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Popular Education in Nineteenth Century St. Louis

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 June 2017

Selwyn K. Troen
Selwyn K. Troen*
Affiliation:
University of Missouri—Columbia
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Extract

It is both encouraging and gratifying to the members of this Board to witness the unexampled success of our school system, and the great popularity of the schools. This is still the more gratifying, when we feel a consciousness that this popularity is deserved; and that the more our schools are tried and the closer their operations are examined, the greater will be their popularity, and the confidence reposed in them.

Type
Research Article
Information
History of Education Quarterly , Volume 13 , Issue 1 , Spring 1973 , pp. 23 - 40
Copyright
Copyright © 1973 by New York University 

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References

Notes

1 Forbes, Isaiah, “President's Report,” Second Annual Report of the Superintendent of the St. Louis Public Schools for the Year Ending July 1, 1855 (St. Louis, 1855), p. 6.Google Scholar

2 Annual Report, 1880, pp. cxxviii–cxxix, and the Tenth Census of the United States, XIX, Pt. II, p. 567.Google Scholar

3 In 1860 the proportion under ten was 66 per cent; in 1865, 54 per cent; in 1870, 49 per cent; in 1875, 53 per cent; and in 1880, 56 per cent. Annual Report, 1860, p. 55, and Annual Report, 1880, p. 31.Google Scholar

4 The curriculum is broadly outlined in Annual Report, 1879, p. cvi.Google Scholar

5 The data was taken from the Second Enumeration of the manuscript census for 1880, and was processed in an SPSS file that is stored at the Computer Center of the University of Missouri/Columbia. Information was gathered on 15,312 children, with child defined as any person at any age who resided in the household of his mother and/or father, and any person twenty-one and younger who lived outside the family unit.Google Scholar

6 Troen, Selwyn K., “Measuring the Black Response to Public Education in Post Civil War St. Louis,” a paper delivered at a symposium on “Urban Education and Black Americans in the Nineteenth Century,” Division F, AERA Annual Meeting, April 5, 1972.Google Scholar

7 The table was constructed by aggregating the data on specific occupations which were recorded by the Annual Reports. For a discussion of the system of classification and tables illustrating the raw data, see Selwyn K. Troen, “Schools for the City: The Growth of Public Education in St. Louis 1838–1880,” Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 1970), Appendix D.Google Scholar

8 Annual Report, 1855, pp 116–121. For a discussion of a parallel structure in Massachusetts, see Katz, Michael B., The Irony of Early School Reform: Educational Innovation in Mid-Nineteenth Century Massachusetts (Cambridge, Mass., 1968), pp. 39–40, and Appendix C.Google Scholar

9 Annual Report, 1881, p. 100.Google Scholar

10 Unknowns represent those for whom the census enumerators marked “at home” or left a blank. It is assumed that these omissions represent those who were neither employed nor at school and they are, therefore, calculated with those whom we know to be “at home.” The assumption is based on three considerations. First, since the enumerator is accounting for nearly all children between nine and twelve, with an average unknown of about eight per cent, is appears unlikely that he was less accurate or less avid in determining occupations or school attendance at other ages. Secondly, the curve reflected by unknowns is so well-ordered as to suggest important meanings rather than chance. Thirdly, the pattern of employment and school attendance conforms to expectations. We know from school reports that children began dropping out in large numbers at about twelve when they gradually began to be absorbed into the work force.Google Scholar

11 Of 734 girls seventeen through twenty-one who were listed as unskilled laborers, 66 per cent (488) were servants and maids, 20 per cent (144) were keeping house, nine per cent (63) were seamstresses, and five per cent (39) were in various other occupations, including 15 prostitutes.Google Scholar

12 For a portrait of comfortable females who make reform their vocation, see Lasch, Christopher, The New Radicalism in America, 1889–1963: The Intellectual as a Social Type (New York, 1965), chapters 1,2, and 4.Google Scholar

13 A classic progressive accounting of poverty is Hunter, Robert, Poverty: Social Conscience in the Progressive Era, ed. by Jones, Peter d'A. (New York, 1965). An example of contemporary scholarship is Stephan Thernstrom, Poverty and Progress: Social Mobility in a Nineteenth-Century City (Cambridge, Mass., 1964).Google Scholar

