On October 19, 1781, at Yorktown, Virginia, in a military setting framed by symmetrical rows of soldiers bearing the colors of three nations, Charles Cornwallis, Major General of the British forces in South Carolina, surrendered his army to George Washington. As news spread up and down the coast and westward to inland villages and farms, citizens congregated for impromptu celebrations. No longer colonials, the victors now could transmute the hardships and tragedies of the war into memories of heroic deeds and patriotic sacrifices, and, for the moment, forget the uncertainties of peace and independence.

How one assesses the characteristics, the major direction, and the role of republican education in the early national period is bound to be influenced by how one defines the kind of society in which it existed. The controversy still continuing among historians about the degree of democracy in the colonial and revolutionary eras has an important bearing on any estimate of what constituted republican education. This controversy revolves around such questions as: Did democracy exist in the colonial era or did it first emerge in the Jacksonian period? To what degree had hierarchy and status been broken down? Was there in fact a ruling elite or had it been dissolved by political democracy and a changing social structure? How much vertical mobility was there in allowing individuals to rise economically or to achieve political leadership?

On the surface, the thesis that progressive education was “the educational phase of American Progressivism writ large” appears valid; but when one examines the various stages in the development of progressive education it becomes more and more like a misleading generality. The thesis suggests, among other things, that progressive education was a unified movement that continued to give expression to the ideology of progressivism until the mid-nineteen-fifties. Even if one were to ignore the other serious problems raised by this thesis, it would still be necessary to explain how it was possible for the educational phase of the progressive movement to survive by some thirty-five years the parent reform movement that came to an untimely end in 1920 with the landslide presidential victory of Warren G. Harding. But there is a more serious difficulty with Lawrence Cremin's thesis that may make it unnecessary to explain the strange tenacity of the progressive educator. In The Transformation of the School, Cremin observed that during the thirties a paralyzing split developed within the movement when influential educationists reacted against the child-centered pedagogy, which had reached its apogee during the twenties, by seeking “to tie progressive education more closely to political Progressivism.” Simply stated, the question that must be answered is whether the ideology of social reform-minded educators like George S. Counts, Harold Rugg, John L. Childs, and William H. Kilpatrick, who were the influential educationists to whom Cremin is referring, can be identified with the ethos of progressivism, with its emphasis on economic and political individualism. And if it cannot, then it would appear that the progressive education movement encompassed at least two distinct and often conflicting ideologies, of which only one can be identified with the progressive movement.

When American educational reformers surveyed the elementary school in the eighteen-nineties, three problems in particular distressed them. First, too many children exhibited a lack of interest when confronted by the joyless and often meaningless routine of learning the three R's. Second, the curriculum seemed irrelevant to the crisis through which American culture was passing on its way to urbanization and industrialization. The third problem, which grew in part out of attempts to resolve the first two difficulties, was the danger of overloading the curriculum of the common school with a host of new subjects which an explosion of specialized knowledge had made available. Charles McMurry, a leading American Herbartian, rejoiced in 1892 that “the old classical monopoly is finally and completely broken,” but he went on to warn that the common school course had become a “batch of miscellanies.” We are, he said, “in danger of over-loading pupils, as well as of making a superficial hodgepodge of all branches,” Educators who regarded themselves as adherents of the New Education now cast about with some urgency for a new elementary program that would incorporate material more relevant to the modern age and more appealing to children, without at the same time stretching the program of the school to impossible limits.

The establishment of the Lincoln School of Teachers College at Columbia University in September 1917 was a reaction against the rigid educational practices of the time. The school developed from the ideas of Charles W. Eliot and Abraham Flexner, who were deeply concerned with the conservative philosophy and lock-step methods of education practiced in the existing schools and who advocated reform of these practices. The publication of Eliot's Changes Needed in Secondary Education and Flexner's A Modern School had influenced the General Education Board under the leadership of Mr. and Mrs. John D. Rockefeller Jr. and Mrs. Willard Straight to recommend to Teachers College that an institution be established that would incorporate the proposed ideas. Both Eliot and Flexner were extremely interested in what was being taught in the schools, feeling that tradition rather than individual or social needs were governing what was included in the curriculum. The General Education Board, in a series of meetings with representatives of Teachers College, convinced them of the value of participating in such an undertaking, and agreement was announced in May 1916. The agreement specified that the proposed modern school be a “laboratory for the working out of an elementary and secondary school curriculum, which shall eliminate obsolete material and endeavor to work up in usable form, materials adapted to the needs of modern living.” The General Education Board agreed to underwrite the annual deficit incurred by the school, and instruction began in September 1917. The Lincoln School opened with a staff of twenty-five and an enrollment of one hundred sixteen in the first five grades and grew rapidly to a staff of over seventy and an enrollment of over five hundred. As had been expected, there was originally great difficulty in finding teaching materials as they had to be developed to fit the philosophy of the school, but contrary to Flexner's expressed fears, there was little difficulty in finding teachers for the enterprise.

Among the ideas firmly associated with the Jacksonian era is that which asserts a general decline in the intellectual qualities of the national political leadership. Most recently, this concept of the low intellectual and educational level of the Jacksonians has been promoted by Richard Hofstadter in his Anti-Intellectualism in American Life. “The first truly powerful and widespread impulse to anti-intellectualism in American politics was, in fact, given by the Jacksonian movement. Its distrust of expertise, its dislike for centralization, its desire to uproot the entrenched classes, and its doctrine that important functions were simple enough to be performed by anyone amounted to a repudiation not only of the system of government by gentlemen which the nation had inherited from the eighteenth century, but also of the special value of the educated classes in civic life.”