American education, the national experience, 1783-1876 by Cremin Lawrence Arthur 1925-

Author:Cremin, Lawrence Arthur, 1925-
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Education, Education
ISBN: 0060109122
Publisher: New York : Harper Torchbooks
Published: 1988-03-15T05:00:00+00:00

INTRODUCTION

The Revolutionary generation was direct and explicit about the need tocreate a new American education, cleansed of the corruption of Europe-an monarchial forms and rooted in the purified immediacies of Ameri-can life, literature, and culture. And, to that end, they spun endlessplans for complicated systems of schools, universities, and institutes thatwould ensure to the young Republic an informed and sober citizenrywho would follow a wise and virtuous leadership. None of the planssucceeded—not Jefferson's or Rush's or Webster's, or even SamuelKnox's or Samuel Harrison Smith's, both of which shared honors inthe American Philosophical Society's contest of 1795. But the ideas theyembodied remained in circulation, to test and be tested by the institu-tions Americans brought into being as they wrestled with the age-oldproblems of how to educate themselves and their children.

A half-century later, the outlines of a distinctive American educa-tional system could be dimly perceived, one that resembled parts of allthe earlier plans but followed none in its entirety. It was a system muchcommented upon by the growing number of European visitors whocrossed the Atlantic to observe and assess the "great experiment" inself-government. Thus, the English author Thomas Hamilton praisedthe ready availability of public schooling, the multiplicity of colleges,and the prevalence of voluntary churches, while lamenting what hedeemed to be the crass utilitarianism of American intellectual life andthe bitter disputatiousness of American religious affairs. By contrast,the German diplomat Francis Grund, seeking to rebut Hamilton'ssomewhat jaundiced view, pointed to the salutary effects of churchesand benevolent societies, schools and colleges, and newspapers and li-braries on the American democratic character. And a few years laterthe Scottish journalist Alexander Mackay and the Polish revolutionary

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Adam G. de Gurowski presented warmly favorable accounts of Ameri-can education in works that applauded the efforts of Americans to ex-tend liberty and equality at the same time as they called Americanssharply to task for countenancing slavery.^

There were Americans, too, who were able to see their emergingsystem in the large. The New Jersey schoolmaster Enoch Cobb Wines,for example, in an extraordinary tract called Hints on a System of Pop-ular Education, observed in 1838: "As a nation, we are educated moreby contact with each other, by business, by newspapers, magazines, andcirculating libraries, by public meetings and conventions, by lyceums,by speeches in Congress, in the state legislatures, and at political gath-erings, and in various other ways, than by direct instructions impartedin the school room." If so much "general intelligence" had already beenachieved through those means. Wines continued, what might not be an-ticipated from the addition of a well-organized and comprehensive sys-tem of primary schooling? Unlike Wines, however, most Americans fo-cused their attention on the local and the immediate. They were awareof the general structures that were becoming ever more prevalent dur-ing the antebellum period; but such national phenomena as the unitedevangelical front, or the movement for public schooling, or the demandfor an expanded college curriculum, or the explosion of penny journal-ism were more likely to appear locally as the itinerations of a harriedpreacher riding on muleback from congregation to congregation, or thestruggles of a newly

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