Chapter 3: Nationalism, Multiculturalism, and Moral Reform in the New Republic
The American School, 1642-2004, Spring, Joel c. 2005

Spring lists 5 themes for the book on page 3:

• A major part of the history of U.S. schools involves conflicts over cultural domination.
• Schools are one of many institutions that attempt to manage the distribution of ideas in society. [In this book, this process is called] ideological management.
• Racism is a central issue in U.S. history and in educational history.
• Economic issues are an important factor in understanding the evolution of U.S. schools.
• Currently, consumerism and environmental education are pressing issues in the evolution of human society.

Major points in chapter 3

The major educational concerns during the post-revolutionary period were:

• Turning a multicultural society into a single-culture society dominated by Anglo-American values
• Creating nationalism and loyalty to the new government
• Controlling freedom through citizenship and moral education
• Determining the best method for educating future citizens
• Using moral education to eliminate crime and poverty

Much of this chapter is about ideological management, and in which way public schools would be involved in managing the ideology of the American people, and which ideology the schools would teach. This chapter also indirectly deals with racism, as it touches on how the American school was, from the beginning, a way to force a single culture, that of “Protestant Anglo-American.”

There were a couple of schools of thought about how to make citizens into the ideal Americans, and indeed what the ideal American would be. Much of the concern about proper education in the post-Revolutionary period revolved around the creation of future leaders of the new republic. There were those such as Noah Webster who believed that it was most important, especially for the body politic, that “citizens [be] virtuous and thus exercise their freedom in a correct manner.” (p. 45) In other words, Webster believed that it was the educator’s job to mold children into a virtuously moral and culturally homogeneous adult that would be submissive to government. Webster is quoted as saying: “Good republicans…are formed by a singular machinery in the body politic, which takes the child as soon as he can speak, checks his natural independence and passions, makes him subordinate to superior age, to the laws of the state, to town and parochial institutions.” (p. 49) There were also those, such as Thomas Jefferson, who felt that people were generally capable of thinking for themselves, that everyone was born with “an inborn moral sense,” which Jefferson referred to as “common sense.” (p. 51) Jefferson is quoted as saying: “The basis of our government being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right; and were it left to me to decide whether we should have government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.” (p. 51) Jefferson believed in the reasoning capabilities of citizens, and seems to have trusted that the newspapers of the day would be printing truthful information.

From Webster’s end of the opinion range came the charity schools. They were “developed in the United States in the early part of the nineteenth century as part of a general attempt to reduce crime and poverty.” (p. 55) It was in the charity schools and juvenile reformatories that Joseph Lancaster’s system of education took hold. It was intended to provide moral training by requiring strict discipline and orderliness from the students, and was a means of mass education, and was supposed to be able to deal with up to 1000 students at one time. Remember from class the way that the education in this system was offered to the students? Rewards in this system were a series of badges, the highest was the Order of Merit, which would lead to being appointed a monitor. Misbehavior (talking out in class, not doing one’s work while the other children were working) was punished in ways such as having a wooden log suspended from one’s neck, or in extreme cases, the offending student would be placed in a sack or basket suspended from the roof of the school where all the other students could see.

From Jefferson’s end of the opinion range came “A Bill for the More General Diffusion of Knowledge” (1779) the bill proposed that tuition-free schools be established to teach all children “reading, writing, and common arithmetick and the books which shall be used therein for instructing the children to read shall be such as will at the same time make them acquainted with Grecian, Roman, English and American history.” (p. 52) Jefferson was interested in creating a “natural aristocracy” through education. Children who were educated would automatically advance their social class, thereby advancing the class of the country in general. This creates a built in economic class difference by allowing the educated to gain more than those who are not.

Both of these schools of thought eventually led to the initializations of public schools throughout the country. It is clear that some things have still not changed: Children still recite catechism every day (what do you think the pledge of allegiance has become?) and schools still largely are involved in homogenizing culture toward an Anglo-American ideal.