Undermining the Common School Ideal: Intermediate Schools and Ungraded Classes in Boston, 1838-1900

Abstract

The common school movement has long constituted one of the defining themes and primary focal points of scholarship in the history of American education. Although this push toward a tax-supported, universal public education was a national movement, no state has been as closely identified with it as Massachusetts, and no individual recognized as taking a more important lead in the dissemination of common school ideology than Horace Mann. The region and the person, so closely linked with each other, were both crucial in advancing the common school cause throughout the nation and in stamping it into the American historical and cultural fabric. In his seminal Twelfth Annual Report as the Secretary of the Massachusetts State Board of Education, Mann articulated a vision of the common school that served as a powerful inspiration to reformers in other regions of the United States. He wrote that the Massachusetts system of common schools "knows no distinction of rich and poor, of bond and free, or between those who, in the imperfect light of this world, are seeking, through different avenues, to reach the gate of heaven. Without money and without price, it throws open its doors, and spreads the table of its bounty, for all the children of the State. Like the sun, it shines, not only upon the good, but upon the evil, that they may become good; and, like the rain, its blessings descend, not only upon the just, but upon the unjust, that their injustice may depart from them and be known no more.''1 This passage strongly conveys the rhetorical nature of much of common school ideology, reflecting the reformist, optimistic, and ultimately political impulses that characterized much of the educational thought in the United States during the mid-nineteenth century. As rhetoric, com

Redefining “Public” Education: Charter Schools, Common Schools, and the Rhetoric of Reform

“…Some historians portray the rise of a system of mass education characterized by an absence of class conflict and a general allegiance to "public" schooling that cut across social and economic barriers ~see, e.g., Kaestle, 1983;Katznelson & Weir, 1985!. Others describe the evolution of a system of common schooling that functioned to socialize an emerging working class into the industrial economy-imparting values of hard work, deference to authority, respect for private property, and acceptance of one's place in the hierarchical social order ~see, e.g., Bowles & Gintis, 1976;Church & Sedlak, 1976;Katz, 1968!. Finally, in addition to the motives and impact of the reformers, historians disagree over the distance between the rhetoric and reality of the common schools, the priority given to competing purposes for education, and the definition of "education" itself ~Kaestle & Vinovskis, 1980;Labaree, 1988;Osgood, 1997!. Certainly, aspects of the common school reforms-including centralization and standardization, bureaucratic oversight, compulsory attendance, assimilation, republicanism, and a common curriculum, for instance-were and are open to criticism on many fronts. Most notably, the reformers imposed a view of education that reflected their Whiggish, Protestant, and nascent capitalist perspective ~Kaestle, 1983!.…”

Becoming a Special Educator: Specialized Professional Training for Teachers of Children with Disabilities in Boston, 1870–1930

“…Throughout this period the school system itself became a far more complex and influential public bureaucracy. 9 The system's policies and practices also responded directly to another fundamental characteristic of this period: the dramatic diversification of the city's population. Through the nineteenth and well into the twentieth century, immigration into the city transformed a mostly Anglo population into one that manifested the migration of people from all over the world to the United States.…”