Introduction

In Chapter 3 we analyzed a situation in which educators quite unanimously wanted young children out of school, while many parents demonstrated a persistent desire to have them in school. After 1860 this conflict was gradually settled at the local level by rules prescribing the minimum age of entry to schools. Because most parents, it seems, still wanted schooling as early as possible, the minimum age requirements tended to result in most children entering school at about the same age, five or six. In other words, the initial transition from family to school was postponed but became nearly universal and was accomplished within a narrow age range.

To illustrate, we may arbitrarily define the duration of this life-course transition for a whole population as the number of years between the age at which 20 percent of the children were enrolled and the age at which 80 percent of the children were enrolled. Using a large sample of children who resided in eight diverse Massachusetts communities in 1880, we calculated the transition time as about three years in 1880.

In this chapter we shall use the same files of census information to analyze school leaving in the teen years, a transition that was more spread out than school entry. The transition from 80 percent enrolled down to 20 percent enrolled took between four and five years in 1880 and, as we shall see, was clearly associated with individual family and community characteristics.

The “sleepy” period: enrollment levels in the American Northeast, 1800–1840

Leading political theorists of the Revolutionary generation considered an educated citizenry essential to the survival of the American republic. Some, like Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Rush, devised plans for systems of common schooling. But these plans generally came to naught, and the discussion of them has too long dominated the educational historiography of this period. If the fragile American nation could be saved only by an educated citizenry, and if an educated citizenry could be maintained only by a state system of common schools, why were two generations of town officials and state legislators so lackadaisical about providing systematic, universal education? Why was there a lag of forty years between the creation of the republic and the creation of a state board of education in Massachusetts?

Perhaps the public did not share the anxieties of the Founding Fathers about the American polity. Perhaps they shared their anxieties but did not share their faith that schooling would preserve republican institutions. Perhaps, on the contrary, they agreed with both propositions but believed that schooling in their society was ample and that most children received the kind of rudimentary intellectual and moral training the political theorists had in mind, even though much schooling was neither publicly controlled nor free. We believe that this third explanation best fits the evidence, and we believe that research into the educational history of the early United States should, for its central focus, turn from the unfulfilled plans of political elites to local patterns of schooling and other forms of education, that is, from the intellectual to the social history of education.

Despite periodic enthusiasm for infant schools, kindergartens, and Head Start programs, progressive educational thought in America has not always endorsed early schooling. In the period from 1830 to 1880, educational spokesmen and medical authorities counseled against the school education of children between the ages of two and four or even five, and they waged a slow but successful battle with parents to keep children of those ages at home. Although in the early nineteenth century it was normal for very young children to attend dame schools, infant schools, or district schools, by the mid-nineteenth century educators counseled against sending three- or four-year-olds to any school. Furthermore, whereas in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries children were encouraged to learn to read at an early age, by the mid-nineteenth century educators argued that children should not engage in such disciplined intellectual activities too early.

Children, parents, and the schools in colonial Massachusetts

Education had been one of the cornerstones of Puritan society. Because the Puritans believed that reading and understanding the Bible were essential to the religious development of their children, they considered it important to insure opportunities for rudimentary education. Early leaders in Massachusetts assumed that parents would instruct their children in reading and writing, as well as in religion. They expected parents to catechize their children at home as a normal part of their initial religious training.

Although substantial opposition to the board of education illustrates the kind of political, economic, regional, and cultural conflicts that accompanied the creation of a state school system in nineteenth-century Massachusetts, the victory of the board's supporters was symbolic of the major trends in education already emerging by 1840. The episode was also prophetic of the direction public education took in the succeeding decades. In this book we have attempted to present and analyze the most important of those trends. We have emphasized quantitative information that reflects mass behavior, rather than the ideas and viewpoints of educational reformers and other socially prominent people, although we have tried to relate the two types of evidence when it seemed appropriate. The resulting evidence does not support a picture of an evolving, benevolent, democratic school system opposed only by religious dissidents, bumpkins, and aristocrats, a picture that predominated in early times. On the other hand, we disagree at several points with some recent historians who have focused – too narrowly, we believe – on human exploitation in our economic system as the chief generator of public school development. Educational participation as well as reform attitudes were indeed often related to the economic status of an individual, a town, or a region, but education itself is so complex that it cannot be treated as a single variable and then pegged to a single historical development, out of which all other concerns flowed.

Note: A discussion of the following definitions is found in Appendix C.

The abbreviation R equals values that are taken directly from the published statistical abstracts of the Annual Reports of the secretary of the Massachusetts Board of Education.

