatory class of twelve young men was the first class at Wabash, where Mills was professor of Greek and Latin until 1876.
Indiana had the highest rate of illiteracy of any northern state, and although numerous laws for common schooling existed, the school system was still only on paper. “One of the People” was the signature on the first educational message that Mills sent to the Indiana state legislature. In his six annual messages, 1846-51, he called upon the legislature to establish public schools. Mills popularized the argument of Horace Mann and other educational leaders that education of the common people would ensure the survival of the nation: “We can better meet the expense of the proper education of the rising generation, than endure the consequences resulting from the neglect of it.”
The messages and the resulting support brought forth a new bill before the legislature providing for compulsory taxation for schools, a central elementary system, uniform textbooks, and a superintendent of public instruction. The lawmaker who helped guide the bill through the legislature and spoke persuasively in its behalf was the ubiquitous Robert Dale Owen, the early leader of workingmen’s demands for education.
The founder of the Michigan system of public schools was also a Congregationalist minister, John Pierce: Born in Chesterfield, New Hampshire, Pierce lost his father when very young and was sent to live with a grandfather on his New England farm, where he received only eight weeks of schooling. Resolving at age twenty to earn an education, Pierce graduated from Brown University, and from Princeton Theological Seminary three years later; then, as an ordained minister, he accepted a call to serve as a missionary in the Michigan Territory.
At the constitutional convention that met to apply for Michigan’s statehood, Pierce helped persuade the chairman of the committee on education to support common schooling in the state. Appointed the first state superintendent of public instruction in 1836, he submitted a report for the organization and support of primary schools, for a University of Michigan with branches, and for disposing of the common school lands. Pierce’s report became the basis of the Michigan school system, although twenty years elapsed after the plan was adopted before free schools existed in the townships, and then only for three months a year. In 1838, Pierce began publication of the Journal of Education.
Religion was a powerful force in the Common School Awakening in urban areas. In New York City, pious men of the Public School Society, worried about the masses of poor people separated from the moral influences of the church, resolved to create an alternative influence to educate the people in morality and virtue. The society received state funds to staff eleven free schools for 20,000 children. The society claimed that the religious teaching offered in its schools was nonsectarian, and it opposed state money going to any schools maintained by religious denominations. Its schools were New York City’s only real public schools, but the increasing number
s of Roman Catholic immigrants boycotted them.
In 1834, Bishop John Hughes found across from the Roman Catholic cathedral in New York City a half-empty school run by the society. If he could supervise the teaching and the books used in the school so that anti-Catholic sentiment would be erased, Hughes promised to bring in Catholic children. Governor William Seward, valuing the discipline, socialization, and routine of education for poor children, supported Bishop Hughes. On this issue, Seward stood alone against his Whig party. The New York school law of 1842 provided for a New York City Board of Education to receive state funds, to tax, to build schools, and to distribute money to schools meeting certain requirements. No school with sectarian religious teaching would receive funds, but the Protestant Bible, viewed by the board as nonsectarian, could be used for instruction in the schools. The Catholics objected, and decided to create their own system of parochial schools.
Conflicting purposes continued to mark the movement for common schooling. Whig businessmen and reformers stressed the redemptive social purpose of education. Not only would common schooling create better workers to operate the new industrial system; it would fuse society together with shared morals and values. Some educational reformers, however, saw uneducated lower-class people as a threat to American democracy—and immigrants and the increasing numbers of factory laborers as a threat to the status quo. The powerful influence of schooling, they believed, was necessary to educate the poor in the values of hard work, individualism, thrift, and morality. Common schooling would relieve social problems without altering the social structure. The reformers focused on changing the person, not the society, as the root of the problem; the individual child was to conform to society’s values. The common school could, therefore, include everyone without large cost or threat to the privileged.
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