An Awakening for Whom?

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”

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.

The End of the Awakening

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”

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.

Early Attempts at Revival in Massachusetts

This chapter focuses on schooling in Massachusetts between the Revolution and the reforms commonly associated with Horace Mann and the Common School Awakening. After surveying the legislative history, especially focusing on laws passed in 1789 and 1827, it looks at two specific efforts to reform education in the 1820s. The first involved Lancasterian schools. After William Bentley Fowle’s success in launching a monitorial school in Boston, Josiah Quincy, the city’s mayor, attempted to implement this method on a broader scale. The second reform examined is James Carter’s campaign to found a state-sponsored teacher training college. Both of these efforts at reform failed. Notably, these campaigns lacked strong religious components. This chapter thus serves as a negative example, a foil that throws into relief the religious appeals treated in other chapters.

“The Schoolmaster Is Abroad”

This chapter fills out the picture of early American schools by surveying developments in several fields of education, ranging from charity institutions to elite academies, including those for the deaf and blind, as well as those aimed distinctly at boys and distinctly at girls. Tracing the transatlantic trips of different educational leaders—John Griscom, Thomas Gallaudet, Samuel Gridley Howe, Joseph Cogswell, George Bancroft, Henry Dwight, Sereno Edwards Dwight, and Emma Willard—this chapter focuses on the religious rhetoric underlying attempts to introduce new types of schooling to the American landscape in the early years of the Common School Awakening.

Joseph Lancaster, Monitorial Education, and Christianity without Sectarianism

The chapter focuses on “monitorial education,” schooling built on a pyramid system in which one master teaches several students, who teach several more. Two British teachers, Joseph Lancaster and Andrew Bell, each developed his own version of this pedagogical strategy at the end of the eighteenth century. In Britain, the question of whose system to use became heated: nonconforming evangelicals supported Lancaster, a Quaker layman; strict Anglicans supported Bell, a Church of England cleric. America picked up on the Lancasterian brand of monitorial instruction, dismissing Bell as tainted by antirepublican ecclesiasticism. In doing so, reformers across the religious spectrum supported monitorial education as a way to instruct America’s youth in a broad Christianity that was not sectarian. Lancasterianism thus introduced educational leaders to the idea of regimented schooling and offered a concrete example of religious schooling anchored in a broad evangelical consensus but not tied to any distinct denomination.

Introduction

This chapter uses as a case study an incident from 1824 in which the New York Tract Society convinced John Van Ness Yates, New York’s acting superintendent of common schools, to encourage the use of its literature in schools under his oversight. This incident highlights the significance of growing educational bureaucracy in this era and how it might be used for distinctly religious aims. This educational bureaucracy emerged as part of what this book calls the “Common School Awakening,” a transatlantic, transdenominational movement that introduced systematized, professionalized schools to America in the first half of the nineteenth century. Previous historical scholarship on education in this era, notably the very different work of Ellwood Cubberley and Michael Katz, has ignored the strongly religious roots of the movement for common schools that has found its representative figure in the person of Horace Mann.

The Common School Awakening in Ohio

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.