Hoosier Schools: Past and Present

Abstract

This is a delightful compilation that spans from the first educational stir rings in the Old Northwest to renewed state-level involvement since 1980. To those with only a passing familiarity with Indiana, the book obliges with fresh looks at student culture in "Middletown" (Muncie's Central High School) and at the popularity of boys' high school basketball. The two cover photographs are most inviting: at the top is a town high school from 1900 in Second Empire style with a globe and a telescope atop the towers, at the bottom is a 1973 middle school of steel-reinforced concrete. The "people's college" is whimsical in its projection of the promise of enhghtenment. The middle school is bunker-like, as if educators and students are hunkering down in their open classrooms, protected from an unstable world. The book fills a gap in Indiana school history-the only other booklength studies were written before Bernard Bailyn and Lawrence Cremin called for a more critical, rigorous, and expansive scholarship. Most of the chapters stand within a revisionist current that stresses social control tem pered by cultural conflict. Since most of the new history of American edu cation focuses on cities or particular topics, Hoosier Schools also breaks new ground by taking a traditional topic, state history, and treating it critically. William J. Reese edited this volume and wrote two chapters; his influence is unmistakable. Most other contributors are his former students. In the introduction, Reese suggests that the cautious and incremen tal "Indiana Way" of reforming schools is also "the American Way." At a general level, this thesis makes sense, as "the power of tradition and slow ness of institutional response" are almost always with us (p. xiv). But I wish that the introduction and some of the chapters also stressed more of Indi ana's uniqueness. In The Indiana Way (1986), James H. Madison asserts that Indiana's educational development has often lagged behind other midwestern states. In antebellum Indiana the common-school movement was slow to develop and literacy rates were lower. Current funding per student continues to trail the national average. The interplay between Indiana school histoiy as American education writ small and as Hoosier variation is a theme that deserves more systematic emphasis. Chapters are arranged chronologically and hang together well. Scott Walter challenges the traditional interpretation of the growth of the Hoosier common schools, which holds that Caleb Mills single-handedly translated his vision into statewide consensus, by showing how a variety of reform ers, of whom Mills was only the most prominent, percolated the common school idea throughout the state. Reese's chapter on the Victorian era details how urban school leaders molded the common school ideal into a bureau cratic "culture of professionalism" that even the smallest towns embraced