An Awakening for Whom?

2020 ◽  
pp. 192-210
Author(s):  
David Komline
Keyword(s):  
African Americans ◽  
School Reform ◽  
Educational Reform ◽  
Educational Change ◽  
Reform Movement ◽  
The Awakening ◽  
Common School ◽  
English Speaking ◽  
The Common ◽  
The Way

In the 1830s, the population of Ohio was much more diverse than was that of Massachusetts. For the most part, school reformers in both states came from a white, Protestant, English-speaking majority and did little to look beyond their narrow cultural horizons when advocating educational change. In Ohio, however, groups that fell outside of this majority were larger and could more feasibly, although not always successfully, engage the debate about school reform. This chapter highlights the way three such groups, African Americans, Germans, and Catholics, interacted with the Common School Awakening, illustrating how their objections to the key assumptions of the awakening adumbrated larger weaknesses that would eventually undermine this educational reform movement.

The “Prussian System”

2020 ◽  
pp. 102-121
Author(s):  
David Komline
Keyword(s):  
School Reform ◽  
System P ◽  
Common School ◽  
The Common ◽  
Legislative Changes

This chapter presents the European inspiration for the legislative changes of the late 1830s that are now most frequently associated with the Common School Awakening in America. Beginning with the Prussian school reform that followed the Napoleonic defeats, the chapter demonstrates how news about Prussian schools traveled from Prussia, through France and then England, and eventually to America. Victor Cousin, famous in America as a French philosopher, served as the principal, if indirect, means of this transmission. His report on Prussian schools, translated in England and then published in abbreviated forms in America, helped to inspire American reforms. After closely examining the report in its several incarnations, especially focusing on its multiple appeals to religion, the chapter concludes by surveying American responses to the report to lay the groundwork for the specific ways that individual states would implement some of its suggestions.

scholarly journals The Forerunners of the Reformation

2015 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 77
Author(s):  
PETER A. LILLBACK
Keyword(s):  
Theological Reflection ◽  
Reform Movement ◽  
Common Life ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
The Common ◽  
The Church ◽  
The Way

Abstract: The plague, abuses in the church, and mysticism constitute the background for considering forerunners of the Reformation. They should not be viewed as directly causing the Reformation, but as anticipating in various ways reformational concerns. While some advocated practical reforms (e.g., Jan Hus and Savonarola), others developed theological reflection (e.g., the Brethren of the Common Life). Conciliarism, another reform movement through councils, ironically by its failure, propelled the cause of the Reformation. Finally, humanism, by its return to the sources and Scripture, paved the way as well. In conclusion, it is observed that the division between forerunners and Reformers sometimes is not very definite.

The First Era of School Reform

2020 ◽  
pp. 148-180
Author(s):  
Mark Boonshoft
Keyword(s):  
Public Schools ◽  
School Reform ◽  
White Men ◽  
War Of 1812 ◽  
Institutional Changes ◽  
Common Schools ◽  
Educational Vision ◽  
Common School ◽  
The Common ◽  
Panic Of 1819

This chapter explains how, during the 1810s and 1820s, a more effective political opposition to aristocratic education formed. In different ways, the “Jeffersonian Revolution” of 1800, the War of 1812, and the Panic of 1819 all helped bolster the critique of academies, and built popular support for public common schools. Historians often skip over this “first era of school reform” and look instead at Horace Mann and the common school reformers of the 1830s. But it was during this period that many northern states started investing in common schools, and also revamping academies and colleges to serve a new educational vision. These institutional changes were all geared toward overthrowing aristocratic education and instead trying to create widespread informed citizenship. But as education came to be seen as an important path to citizenship, the impulse to segregate public schools grew, confining their benefits primarily to white men.

The End of the Awakening

2020 ◽  
pp. 211-226
Author(s):  
David Komline
Keyword(s):  
Public Education ◽  
Board Of Education ◽  
Short Term ◽  
The Awakening ◽  
Common Schools ◽  
Common School ◽  
The Common ◽  
Back To Sleep

Between 1840, when chapters five, six, and seven leave off, and 1848, when Horace Mann left his position as secretary of the board of education, the religious consensus that had helped to give rise to the Common School Awakening definitively broke down. By the end of the decade, American Christians of all stripes were issuing objections to common schools. Lutherans, Reformed Christians, and members of other confessions joined the Catholics who had first voiced opposition to the vision of Christianity without sectarianism that stood at the heart of the Common School Awakening. As a result, the dramatic reform of the 1830s came to a halt, occasionally even retreating. But whatever regression might have occurred in terms of short-term policy, the religiously motivated ideals of systematization and professionalization had been permanently enshrined in the American vision of public education. Once stirred from her slumbers, American public education would not go quietly back to sleep.

