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Reappraisals of the Academy Movement

Introduction

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 February 2017

Kim Tolley  and
Nancy Beadie
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The presence of academies in the United States spans roughly three centuries. Originating in the colonial era, academies spread across the country by mid-nineteenth century. Such institutions generally served students between the ages of eight and twenty-five, providing a relatively advanced form of schooling that was legally incorporated to ensure financial support beyond that available through tuition alone. According to one contemporary source, by 1850 more than 6,100 incorporated academies existed in the United States, with enrollments nine times greater than those of the nation's colleges. Nineteenth-century supporters portrayed academies as exemplars of the nation's commitment to enlightenment and learning; opponents argued that they were harmful to the public interest. Those in favor of a large-scale system of public high schools dismissed academies as irrelevant and outmoded institutions. The culmination of this controversy is well known, because it is reiterated in every secondary text on the history of American education. As a widespread system of public higher schooling supplanted the academies in the twentieth century, private and independent schools dropped out of the mainstream of American educational discourse. The following essays seek to recover something of the long history of academies in the United States and to reconsider the historical significance of these institutions in society.

Type
Symposium
Information
History of Education Quarterly , Volume 41 , Issue 2 , Summer 2001 , pp. 216 - 224
Copyright
Copyright © 2001 by the History of Education Society 

References

1 Barnard, Henry “Educational Statistics of the United States in 1850,“ American Journal of Education, I (1855): 368.Google Scholar

2 This debate is recounted in William Reese, The Origins of the American High School (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 23–29. For a contemporary example, see George S. Boutwell, “The Relative Merits of Public High Schools and Endowed Academies (1857), in Theodore Sizer, The Age of the Academies (New York: Teachers College Press, 1964), 156.Google Scholar

3 For example, Reese noted that academies and private schools were an important source of educational innovation in eighteenth-century Boston. When public high schools emerged in the nineteenth century, they continued to offer many of the pedagogical practices and subjects that had first appeared in these earlier institutions. See Reese, The Origins of the American High School, 5.Google Scholar

4 For instance, in her investigation of the opportunities available to women in higher education, Barbara Solomon acknowledged that the academies played an important role in offering both liberal and vocational opportunities to a range of nineteenth-century women during a period when colleges and universities had not yet opened their doors to females. Barbara Miller Solomon, In the Company of Educated Women: A History of Women and Higher Education in America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985).Google Scholar

5 Sizer, Theodore The Age of the Academies (New York: Teachers College, Columbia University, 1964).Google Scholar

6 Scholars interested in women's higher education in the nineteenth century have focused their attention on a wider range of academies. The earliest study to make extensive use of academy material was Thomas Woody, A History of Women ‘s Education in the United States (New York: Octagon Books, 1929). More recent texts include Linda K. Kerber, Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America [1980] (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997); Mary Beth Norton, Liberty's Daughters: The Revolutionary Experience of American Women [1980] (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996). In her study of the rhetoric of “women's sphere,” Nancy Cott also devoted considerable attention to academies. See Nancy F. Cott, The Bonds of Womanhood: “Woman's Sphere” in New England, 1780–1835 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977).Google Scholar

