HOW ACADEMIC SHOULD PUBLIC SCHOOLS BE?

 

The last posting began this blog’s effort to relay a developmental description of how America, from its origins – its colonial past – to the years following World War II, held onto a version of federalism.  That version, this writer calls parochial/traditional federalism.  It held – more than any other perspective – on how Americans viewed governance and politics. 

As any theoretical approach, this version promoted a set of values and beliefs that were not at all times consistent or even pristinely logical.  And, during its years of dominance, people varied in how exactly each interpreted its tenets.  Generally, the view upheld the values of cooperation, collaboration, and community.

          It is these values, among others, that one can detect underlying the principles of the US Constitution as the founding generation came together and formed the nation’s government.  In a public relations coup, the faction that proposed and argued for the ratification of the Constitution took on the name, the Federalists, even though the term today is associated with local or state governments.  This cast their opponents as the Anti-Federalists who argued for maintaining the bulk of power at the state level. 

But at its heart, the term federalist fit the national effort because what the new agreement was calling for was a federated relationship among the states and the people of the United States.  And to be federated means that those entities were committed to work toward cooperation, collaboration, and community.  But a problem remained:  who constituted “the people”?  Since the original settlers in the eastern seaboard first arrived, there were already a slew of “Others” who had arrived by 1800. 

Mostly, this consisted of voluntary immigrants, but some were forced.  By the time of the Constitution, many immigrants from a variety of European nations had made the trip over the Atlantic and the pure Anglo makeup of the American population already had become significantly mixed.  Of course, the forced element consisted of African slaves who began to be brought over in 1619 and by the time of the Constitutional Convention, the slave population was at 500,000, a significant number since the population of the nation was roughly 3.9 million.[1]

Americans – its original Anglo contingency – were more or less forced to accept the other European nationals and by the late 1700s, when several generations of this mixing had transpired, they defined the white population of the US.  But this was their extent of inclusion.  Even those who opposed slavery, by and large, saw the acceptance of blacks as an inclusionary step too far.  For them, one can detect a bigoted view of Africans which was extended against indigenous peoples and the Asians that began making their way here in the 1800s. 

Racism, under parochial/traditional federalist view was alive and well.  And one can to a degree see this racism being detrimental to the survival of this view.  With the New Deal in the 1930s and its limited efforts to deracialize federal policy, then with the contributions of blacks during World War II, and desegregation of the armed forces under Truman’s administration, the undermining of legal segregation began. 

And these democratizing developments debased the legitimacy of the parochial/traditional federalist view and bolstered the popularization of the natural rights view.  But the challenges to this earlier version of federalism did not begin in the 1930s.  One subplot of the American story, according to this writer, is this building criticism of federalism, some of it reflected in public policy, some of it in the form of social developments. 

The effort here is to take note of the major events and the development of ideas that led to this shift.  And this blog has chosen a telling story concerning American public schools to initiate this effort.  The choice is not because this story happened first, although this writer has shared a Tocqueville account of 1830s America,[2] this story reflects America in the 1840s.  These accounts provide evidence of what is generally being claimed in this blog:  that federalism held strong till the years after World War II.

The last posting began that history with an introduction to Horace Mann and his work in Massachusetts to establish its public school system.  That posting related that under Mann’s leadership, that system encouraged and advanced defining the profession of teaching as one that should be “manned” by women.  At its base, the reasoning seems to have been motivated by funding considerations – simply stated, one could hire women at a cheaper rate than men.

Beyond funding, the policy also reflected Mann’s sexist beliefs that were described in that posting.  What should be mentioned, was that he was not alone in these beliefs, they were generally accepted to varying degrees among Americans, including women.  One of his main advisors was a woman by the name Catherine Beecher.  She promoted women’s role in education and, in time, was instrumental in getting women to go out west and fill teaching positions across the rough western communities in what is now considered the Midwest.

She supported Mann’s initiative to shift the occupation of teaching as being defined mostly as a female profession.  They fought against certain prejudices that held that if teaching was feminized it would lead to weaken academic standards and debasing school discipline especially among male students.  Mann defended his policy by various arguments, but somewhat central, beyond the $11,000 (worth $329, 334.94 today) female teacher corps saved Massachusetts’ taxpayers in an 1800s’ budget, by writing:

As a teacher of schools … how divinely does she come, her head encircled with a halo of heavenly light, her feet sweetening the earth on which she treads, and the celestial radiance of her benignity making vice begin its work of repentance through very envy of the beauty of virtue![3]

          As an ideal one can detect some biases and presumptions about teaching.  And these views reflect religious leanings.  To remind the reader, from the last posting, the connection was made between federalist thinking and Puritanical/Calvinistic beliefs.  In all of this, while congregational thinking of this tradition affected constitutional thinking in all American states, it was strongest in the New England states.  And in this, there is an irony.

