Over the next ten weeks, I will be walking through Dana Goldstein’s book The Teacher Wars: A History of America’s Most Embattled Profession chapter-by-chapter. My hope is that this level of engagement with her work will better help me ingrain the history and key themes of American education and perhaps be helpful to you as well.
So, you want to to design a system to ensure each child in America receives a good education.
What will you teach? What will your model classroom look like? What type of teachers will be your exemplars? What is the goal of your education system? Good citizens? Good workers? Good academics? A combination of all the above?
Most importantly, how will you sell this idea to your nation?
Dana Goldstein’s 2014 book recounts the contentious origin and history of the American public education system with each chapter focusing on a significant battle within the conflict. The “war” metaphors are appropriate because the controversy and vehemence that have marked these disagreements simply can’t be described with the language typically reserved to describe political disagreement.
As I work my way through the book, chapter by chapter, I hope to summarize each battle as Goldstein presents it and reflect on the enduring ramifications for American public education in America today.
In the first chapter, “Missionary Teachers: The Common Schools Movement and the Feminization of Teaching”, Goldstein argues that despite over two centuries of change, upheavals, divisions and reforms, Catharine Beecher and Horace Mann’s vision of public education “as America’s new more gentle church, [with] female teachers as the ministers of American morality” has proven remarkably durable.
Institutional Promiscuity
After her young fiance, Alexander Fisher, tragically died at sea, Catharine Beecher, the well-educated daughter of a famous Puritan preacher, found herself spiritually and vocationally adrift. Her crisis was further exacerbated when she began poring through Fisher’s journals and discovered a more sensitive and reflective soul than she had been prepared to marry. In those pages, Beecher discovered that Fisher found the culturally approved Christian faith of his time too nebulous and boring to engender any semblance of true belief inside his heart and so had given up on it in order to wholeheartedly devote himself to his work as an educator. This was an unsettling revelation to Beecher, for she harbored similar doubts about her own Calvinistic upbringing and, in part because of Fisher’s journals, would soon come to similar conclusions.
According to Goldstein, the catalyst for Beecher and Fisher’s decision to part ways with a dutiful obedience to Christian faith was Calvinism’s unbending determinism, it’s argument that you were either “good” or “bad” based on God’s whim and that you were powerless to change your state, try as you might. Leaving aside for the moment that this is neither how Calvinism works nor how it would have been understood by any self-respecting Puritan, Goldstein is at aims to show that the first push for “common schools” was partly led by a woman who had undergone a new conversion experience: from a religion based on God’s grace to a religion based on one’s effort, where salvation could be achieved through the acquisition of both good morals and good instruction.
The first fruits of Beecher’s conversion showed up in the creation of the Litchfield Female Academy, a school where girls could begin receiving an education closer to the style that well-bred men commonly expected. The Academy’s goal, however, was not to raise a generation of feminists but to cultivate deep, feminine piety and which was essentially more convent than school. In short time, though, Beecher’s pedagogical philosophy would mature as well as her radical conviction that females could be more than just fine students; they could make great, nay, preferable, teachers.
An Affordable Angel in Every Classroom
Massachusetts lawyer Horace Mann had his own ambitious goal. He wanted to see the creation of a school system that provided an education to every student and focused on developing the skills they needed to make it in the real world, the character they needed to uphold America’s treasured ideals, and, most importantly, the knowledge required to vote wisely. He modelled this project after the well regarded Prussian school system but was limited in his ability to realize this vision by the strong anti-tax sentiment of his milieu. Mann was in the unenviable position of wanting to create an extremely costly, tax-payer funded venture in a young, self-made nation that just won a bloody war over the issue of taxes.
Mann’s mission soon found shared ground with the gospel of Catharine Beecher, who was convincingly arguing to the masses that women should have the dignity of a profession of their own and this should naturally be in the classroom. Beecher shrewdly connected the qualities of a good mother to that of a good teacher (at least for non-college aged students) and had built the systems by which young women could receive vocational training to become these “motherteachers”. This progressive project was only mildly scandalous, for while women’s intellectual and vocational potential was held in great suspicion, few doubted the maxim that women were more virtuous, gentler, and better at dealing with children than the tougher and rougher sex. Paying women to do this work outside of the home struck most people as a novel, but not perverse, concept.
There was, however, an even more appealing aspect to Beecher’s argument. Since it was expected that every female teacher would be married, and since the man was responsible for bringing home the bulk of the income, the female teachers would not need to be paid as much as men, Now, at last, Mann and Beecher had their winning sales pitch: a nation of common schools, powered by a teaching force consisting of morally and pedagogically superior women who would be willing to forgo equal pay in order to achieve the missionary goal of educating the nation’s youth.
