8 - The politics of educational reform in mid-nineteenth-century Massachusetts

Summary

Educational reform and state intervention in schooling appealed more to some communities and some individuals than others. Previous chapters have explored support and opposition through town records, census information, and case studies. Another way to get at conflict in the process of educational development is to examine the politics of education during the formative years when state intervention was still controversial.

Historians of American education have long been interested in the question of who supported educational reform in the 1830s and 1840s, and they have put forth a wide variety of answers. Some have seen the educational revivals of the thirties and forties as the result of dedicated humanitarian leaders, such as James Carter, Horace Mann, and Henry Barnard, who aroused an otherwise apathetic public to the value of common school education. Others have argued that the educational reforms of the period resulted from the demands of workers who wanted educational opportunities for their children. Some recent scholarship on antebellum education has stressed the role of capitalists in developing an extensive public school system in order to insure stability in the emerging industrial order. There is, then, little agreement among historians about the relative importance of various groups in supporting educational reform in Massachusetts. Part of the disagreement has arisen because historians with different theories have used different types of evidence. Supporters of the great-crusader interpretation relied on the writings of elite reformers, common-man advocates looked to the platforms of worker organizations, and recent supporters of economic interpretations have analyzed the characteristics of towns that adopted educational reforms.