Table A2.1

Col. 1. Number of children 0–19.

Source: Reported figures are from the U.S. censuses of 1840, 1850, 1860, 1870, and 1880, and from the Massachusetts censuses of 1855, 1865, and 1875. Interim years are extrapolated on the assumption of constant arithmetic annual increases between censuses. Figures are for all races. (See discussion, Appendix C, Section 1.)

Col. 2. Number of children enrolled in public schools, all ages, summer term.

Source: R.

Col. 3. Percentage of children birth to 19 enrolled in public schools, summer term.

Definition: Col. 2/Col. 1.

Col. 4. Number of children enrolled in public schools, all ages, winter term.

Source: R.

Col. 5. Percentage of children birth to 19 enrolled in public schools, winter term.

Definition: Col. 4/Col. 1.

Col. 6. Average daily number of children attending public schools, summer term.

Source: R

Col. 7. Average percentage of children birth to 19 attending public schools daily, summer term.

The laudatory tradition of educational history that prevailed in the United States until the 1950s emphasized democracy, opportunity, humanitarianism, enlightenment, and the development of an American consensus as motives for public schooling. Historians of education, often committed to the schools of their day by virtue of their positions as school administrators or education professors, saw public schools as the engines of American democracy, as the bulwark of free institutions, and as the “balance wheel of the social machinery,” in Horace Mann's famous phrase. This tradition emphasized the relationship of schooling to the political system and to the development of a common American culture. It was an idealist tradition, which was, and still is, widely shared by the American public.

The past fifteen years, however, have seen a pendulum swing among some historians on questions about the initial and continuing purposes of public schooling. A new critical view has emerged, emphasizing socioeconomic realities rather than political ideals. Revisionist historians have emphasized class and cultural conflict, bureaucracy, and the schools' role in inculcating submissive attitudes. Their work constitutes a reaction against the old history of education, and also against the consensus view of American history of the 1950s. Although their normative perspective is often much more negative, the revisionists share a basic assumption of their predecessors: They assume that the structure and content of public schooling have been largely determined by the political and economic system in America.

Educational reform and state intervention in schooling appealed more to some communities and some individuals than others. Previous chapters have explored support and opposition through town records, census information, and case studies. Another way to get at conflict in the process of educational development is to examine the politics of education during the formative years when state intervention was still controversial.

Historians of American education have long been interested in the question of who supported educational reform in the 1830s and 1840s, and they have put forth a wide variety of answers. Some have seen the educational revivals of the thirties and forties as the result of dedicated humanitarian leaders, such as James Carter, Horace Mann, and Henry Barnard, who aroused an otherwise apathetic public to the value of common school education. Others have argued that the educational reforms of the period resulted from the demands of workers who wanted educational opportunities for their children. Some recent scholarship on antebellum education has stressed the role of capitalists in developing an extensive public school system in order to insure stability in the emerging industrial order. There is, then, little agreement among historians about the relative importance of various groups in supporting educational reform in Massachusetts. Part of the disagreement has arisen because historians with different theories have used different types of evidence. Supporters of the great-crusader interpretation relied on the writings of elite reformers, common-man advocates looked to the platforms of worker organizations, and recent supporters of economic interpretations have analyzed the characteristics of towns that adopted educational reforms.

We do not present a theory of educational development in this volume. Indeed, we have been impressed by the inadequacy of various one-to-one models that have characterized some recent works relating education to social change in nineteenth-century America, works that argue, implicitly or explicitly, that factory production caused educational reform, that urbanization caused school bureaucracy, that capitalism caused increased enrollments, or that modernization caused increased literacy. When these propositions have been sufficiently specific to test, as in the case of factory production and educational reform, they have at worst proved incorrect and at best provided only a partial picture of educational development. When the explanatory concept is more comprehensive, as with the notion of modernization, the danger lies in reifying the umbrella term into a cause independent of its parts. Furthermore, even among its most talented practitioners, modernization theories are plagued by the equation of modernity with progress and desirable change.

We seek in this volume to describe in detail a complex set of educational developments and to discuss some of their more important cultural, political, and socioeconomic concomitants. Systematic state schooling did not develop in a vacuum. It was not just the gradual evolution of some universally desirable idea. It developed in relationship to the evolving social structure, economic system, and cultural relationships of community, region, and nation. Because schooling had a cultural content more compatible with some groups than with others, and because schooling cost money, both to communities and to individuals, there were predisposing characteristics associated with school participation and educational reform.