The Common School Awakening
The Common School Awakening

Author: David Komline

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2020-09-01

Total Pages: 313

ISBN-13: 0190085177

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A statue of Horace Mann, erected in front of the Boston State House in 1863, declares him the "Father of the American Public School System." For over a century and a half, most narratives about early American education have taken this epithet as the truth. As Mann looms over the Boston Common, so he has also loomed over discussions of early American schooling. Other scholarship has emphasized economic factors as the main reason for the emergence of public schools. The Common School Awakening offers a new narrative about the rise of public schools in America that counters these conceptions. In this book, David Komline explains how a broad and distinctly American religious consensus emerged in the first half of the nineteenth century, allowing people from across the religious spectrum to cooperate in systematizing and professionalizing America's schools in an effort to Christianize the country. At the height of this movement, several states introduced state-sponsored teacher training colleges and concentrated government oversight of schools in offices such as the one held by Mann. Shortly thereafter, the religious consensus that had served as the foundation for this common school system disintegrated. But the system itself remained, the legacy of not just one man, but of a whole network of reformers who put into motion a transatlantic and transdenominational religious movement - the "Common School Awakening."

Mr. Lancaster's System
Mr. Lancaster's System

Author: Adam Laats

Publisher: JHU Press

Published: 2024-09-17

Total Pages: 193

ISBN-13: 1421449374

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How a con artist "reformer" shaped America's modern public schools. Two centuries ago, London school reformer Joseph Lancaster swept into New York City to revolutionize its public schools. Pennsylvania and Massachusetts passed laws mandating Lancaster's methods, and cities such as Albany, Savannah, Detroit, and Baltimore soon followed. In Mr. Lancaster's System, Adam Laats tells the story of how this abusive, scheming reformer fooled the world into believing his system could provide free high-quality education for poor children. The system never worked as promised, but thanks to real work done by students, teachers, and families, Lancaster's failed reforms eventually led to the creation of the modern public school system. Lancaster's idea was simple: instead of hiring expensive adult teachers, Lancasterian schools made children teach one another to read, write, and behave properly. America's city leaders poured the equivalent of millions of dollars into the scheme, built specialized school buildings featuring Lancaster's teaching machines, and offered him a huge salary. In London, where Lancaster opened his first school, the enthusiasm of city leaders was quickly and similarly followed by scandal and dismay. Lancaster borrowed money—even from the king of England—and spent it on fancy carriage rides and cases of champagne. Even worse, Lancaster proved to be a sexual predator. Kicked out of London, Lancaster brought his simplistic plan to the United States. His school model didn't work any better in US cities than it had in London, and Lancaster himself never changed his abusive ways. Mr. Lancaster's System details how American cities created their first public schools out of the wreckage of Lancasterian failure. In the end, the most important people in this story are not self-proclaimed geniuses like Lancaster or elites like New York's mayor De Witt Clinton, but rather the thousands of parents and children who forced urban public schools to assume their modern shape.

Hist West Educ:Modern West V3
Hist West Educ:Modern West V3

Author: James Bowen

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2013-10-08

Total Pages: 616

ISBN-13: 113650124X

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Volume Three of three, this is a reprint of James Bowen's A History of Western Education originally published by Methuen in the 1970s. Volume Three: The Modern West: Europe and the New World. The final volume covers the period of educational dissent, which became conspicuous in the early seventeenth century and reached crisis proportions in the late twentieth, when the dominant ideologies of progress and equality, generated at the beginning of the nineteenth century, were questioned for the first time on a widespread, popular scale.