Nineteenth-Century Schools between Community and State: The Cases of Prussia and the United States

Abstract

Forty years ago Bernard Bailyn remarked that American historians of education had carried out their work “in a special atmosphere of professional purpose” and had made the history of the public school the focus of their investigations. Lawrence Cremin seconded that observation and added that, for all intents and purposes, the history of American education had been “the history of the public school realizing itself over time.” In the tradition of Ellwood Patterson Cubberley that self-realization of the American public school was portrayed as a progression from local roots to state-wide systems. It became synonymous with the evolution of school government from local control on the district and ward levels to direction and oversight by state administrators. For many school professionals and historians that progression meant progress. They saw it as overcoming local control which they regarded as a relic of the past denoting an endorsement of inequality, discrimination, and special privilege. It persuaded them to see the solution to the schools' problems in strengthened state and, eventually, federal control.

Social Capital, Civic Labor, and State Capacity in the Early American Republic: Schools, Courts, and Law Enforcement

“…The resulting schools, however, were neither creatures of the state nor the community but, to Herbst, in a middle space as localists and reformers engaged in a "see-saw battle" to control them. 27 Economists thus have found a correlation between localism and increased enrollment and taxation. Historians Tyack and Herbst, in analyzing these correlations, have suggested that the public sector expanded because schools blurred the conceptual line between the state and the community.…”

Big BRICs, Weak Foundations: The Beginning of Public Elementary Education in Brazil, Russia, India, and China

“…15 The availability of private schools and the 12 From the 18 th century onwards, the highly centralized Prussian state mandated that local governments provide public schools according to a national model and was eventually adopted in Meiji Japan (Duke, 2009). The decentralization of financial authority that this required -whether conducted through local governments or the church -was effective in generating relatively high enrollment rates by the mid-19 th century (Herbst, 2002;and Lindert, 2004). Post-Napoleonic France enacted a strongly centralized school system that required departments and local communities to create and fund public schools.…”