Then as now, many parents were interested as much in baby-sitting as education.  Children as young as two were sent to school “to relieve the mothers of their care at home.”  Some poorer children got to attend for free, but most parents paid fees for their children to attend.  Parents typically enjoyed a degree of control over the schools, particularly as the teachers often boarded with parents of the children on a rotation basis. (Coulson 1999 p74)  In more populous areas, a variety of schools, of varying degrees of sophistication, competed for the custom of parents.  Some schools stuck to the basics; others were focused upon college preparation, and others appealed to the widest market by advertising a large range of classes.  In the early republic independent private schools served the majority of children, but free charity schools sponsored by philanthropy and religious groups catered to the poor.  The charitable efforts increased in step with urbanization. 

In the environment of the early nineteenth century, the idea of centralized, government-run education for children did not appeal to the average American.  Would-be education reformers like James G. Carter and Samuel Smith proposed that it was the duty of the state to compel the ignorant to learn and the superintend the education of children. (Coulson 1999 p78)  But the idea of compulsion did not achieve much traction until the election of the populist Andrew Jackson to the White House and the first waves of immigration started in mid-century, prompting the high-toned Anglo-Saxon Protestants in the Whig Party to erect a defense against the tide of Democracy and immigration. 

In Boston, the Harvard Unitarians wanted to use government power to dish the Puritans, and the Protestants of every stripe wanted to use government power to dish the Catholics.  So they nominated Horace Mann, speaker of the Massachusetts state house, to became secretary of the Massachusetts board of education and implement a solution: a centralized, government-run system of universal education.  “Let the Common School be expanded to its capabilities, let it be worked with the efficiency of which it is susceptible, and nine tenths of the crimes in the penal code would become obsolete; the long catalogue of human ills would be abridged,” wrote Mann. (Coulson 1999 p80)

Horace Mann may have been thinking of using the common schools for fighting crime, but the lower orders were thinking more about getting a better education for their children than they could get at the charity schools.  “Give us our rights, and we shall not need your charity,” wrote  the Mechanics’ Free Press.  The Albany Mechanics’ Society argued against subsidies going to “the aristocratical nurseries of the wealthy few” and argued for the benefits of government funds generally “applied to the really useful instruction of all.” (Kaestle 1983 p138)  The working people wanted their children to rise in the world, and they wanted government subsidy to help them do it.

  From its beginnings in Massachusetts the common school movement quickly spread.  By the Civil War the North had been converted to the common school, and the South followed soon after.  From this beginning the government-run school system slowly expanded upwards and outwards.  High schools became the big idea at the end of the nineteenth century and the number of years of compulsory education were slowly increased.  Educators became better and better and manipulating the political system for their benefit and education slowly moved away from local and parental control.

The common school movement immediately provoked a clash over whose ideas and religious beliefs would rule in the classroom.  Mann had promised that “all particularities of dogma” over which Protestants disagreed would be removed from school instruction.  However, the Protestant Bible, rather than the Catholic Bible was used, and arguments over which Bible to use resulted in the Philadelphia Bible riots of 1844.  In face of the bigotry of anti-Catholic public education, the Catholic immigrants felt forced to develop, through the Catholic Church, a duplicate system of schools in which their children could be taught Catholic culture.  Fortunately, they had in Archbishop John Hughes of New York a leader with the vision and the tenacity to see such a radical notion through to completion.  The Jews, arriving in the United States 50 years later, solved the problem for themselves by slowly squeezing all religious instruction out of the public schools.

In England widespread literacy was not as widespread as early as in the United States.  However, according to E.G. West, literacy increased steadily from the beginning of the nineteenth century right up until 1870, when government sponsored state education was legislated.  Up until 1833 the government, in the interests of social stability, actively discouraged the lower orders from acquiring literacy.  Still, by the 1840s, researcher R. K. Webb estimated the literacy among the working classes as “between two-thirds and three-quarters.” (West 1994 p164)  A survey of miners in the north of England in 1840 showed that over 50 percent could read and write.  Only 21 percent could neither read nor write.  The Royal Navy in 1865 reported that 89 percent of seamen could read, 80 percent of marines, and 94 percent of petty officers.  Examination of marriage records showed that the literacy rate of men getting married rose from 67 percent in 1841 to 94 percent in 1891. (West 1994 p168)  All this occurred before state education had really had a chance to make a difference.  It resulted from spontaneous, self-motivated actions by parents acquiring education for their children even when discouraged by the government.

From what kind of school were the working classes getting this basic literacy?  Chiefly, they got it from fee-paying schools.  In 1813 James Mill (father of John Stuart Mill) wrote of “the rapid progress which the love of education is making among the lower orders in England.”  He noted that

| <<prev | 1 | 2 | (3) | 4 | 5 | next>> |

print view

Click for Chapter 8: Mutual Aid

Your comments are welcome. Please e-mail to Christopher Chantrill at mailto:chrischantrill@gmail.com, and take the RMC test here.

©2005 Christopher Chantrill