          Initially, Mann rebelled against Puritanical, religious thinking and adopted phrenology (a belief that physical features affect behavior).  By diminishing predestination, Mann saw phrenology as beliefs that led to proactive education to meet the shortcomings of young people.  But in this, which was ironic in of itself, he downgraded the importance of academic goals in educating the masses.

          His view of public education emphasized the social – congregational – qualities that led to a cooperative, collaborative, and communal population with a religious bent.  The overall purpose of public schooling should promote students’ “affection outward in good-will towards men, and upward in reverence to God.”[4]  This stood in counter distinction to European public schooling.

          For example, Prussian schools – of which Mann saw through admiring eyes – upped teacher salaries to hold on to their male teachers and French schools promoted high academic standards with secular content (the French were prone to critique German school curricula as being too religious). 

          Next posting will look at what Mann’s contributions meant to the religious, parochial foundations of American federalism as it was considered in the early 1800s.  This writer hopes he is expressing that a culturally based idea with its associated ideals of governance and politics is not a well thought out ideology. 

It is instead a mixture of beliefs and emotions that are expressed in a more or less logically congruent argument about how and why a polity exists.  But that level of coherence is enough to project a clear sense of what is considered politically legitimate.  And in the 1800s it was securely considered legitimate for schools to promote a view of morality.

---

[1] “How Things Have Changed in Philadelphia Since the 1787 Convention,” Constitution Daily (May 25,2016), accessed January 21, 2021, https://constitutioncenter.org/blog/how-things-have-changed-since-1787#:~:text=The%20population%20of%20the%20United,were%20being%20held%20as%20slaves.

[2] Robert Gutierrez, Toward a Federated Nation:  Implementing National Civics Standards (Tallahassee, FL:  Gravitas/Civics Books, 2020).  See pages 78-79.

[3] Dana Goldstein, The Teacher Wars:  A History of America’s Most Embattled Profession (New York, NY:  Doubleday, 2014), 27.  The historical information concerning Mann in this posting is drawn from this source.

[4] Ibid., 28.

A STEP FROM CALVINISM

 

This blog will now turn to an effort this writer will revisit in the future.  He fears he might have misled the reader of this blog a bit and this effort is meant to clear any misconceptions.  He has repeatedly claimed that the US had as a dominant view of governance and politics what he calls the parochial/traditional federalism view or construct.  He described that view in more or less positive language although he has pointed out that it encouraged or justified Americans holding racist and other xenophobic beliefs, attitudes, and values. 

He didn’t underestimate those negative qualities, but he did want to make sure the reader appreciates its positive qualities.  The positive qualities have to do with the construct’s set of espoused values of community, partnership, and collaboration.  But at the same time, people who held on to its espoused values made no excuses for the exclusionary policies its adherents proposed and maintained.  Those policies included slavery, discriminatory practices, and other exclusionary behaviors Americans commonly put into effect.

Probably the most direct and unambiguous pronouncement of this exclusion can be found in the Supreme Court’s decision in the Dred Scott Case.  Chief Justice Taney clearly states that African Americans – be they enslaved or not – were not part of the partnership the Constitution established.   Here is a portion of that decision:

In the opinion of the court, the legislation and histories of the times, and the language used in the declaration of independence, show, that neither the class of persons who had been imported as slaves, nor their descendants, whether they had become free or not, were then acknowledged as a part of the people, nor intended to be included in the general words used in the memorable instrument … [1]

Taney here is not shy of what he interpreted the founding compact to be in terms of African Americans.

And a lot of this exclusion falls in line with certain religious biases generally held but originating with the Puritan settlers of the Massachusetts colony and, in general, in the New England.  It was the Puritans who introduced the covenanted approach to the establishment of governments. 

Puritanism was based on Calvinism that, in turn, believed in strict moral precepts, predestination, and a rebellion against adorned trappings and the hierarchical organization of the Roman Catholic and Anglican Churches.  Through these beliefs, that tradition promoted an equality within its congregations and as interpreted in governance, this sense of partnership was strongly encouraged but as indicated years later by Taney’s opinion, was limited to those considered part of the “tribe.”

Such scholars as Donald Lutz[2] have traced how these precepts, especially those based on congregational ideals, worked their ways into the various founding documents.  These documents were drawn in the localities within the original thirteen colonies.  One can also detect them guiding the development of the states as the nation initially established its governments and expanded westward across North America.