7 For secondary sources that include some discussion of the role of academies in Catholic education in America, see Mary J. Oates, “Catholic Female Academies on the Frontier,” U.S. Catholic Historian, 12 (Fall 1994): 121–136; Michael F. Perko, ed., Enlightening the Next Generation: Catholics and Their Schools: 1830–1980 (New York: Garland, 1988); Eileen Mary Brewer, Nuns and the Education of American Catholic Women, 1860–1920 (Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1987); Harold A. Buetow, Of Singular Benefit: The Story of Catholic Education in the United States (New York: Macmillan, 1970); There are also scattered references to higher schools in Timothy Walch, Parish School: American Catholic Parochial Education from Colonial Times to the Present (New York: The Crossroad Publishing Co., 1996). For an analysis of the role of academies and boarding schools in the education of Native Americans, see David Wallace Adams, Education for Extinction: American Indians and the Boarding School Experience 1875–1928 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1995). A number of historians have concentrated on the role of one particular institution in the dissemination of religious or pedagogical values. For instance, see Anne Firor Scott, “The Ever-Widening Circle: The Diffusion of Feminist Values from the Troy Female Seminary, 1822–1872,” History of Education Quarterly 19 (Spring 1979), 3–25; Amanda Porterfield, Mary Lyon and the Mount Holyoke Missionaries (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997); Elizabeth Nybakken analyzes the influence of the Irish Presbyterian tradition in her article, “In the Irish Tradition: Pre-Revolutionary Academies in America,” History of Education Quarterly, 37 (Summer 1997), 163–183. Other scholars have focused their attention on the academies established by individuals. For instance, see Maurice Whitehead, The Academies of the Reverend Bartholomew Booth in Georgian England and Revolutionary America; Enlightening the Curriculum (Lewiston, ME: Edwin Mellen Press, 1996). More recent attempts to include academies in studies of southern education include Christie Anne Farnham, The Education of the Southern Belle: Higher Education and Student Socialization in the Antebellum South (New York: New York University Press, 1994).Google Scholar

8 I.e., Kerber, Women of the Republic; Charles Sellers, The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815–1846 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991); Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985); Mary Ryan, The Cradle of the Middle Class: The Family in Oneida County, New York, 1790–1865 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981); Stuart M. Blumin, The Emergence of the Middle Class: Social Experience in the American City, 1760–1900 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Burton Bledstein, The Culture of Professionalism: The Middle Class and the Development of Higher Education in America (New York: W. W. Norton, 1976); and Richard Wiebe, The Search for Order, 1877–1920 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1967).Google Scholar

9 A recently published case study, for example, shows that proponents of one consolidated public high school enlisted the Ku Klux Klan to overcome Catholic opposition. David R. Reynolds, There Goes the Neighborhood: Rural School Consolidation at the Grass Roots in Early Twentieth-Century Iowa (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1999). Other recent studies of the role of anti-Catholicism in public school reforms of this period include William M. McAfee, Religion, Race, and Reconstruction: The Public School in the Politics of the 1870s (Albany: The State University of New York Press, 1998) and Stephen Provasnik, “Compulsory Schooling, From Idea to Institution: A Case Study of the Development of Compulsory Attendance in Illinois, 1857–1907 (Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 1999).Google Scholar

10 One recent study of Catholic institutions that pays excellent attention to context and that includes some comparative reference to non-Catholic institutions in the same locality is JoEllen McNergney Vinyard, For Faith and Fortune: The Education of Catholic Immigrants in Detroit, 1805–1925 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998). Comparisons of Catholic and non-Catholic schools, though not specifically at the level of higher schooling, are also made in D.W. Galenson, “Ethnic Differences in Neighborhood Effects on the School Attendance of Boys in Early Chicago,” History of Education Quarterly 38 (Spring 1998): 17–35.Google Scholar

11 Some of the issues and questions raised here will be addressed in our edited book, Chartered Schools: 1727–1925. The book includes: studies of academies in different regions of the country and serving different ethnic and religious communities; analysis of teacher and student experience in diverse academies based on diaries, letters, and student work; and comparisons between academies and other kinds of institutions such as venture schools, public high schools, and normal schools. Examples of existing published work on independent African-American and Native American academies include Linda M. Perkins, Fanny Jackson Coppin and the Institute for Colored Youth, 1865–1902 (New York: Garland, 1987), idem., “The History of Blacks in Teaching: Growth and Decline within the Profession,” in American Teachers: Histories of a Profession at Work ed. Donald Warren (New York: MacMillan Publishing Col, 1989): 3434–549; and Devon Mihesuah, Cultivating the Rosebuds: The Education of Women at the Cherokee Female Seminary, 1851–1909 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993).Google Scholar