Victory of the Common School Movement.docx

1、Victory of the Common School MovementVictory of the Common School MovementA turning point in American educational history03 April 2008George Washington, Constitutional Convention, 1787. (Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond. Gift of Edgar William, Bernice Garbisch)(The following article by Carl F.

2、 Kaestle is taken from the U.S. Department of State publication, Historians on America.)Victory of the Common School Movement: A Turning Point in American Educational HistoryBy Carl F. KaestleAmericans today count on their public schools to be free of expense, open to all, and devoid of religious se

3、ctarianism. Although families are permitted to enroll their children in private schools at their own expense in the United States, the percentage of private school students has been stable at about 10-12 percent for half a century. The great majority of students attend public schools, from the first

4、 to the twelfth year of schooling, the fulfillment of a crucial policy decision made in each individual state in the northern part of the country in the 1840s, and in the southern states in the late 19th century. It was called the Common School Movement.Free schools open to all children did not exis

5、t in colonial America. Yet, something like modern American public schools developed in the 1840s, when a majority of voters in the northern regions of the United States decided that it would be wise to create state-mandated and locally controlled free schools. Once this model of schooling prevailed,

6、 the stage was set for the creation of an inclusive free-school system in the United States.In the British colonies of the 17th and 18th centuries, schooling was not compulsory, not free of charge, not secular, not open to all, and not even central to most childrens education. Decisions about the pr

7、ovision of schools were made town-by-town. Girls were often excluded, or allowed to attend only the lower-level schools, and sometimes at different hours from the boys. In most towns, parents had to pay part of the tuition to get their young educated. These barriers to the education of all character

8、ized the New England colonies in the Northeast as well as those in the middle-Atlantic and the South. In those sections of North America that were then governed by Spain or France, even less was done for education. Christian missionaries made intermittent efforts to evangelize Native Americans and A

9、frican Americans through religious education across North America; but schooling, whether local or continental, was not primarily a governmental matter.The Religious Roots of Colonial SchoolingHowever, in spite of patchwork, casual customs of schooling throughout the British colonies, there was a pu

10、sh for literacy among many colonists, based largely on the Protestant belief that lay people should learn to read the Bible in the vernacular tongue (that is, for British colonists, in English, rather than Latin or Greek). Passing a law in 1647 for the provision of schools, the Massachusetts colonia

11、l legislature commented that old deluder Satan had kept the Bible from the people in the times before the Protestant Reformation, but now they should learn to read. Thus, the legislature decreed, towns of over 50 families should provide a school. They did not specify that the education had to be fre

12、e, nor did they require attendance. The law was weakly enforced. In effect, parents decided whether to send their children; if they did, they had to pay part or all of the cost; and religion was without doubt or question intertwined with education in those days. The most popular schoolbook in Britis

13、h colonial America, The New England Primer, taught children their ABCs through rhymed couplets, beginning with In Adams Fall, We sinned all, and concluding with Zaccheus he Did climb the Tree, Our Lord to see.Schools offered brief terms, perhaps six weeks in winter and another six weeks in summer, a

14、ttended mainly by young children who were not working in the fields. These practices swayed to the rhythms of agricultural work and the determination of most towns to provide only modest resources for schools. Formal schooling was more extensive for a tiny elite, as it was in Americas parent country

15、, England. In the colonies, only a few boys of European ancestry might go on to more advanced schools for English grammar and then, for an even smaller number, tutoring in Latin, leading to Harvard College, or Yale, or William and Mary. The majority of these privileged few then became ministers, rat

16、her than leaders in secular society.The rest of the children learned most of their literacy, adult roles, work skills, and traditions outside of school, from a constellation of institutions, principally the home, the workplace, and the church. However, as colonial society became more highly populate

17、d, more complex, and more riven by faction in the 18th century, competition among rival Protestant denominations and quarrels developed over religious doctrine. In addition, political and financial issues ultimately brought relations between the colonists and the English homeland to a breaking point

18、. Thus, the uses of literacy for argumentation both in oral and written form grew. And as agriculture became more commercial and efficient, it brought more cash transactions, more focus on single crops, and the prospect of more distant markets, into the countryside, reinforcing the value of literacy

19、. In the growing coastal towns of Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Charleston, and in some inland centers like Albany and Hartford, philanthropic groups and churches, responding to the increase in poverty and its visibility, established free schools for the moral education of poor children, on th

20、e model of English charity schools.The Common School MovementGiven these 18th-century dynamics, one might have expected that when the colonists victory over British forces in the American Revolution finally left newly-minted Americans free to establish republican institutions to their liking, school

21、s would have been high on the list. Indeed, many of the Revolutions leaders thought they should be including Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Rush. Jefferson wrote from France in 1786, advising a friend to preach a crusade against ignorance, and support free schools in Virginia. Rush, a Philadelphia ph

22、ysician and signer of the Declaration of Independence, proposed a similar bill for free schools in Pennsylvania.Leaders of this movement for state systems of common schools in the early national period came from both the Jeffersonian Republicans and the Federalists. But their efforts failed in their

23、 state legislatures. Most free citizens, it appears, thought that the patchwork colonial mode of education was still quite sufficient. In particular, Americans were wary of any increase in taxes (which had been a major point of contention with England) and did not want their fledgling state governme

24、nts to meddle in affairs that had always been local matters for towns or families to decide. After Jeffersons bill for free schools in the Virginia legislature had failed twice, he complained to his friend Joel Barlow in 1807, There is a snail-paced gait for the advance of new ideas on the general m

25、ind, under which we must acquiesce.Thus, in the countryside, towns still decided whether to have a school, and if so, how to fund it. The cost was usually covered through some combination of taxes on all citizens plus tuition fees for the parents of children who attended. Sometimes parents paid by p

26、roviding food for the teacher or firewood for the school, but usually it was cash. Parental payments were called rate bills. Sometimes the school would be free for all children for a set amount of time and then a continuation school would be provided for those whose parents were able to pay. Thus th

27、e amount of schooling a child received was in the last analysis determined by wealth. At most, there would be a single school for each town or district. Blacks and Indians in general received no formal schooling in these institutions. Even for white children, the terms were brief, the teachers often

28、 poorly educated, and the buildings generally in poor condition. The rural school became a favorite target of school reformers later in the early 19th century. Michigans superintendent, John Pierce, called little rural districts the paradise of ignorant teachers; another report spoke of a district s

29、chool building in such bad repair that even the mice had deserted it.The Monitorial School ModelIn cities, there were more opportunities. Even in the 18th century in urban areas, there were several different kinds of schools, funded in different ways and with different levels of financial resources.

30、 A modest amount of charity schooling provided some free instruction for children of poor whites and of African Americans, often subsidized by churches and by state and local government. Such efforts resulted in African Free Schools, infant schools for the two- and three-year-old children of the ind

31、igent, and other types of sponsorship. As time passed and as concern grew, many cities in the new Republic experimented with a type of charity school, the monitorial school, which became popular in England, Europe, and Latin America in the 1810s and 20s. Invented by Joseph Lancaster, a Quaker school

32、master in England, the monitorial school model encouraged more advanced pupils to teach those who were less advanced. Lancaster wrote many manuals in his efforts to popularize the methods. Lancaster attempted to define appropriate discipline and to provide detailed instructions for classroom procedu

33、res. At a time when boys were routinely paddled for school infractions, advocates applauded Lancasters ideas about motivation without corporal punishment, discipline motivated by an active curriculum and competition, neutrality with regard to religious denominations, and, perhaps most important, economy of