This posting begins this writer’s effort to take a closer look at that historical record.  The postings that will further this effort will not be immediately follow each other (although the next posting, at least, will continue this posting’s message).  Instead, this topic will be revisited here and there but with more frequency in the upcoming year or so. 

This first installment looks at the effect of this tradition on the development of the nation’s public schools.  And the first topic has to do with the hiring of teachers.  By the 1820s, school officials were finding it difficult to fill teaching slots in what had been a male dominated “profession.”  The problem was a reluctance to raise either taxes or church contributions to pay men sufficiently. 

The option was to hire women to those positions.  In terms of timing, this coincided with the efforts to establish independent public schools especially in Massachusetts and through the work of Horace Mann.  His story is telling in terms of how parochial/traditional federalism influenced the development of the nation’s initial efforts to provide public education.

And it is with him that this blog begins its look at this development.  Relevant to this story, Mann was elected to the lower house of the Massachusetts’ legislature in 1827.  His political leanings encouraged him to join up with the initial political organizing that led to the establishment of Whig Party.  This was a movement that brought together socially liberal advocates with northeastern business interests.

They were liberal in that they pushed for the establishment of insane asylums and for public funding of schools for the deaf and blind.  He himself argued for an end to the death penalty and doing away with lotteries as being unchristian.  He attained a level of notoriety when he was assigned to investigate the burning of a Catholic convent in the town of Charleston.  This led to his political advancement that resulted in his election to the state senate.

An ironic aspect of his story was his belief in phrenology – the belief in and analysis of people’s physical attributes as causal factors in their behaviors.  He, unlike others who looked at such characteristics, used the derived analyses as a way to discover potential shortcomings in people that could be addressed by education. 

That is, “[d]uring the nineteenth century, phrenology was considered a progressive ideology.  Its proponents believed that each individual’s deficiencies could be identified, then ameliorated through schooling; … [and therefore] would eradicate poverty and crime in just a few generations.”[3]  Interestingly, he saw the utilization of phrenology as a substitute for the prevailing reliance on religion to guide such judgements.  Further, through that guidance one could lead challenged individuals – even arsonists – to productive lives.

This bent in his public acts did not go unnoticed by local religious personage and elicited a fire-and-brimstone sermon reaction from the local Calvinist preacher.  But the experience led Mann to take up education as an issue that would lead him to establish his place in American history.  School reform became his life’s work.  And in this he bucked the thrust of Whigs who favored laissez faire policies in the economy and other social areas of concern. 

By the late 1830s he was leading Whigs to establish a state board of education to oversee Massachusetts’ local schools and to institute compulsory education.  By that time, as a state senator, he left the legislature to become the first state’s secretary of education.  He took it upon himself to become versed in educational theories and looked to reputable systems particularly Prussian schools.  That European system in the nineteenth century instituted various policies to upgrade the teaching profession including higher pay and prohibition of teachers holding other jobs.

From the Prussian example, Mann instituted the policy for the Massachusetts’ school system that every school have a library and that the state established “normal schools” for the purpose of training teachers.  Again, normal schools were originally only open to women applicants – the reasoning being women could be paid less than men.  Later in the twentieth century, these schools were converted into regional state colleges (having lower admission standards than state universities).

Unfortunately, much of Mann’s reasoning for these sexist policies had to do with his sexist beliefs.  While he saw teaching as a woman’s profession, albeit economic reasoning was offered, he also believed women were not appropriate for certain occupations such as politics, military, and journalistic professions – they were not suitable due to their “black and sulfurous” environments.

All these elements of the Mann’s story were instrumental in defining how Calvinist traditions and biases affected the development of American education.  The aim is to give the reader some of the detail of how this influence was felt and give a hint, at least, as to why it finally gave way to the natural rights view.  There were various social and political forces that pushed toward the eventuality of that transformation.

---

[1] “Dred Scott v. Stanford, (19 HOWARD 393 (1857)),” in Major Problems in American Constitutional History, Volume I:  The Colonial Era Through Reconstruction, ed. Kermit L. Hall (Lexington, MA:  D. C. Heath and Company, 1992), 463-470, 465.

[2] Donald S. Lutz (ed.), Colonial Origins of the American Constitution:  A Documentary History (Indianapolis, IN:  Liberty Fund,1998).

[3] Dana Goldstein, The Teacher Wars:  A History of America’s Most Embattled Profession (New York, NY:  Doubleday, 2014), 23.  The historical information in this posting is drawn from this source.