14 Although the census does not include information on income, it is possible to establish occupational hierarchies that reflect both status and wealth. The occupational matrix for the prosopography is an adaptation of the one developed by Stephan Thernstrom and Peter Knights in their studies of occupational mobility in Boston, and has been modified to include children's and women's vocations. A copy can be sent on request. For an abbreviated version of the matrix see Knights, Peter R., The Plain People of Boston 1830–1860 (New York, 1971), Appendix E.Google Scholar

15 On professionalization see Wiebe, Robert H., The Search for Order, 1877–1920 (New York, 1967), pp. 111–132. Also, the teen years were not yet defined as a distinct period in the life-cycle and special attention in the form of institutional care had not yet developed. Hence, the shift from the fourth or fifth year of school into the factory or office was considered natural. On attitudes towards teens, see Demos, John and Demos, Virginia, “Adolescence in Historical Perspective,” Journal of Marriage and the Family, (November, 1969), 632–638.Google Scholar

16 Annual Report, 1880, pp. cxviii–cxix. There were 22, 954 in grades one through three but only 2,233 in grades seven through nine.Google Scholar

17 Report of the Immigration Commission, The Children of Immigrants in Schools (Washington, 1911), pp. V, 213–219.Google Scholar

18 For a discussion of the expansion and the popular appreciation of the high school around the turn of the century, see Krug, Edward A., The Shaping of the American High School (New York, 1964), pp. 169–189.Google Scholar

19 There are no precise figures available for parochial schools on a regular basis. Catholic parish schools comprised the largest group and they were not yet organized into a system. Based on Catholic directories and newspaper descriptions of students and curricula in the Western Watchman, which was sponsored by the St. Louis archdiocese, at least 80 per cent of the students were receiving elementary instruction and the ages of the students ranged from seven to sixteen. Sadler's Catholic Directory, Almanac, and Order for the Year of our Lord, 1880 (New York: 1880), pp. 155–158; “The Catholic Schools,” Western Watchman, August 20, 1870; “Examination of St. Patrick's Parochial Schools,” Western Watchman, May 20, 1871; “The ‘Globe’ on the Public Schools,” Western Watchman, May 3, 1873.Google Scholar

20 Kett, Joseph F., “Growing Up in Rural New England, 1800–1840,” in Anonymous Americans: Explorations in Nineteenth Century Social History, ed. by Hareven, Tamara K. (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1971), pp. 1–16.Google Scholar

21 A major source for Harris' ideas are the Annual Reports from 1867 through 1880. Other sources include Curti, Merle, The Social Ideas of American Educators (Paterson, N.J., 1959), pp. 310–347; Roberts, John S., William T. Harris: His Educational and Related Philosophical Views (Washington, 1924), and Leidecker, Kurt, Yankee Teacher (New York, 1946).Google Scholar

22 Annual Report, 1867, p. 71; Annual Report, 1871, p. 165, and Annual Report, 1872, p. 150. Harris never tired of this refrain. In 1900 as United States Commissioner of Education, he wrote: “In the United States the citizen must learn to help himself in this matter of gaining information, and for this reason he must use his school time to acquire the art of digging knowledge out of books.” Harris, William T., “Elementary Education,” in Education in the United States, ed. by Nicholas Murray Butler (Albany, N.Y., 1900), p. 11.Google Scholar

23 Indicative of popular feelings are the letters to the editor in the month preceding the April elections for school directors. For example, see St. Louis Globe-Democrat, March 14, 15, 18, and 29, 1878. For the Catholic viewpoint, see “Our Common Schools,” Western Watchman, September 22, 1883.Google Scholar

24 Lipset, Seymour Martin and Bendix, Reinhard, Social Mobility in Industrial Society (Berkeley, Calif., 1964), pp. 91–101.Google Scholar

25 Annual Report, 1879, pp. 131–133.Google Scholar

26 Annual Report, 1856, pp. 46–47, and Annual Report, 1879, pp. 142–144.Google Scholar

27 Monroe, Paul, Founding of the American Public School System (New York, 1940), I, pp. 295 ff. For the problem of the charity stigma in a neighboring state, see Pulliam, John, “Changing Attitudes toward the Public Schools in Illinois, 1825–1860,” History of Education Quarterly, VII (Summer, 1967), 191–208.Google Scholar