In his 1916 book, The Measurement of Intelligence, Lewis Terman presented the first version of the Stanford-Binet scale and his testing results for groups of California children. Singling out a few children whose scores fell in the range he categorized as “feeble-minded,” Terman commented:

In 1950, the Denver Catholic Register published an article describing and challenging the varieties of “prejudice” that a military pilot moving from base to base in the United States might encounter. To “successfully transact business” in the vicinity of various “metropolitan landing fields,” the writer admonished, the veteran must:

Professor Tamura, in her paper “Narrative History and Theory,” poses an issue with which I have lately wrestled. She reviews, first of all, some of the challenges to the tradition of narrative history presented by “social-scientifically oriented historians” like Fernand Braudel and “analytic philosophers” like Hayden White in the 1960s and 1970s, and then goes on to note that more recently, a turn to narrative among social scientists and a use of theory by historians suggests the possibility of combining narrative and theory in historical work. Overall, Professor Tamura expresses a sanguine view of the prospects for such integration. While narrative “provides a causal account and allows us to relive events,” theory “allows us to analyze more effectively the forces that are beneath the surface.” My own efforts to write a history of education in the early Republican era that moves back and forth between telling the stories of ordinary people and using social capital theory to analyze the place of schooling in larger patterns of social, economic, and political change, lead me to share Professor Tamura's interest in the possibilities, and at the same time to identify some of the challenges, of such work.

Funding for schools of all kinds was largely market-based until the Civil War. Parents in New York and other northern states continued to pay tuition, or rate bills, in addition to taxes to support common schools. Previous research relied on aggregate state-level data to estimate the amount of funding from public and nonpublic sources for common schools, while existing case studies of local school practices focus exclusively on Massachusetts or on urban locations and thus on exceptions to the rule. This study looks at local practices of school funding for multiple types of schools in one unexceptional rural town in western New York from 1815 to 1850. The results reveal considerable in-state variation in the proportion of public and private funding for common schools that is otherwise obscured by state-level data. The proportion of school funds that came from tuition was much higher for rural areas than for urban areas. The article also compares tuition funding for common schools with that for other types of market-based schooling, including two local venture schools and one local academy. The results show that, although tuition prices for academies and venture schools were predictably higher than for common schools, the overall structure of school funding for rural common schools and academies was more similar than different in New York in the antebellum era.

The recent shift away from the idea of centrally planned public systems and toward market-based models of schooling opens new territory for scholarship in the history of education. What is the history of education markets? How has the structure of education markets changed over time? This article addresses these questions by surveying existing literature, with an emphasis on the early national and antebellum periods. In the process it brings new perspectives to standard narratives of the history of education in the nineteenth century, particularly regarding the development of state-based educational systems. It then proposes areas for future research and concludes by introducing two examples of new work in this field.

In the Fall of 1840, twenty-four-year-old Clarissa Pengra journeyed from a small town in western New York to the growing city of Syracuse to take up a new teaching position. She began by heading north by carriage on a plank road to Rochester, where she would catch a canal boat east. Arriving in Rochester in the evening, after what she described as “an unpleasant ride,” she decided to spend the night at a boarding establishment rather than at the home of a family friend, “in order to be convenient for the boat in the morning.” While in the city, she finished her “shopping,” a term she had never used in the context of her rural hometown. Already, Clarissa had traveled a social and psychological distance. In the hours, weeks, and months that followed, her sense of dislocation would continue. At 6 a.m. on the morning after she arrived in Rochester, she boarded the canal boat for a trip that would take 24 hours, ending in Syracuse the following day “before daylight.” On the boat, Clarissa encountered whist-players, whiskey drinkers, and a follower of the Calvinist evangelist, Charles Finney, each in his own way somewhat at odds with her own principles and ideas. With respect to the trip as a whole, she expressed a sense of adventure, tempered by a hint of anxiety. “I have left home and friend,” she wrote in her journal, “and for the present must learn to depend upon myself.”

Before sunrise one spring morning in 1815, twenty-four-year-old Susan Davis Nye left her family's farm in Amenia, New York. “After a most affecting parting from my beloved brothers, sisters and friends, I kissed my little sleeping babes and before the sun shone upon my dear native hills, bade them farewell, perhaps forever!” Thus begins the first entry in her journal dated April 22nd, the day she undertook the initial leg of a long voyage south to teach in North Carolina.

The presence of academies in the United States spans roughly three centuries. Originating in the colonial era, academies spread across the country by mid-nineteenth century. Such institutions generally served students between the ages of eight and twenty-five, providing a relatively advanced form of schooling that was legally incorporated to ensure financial support beyond that available through tuition alone. According to one contemporary source, by 1850 more than 6,100 incorporated academies existed in the United States, with enrollments nine times greater than those of the nation's colleges. Nineteenth-century supporters portrayed academies as exemplars of the nation's commitment to enlightenment and learning; opponents argued that they were harmful to the public interest. Those in favor of a large-scale system of public high schools dismissed academies as irrelevant and outmoded institutions. The culmination of this controversy is well known, because it is reiterated in every secondary text on the history of American education. As a widespread system of public higher schooling supplanted the academies in the twentieth century, private and independent schools dropped out of the mainstream of American educational discourse. The following essays seek to recover something of the long history of academies in the United States and to reconsider the historical significance of these institutions in society.

Academies and academy students increased substantially in number during the period from the American Revolution to the Civil War. Why? Who were these students and what did academy attendance mean to them? Theodore R. Sizer asked these questions in 1964, but his ability to answer them was limited by the absence of studies that focused on academy students. In this essay I reexamine Sizer's understanding of academies in light of evidence provided by subsequent studies of student populations. These studies include my own comparative analysis of data from nearly 500 Regents academies that operated in New York State between 1835 and 1890, as well as in-depth case studies of individual institutions by myself and others.

In 1864 the Regents of the University of the State of New York announced their intention to develop a system of competitive examinations for students at academies and high schools across the state. Aimed both at strengthening those institutions and at stimulating the ambitions of students, the exams would provide “positive evidence of actual merit” in learning and instruction. On the basis of the exams the Regents would then distribute state funds to institutions and award “promotions and honors” to students. Thus New York launched the first state-wide system of standardized examinations and performance-based credentials in the country.

“Civilized nations have long since been convinced,” Emma Willard declared to the New York legislature in 1818, “that education with respect to males, will not, like trade, regulate itself.” Thus Willard introduced her famous argument for state support of female education by observing the limits of market principles for promoting good schools.