The enduring vision for public education was ambitious, female, and best of all, cheap.
Once a Puritan, Always a Puritan
The public school movement truly began its journey in 1837, when Mann helped establish public-funded common schools throughout Massachusetts along with compulsory enrollment. Common schools spread throughout the States, and Mann became the well-recognized father of public schools while Beecher continued to shape the character of them through her advocacy for female-driven pedagogy.
During these nascent years, critical decisions were made by both Mann and Beecher that would prove indelible. The first was to distance themselves from the classical model of education preferred by the elite in favor of a more pragmatic, moral-based curriculum. While some paternalism might be forgiven the parents of American public education, the decision to only focus on what they felt “the common child” needed – good discipline and good job skills – in contrast to the cohesive, foundational classical program of instruction reeks of an anti-intellectualism that was already spreading in America. Mann himself grew so ardently combative on the issue of a pragmatic versus principled form of education that he once declared, “I should have rather built an insane asylum than to have written Hamlet.”
The second decision was to design schools around the goal of being the primary agency for character and moral formation. This design choice remains popular to this day, and doesn’t seem that strange on the surface, except for when you consider that this move was in direct opposition to the wide-spread role of the church at the time. In early American life, virtue and morality were understood to spring from the church, flow through the home, and then be tested and proved in the world at school and in adulthood. Mann and Beecher, both disenchanted with the church and overwhelmed by the capabilities of their new project, were eager to present an alternate space for virtue formation. This decision wasn’t merely a play at shifting character formation from a religious arena to what was – at the time – a slightly less religious arena. It posited a different view of how virtue was formed entirely. From the Christian perspective, a moral and virtuous citizenry was merely the spillover of orthodox Christianity, never the explicit aim. Without the Gospel and the doctrine of Christianity at its base, it remained to be seen if you could achieve with any lasting success the same effects by focusing only on the outcomes (“good, moral citizens”) themselves. Goldstein astutely points out that this objective was more religious than pedagogical, and it resulted in the female teachers being seen less as professionals and more as missionaries: dutiful, self-sacrificing servants willing to “save” poor, uneducated children with the new American gospel of the self-made person who could raise him or herself to new heights with a humble helping of good morals and good learning.
Conclusion
I appreciate Goldstein’s style of selecting and following one or two influential figures in the midst of these battles – an organizational strategy employed throughout the book – but it does make me wonder how the actual history might be mildly distorted in order to make it fit this framework. My only real reservation with this chapter is her breakdown of religious themes and influences, which I found superficial at best. The trope of the joyless Puritan serving as the cause of our cultural “daddy issues” is overdone and mostly sustained by a famous quip from H.L. Mencken in the 1920s. This minor quibble, however, does not detract from this chapter’s entertaining narrative or insightful analysis.
In a moment where American systems are under close re-examination, it is unsettling to realize just how long-lasting the effects of specific decisions made by founders can endure. The feminization of American education and the concomitant drop in teacher reputation with the public has hardly been improved upon since 1834. Similarly, our schools today hardly differ in their approach to moral instruction, deeming it more efficient to teach children our current moral maxims (i.e., “Love is love”) rather than to equip students with the scholarship and thoughtfulness necessary to examine their substance. Whereas early-American and Puritan values have shifted to professional and social justice values, most schools still prioritize ensuring “students learn good deeds” instead of “good doctrine”, not realizing you can’t sustain a fire without fuel.
The main questions this chapter left me with include:
What might American public education have been if it had initially embraced the classical model? Is it even possible to have a public school system based on this model?
Are American education and American evangelicalism two sides of the same coin? Both have strains of strong anti-intellectualism, both have been powered by an appeal to feminine exceptionalism in virtue and emotion, and both adherents are deeply evangelical. In undergrad, I read Nathaniel Hatch’s The Democratization of American Christianity and remember the story he told as eerily similar to the one Goldstein presents in her book. I might need to revisit it.
What are the implications of a system of learning that never aspired to give students a true, high-quality education, but merely that which enabled them to get by?
Despite the glaring problems in the American system from the get-go, what in it – or despite it – has allowed the American populace to still be so entrepreneurial, creative and forward-thinking over the course of its short history? Are the reasons for our last two centuries of dominance primarily unrelated to our method of education or is there something within this model that produces the type of people capable of building a superpower in a century, winning two world wars, and proving surprisingly resilient to internal strife? Or does this “American spirit” simply predate the formation of common schools and endure from our pilgrim/immigrant/revolutionary ancestors?
What would American public education be if Alexander Fisher hadn’t died at sea?
The Red Book 