“The Educational Regeneration of New England”

2020 ◽  
pp. 122-166
Author(s):  
David Komline
Keyword(s):  
New England ◽  
Board Of Education ◽  
Normal Schools ◽  
The Awakening ◽  
Common School ◽  
American Schools ◽  
The Common

This chapter narrates the Common School Awakening in Massachusetts, homing in on a pivotal figure whose role in the awakening has been underestimated: Charles Brooks, a Unitarian minister whose travels to Europe inspired him to begin a campaign to introduce Prussian reforms to American schools. The chapter follows Brooks from the beginning of his career to 1840, when he resigned from his clerical post after having helped introduce two key institutions into the Massachusetts educational bureaucracy, the board of education with its secretary and state-sponsored normal schools. The chapter focuses on the broad religious consensus that Brooks relied upon in his campaign.

The Common School Awakening in Ohio

2020 ◽  
pp. 167-191
Author(s):  
David Komline
Keyword(s):  
Board Of Education ◽  
Normal School ◽  
Normal Schools ◽  
Legislative Change ◽  
The Awakening ◽  
Common Schools ◽  
Common School ◽  
The Common ◽  
The Creation

This chapter narrates the key developments in the movement to systematize and professionalize Ohio’s schools, which culminated in 1837 with the creation of the office of the superintendent of common schools. In many ways, Ohio resembled Massachusetts: religious reformers pointed to the example of Prussia in a successful campaign to introduce legislative change. In other respects, however, the case of Ohio differed. One important contrast between the course of the Common School Awakening in the two states involves the scope of the legislative victories achieved in each. In Massachusetts, the board of education and state-sponsored normal schools that came into existence in the 1830s continued largely unchanged for decades. In Ohio, however, the awakening did not result in a state-sponsored normal school and the superintendent office that it created passed out of existence when its first occupant resigned.

Norwegian Immigrants Respond to the Common School: A Case Study of American Values and the Lutheran Tradition

1981 ◽  
Vol 50 (3) ◽  
pp. 302-315 ◽  
Author(s):  
James S. Hamre
Keyword(s):  
Voluntary Organizations ◽  
Disciples Of Christ ◽  
American Values ◽  
Common School ◽  
English Speaking ◽  
The Common ◽  
Nineteeth Century ◽  
Protestant Denominations ◽  
Evangelical Protestant

In his book, A Christian America: Protestant Hopes and Historical Realities, Robert T. Handy stresses “the important role that the idea of civilization has played in the evangelical Protestant denominations that together made up the dominant religious subculture of nineteeth-century America.” Handy contends that the English-speaking evangelical Protestant denominations—he includes the Baptists, Methodists, Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Disciples of Christ, United Brethren, and the evangelical wing in the Protestant Episcopal Church—thought of themselves as making up the “religious mainstream of the nation” and were motivated by the vision of a Christian America. They saw it as their task to work for the creation of a nation based on Christian principles, and they sought to utilize a number of institutions, voluntary organizations, and techniques to achieve that goal.

Causality Then and Now

1993 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 165-177
Author(s):  
Karen Harding
Keyword(s):  
Quantum Theory ◽  
Common Sense ◽  
Mechanical Model ◽  
Physical World ◽  
Scientific Data ◽  
The World ◽  
The Common ◽  
The Universe ◽  
The Way

Ate appearances deceiving? Do objects behave the way they do becauseGod wills it? Ate objects impetmanent and do they only exist becausethey ate continuously created by God? According to a1 Ghazlli, theanswers to all of these questions ate yes. Objects that appear to bepermanent are not. Those relationships commonly tefemed to as causalare a result of God’s habits rather than because one event inevitably leadsto another. God creates everything in the universe continuously; if Heceased to create it, it would no longer exist.These ideas seem oddly naive and unscientific to people living in thetwentieth century. They seem at odds with the common conception of thephysical world. Common sense says that the universe is made of tealobjects that persist in time. Furthermore, the behavior of these objects isreasonable, logical, and predictable. The belief that the univetse is understandablevia logic and reason harkens back to Newton’s mechanical viewof the universe and has provided one of the basic underpinnings ofscience for centuries. Although most people believe that the world is accutatelydescribed by this sort of mechanical model, the appropriatenessof such a model has been called into question by recent scientificadvances, and in particular, by quantum theory. This theory implies thatthe physical world is actually very different from what a mechanicalmodel would predit.Quantum theory seeks to explain the nature of physical entities andthe way that they interact. It atose in the early part of the twentieth centuryin response to new scientific data that could not be incorporated successfullyinto the ptevailing mechanical view of the universe. Due largely ...

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