Schooling and Age Grading in American Society Since 1800: The Fragmenting of Experience

Abstract

In different ways, James Agee and Lacy Wright questioned the importance and influence of public schooling. Learning continues beyond, and perhaps despite, formal school attendance. This seems like common sense. Schools can also be harmful and destructive to children and society. This, too, seems clear. The trend in recent decades, however, has been to extend the years of formal schooling, putting more and more emphasis on degrees and credentials as passports to the future. What this will mean to our children and grandchildren is hard to say. But how we got to this point is rather clear. Simply, schools have been the most visible manifestation of the continued development of age grading in American society since Independence, and age grading has been a vital component of what we broadly term “modernization.”

The coming of ‘age’: Educational and bureaucratic dimensions of the classification of children in elementary schools (Western Europe, 19th century)

“…Nonetheless, scholarship has not dealt with age-grouping in mass, compulsory, or primary schooling in due depth. Whereas for the United States (Angus et al, 1995;Cohen, 1982) and, to some degree, England (Simon, 1978), short overviews about age grading exist, more detailed scholarship is only available for colonial Australia (Thretewey, 1998). Even major works dealing with the transformations of the organization of mass schooling and teaching in Europe stop short of looking into the pace and characteristics of age grading (Hamilton, 1989;Jenzer, 1991).…”

“…I will address these issues by looking at the historical context within which age-classes increasingly came to a dominant position: the European nineteenth century. Certainly, similar changes favouring age classification of students in schools existed in other geographies (Angus et al, 1995;Cohen, 1982;Thretewey, 1998). However, European innovations in schooling were almost unrivalled as purported models of progress for other countries and colonies (Roldán Vera, 2005;Schriewer, 2001).…”